"You're a south canal grease monkey," Vance said, his voice shaking with venom. "You change oil filters on municipal garbage trucks. You wouldn't know the first thing about a hand-built carbon-alloy chassis."
"I know that an Apollo-Vandegrift uses 7075 aluminum box extrusions," I said quietly. "And I know that when you drop four thousand pounds of dry weight onto an unbraced curb, the subframe doesn't bend. It shatters. You don't have a paint problem here, Julian. You have a scrap vehicle sitting on your centerpiece floor, and you just tried to threaten an eight-year-old child with an arrest record so you wouldn't have to explain the transit bill to the man who holds the title."
Vance stepped directly into my space, his chest nearly brushing mine. He didn't smell like cologne anymore; he smelled like stale coffee and sweat.
"Listen to me, Mercer," he whispered, low enough that the crowd behind him couldn't hear. "No one in this room knows who you are. No one cares what's on that sketch pad. If you think some truck-bay mechanic is going to contradict my intake log in front of the board of directors, you're out of your mind. You give me that paper, you take your kid out the service alley, and I forget to call the precinct. If you don't, I swear to God I will have Cole escort your boy to social services before the appetizers are cleared."
He reached out his manicured hand to rip the torn page from Toby’s pad.
I caught his wrist two inches before his fingers touched the paper.
I didn't twist it. I didn't strike him. I just held his arm with the grip I use to seat sixteen-ply truck tires on steel rims. Vance froze, his mouth falling open in shock as the pressure locked his wrist in place.
"Cole," Vance choked out, his eyes wide. "He's assaulting me! Get him down!"
Officer Cole didn't draw his baton. Instead, he stared at the gray paste stuck to the sketch paper in my other hand, then looked down at the puddle of uncured resin beginning to bubble under the heat lamp beneath the car.
"Director," Cole said, his voice flat and uneasy. "I’m not putting hands on a father holding his kid's schoolwork. Not until I see the dispatch gate log."
Vance pulled his arm back with a sharp jerk, rubbing his red wrist with his left hand. His face had turned the color of bruised plums. He backed up toward the chrome stanchions, reaching into the breast pocket of his bespoke jacket with trembling fingers.
"Fine," Vance spat, his eyes wild with panic. "You want to play games with private property? We’ll see how brave you are when the man who actually owns the title arrives."
He pulled out his phone, but he wasn't dialing the police. He was dialing an internal pavilion extension, his fingers hammering the glass.
I stood there on the cold terrazzo, looking down at Toby. My son was still shaking, his small hand tucked into my pocket, his eyes looking up at me for an answer I couldn't yet give him. I looked at the gray smudge on the drawing paper, then at the two guards now standing awkwardly between us and the only open double doors leading to the south parking lot.
Silence wasn't going to get us out of the hall. An apology would put my boy in a patrol car. The only way through those glass doors was to make sure the person on the other end of that phone saw exactly what Vance had buried under the silver paint.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
A tinny, metallic rasp answered him through the speaker, low enough that the chattering gala guests thirty feet away couldn't hear, but loud enough to hit Cole’s ears.
Cole’s eyebrows twitched. The older guard didn't step back, but his chin dropped slightly, his gaze shifting from Vance’s tailored shoulder down to the scuffed toes of his own duty boots. A man who has spent twenty years carrying a marshal’s badge knows what a request to scrub a local drive means. It doesn't mean safety. It means someone is digging a trench to bury a mistake before the daylight catches it.
"Julian," I said, my voice cutting through the ambient hum of the chiller units. "You tell Marty to wipe that drive, and you’re turning a commercial transit claim into a state felony."
Vance didn't lower the phone. He pressed it harder against his ear, his jaw grinding so tight that a muscle jumped beneath his cheekbone. "Mind your place, David. You're an off-shift mechanic with grease on your cuffs and a delinquent boy who can't keep his hands off multi-million-dollar carbon fiber."
Toby didn't cry. His fingers tightened around two of my belt loops, anchoring himself against my hip. He didn't shrink away from the guards; he kept his chin lifted, his eyes fixed on the low chrome stanchions where the Apollo’s silver-blue skirt met the polished floor.
"Dad," Toby whispered, tugging gently on my denim. "Look at the splitter. Under the lamp."