Beyond them, angled across the apron like it owned a piece of the street too, sat Brandon Prescott's silver SUV, exactly where it had been since six o'clock the evening before. Eight, Mike thought.
It was the first time all night he let himself count them as a number instead of as entries in a log. Ray Delgado came down from the cab slowly, clipboard already in hand, and the second flatbed, driven by one of his regulars, a quiet kid named Tomas, eased in behind the first.
Neither man spoke above a working murmur. This was the part Mike had insisted on when they'd planned it over coffee at Ray's kitchen table the week before, Dana on speakerphone, all of them going over the paper one more time.
Whatever it looked like from the Prescotts' windows in the morning, it was not going to look or sound like revenge. It was going to look like a Tuesday.
Winches. Chains.
Signatures.
"Order still the same?"
Ray asked, coming halfway up the porch steps.
"Guests first," Mike said.
"His last."
Ray nodded the way he nodded at a measurement he'd already taken twice and went back down into the dark. At the curb, in front of the Hartleys' old maple two doors down, a Hartley Township patrol car sat idling with its lights off.
The officer in it had been there since two-thirty.
Before the first truck rolled, Mike had walked down with a folder and watched him page through it without hurry: photographs of the two posted signs, up since September 2, one at the apron and one at the garage, white on red, PRIVATE DRIVE — UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED AT OWNER'S EXPENSE, with Delgado Towing's name and number at the bottom.
The certified-mail receipt, green card and all, and the copy of the written notice Brandon Prescott had signed for on September 3, his signature sitting right under the sentence that said the driveway at Mike's address was private property in its entirety and that vehicles blocking it would be removed without further warning.
And the log.
Mike's log, forty-one typed pages by then, every blockage since the fence went up in August dated and timed and photographed, including the eight new entries he'd added standing in the cold the night before while music came through the Prescotts' open windows and Brandon's guests parked wherever the party told them to.
The officer had closed the folder and handed it back.
"You've done your homework," he'd said.
"We'll be right here if anybody needs a referee."
Now Tomas took photographs before anyone touched a car. That was the protocol, and Ray ran it the same whether the job was a repo, an accident, or the strangest tow of his career.
Full walk-around of each vehicle, flash popping in the dark. Plate.
VIN plate through the windshield, read aloud so Mike, standing at the edge of his own gravel with his own copy of the log open on the flatbed's fender, could write it down in his blocky hand.
Existing damage noted — a creased fender on the third car, a cracked taillight on the fifth — because Ray had been in business twenty-six years and knew that the first thing a towed man claims is that the truck hurt his car.
Then the winch cable went out, and the first car, a white sedan with a valet tag still hanging from its mirror, rose up the tilted bed with a hydraulic sigh and settled onto the steel like it had been built there. Kate came out onto the porch during the second car.
She had a blanket over her shoulders and two mugs in her hands, and she gave Mike the one that wasn't the thermos and stood with her shoulder against his arm. Neither of them said anything for a while.
The winch whined. A chain sang once against a rim.
Somewhere down the street a dog barked twice and thought better of it.
"You okay?" she asked finally.
"I'm not enjoying it," Mike said.
"I want to be clear about that, mostly to myself. I'm not enjoying it."
"I know."
"If he'd moved his car when I asked in August — " "I know, Mike."
The third car went up. The fourth.
The work had a rhythm by then, Tomas spotting, Ray on the controls, Mike writing, and the strange thing was how ordinary it felt, like a job site at an odd hour, which in the end was all Mike had ever wanted it to be. He was a man who laid pavement for a living.
He understood work done in sequence, by the book, with the paperwork in order.
What he did not understand, what he had stopped trying to understand sometime in September, was how a man could stand in another man's driveway in broad daylight and call it his own — and yet that man was asleep a hundred feet away behind blackout curtains, in a house full of borrowed guests, while strangers loaded his party onto trucks.
Brandon's SUV went last, by design.
It sat across the apron with its nose in the street, and it took Ray a few extra minutes because of the angle, the flatbed nosing in off the asphalt, the cable walking the big silver thing sideways a foot at a time before it straightened and climbed.
Mike watched its brake lights flash once as it settled — some alarm in it waking and deciding there was nothing to be done — and then Ray chained it down and the two trucks sat loaded in the dark, seven cars and an SUV, the whole glittering fleet of the Prescotts' open-house gala stacked on steel like a used-car lot at closing time.
"That's the last of it," Ray said.
He signed the bottom of Mike's log page, and Mike signed under him, and Tomas took one final photograph of the empty driveway with the posted sign in the frame, the flash catching the red letters and the clean gravel beyond.
The officer at the curb lifted two fingers off the steering wheel as the trucks pulled away. The whole thing had taken just under two hours.
Mike and Kate stayed on the porch until the sound of the flatbeds faded out at the end of Hickory Lane.
Then Mike went down with a push broom and swept the apron and the first ten feet of the drive, the way he did every morning of his working life, gravel dust and a scatter of gala gravel — somebody's heel had kicked up the edge — going back where they belonged.
By the time the sky went the color of wet newspaper behind the Novak house across the street, his driveway was empty and swept and entirely his, and it looked, for the first time since August, like nothing more remarkable than a place to park.
The guests started discovering it a little after seven.
Mike was at the kitchen table with Maddie, who was eating cereal with the concentration of a bomb technician, when Ben came in from the front room and said, "Dad. There's people just standing in the Prescotts' driveway."
"Like, a lot of people. In nice clothes."