Chapter 15: Inspected, Passed

Quincy's POV

I had not been under a car since I was nineteen.

I had forgotten how much the floor of a garage hates a good suit.

It was eleven on Monday night.

I lay on a borrowed creeper beneath Hattie Ellerby's Volvo with a flashlight in my teeth.

A mechanic's checklist sat on my chest.

The mechanic was a man I had paid triple to come at ten and look at the brake lines.

He had been told to say nothing to anyone, and he had gone home.

He had said the lines were sound.

I was checking anyway, because Tilda would have.

That was one of the things I had done behind her back.

The second was in my email.

On Sunday I had called the county about the lake road.

The road had a contractor, the contractor had an owner, and the owner had a price.

I bought the firm for the price of a small yacht.

By Wednesday it would have a new steel guardrail on the long bend above the quarry.

At the end of the bend there would be a row of sand barrels.

I had never bought anything so ugly with so much pleasure.

I had also not told her, because she would have made me fill out a form.

"Quincy Moncrieff," a voice said above my knees, "are you under my grandmother's car?"

I took the flashlight out of my mouth.

"I'm inspecting it."

"You're in a four-thousand-dollar shirt."

"It's an eighteen-hundred-dollar shirt."

"It has grease on the cuff."

Tilda stood in the garage doorway in an old sweatshirt and bare feet.

Her hair was knotted up and her arms were folded.

I rolled out on the creeper to look at her.

She was trying very hard to be angry, and failing in an interesting direction.

"The lines are good," I said. "I stuck one of your labels on the master cylinder. It says Inspected."

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