Chapter 10: Elk Grove

We went the next night, because I was off and it was raining.

"Why does the rain matter?" Santiago asked, in the back of his car.

"It doesn't. I just wanted to say it was raining. It feels like the kind of thing you'd do in the rain."

His driver, in the front seat, made a very small noise. Santiago looked out the window so I wouldn't see him smile.

The impound lot was out past O'Hare, in Elk Grove Village, behind a chain-link fence topped with wire.

Planes came in low over it every two minutes, so loud the puddles shivered.

There was a booth at the gate with one light on and one man inside, watching a hockey game on a tablet.

Santiago did the talking. He had the rental papers and his passport and an envelope.

The man looked at the papers. He looked at the envelope a lot longer.

"Row J," he said. "Toward the back. Don't touch nothing else."

His driver held an umbrella over Santiago. I held my own.

Row J was mostly wrecks, like a pickup with no front end and a minivan burned black.

At the very end, under a sodium light, sat a dark blue sedan with its driver's side caved in.

Santiago stopped.

The rain drummed on the umbrella.

He looked for a long time at the door that had folded in on his leg, and at the glass still lying on the seat.

"Forty minutes," he said, to nobody. "I counted the light changes. Red, green, red. Nobody stopped."

I didn't say anything. I put my hand on his back, flat, between his shoulder blades, the way I held him on the bars.

He leaned into it, just slightly.

Then he gave his cane to the driver and bent, slowly, and opened the passenger door.

The dashcam was still on the windshield, behind the mirror. A little black box, with a slot on the side.

There was a card in the slot.

He pulled it out with two fingers and held it up in the light, tiny and blue.

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