Chapter 17: Item Seven

The coupe had a bow and a full tank of gas.

It also had a brake line with a cut in it the width of a hair.

I found it at seven on Thursday morning, lying on my back on Hattie's driveway with a flashlight.

Quincy crouched beside me in his board-meeting suit.

"We take it to a shop," he said. "Right now. They fix it."

"If it's fixed, the book finds another car."

"There is no book."

"Then it finds another car anyway. Another hour, another road."

I clicked the flashlight off.

"Right now I know the road, the bend and the day."

"Tilda."

"You bought sand barrels, Quincy. Let me use them."

He took out his phone and looked at it for a long time.

"Rule four," he said. "You don't drive a car that came with a ribbon."

"Rejected."

"Rule five. You wear a helmet."

"Accepted."

"Rule six. I'm on the phone with you the whole way, and you call me the moment it goes."

"I'll call you the moment it goes," I said, "and you'll answer."

"Of course I'll answer."

"I know," I said. "I'd just like it on the record."

He wrote rule four through six on the back of a sticker and signed it.

I put it in my pocket with the others.

At nine, I sat in a boardroom on the thirty-first floor of the Moncrieff Lakeshore building.

The chair did not belong to me.

Hattie owned six percent of the company through an old land swap.

She had sent me as her proxy, with a cane-seat folding chair and instructions to be a nuisance.

I had already tagged the carpet seam.

The board sat around the long table with their coffee, eleven gray men and one gray woman.

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