He limped out into the little town. There wasn’t much to it. The commercial buildings were all clustered close to the intersection of the two-lane county highway and the secondary road they’d taken out of the mountains.
Across from the pizza place was a modest hip-roofed shop with cheerful green paint and an elaborate multicolored sign for Esmerelda’s Grocery. A nameless beat-down bar with neon in the windows took up one corner of the intersection, two motorcycles and a dusty pickup out front. On the opposite corner stood a sagging frame building with wide overhangs, unpainted redwood siding, and a neatly lettered plank sign over the big front porch: HAPPY HIKE AND BIKE, in the same green as the grocery store. A few long driveways led to houses of various vintages, set back in the trees.
He was hoping to see a car parked on the street with a FOR SALE sign stuck under the wiper. He didn’t want to start knocking on doors, although maybe he’d have to. It would make him far too memorable for any hunters.
He looked up at the sky. The cloud cover was higher now, although the air was still thick and damp and he thought the rain would come back soon. They’d need a car quickly.
Then he saw another big bird, or maybe the same bird he’d seen over the riverbed, just the shape of it in the lowest level of the clouds. It was some kind of raptor or vulture he didn’t recognize, floating silently in the mist. It looked bigger than it should. He wondered if he was within the range of the reintroduced California condor. Then the clouds shifted and the bird turned and he saw the golden glint again. Maybe a condor, he thought. With some kind of metallic tracking device on its wing or leg.
He kept walking through town. The last building was an old cinderblock structure with a simple fa?ade, a rusty steel roll-up door, and a tin roof. Another crisp hand-painted sign in the same green: ALBERTO’S REPAIR AND REBUILD. As Peter limped closer, he saw a small gravel parking lot with a half-dozen cars in a neat row with prices written on notecards taped to the inside of their windshields.
Inventory ran to Detroit steel from the sixties and seventies. He saw a ’71 Plymouth Barracuda with an aggressive green flake paint job parked beside a beautiful red ’68 Mustang that looked like a hundred miles an hour standing still. A GTO, a Charger, a Galaxie 500, all of them classic muscle cars and together probably worth half a million dollars if they were mostly original and fully restored. He ran his hand over the silky flank of a sky-blue Chevelle SS with a white hood stripe. Peter was generally more of a truck guy, but for a moment, he wanted them all.
This was what you could do with a few million dollars, he thought. Buy a lot of cool cars.
Then you’d need a garage to hold them. And someone to maintain them. And a lawyer to handle your speeding tickets. Before you knew it, your cars had employees, which didn’t sound like much fun. Not at all the same as finding an old car in a barn and restoring it yourself.
And none of these muscle machines were what he needed, anyway. He needed something less sexy, something invisible and reliable. He limped past the cars to another roll-up door set into the cinderblock side of the shop, this one open. Whitewashed walls, a raft of good bright lighting overhead, six repair bays with lifts, three of them occupied. Celia Cruz’s distinctive contralto purred from speakers in the back corner. He stood in the doorway but didn’t see anyone.
The white static crackled up his brainstem. He didn’t want to go inside. “Anybody home?”
“Gimme a minute,” a voice called out. Then a brown-skinned man with a long black and gray ponytail walked out, peeling thin blue gloves from his hands. Somewhere in his fifties, he had thick, hairy arms and a few days of stubble. He wore mechanic’s blues and steel-toed welder’s boots and wire-rimmed glasses with full-round earpieces hooked around big ears. “If you’re in a hurry, I prob’ly can’t help. I got about twenty good repairs ahead of you.”
“I don’t need a repair, I need a car.”
The mechanic’s face opened up in a broad smile. “Now you’re talking,” he said. “Those are my babies.” He put out his hand. “I’m Al. What do you like?”
He had the long fingers of a piano player, but the strong raspy grip of a plumber. The word “HERMANOS” was spelled out with crude blue tattoos on his knuckles, one faded letter each. Hermanos was Spanish for brothers. It was a word Peter had heard a lot in the Marines.
“I’m Peter, and I like all of them. They’re truly gorgeous. But I need something different.”
The mechanic looked startled at this radical thought. Who’d want to drive anything but a vintage muscle car?
Then he looked past Peter. “Hi, I’m Al,” he said, and put out his hand. “Are you with this guy?”