Chapter 19 : Just This Once

Chapter 19: Chapter 19 : Just This Once

Chloe took off her sunglasses and folded them in her lap. Then she unfolded them. Then she folded them again. The Cayenne merged onto the 405.

Preston kept one hand draped over the wheel and didn’t push the speed. He hadn’t said anything since they’d pulled out of the lot. He waited until they were past the airport exit.

"Donuts," he said. "So we drove forty minutes just to bring this guy a bag of donuts?"

"He has a name." Chloe didn’t look at him. "Ethan."

"What difference does it make what his name is?" Preston couldn’t stop the cold little laugh that came out of his nose. "He’s still a clown."

Chloe’s brows drew together.

Preston didn’t notice. Or if he did, he didn’t care. He was warming up now, one hand off the wheel and carving the air.

"He films a bunch of broke kids crawling around on the grass for cash, films some girl dumping water on her boyfriend’s head, puts out two pieces of cheap internet trash, and now he thinks he’s a director? The next Spielberg? Ha! My dad knows real filmmakers. I’ve had dinner with them. If you ask me—"

"Enough!"

The words stuck in Preston’s throat, his mouth still half open. He’d chased Chloe for an entire semester. Ask her out ten times and she’d turn him down eight, but always politely, with a smile and a "maybe next time." He had never heard her use that tone. Not with him, not with anybody.

Chloe turned her face to the window. She’d figured him out a long time ago. The car was his father’s. The dinners were his father’s. All those names he dropped belonged to his father too. He’d sat through a few meals beside people who’d actually built something, and decided that made him one of them.

Ethan was different. Nothing he had in his hands had been handed to him, and whenever she was around him, she couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

"First week of school," she said. "Every other freshman was still wandering around looking for their classrooms and standing in line for a meal card. Meanwhile he’s got a TV crew on campus, and he’s raised enough to stock a whole library at a high school in New Orleans that got flooded out. What were you doing your first week of freshman year?"

Preston didn’t answer that. His hand just tightened a little more on the wheel.

Neither of them said another word the rest of the way. The DJ on the radio was running through the traffic report, and Preston reached over and switched it off.

The car pulled up in front of her dorm. Chloe picked up her bag and pushed the door open.

Preston had to get one more in. "I’ve seen a hundred guys like him. Half-baked. Trying to run before they can walk. This time, he’s—"

The door slammed.

Chloe bent down and looked at him through the open window. "He’s going to pull it off."

Then she turned and walked away without looking back.

Preston sat there with the engine idling. After a while, he picked up his phone and dialed.

"I need you to run down to Gardena," he said. "Big Bob’s. The used car place. There’s a silver M3 in the showroom. Go find out about it."

Down in Gardena, Kyle had a phone to his ear as well.

"Twenty-two?" He kept his voice down. "Last week you said you could do twenty-four... I know it’s been sitting a year, but it’s an M3... Fine. Fine. I’ll think about it."

He hung up and crossed a name off the list in front of him. There were nine names on it, every wholesaler within a hundred miles who’d take a used luxury car, and that made eight crossed out.

The M3 had to be gone before the contest started, and it had to go quietly. When the day came, the car in the middle of the lot with thirty pairs of hands on it would be the 330Ci from out back.

Through the showroom’s back window, he could see the roll-up door of the service bay, halfway open. The 330 sat inside under a canvas tarp, nothing showing but its four wheels. Against the wall leaned a stack of M3 bumpers and fenders from a salvage yard in Fontana, an M-badged steering wheel sitting on top. Up on the tool shelf was a little camcorder one of the college kids had left behind, its screen folded shut, forgotten.

The 330 had come off the line the same year as the M3, with an identical body and even the same shade of silver. It had been sitting out back for over a year at nearly ten grand less, and nobody wanted it either.

The idea was Kyle’s. The day those two college kids crossed the street to the Toyota store, he’d been at Bob’s side before they reached the far curb.

"Say yes." He’d bent down close and dropped his voice. "Let him shoot his ad. Your name’s all over it. We find somebody to take the M3 off our hands on the quiet, even if we eat a little on the price. The car that sits out there for people to put their hands on, we swap for the 330 out back."

Bob had needed a moment. "Those are two different cars."

"To you they are," Kyle had said. "To a bunch of college kids, and a few million people watching on a computer screen, it’s a silver BMW."

Bob had taken one more look at the M3. Then he’d gotten up, left his jacket on the chair, and gone out the door at a run.

Later, at the signing, when the college kid suddenly wrote in that clause by hand, Bob had nearly blown up on the spot. Kyle read it twice and relaxed. It said the prize had to match the vehicle shown in the video. It said nothing at all about a VIN. And what the video would show was a silver BMW.

All he’d said in Bob’s ear was, "It doesn’t have the VIN."

Now more than a week had gone by, and the real one still wouldn’t sell.

The bell over the showroom door jangled.

Kyle’s smile was in place before he even looked up. The guy who’d come in was tall and skinny, early twenties, a ball cap pulled low and both hands jammed in his hoodie pocket. He didn’t spare the other cars a glance. He went straight to the M3 and walked all the way around it, paused at the front to bend down and read the price on the windshield, and only then wandered over to Kyle’s desk.

"This one. How much?"

"That one’s not for sale." Kyle closed the ledger without letting the smile slip. "It’s a prize. There’s a contest in a couple of days. Come watch, if you’ve got the time."

His visitor didn’t answer. He pulled a manila envelope out of his pocket, held it by the flap, and gave it a shake over the desk. Stacks of hundreds slid out, bank bands still around them, and spread across half the desktop.

"Fifteen grand." He nudged the money forward with two fingers. "It goes for thirty, right? I’ll pay the thirty, and this on top."

Kyle’s eyes dropped to the money, and his Adam’s apple bobbed once. His hands stayed flat on the desk.

He was greedy, but he wasn’t stupid. A used car that had been gathering dust in the showroom for the better part of a year, and somebody wanted to pay fifteen grand over for it? Either the guy had money to burn, or somebody had sent him.

His first thought was across the street. Ray Delgado at the Toyota store had come within a breath of landing this deal, until Bob ran over and snatched it out from under his nose. If Big Bob’s quietly sold off the prize and the contest couldn’t go on, the contract was broken. And who would the college kid go running to then?

Kyle leaned back, laced his fingers over his stomach, and took his time looking the guy over. "Friend. That’s a lot of money for a used car. What’s in it for you?"

The guy grinned, showing a front tooth that sat a little crooked. "Doesn’t matter what’s in it for me. Somebody doesn’t like the video guy. That’s all."

"And?"

"You sell me the car, and I pick it up the night before the contest." He pushed the brim of his cap up an inch. "Next morning a few hundred people turn up with their cameras, and there’s nothing in the middle of the lot. What’s he going to run his contest with? Who’s ever going to work with him again?"

Kyle didn’t answer right away. When this guy talked about the college kid, there was a gleeful spite all over his face that nobody could have faked. Ray wanted business. He had no reason to hate some college kid this much. Nobody from across the street had sent this guy.

Then he understood something else. The plan was sloppy. If the car simply vanished, the kid would look bad for a day. Then he’d say the dealership broke its contract, hand the paper to a reporter, and Big Bob’s would take the beating. He might even come out of it with some sympathy. Kyle very nearly laughed. Somebody could afford to throw this kind of money around, and this was the best he could come up with?

Kyle squared the stacks of cash, slid them back into the envelope, and pushed it across the desk.

"Your way, he’s embarrassed for a day." He stood and straightened his collar. "My way, he never shoots anything again. Come with me."

On the way out the back, Kyle glanced over his shoulder into the showroom. Bob was at the bank and wouldn’t be back this afternoon.

The service bay smelled of motor oil. Kyle flipped back one corner of the tarp and tipped his chin at the parts stacked against the wall.

"This is a 330. Same body as the M3. Put the kit on and stick the badges on, and anybody who doesn’t know cars can’t tell. This is what’ll be sitting out there on contest day."

He laid it out in no hurry, the same easy voice he used to walk a customer through a payment plan. "You drive off with the real one. I’ll pull the LoJack out of it first. The bank makes us put a tracker in every car they floor, so nobody comes looking. Let them fight over this for two days and two nights. Once some poor sap has won and has the keys in his hand, you show up with somebody who knows cars and check it right there in front of everybody. Pop the hood. Read off the VIN."

The skinny guy lifted the tarp a little higher, bent to peer underneath, and clicked his tongue. When he straightened up and looked at Kyle again, something in his eyes had changed.

"After that, the whole city knows his video was a con from start to finish." Kyle let the tarp drop and smoothed out the wrinkles. "But the idea costs extra." He paused. "Ten grand."

The moment the number left his mouth, his own heart picked up a beat.

The guy in the ball cap gave him a look. He didn’t haggle, but he didn’t move either. "You the one who calls the shots here?" he asked suddenly. "Does your boss know about this?"

"He knows, he knows," Kyle said quickly. He hurried back into the showroom, grabbed the list of wholesalers off his desk, came back, and held it up in front of the guy. Nine names, eight crossed out. "See? We’ve been trying to find somebody to take this car off our hands all week. The boss signed off on it."

The guy skimmed the page. Only then did he take out his phone and walk to the far end of the service bay to make a call. He kept his back to Kyle and his voice low. Only a word here and there carried.

Kyle stayed where he was. His palms were damp, and he wiped them on his slacks twice. In six years of keeping the books here, he’d skimmed a little off the top and taken the odd kickback from a customer, but all of it together didn’t come close to this one afternoon. Forty-five for the car, plus ten. He ran the numbers once, then again, and every time he ran them, the silences on the other end of that call seemed to stretch a little longer.

The call finally ended, and he came back, tucking the phone away.

"Deal," he said.

Kyle’s shoulders came down an inch.

He didn’t leave right away, though. He tilted his head and looked Kyle over again from head to toe, with an expression that was hard to read. "You’re cold, man. The car’s a fake, and it’s Big Bob’s name that goes down with it. Isn’t he your father-in-law? He’s finished too."

Kyle didn’t so much as blush. If anything, his smile got easier. "This place wasn’t going to last another few months anyway. The bank calls every day," he said. "I’m just getting what I can while there’s still something to sell. Call it my father-in-law’s retirement fund." He even sighed when he was done, a man worried sick about the old fellow.

His visitor shook his head, muttered something, and left. Kyle only caught the tail end of it: "...something else."

Kyle went back into the showroom, sat down, and cleared his throat. Before he dialed, he checked his face in the reflection off the showroom glass and adjusted his expression. Then he called Bob’s cell.

"Dad, good news." His voice warmed right up. "Somebody wants the M3... Thirty. That’s eight grand better than the guy in Riverside... Some rich college kid. Saw it and has to have it. Cash. He picks it up the night before the contest."

The line went quiet.

"Just this once," Bob said.

"Just this once," Kyle said. "Don’t you worry. I’ve got it."

He hung up, opened the ledger to a fresh line, and wrote: 2002 BMW M3, sold, $30,000. His handwriting was very neat.

?

The day before the contest, Ethan didn’t stop moving from morning to night.

He spent the morning going through all thirty waivers one at a time. Two of them were missing a phone number for the emergency contact, and he had Kevin’s people track those down before the afternoon was out. By noon the EMT tent was up. He ducked inside, sat on the cot to test it, then came back out and paced off the distance to the car. Twenty steps. If somebody went down, a stretcher could be there in thirty seconds.

In the afternoon, Sam hit a snag: two of the DV cameras wouldn’t take a charge. Ethan caught a bus to Fry’s and came back with a whole box of batteries. While he was at it, he checked the label on every tape, and any tape marked DO NOT ERASE went into a separate case under lock.

On the way back, he remembered something else and turned to Noah. The test tapes from the last two days had piled up to twenty-some cassettes. Noah needed to go through every one of them before tonight. Anything usable got a DO NOT ERASE label, and the rest would be wiped and reused when the contest started tomorrow. Noah groaned at the stack in his arms, but he hauled it off to the editing room anyway.

Everything was handled. But since sometime that afternoon, something had been nagging at him, and he couldn’t say what.

Back when he ran the MCN, with two hundred-odd channels under him, he’d overseen more shoots than he could count, and he’d had this feeling more than once. One time, the day before a shoot, he couldn’t shake the sense that something was off, and the next morning one of his creators’ managers was waiting at the set with a lawyer. Other times nothing happened at all, and the feeling just faded on its own. He couldn’t tell which kind this was.

He sat down on an equipment case and went back over the last few days from the start.

Kyle came first. He’d asked for a five-thousand-dollar kickback that day, and when Ethan turned him down, the smile had stayed on his face a beat too long. A man like that, you shut the door on him, he usually finds a way to get even. But Kyle hadn’t given him any trouble since. He even nodded when they passed. He’d gone too quiet.

But Kyle kept the books. He had no hand in the contest. Once it started, Kevin’s people would be on security in shifts around the clock, Hendricks was judging, the rules were posted on the wall in black and white, and four cameras would never stop rolling. Even if Kyle wanted to trip them up, he’d have nowhere to get a grip.

Then there was Bob. That day in the showroom, Bob had plainly been on the fence. He’d said he needed to think. They’d barely gotten out the door before Bob came running all the way over to the Toyota store without his jacket. In those few minutes in between, what had Kyle said in his ear?

But however he turned it over, what could be sinister about Bob running after them? Most likely Kyle had told him not to let a deal walk across the street. The bank was leaning hard, and Bob knew as well as anyone he couldn’t hang on to that car. Even if the bank came to tow it, the clause had that covered: the prize had to match the vehicle shown in the video. If the dealership couldn’t produce it, that was breach of contract.

At the signing, when Bob saw the clause, his face had gone purple, and he’d looked about ready to pound the desk. Again Kyle had leaned in and said something, and Bob had signed.

Why would a man Ethan had just embarrassed put in a good word for him twice?

Ethan couldn’t make it add up.

But the feeling he couldn’t name was still there.

By dusk, most people had gone. The silver M3 had been driven out of the showroom and parked in the middle of the lot, BIG BOB’S AUTO on magnetic signs across both doors, waiting to go under the tarp tonight and be unveiled in front of everyone in the morning.

Ethan got up and walked toward it.

The closer he got, the nearer that nameless thing rose to the surface.

He circled the car slowly. The paint had been polished to a shine, and the pennant flags by the entrance swayed in its reflection. Every time Kyle had leaned into Bob’s ear, every time Bob had suddenly changed his mind, that line in the contract about the vehicle shown in the video... The pieces shifted around in his head, one at a time. They bumped up against each other, then slid apart again.

The vehicle shown in the video.

He stopped at the back of the car and crouched. Four exhaust tips poked out side by side beneath the bumper, holding a dull gleam in the fading light. He rested his hand on the cool trunk lid.

Why had Kyle helped him? What was Bob really afraid of? And this car—

Something was right there. Just a little further, and he could almost feel the edge of it.

"Ethan."

Noah’s voice came from the doorway of the editing room and broke his train of thought.

"C’mere a sec. Take a look at something for me."