Chapter 25 : Prove It

Chapter 25: Chapter 25 : Prove It

The smile slowly left Ethan’s face.

"Fake?" He looked at Preston. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." Preston took a phone from the inside pocket of his blazer, flipped it open, and turned the screen halfway around for the crowd. "This is the sponsorship agreement between Big Bob’s and MrPelican. The last clause, Ethan added himself. The prize vehicle shall be ’identical to the vehicle shown in the video.’"

He pulled the phone back and smiled. "A contract to give away a car, and no VIN. Just ’the one in the video.’ Ask yourselves why. Because he shoots the video. He edits the video. Whichever car ends up on camera, that’s his call."

He turned and patted the hood of his own car. "This is the prize Big Bob’s actually put up. The real M3. As for the one on the lift—" He glanced up at it. "Same paint. Same body. What’s under it is another story."

"Three days, two nights," he went on. "In the daytime, sure, plenty of people, plenty of fun. But at night? A few people dozing outside the tape. Whether the car got swapped, whether a hand came off in the middle of the night, you only ever saw what the camera was pointed at."

Behind him, the other door of the black sedan opened. A gray-haired man in his fifties climbed out without any hurry, an open reporter’s notebook in his hand. Someone in the crowd recognized him. "Isn’t that Chuck Ross? The Bay Chronicle columnist?"

"I asked Mr. Ross to come," Preston said, "because this shouldn’t stay between a few hundred people. All of L.A. has been watching this contest. When that many people get played by one college kid, somebody has to stand up and tell the truth."

A buzz went through the service bay, and the murmuring broke out on every side.

Kevin was the first to step forward, the whiteboard marker still in his fist. "What are you talking about? We’ve been working shifts for three days and two nights. Not one of us took our eyes off that car!"

"Yeah!" a few volunteers shouted behind him. "We were here every night! And we’ve got the tapes, every last one!"

Preston actually laughed. "And who brought you here? Whose sandwiches are you eating? Whose T-shirts are you wearing?" He spread his hands. "His people vouching for him, on tapes his people shot. I’ve got one question. In three days and two nights, was there a single outsider, someone with no connection to him, who watched this from start to finish?"

The volunteers opened their mouths, and for a moment nobody had an answer.

It was Mac who broke the silence, from somewhere in the crowd. "Oh, fuck you, man. So you just get to say whatever you want?"

Preston didn’t even glance his way.

He didn’t push any further. He didn’t need to. He knew perfectly well that who was right in this service bay today didn’t matter. Tomorrow morning Chuck’s column would hit the paper, and the headline was what a few hundred thousand people would read. After that, Ethan could be holding a hundred tapes, and they’d just be a hundred tapes in a con man’s hands.

Ethan knew it too. He knew it better than Preston did.

In his old life, he’d spent more than ten years at an MCN, and he’d watched more people than he could count get nailed overnight by a single post. However fast the correction went up, the first story was always the one that got passed around. Even his own first video, the one he’d made after coming back, he’d set that fire on Facebook with his own hands. Nobody understood better than he did how a rumor caught.

Which was exactly why he didn’t rush to answer. He ran back through everything Preston had just said and took it apart, one piece at a time.

"I wrote that clause," he said, not loudly. "That car’s been on camera for three days with every one of you watching. ’The one in the video’ doesn’t tie the dealership’s hands. It ties mine. If the car had been switched, you’d be the first ones holding up the video to compare."

"As for the video, every bit of it is on DV tape with timecode. Cut a single second and the numbers stop lining up. The originals haven’t been touched. Anyone who wants to see them, we can roll them out right now."

He looked around the service bay. "You asked whether any outsider watched from start to finish. Thirty contestants. Twenty-nine of them lost. Which one of them has a reason to cover for me?"

"My hands never left that car!" Gus yelled from the crowd. Sierra nodded along, and number nine raised the arm he could barely lift anymore.

Preston didn’t flinch. He nodded, as if he’d been waiting for exactly this.

"Very nice. Then let me ask something else." He fixed his eyes on Ethan. "Who bought Big Bob’s real M3? Whose pocket did the money go into? You had the dealership sell the real car and put a cheap one up there for a three-day show, and you walk away with all of it. What do you say to that?"

Ethan didn’t answer.

He walked up to Preston and stopped less than an arm’s length away.

"You say I told the dealership to switch the car," Ethan said. "Where’s your proof?"

Preston smiled, tilted his head, and beckoned toward the back of the crowd.

Every eye followed his hand and landed on Kyle. He was standing in the showroom doorway, and he went rigid.

He hadn’t counted on being called out. The deal was that he’d hand over the car and take the money, and the rest had nothing to do with him. Ethan would take the blame, the dealership would take the heat, and he’d sit back with fifteen grand in his pocket where nobody would ever think to look. One wave of Preston’s hand, and that dream was gone.

But he’d come too far to turn back. He’d taken the money. He’d handed over the car. Preston had him by the collar. He might as well go all the way. It even crossed his mind that if he played his part well today, hitching himself to a rich kid like that might beat grinding away at the dealership for the rest of his life.

He stepped out, pushed his way to the front, and spoke louder than anyone.

"I’m the sales manager at Big Bob’s. Bob is my father-in-law." He led with that. "I didn’t want to say anything. But I can’t stand by and watch this anymore."

He pointed at Ethan. "A week before the contest, this kid came to me. He said the car would sit on display for three days and nobody could tell the real thing from a fake. He wanted me to find a buyer for the real one and put something cheap in its place. He’d take the big cut, I’d take the small one."

"I turned him down on the spot. But he wouldn’t let it go. He kept coming around, shutting the door with my father-in-law and whispering..."

He sighed and shook his head. "A college kid with a mind that dirty. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to Mr. Preston and asked him to come set things right."

He hadn’t even finished when Bob charged out.

"You lying little—!" The old man’s face had gone purple, and his gum went flying. He drew back his arm and lunged at Kyle. Both salesmen grabbed him around the waist from behind, and Hendricks caught one of his arms. Bob fought them twice and couldn’t break loose. His chest was heaving, and the finger he was jabbing at Kyle wouldn’t stop shaking.

Kyle shrank back half a step, then straightened up and spread his hands at the crowd. "You all see that? That’s what it looks like when somebody gets caught."

That did it. The crowd came apart.

"So that’s how it is..."

"I knew it. Who gives away a BMW for free?"

"The dealership’s own guy is saying it. How’s that made up?"

Even a few of the volunteers traded looks. Number nine, mouth hanging open, looked from the car on the lift to Preston’s and back. "They really do look exactly the same," he muttered. Gus stared at the two cars, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper.

Owen was still standing under the lift, one hand on his mother’s arm. He looked up at Ethan, his throat dry. "The car... it’s fake?"

Ethan didn’t answer him.

Preston took it all in and couldn’t stop smiling. His gaze swept the back of the crowd and landed on Chloe. Her face had gone pale, and she was biting her lip, her eyes fixed on Ethan. That made it sweeter still. Wrecking the way a woman saw a man was nothing new to him. As for the rest, he had plenty of ways to get her.

Chloe clutched her coffee and took a step forward, and Maya caught her by the wrist.

Ethan acted as if he hadn’t heard a word of it. He looked at Preston and asked again. "You’re saying this car is fake?"

Preston laughed out loud. "Are you having trouble with English?" He shook his head, done wasting breath on him. "Fine. If talking won’t settle it, we’ll get somebody to check. Ray Delgado, at the Toyota store across the street. Current president of the South Bay dealers’ association, thirty years selling cars. He’s not one of your people, is he?"

"Fine," said Ethan.

Preston jerked his chin at Kyle. "Go get him."

Ray couldn’t come right away. He was in the middle of closing a deal and needed twenty minutes at least. In those twenty minutes, nobody left the service bay.

Ethan went around behind the monitors. Maya looked up and turned her laptop toward him. She looked pale.

The comment section had blown up. Somebody had typed out Preston’s speech word for word, and every reply under it was uglier than the last. fake. scam. knew it. People were posting links, too. It was already being shared on Facebook, and on the school forum someone had started a thread called "Is MrPelican a FRAUD?" In under twenty minutes, it had passed three hundred replies.

"Should I delete some of these?" Maya kept her voice low. "Or I could post a statement—"

"Don’t delete anything." Ethan kept his eyes on the screen. "Don’t reply, either."

Maya stared at him. Studying his face in profile, she realized he wasn’t worried at all. If anything, there was a gleam in his eyes.

"Let it burn," he said.

A little over twenty minutes later, Ray Delgado finally ambled across the street. Early sixties, beer gut, a Toyota name badge clipped to his shirt. He walked into the service bay and nodded to Bob first, wearing the faint smile of a man who’d come for the show.

"Heard you’ve got trouble over here, Bob."

Bob didn’t answer. He reached over and hit the switch, and the lift hummed as it brought the M3 back down to the floor, inch by inch.

Ray took his time. First he walked a full circle around the car. He crouched to look at the brake calipers behind the wheels, ran a hand along the seam of the fender, then opened the door and checked the seats and the dash. Only then did he bend down, squint, and lean in close to the VIN plate in the lower corner of the windshield. He didn’t hurry.

"Starts with WBS." He straightened up and lifted his chin at Bob. "Pop the hood."

Bob popped the hood. Ray took one look and scratched the back of his head. "S54. Inline six," he said. "Nothing wrong with this one, far as I can tell. Anything out of BMW’s M division gets a VIN starting with WBS. This is a genuine M3."

The service bay went still.

Preston frowned. "Take a closer look—"

Ray ignored him and walked over to Preston’s car. This time he went straight for the windshield, read the VIN, then had someone pop the hood. He was even slower about it this time.

"An M3 and a 330 are different right from the first three letters of the VIN." He straightened slowly and turned to look at Preston, an odd expression on his face. "WBA. M54 engine. Son, yours is the 330."

The smile froze on Preston’s face. His head whipped around, looking for Kyle.

Kyle was standing at the edge of the crowd, every drop of color gone from his face. His lips moved, but nothing came out. He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know. That night he’d handed the car over with his own two hands...

The crowd had gone silent. The ones who’d been shouting "I knew it" a few minutes ago were all looking at their shoes.

"Well?" Ethan said. "Still not convinced?"

He didn’t wait for Preston to answer. He dug a set of keys out of his pocket, walked over to Owen, pressed them into his hand, and lowered his voice. "Put your mom behind the wheel. Start it up and floor it."

Owen looked down at the keys in his hand, then up at Ethan, and his eyes went red.

Owen helped his mother into the car. She was still in her diner uniform, an order pad poking out of her apron pocket. She sat down in the driver’s seat and put her hands on the wheel, then took them off, then after a moment put them back, afraid she might break something.

Owen leaned in, turned the key for her, and slipped it into neutral. "Mom, step on the gas. Hard."

She drew a deep breath and held it. She pulled back her bad leg, switched to the good one, and stomped it all the way to the floor.

The engine roared.

The sound blew out of the front end, slammed into the sheet-metal roof, and came back off all four walls. Wrenches rattled on the tool racks. Out by the caution tape, people clapped their hands over their ears without thinking.

Owen’s mother sat there gripping the wheel, stunned, and the tears just came.

The first one to make a sound was Gus. He yanked off his glasses, jammed them back on crooked, and bellowed, "You hear that? That’s the S54! THAT is an M3!"