Chapter 27 : Let It Burn

Chapter 27: Chapter 27 : Let It Burn

Chuck didn’t answer right away. He tapped the notebook against his palm a couple of times. "Pictures of what?"

"Mr. Ross." Ethan took his hands out of his pockets, eased back half a step, and let his palms hang open, his voice gentler now. "Your column never sings along with everybody else. When the whole city was cheering, you were the only one who called it fake." He smiled. "Honestly? I respect that."

Chuck grunted and didn’t deny it.

"Then you might not know what they’re saying about me online right now." Ethan tipped his head toward the editing room. "There’s a thread on the school forum called ’Is MrPelican a FRAUD?’ Eight hundred replies in an hour, and it’s getting passed around even more on Facebook. Most of those people don’t even know who was here just now. All they know is somebody said this contest was fake."

"So?"

"So I’d like you to write it up," Ethan said. "You were here. You watched Ray check the car. The raw tapes, three days and two nights of them, every last one, are yours to go through whenever you like, timecode and all. When the cut’s done, you see it the night before it goes up. Then you write what’s true. The contest was real. The car was real."

Chuck closed the notebook and tucked it under his arm. "I could write that," he said slowly. "But, son, do you know who Preston’s father is around here? The Hale family owns land from Torrance clear down to Long Beach. Half the ads in our real estate section every year are theirs." He shrugged. "I’ll write it. But if he decides to spend some money making it go away, whether it ever sees print, I wouldn’t bet on it."

"Then leave him out." Ethan didn’t even hesitate. "Not one word about him. All you need to make clear is one thing. We didn’t fake it."

Chuck blinked.

He’d figured the kid’s first words would be put Preston’s name in the paper. Eighteen, nineteen years old, somebody had just tried to bury him in front of a crowd. Who wouldn’t want to hit back on the spot? This kid hadn’t even brought it up.

Chuck found himself sizing him up all over again.

Ethan knew that card carried a lot more weight held in his hand than played on the table.

"I get it," Chuck said slowly, sounding almost amused. "Last time I ran you down. This time I slap my own face. The guy who bet wrong taking it back himself is more believable than anybody else, and more people read it than anybody else. That’s the idea, isn’t it?"

Ethan laughed. "I’d never ask you to slap your own face. Every paper in town is just repeating whatever the internet says about me, good or bad. You’re the only one who was actually here, start to finish. Everybody else heard about it. You’re a witness." He paused. "I’m just handing you an angle nobody else can get."

Chuck didn’t say anything more. After a moment, he turned and jerked his head at his photographer. "Go on. When they hand over those keys, find yourself a good spot."

When Ethan got back behind the monitors, Noah was about to burst. "What were you two whispering about? And," he lowered his voice, "people were ripping us apart online. Why wouldn’t you let Maya answer?"

Maya looked up too. On the screen beside her, the "Is MrPelican a FRAUD?" thread was still climbing. It was past eight hundred replies.

"Would you chill out for one second?" Ethan swatted him on the shoulder, then tapped the screen. "Look at these people. Three days of contest, and they never gave it a single look. Now they’ve all shown up, just to watch us go down."

"So?"

"So they’re all waiting for an answer," Ethan said. "If we’d put out a statement back then, they’d have glanced at it, rolled their eyes, and moved on. We didn’t, so now they’ll keep waiting. They’ll keep refreshing, and they’ll drag their friends in to wait with them. Every post calling us frauds is out there recruiting for us."

Noah’s mouth hung open.

"We cut it into two episodes," Ethan went on. "The last one, we check the car in front of everybody and settle every last bit of this. No rush putting it out. First, everybody goes home and sleeps. Sam’s students have been cutting clips for three days straight, and the footage is already logged hour by hour. Give us a day. Episode two goes up the same day Chuck’s column runs." He looked at Maya. "When it does, you go to that thread and post exactly one reply. A link."

"A whole day?" Noah’s eyes went wide. "They’ll have torn us to pieces by then."

"Let it burn," Ethan said. "One night is enough. The more people swear at us tonight, the more of them come back tomorrow to see who was right." He added, "The day episode two goes up, we put every minute of the night-vision footage on the site. Three days, two nights, not one second cut. Anybody who doesn’t believe us can go dig through it themselves."

Maya frowned. "The server won’t hold up."

"We’ll cross that bridge when we get there."

Maya looked at the long string of insults on the screen, and it took her a few seconds to see it. The harder they cursed now, the more of them would come back to watch.

"And at the end of every episode, the dealership’s promo code," Ethan added. "They come in for the drama, and on their way out, maybe they buy a car."

Noah opened his mouth, shut it, and opened it again. "...You’re kind of terrifying, you know that?"

He’d barely gotten it out when Chloe came squeezing through the crowd.

She’d lost her coffee somewhere, and her eyes were still red. She ran straight at Ethan and threw her arms around him. "I knew you’d pull it off!"

The impact knocked Ethan back half a step. His hands hovered in midair for a second before he gave her back a light pat. "It almost didn’t happen."

"Oh, please." Chloe let go, swiped at her eyes, and laughed. "The look on Preston’s face just now? I’m going to remember that for the rest of my life."

At the editing room door, Maya was carrying her laptop inside, and her steps faltered.

She’d seen it.

Last night, right behind this door, he’d told her he was in no rush. He could wait. And today he’d turned right around with someone else in his arms.

First her heart sank. Then something hot rose up behind it. Not for herself. She glanced at Chloe, whose eyes were creased shut from laughing, without a clue. A little while ago, Chloe had been ready to charge out there and stick up for him, and Maya was the one who’d held her back. All that, for a guy like this? A girl that nice, stuck with someone like him...

Scumbag.

She turned and went into the editing room. The door shut behind her, not loud, not quiet either.

Ethan glanced over just in time to see it close. He rubbed his nose, without the faintest idea what he’d done wrong this time.

The pickups started with the keys.

Chuck’s photographer took the best spot. Ethan set the M3’s key in Owen’s hand without a word and stepped back, out of the frame.

Owen looked down at the key. Then he turned, laid it in his mother’s palm, and folded her fingers over it, one at a time.

"Mom," he said. "No more walking to the bus stop after the night shift."

His mother didn’t say anything. She pressed the hand holding the key to her chest and reached up with the other to touch her son’s face. Shutters clattered all around them.

Noah had to drag Mac in front of the camera. He scratched the back of his head and held up the pinky. "Traitor. We’re not on speaking terms anymore."

Owen came over, stood next to him, and it took him two tries to get it out. "...Thanks."

"Thanks for what?" Mac’s eyes went wide. "My hand slipped! Slipped, you get it?" He hooked an arm around Owen’s neck. "Just pay me back that week of granola bars. Chocolate."

Behind the monitors, Ethan watched, and didn’t say anything.

The last shot was Ethan’s.

The sun was sinking in the west. Owen’s mother had the wheel, Owen sat beside her, and the M3 rolled slowly out of the service bay, past the snapped caution tape, past Kevin’s whiteboard crowded with names, and out through the gate of Big Bob’s.

Ethan stood in front of the camera with the taillights shrinking behind him.

"Thirty people, one car, three days and two nights," he said. "Somewhere in the middle, somebody told you it was all fake. Now you’ve seen it for yourself." He turned sideways so the lens could find the car over his shoulder. "Tonight, that car’s going to be parked out back of a diner, waiting for somebody coming off the night shift."

He turned back and grinned into the lens. "Next one’s going to be bigger."

Noah called cut, his voice worn down to gravel.

Tearing down went a lot faster than setting up.

The caution tape came down roll by roll, and the sleeping bags piled up in a corner. Kevin wiped the names off the whiteboard one at a time, reached Owen’s line, paused, and left it. The ten night-vision DVs sat in a row on a folding table, and the supervisors who’d worked their three full shifts came up one by one to claim theirs. One freshman hugged his to his chest and couldn’t stop grinning.

Sam had his students unplugging the editing room cable by cable, muttering the whole time. "Three days, thirty-some hours of footage... That’s a whole semester of lectures right there."

Once it was fully dark, the only thing left in the middle of the bay was the 330Ci, alone under the lift, its door shut and the key still in the ignition.

The light in Bob’s office was still on.

When Ethan walked in, Bob was staring at his ledger. The phone on his desk had been ringing all afternoon and still went off every so often. The notepad beside it was covered with names and numbers.

"All from this afternoon." Bob tapped the page with his pen. "Eleven asking about the promo code, four asking about financing, and two," he snorted, "asking if that 330’s for sale."

Ethan laughed out loud.

Bob pulled open the drawer, took out a manila envelope, and pushed it to the edge of the desk. It was fat.

"Thirty thousand," he said. "What the 330 brought in."

Ethan didn’t reach for it. "That’s money from your car."

"That car sat on my lot for over a year, and nobody wanted it. That thirty was the kid’s way of playing me, and you turned it into clean money." Bob paused. "Take it. Call it an apology."

Ethan looked at the envelope, didn’t argue any further, and put it away.

Then he took something out of his jacket pocket and set it on the desk.

It was the crushed pack of Marlboros.

"Yours," he said.

Bob looked down at the pack and went still. Then he picked it up, weighed it in his hand, and tossed it into the wastebasket by the desk. He fished a piece of nicotine gum out of the drawer, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

"About Kyle," he said around the gum. "My daughter. I’ll tell her myself."

Ethan nodded and didn’t ask anything more.

"Starting tomorrow," Bob tore off the page of phone numbers and slapped it on the desk, "the promo code goes by the contract. Every car I sell, you get a thousand." He looked up at Ethan, and for the first time all day, he almost smiled. "Kid, you’d better hope I don’t run out of cars."