Chapter 26
Six weeks after the arrest, on a Tuesday afternoon that had no reason to be memorable, my phone rang while I was standing in my kitchen with a mug of coffee gone cold in my hand. I did not recognize the number, and for a moment I almost let it go to voicemail. Something made me answer. The voice on the other end was rough and careful, the voice of a man who was used to shouting over machinery and had learned to speak quietly for a phone call.
He introduced himself as Sam Delgado, and he said he owned the salvage yard where the Charger had been taken. I stood very still. I had spent months building a case out of records and recordings and invoices, and I had trained myself to think of the car as evidence, as a number, as an appraised value on a certificate. Hearing the name of the yard out loud, from the man who ran it, brought all of it back in a rush, the black paint, the sound of the engine, the way the driver's seat had worn down on the left side where my father always sat.
Sam did not waste time. He told me that when a car comes into his yard for crushing, his workers strip the valuable parts first, the way they always do, because that is the business and there is no point pretending otherwise. Most of what they took from the Charger was gone within days, sold off or melted down or already forgotten. But he had set one piece aside, he said, on a feeling he could not quite explain. The wooden gearshift knob. The one my father had fitted himself during the restoration, the one with the grain worn smooth by nine years of his hand and then mine.
I sat down at the kitchen table, because my legs had decided for me that standing was no longer an option. The knob was not the most valuable part of the car, and no auction house would have paid a fortune for it. But it was the part my father's hand had touched every single time he drove, the part he had chosen himself, sanded himself, fitted himself on a Saturday afternoon in our garage while I held the wrench and tried not to drop it. It was the last piece of the car that still existed in the world, and a stranger who owed me nothing had kept it because something in him had said not to let it go.
I asked Sam why he was calling me now, six weeks after everything, and his answer was simple. He had followed the case, he said, and when the arrests were made and the story came out, he had realized whose car it had been and what it had meant. He had kept the knob in a drawer in his office ever since the day the car came in, and he had told himself he would know what to do with it eventually. Now he knew. He wanted me to come and get it, and he wanted me to know that he was sorry for his part in what had happened, even though he had only done the job he was hired to do.
I told him I would come the next morning, and after I hung up I sat at the table for a long time with the cold coffee in front of me, not drinking it, not moving it, just sitting with the knowledge that something of my father's car was still out there in the world. For months I had believed the Charger was entirely gone, reduced to scrap and memory, and I had made my peace with that belief because there had been no alternative. Now there was an alternative, small and wooden and worn smooth, and it was waiting for me in a drawer in a salvage yard office.
That night I slept badly, but for a different reason than usual. It was not the old anger that used to wake me at three in the morning. It was anticipation, sharp and unfamiliar, mixed with a grief I thought I had already finished feeling. I kept thinking about my father's hand on that knob, and the way he used to rest his palm on it at red lights. I thought about the last drive we took together, and about how I had not known it was the last one, and about how that is the way last times always work. You never know. You only find out later, and then you carry it.
When morning came I showered, dressed, and drove to the yard without calling Kevin and without telling anyone else where I was going. This was not part of the case. It was not evidence, and it was not a lead, and it did not need a detective. It needed a son, and for the first time in a very long time, that felt like enough of a reason to go somewhere.