Page 20 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“This lock is garbage,” he calls.

“That lock is original to the building,” I counter.

“That’s what I said.”

He comes back through, and the lights are on the long wall now. He stops in front of the boatyard. Tobias’s orange dab sits there in all that gray water, saving its own life.

Then his phone goes.

He takes it out and looks at the screen, and I watch him read a name and go somewhere else entirely. He answers it with one syllable I don’t catch. He listens for about eleven seconds. He says two words in Russian, and then, “Twenty minutes,” and hangs up.

“I have to go,” he says, regret lacing his words.

“Now?”

“Now.” He’s already got his keys. He comes over and takes my chin in his hand, tips my face up and kisses me, unhurried. “I’ll be back before you close.”

“Is everything all right?” I ask.

“It will be.”

Natan

The two men out of the white van are sitting on the floor of Johansson’s warehouse with their backs against their own rear wheel, and I’ve laid what they were carrying out in a line on the concrete so that their employer has something to look at when he gets here.

Two five-liter drums of solvent. A bolt cutter. Ten feet of garden hose cut clean at both ends. A key on a paper tag with the laundry’s address written on it in pencil, and a second key with no tag at all, which Mechislav walked up the alley behind Calloway Street at half past six this morning and fitted into the gate at the back of a converted hardware store.

Kimmie’s gallery.

“Upstairs at the laundry has a sink and a supply that’s still live,” Mechislav says. He’s got their phones in his jacket. “Hose in the sink, hose out the window, down the wall, through the gate. Water goes under her back door overnight and comes up through that floor. Nobody breaks anything. Nobody’s on a camera. Old building, old pipes, bad luck.”

“And the solvent?”

“For if she’s insured.”

The roller door goes up at eight, and Johansson comes in under it before it’s halfway, because I called him from the phone of the man on the left and told him his van was here and he could come and collect it. He’s in a gray jacket, and he has the walk of a man who has spent three years being told he’s the cleverest person in whichever room he’s standing in.

He looks at the line of items on the floor. He looks at his two employees. Then he arranges his face into something patient and puts his hands in his coat pockets.

“I don’t know these people,” he says.

I pick up the first drum, unscrew the cap, and pour it over the hood of the Jaguar.

It goes on like syrup and then it starts working, and the paint lifts in long muddy blisters from the middle outward. The smell fills the whole building. Johansson makes a noise I’d describe as involuntary and takes two steps toward the car before he thinks better of it.

“That’s the burst pipe,” I tell him.

“Do you have any idea what that car costs?” he screams.

“To the dollar.” I set the empty drum down on his front tire. “Vestbro Holdings. You’ve been putting a street together one piece at a time and waiting for the difficult ones to get tired. It’s good work. It’s cheap, and it’s slow and nobody ever calls the police about coincidences.”

He doesn’t bother denying it, which I respect more than I expected to.

“It’s just property,” he says. “It’s completely legal.”

“Most of it. Only you walked into her gallery, and I don’t trust your intentions aren’t dishonorable.” I take my time with the second drum, turning it so the label faces him. “My family has moved freight over that bridge for forty years. You bought a warehouse two doors down from our yard and never opened it once. I want you to think about how that looks from where I stand.”

“I have never sent a truck across your bridge.”