I brought the Virtue to a stop directly in front of the center garage, as asked, and found myself parked next to the black Annihilator, which was backed up to the garage on the right. The add-on bars that protected the front grill were scratched and bent out of shape, no doubt from being used to ram storefronts. Sitting there, engine and lights off, it was a fierce beast asleep.

I sat in the car, with the engine running, wondering what I should do next. Get out, go knock on a door?

But then, at the bottom of the door, a sliver of light appeared, and grew wider as the door slowly rose. Two sets of legs turned into full bodies as the door glided all the way up electrically. It was two men, neither of whom I recognized, dressed in black jeans and black leather jackets, dark sunglasses perched atop their noses like they were auditioning for bad-guy parts in a Chuck Norris movie.

The one on the left looked at me and motioned me forward with his index finger, the way the car wash guys do when they lead you onto the track. The two men stepped apart to allow me to drive the Virtue into the garage, and once the car was fully inside, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the garage door slowly slide back down.

Chapter 30

30

One of the two guys in leather jackets—he was blond and lean and fit and kind of Swedish looking—approached my door. I put down the window and said, “Should I turn it off? Once it’s off, you never know whether it’s going to start again.”

Blondie smiled. “You can turn it off.”

I turned back the key, opened the door. It was a hell of a garage. You could have performed surgery in there. Banks of overhead lights, a spotless concrete floor. Across the back wall, cabinets and tools of the kind you might expect to see in an auto-repair shop. A machine that separated tires from rims, jacks you could push under cars, a broad counter where you could disassemble and fix things.

The Virtue was the only car in there. The right bay, which the Annihilator might have backed into if it weren’t too tall for the door opening, was empty. And the left bay was filled, but not with any kind of vehicle. There had to be half a dozen long racks, the kind they push around the fashion district, of new suits, tags still attached. As you may have gathered, I am not particularly knowledgeable about matters related to fashion, but this looked like high-end stuff. Boss, Versace, Armani, apparently nothing from the Gap.

The other one, whose face looked like a relief map of the moon, littered with small round scars as though he’d barely survived chicken pox, came around the back of the car and up to the door. “Keys inside?” Pockmark asked me.