Random dirt and refuse littered the gravel lot before the structure. The building itself was nothing special: built post-Shift, with magic in mind. Just a brick box, with barred dusty windows and a barred door, a standard house for a world where monsters spawned out of thin air and tried to break into your house to eat you. Another chain-link gate, on the right of the building and also wide open, led to the back lot.

The place smelled abandoned: squirrels, the musk of a tomcat on the prowl, dog excrement decomposing in the sun, tree rats. No human odors. Odd.

I ran my fingers along the wooden board nailed tight across the double door. Dirt.

“They arrrre closshed,” Ascanio observed.

“It looks that way. Either the Heron building was supposed to be their big comeback and they didn’t rehire anyone until they got a contract, or…”

“Orrr?”

“Or someone hired them specifically to reclaim the Heron Building and when the deal fell through, the client abandoned them. Come on, we’re going to dig in their garbage.”

“Oh boy!”

Smartass.

The Dumpster by the fence didn’t yield any new information. It wasn’t exactly empty either. The moment we lifted the lid, a very upset mama skunk aimed her butt at us, and we dropped the lid pronto. Stupid May, everybody was having babies.

I went to check the mailbox, while Ascanio trotted off to the back.

The metal box was empty. No mail. Hmm.

“I found shomeshing!” Ascanio called.

I made my way to the back. The narrow space between the building and the fence opened into an enormous back lot, filled with random metal junk. Tiny creatures, fuzzy and quick, with long chinchilla tails, skittered over the refuse. The gravel lay unevenly. It looked like something had been dragged out.

Ascanio greeted me in the back, holding up a flat tire, with a jagged chunk of metal embedded in it. He stuck the tire under my nose. The scent of automotive lubricant wafted up. Fresh. Car grease changed its scent in the open. This was a recent blowout.

Someone had driven into this lot probably during the last week, no more than ten days ago for sure. I held up the tire. It wasn’t just flat, it must’ve exploded. The vehicle to which that tire belonged couldn’t have gotten very far. I looked back at the drag marks. Someone had been towed out. That was the most likely explanation.

The dirt on the board blocking the door was months old. Magic had killed most of the cell phones—if you had a working one, you were likely in the military. So how did this person get themselves out of their blown tire predicament?

I jogged to the street, with Ascanio at my heels. Two hundred yards down the road, a tall sign announced Downs Motor Care. Aha.

I pointed at the sign. “This would be a clue.”