I cross North Avenue and walk past the RaceTrac, not hurrying, not ambling, but with a purpose. Projecting confidence is the first trick. If you hunch your shoulders or duck your face and keep looking around like you’re making sure there isn’t a cop nearby, people notice. Act like you belong and that you know what you’re doing, and you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time. I walk up to the black pickup truck in the little gravel lot like it’s mine. It’s a Supercrew model with four doors and a huge interior. Through the windshield I see two-tone leather seats and a screen on the dash the size of a small flat-screen TV. The truck looks like your little cousin came to the big city wearing bling, trying to act grown up. It’s backed in, facing the street, so I walk around to the tailgate. Behind the truck, I crouch and slap a small, magnetized box the size of a pack of cigarettes underneath the rear bumper. Then I stand back up and continue around the truck. I can see a door at the back of the building that probably goes into the office, but even if it’s unlocked I want to eyeball the inside of the garage first, see what I’m up against.

At the front of the garage, I can see in the nearest open bay there’s a red Mustang up on a lift, and a man in a gray coverall is standing underneath the car, looking up at the front axle. At the far end, to my left, another man is bent over the engine of an SUV. I see no one else in the garage bays. To my right is the office, basically a wall of Sheetrock across the width of the garage with a plate-glass window and a door in it. Through the window I see Cargill seated behind a desk, lazily spinning around in his office chair, talking into a cell phone. He’s a tall, rawboned man, skin pale as milk. His head is nearly shorn, with only a fuzzy remnant of blond hair on his scalp. As soon as I see him, my head starts humming like an electric razor. Time to dance. I walk into the garage.

“Help you?” calls the man working on the Mustang as I open the office door.