By this time, Johan had already called Ramón to tell him that they were back in business.

His body wasn’t perfect—his calves could be bigger, his cephalic veins more pronounced, and his stomach flatter—but journeying it invariably brought a cooler frame of mind. Johan took photos of his chest and jaw, added a filter to accentuate the lines, and shared them across his social platforms. The likes came in, first by the tens, then by the hundreds. He masturbated as he watched the number next to the little heart symbol grow.

Johan thought Xander might have sloped off home with his tail between his legs, but he was still there. He’d moved from the TV room to the garage, trying to make amends by working on the Mustang. It was coming together. There were still dents and scratches, but over the last couple of days Xander had replaced the exhaust, headlights, and windshield, and had done something beneath the hood to make the engine snarl louder.

He looked up as Johan entered the garage. His teeth flashed in a hungry, excited sort of way, almost catlike.

“Got the son of a bitch,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag, then grabbing his phone from the top compartment in his toolbox. Xander looked at home in the garage, with wrenches scattered around his boots and oil on his face. He was a mechanic when Johan recruited him, chopping stolen vehicles for Redline Rikki in Central-Alameda. Rikki had called Xander her animal, because he used to deadlift engine blocks and hammer out dented panels with his skull. “I keep him chained up at night,” she’d said. Xander had once won a thousand bucks in a bet after drinking a quart of 5W-30 straight from the bottle. Johan had surmised that someone so simpleminded would be dog-loyal, and he was right.

He swiped through his phone—still with his teeth showing—and turned it toward Johan. The red TMZ logo filled the top of the screen, and beneath this a paparazzi shot of Luke Kingsley climbing behind the wheel of a boxy blue car. The caption beneath read: OH, LUKE! FROM A TESLA TO A DODGE!

“This isn’t the car from the security footage,” Johan said.

“No. He came here in a Camaro. A ’78, I think. Custom paint and a Z28 scoop.”

“Right. And how many cops have you ever seen driving a car like that—outside of a fucking movie, I mean?”

“Okay. Jesus, okay.” Xander plucked at his earlobe. “Anyway, that car . . . the Dodge Caliber. Puke-blue. Marine blue, they called it, or something like that. It’s not that common a color, right? I knew I kept seeing one around, and then I remembered where.”