Owen got up and saw in the margins of his vision everyone track his rise toward the ceiling—Carly, Jonathan, the people at the massive table across the aisle, Courtney, still by the bar, and the bartender, too.

Owen snapped his arms straight to settle his cuffs, buttoned his jacket, and walked out.

Once he was in behind the steering wheel, having pointedly avoided admiring the sleek flares that ran the length of the car’s flank, or the sun splashing in the silver flecks in the paint, or the orange enamel winking at him from behind the spokes of the wheel rims, Owen sent Jonathan a text:

Didn’t get around to it four years ago. Didn’t get around to it today. There’s possibly more money in any offer that might come down if there’s useful information about how you came by the Flinck.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

John gathered a storm cloud of silence over his head the whole way to Ada’s house. If Carly materializing over his shoulder in the restaurant had been a shock, finding out that Ada was in the comic book shop on the corner waiting for them was right up to the edge of what he could believe for this day.

He set a grim face and hoped it held a perimeter against any conversation. His time for questions, for looking before leaping, was all but gone. He needed to think and go—forward or underground.

John had never once been eager to talk to Roy. Well, not exactly. Sometimes hearing Roy’s truck pull up, whining on its burned-out springs, or watching him walk over on his bowlegs with his shoulders all hunched and stiff, John would grow a not entirely unpleasant pressure in his jaw. Like the tight, rising tension in knuckles that need to pop. The anticipation wasn’t awful. It was a sure thing. An itch that would get scratched.

But those little exorcisms of irritation aside, Jonathan had never, in any way, been bursting to talk to Roy. He often daydreamed about getting news that would signal the end of having to deal with him at all. Of Roy breaking his neck while crashing down the stairs. That’d be great. Totally something to look forward to. Or him getting struck by lightning. Or finding out that he’d finally caved in and let that mopey-ass face have what it—deep down—really wanted: a hose run from the tailpipe of his rolling junkyard right in through the window. Carbon monoxide, an hour, and a classic-rock mixtape to sing him over to the other side.

So, of course, for the first time ever that he actually wanted to talk to Roy, he couldn’t. He’d blown off the meeting. Another quarter left on the curb at the Y had just come in at the wrong time, in the middle of everything. Something had to give and Jonathan had let it be Roy.