"I already regret it," I said. "I regret the twenty-three times I didn't do it."
Marcus engaged the hydraulics, and the front wheels of the Mercedes lifted off my driveway for the first time in nineteen days.
The front wheels of the Mercedes were off the ground and Marcus was walking around to the back to check the clearances before he secured everything. That was when he crouched down behind the rear bumper and stopped.
"Hold on," he said.
There was something in his voice that pulled all of us closer. I stepped up beside him. Meredith stopped mid-sentence about her lawyer. Even Tyler stopped pacing.
Underneath the rear bumper, tucked up tight against the underbody where you'd never see it unless you were on your back looking, there was a thin black cable running along the frame. It disappeared into a small black metal housing, maybe the size of a paperback, bolted to the underside of the car with two shiny brackets. It didn't belong there. I'd spent eighteen years under cars, and I know what belongs under a car and what doesn't. The housing was aftermarket. The brackets were new, not factory, and they'd been drilled into place by somebody in a hurry. A tiny green LED blinked on one edge, steady as a heartbeat.
"What is that?" I asked.
Marcus shook his head slow. "I don't know yet."
"Don't touch that," Tyler said.
He said it fast, too fast, and his voice had gone up half an octave. He was standing maybe six feet away, and he'd taken a half step forward without realizing it.
"Just leave it," he said. "Just tow the car."
Marcus looked at him, then at the box, then back at Tyler. "Son, I'm not comfortable lifting it with that attached. I don't know what it is, and I'm not hauling a car with unknown electronics bolted to the underbody. If that thing shorts, if it sparks, if it's connected to something under the hood — that's on me."
"It's just a tracking device," Meredith said quickly. Too quickly. "My husband had it installed. For insurance. You don't need to make a production out of this."
But her eyes were on Tyler, not on the box, and Tyler's face had gone pale under the morning sun. The red around his ears was gone. He looked like a kid who'd been caught with his hand somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.
Marcus crouched again, careful, hands visible, like the box might bite. He traced the cable with his eyes along the frame toward the front of the car. "Where does it run? Into the dash? The OBD port?"
"Nobody needs to know that," Tyler said. "Just tow the car."
"I'm calling the police," Marcus said, and he pulled out his phone.
"You can't do that," Tyler said. "It's my car. You can't call the police about my car."
Marcus was already dialing. "I can call the police about anything I want. It's my tow, my truck, my license on the line."
What happened next happened fast. Marcus leaned in to get a better look at the mounting brackets, bracing one hand against the housing to steady himself, and one of the brackets — the cheap aftermarket kind, the kind that comes in a bag with Chinese instructions — snapped clean at the bend. The box broke loose, dropped maybe eighteen inches, and hit the concrete of my driveway with a crack like a dropped toolbox.
The impact panel popped open.
We all stood there looking down at it. Inside the housing there was a nest of colored wires, red and yellow and black, wrapped tight around a circuit board no bigger than a playing card. There was a memory card in a slot on one side, the tiny kind that goes in a phone. There were little electronic components I didn't have names for, resistors and capacitors and a chip with a serial number etched on it. And tucked along the inside wall, in a clear plastic sleeve, there was a stack of folded papers.
Nobody moved for a second. The green LED was still blinking, lying there on the concrete, blinking up at the sky like nothing had happened.
Tyler went the color of skim milk. His mouth opened and closed and nothing came out.
Meredith said, "It's just a tracking device," but her voice didn't sound certain anymore. It sounded like a woman repeating a line she'd been given, a line that was supposed to end the conversation, and the conversation wasn't ending.
Marcus finished his call and put the phone back in his pocket. "Non-emergency says a unit's on the way. Nobody touches anything until they get here."
He looked at me. "Sorry about the delay, Nathan."
I looked at the box on my driveway, at the wires and the blinking light and the plastic sleeve of papers, and I thought about nineteen days of that Mercedes parked across my garage, and the laugh Tyler had given the sign at 7:18, and I had the strangest feeling that this whole thing had just stopped being about parking.