The morning after the second time I found the Mercedes blocking my garage door, I drove out to the hardware store on Route 70 and bought two cameras.
They were nothing fancy. Weatherproof, motion-activated, the kind that sends clips to your phone and keeps two weeks of footage on a memory card. I paid cash and carried the bag out like I was buying a water pump. That is how I wanted it to feel: maintenance. Not paranoia. Maintenance.
I mounted the first one under the eave of the garage, angled down at the driveway so it caught the full apron from the garage door to the curb. The second went on the side of the house, facing the street, wide enough to see the whole front of my lot and a decent stretch of pavement in both directions. I made sure both were visible. I did not hide them behind trim or bury them in the bushes. They sat in plain sight, little black eyes, blinking a slow red light.
I was not trying to spy. I was creating a record.
My father had a saying for everything, and one of them was this: never argue with memory. Write it down. He said it about work orders first. A customer would swear we had quoted him four hundred when the slip said six, and Dad would hold up the paper like it was a court order. It worked every time. Memory bends. Ink does not.
So I started a logbook.
It was an old spiral notebook from the shop, grease on the cover, half the pages already gone. I turned to the first clean page and wrote the date at the top, then made columns: DATE / TIME IN / TIME OUT / DURATION / VEHICLE / PLATE / NOTES. I numbered the rows down the margin. I sat at my workbench with a pen and filled in the two entries I already had, from memory, and underlined them twice because they were reconstructions. Everything after that would be real.
The first entry was the Tuesday I had described in my own head as the day the Mercedes appeared. Time in: roughly 9:40 a.m. I had been under a Honda, and by the time I rolled out, it was sitting there like it had always been there. Plate: I had not written it down the first time, which annoyed me more than the car did. Notes: dark blue Mercedes, chrome wheels, tinted windows, spotless. It looked like it had been detailed that morning.
The second entry was sharper. Thursday. Time in: 8:15 a.m., because I remember checking my watch and doing the math on my first appointment. Time out: 11:50 a.m., because the same customer waited in my waiting room, drinking my coffee, while I could not get the tow trailer out past the thing. Duration: three hours and thirty-five minutes. Notes: same car. I had the plate this time. I read it off the car with my own eyes and wrote it in the book, and I will not pretend that did not feel like a small victory.
From then on, the system ran itself. Motion clip comes in, I open the app, I write it down. Time in, time out, duration. I photographed the car from three angles every single time, the same three angles, like a mechanic doing a walkaround. Front plate. Side profile showing the car across my driveway. Wide shot showing the blocked garage door with my shop sign above it. I kept the video clips backed up to a folder on my computer, named by date, each one labeled with the logbook row number.
I told exactly one person. Frank, who was in that week for brake pads, noticed the camera under the eave and asked if somebody had been messing with the shop.
"Just a parking problem," I said.
"Guy blocking your driveway?"
"Something like that."
Frank laughed. "Get a tow truck."
"I am," I said. "I am getting a paper trail first."
That is what the cameras were. Not a weapon. A paper trail. A man can tell the police anything. A man can tell his mother anything. Footage with a timestamp does not argue. It just sits there, quiet, doing what my father always said records were supposed to do: stand still while everything else moves.
The third time the Mercedes showed up, I was ready. I did not storm out. I did not knock on a window. I stood inside the garage with my phone, watched the clip arrive, and wrote the time in the book before I even walked outside to take the photographs. Eight forty-five a.m. to one twenty p.m. Four hours and thirty-five minutes. Row three.
I remember feeling something I did not expect. Calm. The calm of a man who has stopped arguing with what is happening and started measuring it instead.
By the fourth time, I was done being quiet about it.