Isaiah stopped spending the burglary money and set aside what was left for Flaco. He didn’t know what else he could do. Broke now, he got a job at the Hurston Animal Shelter. He liked the animals and he liked Harry but the city cut the budget and Harry had to let him go.
Isaiah worked as a night janitor at Hopkins Machining and Welding. He learned how to use the machines by watching videos and practiced on them at night. Mr. Hopkins caught him working on a canopy for a client’s vintage Spitfire airplane. He was impressed but couldn’t hire Isaiah because it was a union shop.
Hopkins referred Isaiah to Garrison Robles, a gunsmith who made custom firearms and ammo. Garrison was looking for a machinist who would work cheap in exchange for learning the trade. Isaiah had reservations about taking the job. Since the shootings he was gun-shy and Dr. Lopez and her one damn bullet had made him almost phobic.
Isaiah was eleven years old and afraid of spiders. He refused to take a bath because a daddy longlegs was in the tub.
“That little thing?” Marcus had said. “It can’t hurt you.”
“I don’t care,” Isaiah said. “I’m not going in there.”
“I was scared of snakes. Couldn’t even look at a picture of one. So I studied up on them, learned what made them tick, got them down to their nuts and bolts. Made them a thing instead of a boogieman.”
“Are you still afraid of them?”
“Oh yeah, I’m terrified-but I know what I’m dealing with.”
Isaiah learned a lot about guns and ammo working for Garrison. He was still afraid of them but he knew what he was dealing with.
Other jobs came and went. He worked as a barista at the Coffee Cup, making espressos, lattes, and mocha frappuccinos. He learned about coffee and its smells. Separating the aroma into notes of charcoal, chocolate, red fruits, caramel, and a dozen others. He began paying attention to smells in general. Walking into a room, meeting someone, opening a package. He worked for a law practice as a process server. He liked finding people who didn’t want to be found and he liked reading the documents he was serving. Divorces, summonses, lawsuits, subpoenas, cease-and-desist orders. A mini-course in the law. He worked at a sporting goods store. It had a rock-climbing wall and he got into it, the guy there taking him on climbs to Eagle Peak, Stoney Point, Joshua Tree.
His best job was at TK’s Wrecking Yard. Twelve desolate acres near the Dominguez Channel. TK was a skinny old man who smelled like motor oil and sweat, enough room in his overalls for two more TKs, his cap so filthy you could barely make out the STP.
“What’s your name, son?” TK said, wiping his hands with a rag that was dirtier than his hands.
“Isaiah Quintabe,” Isaiah said.
“You ever work on cars before, Isaiah Quintabe?”
“No sir, but I know my tools and I learn fast.”
“Must be six hundred vehicles out here plus all the parts. You can’t tell one from another you’re of no use to me.”
“I can tell one from another,” Isaiah said. He’d seen every make and model ever made come off the Anaheim off-ramp. After he’d named all the cars within a forty-yard radius TK said: “Say, have you heard this one? These two old peoples was at the church service and during the prayer the old man leans over to the old lady and says, ‘I just cut a silent fart. Should I say something?’ And the old lady says, ‘No, but you better put a new battery in your hearing aid.’” Isaiah laughed for the first time in a long time. TK lit a Pall Mall, his eyes narrowing as he inhaled. “Well, I guess you got the job, boy,” he said.
As a young man, TK raced a Turbo Eclipse on the wide streets near the Ontario airport and ran super go-karts at CalSpeed and drove a highly modified CRX in SCCA races until he couldn’t afford it anymore. Isaiah found boxes of dinged-up trophies in the warehouse. TK taught Isaiah how to drive. Really drive. How to heel-and-toe, rev match, drift with the hand brake. They set up their own race course. S-turns through the rows of crushed cars, a straightaway along the perimeter fence, then a sweeping right-hander around the mountain of tires and back through the S-turns to the finish line in front of the warehouse, where you had to brake hard or run into the crane.
TK would get a car up and running, put Isaiah behind the wheel in a scratched-up motorcycle helmet, and class was in session. TK knew his stuff but patience was not a virtue he cultivated. He’d bounce around in the shotgun seat, pointing at things Isaiah couldn’t see and rounding the curves with his hand.
“Get wide, wider, goddammit-okay okay, here comes your turn-in, brake to the threshold, pick your line-no, not that line, you’re early, steer, steer, come off it now-too much, too much-shit, boy, if they gave points for sliding off the road you’d be a goddamn champion.”
It was late afternoon. Oil and rust were cooking in the heat, the glare off the windshields like six hundred suns. Isaiah and TK were dismantling an Audi that had rear-ended an eighteen-wheeler. Isaiah had always liked Audis and this one was an S4. A pocket rocket in sheep’s clothing.
“You heard this one?” TK said. “Good-lookin’ woman’s walking down the street and her blouse is all open in the front and one of her titties is hanging out. Well, a cop comes along and says, ‘Lady, did you know your titty is hanging out? I could arrest you for indecent exposure.’ And the lady says, ‘Shit, I musta left my baby on the bus.’”
Isaiah laughed and got inside the Audi to remove the seats. They were undamaged and so was the rest of the interior except for the dash. It occurred to him: If he could take a car apart why couldn’t he put one back together?
“I want to buy this car,” Isaiah said.
“This car?” TK said. “This car needs a bumper assembly, radiator, wheels, struts, shocks, front cross-member, the engine’s messed up, and who knows what else.”
“The engine can be repaired and the drive train is okay. The back of the car is like new.”
“The parts for this thing cost an arm and two legs and we don’t get a lot of Audis coming through here, you know.”
“This one did.”
“This ain’t some old Chevy. These German cars are a nightmare to fix.”
“Then you’ll help me.”
Isaiah was nineteen years old and adrift. He worked at the wrecking yard, visited Flaco, and occasionally hung out with the guys at the gym. The few girls he’d slept with were only around for a week or two. They thought he was strange, this quiet insomniac who was really smart but had a menial job, never did anything fun, and spent all his free time with a crippled boy.
Other than Flaco and Marcus’s constant rebukes, what concerned Isaiah most was the state of his brain. He could feel it getting rusty, the neurons granulating and hardening into a crust. He thought about going back to school but he was a high school dropout. He’d have to get his GED and slog through years of undergrad courses before it got interesting. There were other jobs to be had but they’d be entry-level and climbing the corporate ladder had no appeal. He might have gone on that way indefinitely if he hadn’t caught that first case.
It was laundry day. Isaiah gathered up his dirty clothes and took them down to the laundry room. An elderly woman was there, her face creased and dark as a dug-up baseball mitt from the forties. She was wearing a flowered muumuu, her copper-colored wig styled in an unlikely pageboy. She looked frustrated and in pain, one hand on the small of her back.