And when the call ended at 4:59 p.m., he put the phone back in his pocket and picked up the cloth and returned to the same panel, the same motion—a man in his element, in his sanctuary, in the life he had chosen and built and intended to keep.
The crew clocked out at 5:30. Marcus signed their time sheets at the workbench the way he always did, standing up, not making a production of it, the same few words for each of them, and they filed out through the side door into the cooling afternoon, and the garage became his.
Darius was the last one out. He was 19 years old and he had been working at Webb's for 2 years. And before that, he had spent three months in the Fulton County Juvenile Detention Center on a charge that Marcus knew the details of because Marcus had read every page of his file before agreeing to the hire.
And what Marcus had seen in that file was not a dangerous young man, but a young man who had made a single catastrophic decision in an environment that offered very few good ones.
And that distinction mattered to Marcus in a way that was not sentimental, but practical. Darius had the kind of mind that took to mechanical work the way some minds take to music—quickly and completely and with an instinct for it that couldn't be entirely taught.
Marcus had not told Darius any of this. He had offered him the job, shown him where the tools were, corrected his work when it needed correcting, and left it alone when it didn't.
And over two years, Darius had become quietly indispensable in the way that quiet, capable people always do. And Marcus suspected he knew it. And Marcus was fine with that.
"You good, Mr. Webb?" Darius said at the door, which was his way of checking in, the closest he came to expressing the specific gratitude that lived permanently behind his eyes when he looked at this place.
"I'm good," Marcus said. "Lock the supply cabinet on your way out. You left it open Tuesday."
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Lock it."
Darius locked it and left. And Marcus listened to the sound of the side door closing and then to the sound of nothing, which in this shop was not empty, but full: the refrigerator in the back office cycling, the Bluetooth speaker still going low, the sound of Bowen Street outside settling into early evening.
The two older men who came most Thursdays, Big Earl and Wendell, had been in around 3:00 with their trucks and their coffee, staying longer than any oil change required. Because what they were really there for was the company and the quiet authority of a man who ran a clean shop and didn't talk too much, and was, in the language of this neighborhood, solid—in the way that very few people managed to be solid over the long run of a life.
And they had left at 4:00, Big Earl patting the hood of his Silverado like it had done something good.
And then there was Mrs. Loretta Sims, who appeared at 4:15 p.m., the way she appeared every other Thursday, coming through the side door without knocking because she had long since stopped feeling the need to knock here, carrying a foil-covered plate that smelled of something involving sweet potatoes and probably pork.
67 years old, and moving with the deliberate authority of a woman who had outlasted every hardship she'd ever met and intended to outlast several more.
"Here, baby," she said, setting the plate on the workbench near the speaker, which was what she called him because she had watched him grow from a new business owner on her street into something she didn't entirely have words for. And baby was the word that covered all of it.
"Mrs. Sims," he said, "you look tired."
"I'm fine."
"You always say that."
She looked at the Shelby for a moment, the way she always looked at it—not with the eye of someone who understood cars, but with the eye of someone who understood what the car meant, which was different and somehow more accurate.
"It's getting there," she said.
"It is," Marcus said.
She stayed 10 minutes, told him that her nephew Devon, the one who ran the jerk chicken food truck on Piedmont, had gotten a bad health inspection last week that she was certain was not legitimate.
And Marcus listened to this without commenting on it, though he had his own thoughts about the inspectors who worked that part of the city and about Devon's particular run of bad luck with city officials over the last 18 months. He filed it in the part of his mind that filed things to be returned to later.
After she left, the shop was his again, and he went to the back office and looked at the floor safe.
It was a Browning heavy steel unit bolted through the concrete with four industrial anchors he had set himself.
And inside it was $280,000 in cash withdrawn from his business account, Georgia Credit Union, on Tuesday morning, documented with a withdrawal receipt, an escrow agreement, a signed letter of intent from the seller, and a copy of the certified appraisal.
All of it organized in a manila folder that sat beside the stacked bills because Marcus organized everything—because that was how he had always operated, and the habit had not left him when the occupation that trained it did.
The money was for the warehouse. The vacant commercial building directly adjacent to the shop had been on the market for 14 months, and Marcus had been in quiet negotiation with the owner for the last six of those months.
And the closing was set for Monday morning at 9:00.