And he buffed the primer with the microfiber cloth in the same slow circles he had been making since 4:00 in the afternoon, in the quiet of the shop that he had built from a VA loan and 8 years of mornings that started before the crew arrived, and the jazz station played, and the light outside went from purple to black.
And Marcus worked until there was nothing left in the motion that wasn't peace.
The bar was in Buckhead, the kind of place where the leather booths were deep enough to have privacy, and the bourbon list ran to two pages, and the air smelled of expensive tobacco, and the specific kind of satisfaction that comes from spending money you didn't earn on things you don't deserve.
And at 9:15 on that Thursday evening, Puit and Vance were in the corner booth with their drinks, and Puit was doing the thing he always did after a score, which was talk.
"I'm telling you," Puit said, swirling the bourbon in a way that suggested he had watched someone do this in a movie and decided it was the right gesture for the moment, "easiest one we've done this year. The guy didn't even ask for a lawyer. Didn't even flinch. Just opened the safe and stepped back."
The duffel was in the trunk of Puit's Charger in the bar's parking garage, and it was $55,000 lighter than it had been when they left Webb's Premier Restorations because Vance had counted the full amount in the car on the way here, and they had put $55,000 in a separate bag that was going to a secondary location before the rest was logged into the unit evidence system at midnight, which was when Dobs would be there to facilitate the intake and receive his cut—which was the arrangement that had been in place for 4 years and which had never produced a complication that couldn't be managed.
Dobs got 15% of the skim. It had never been written down.
"62 and 23 this month," Puit continued, referring to what the two seizures had netted him personally. "I can cover September and get ahead on October. Teresa's going to stop asking questions."
He leaned back in the booth with the specific relaxation of a man whose debt anxiety has temporarily released its grip, which was the only relaxation Puit was capable of: the brief interval between the pressure and the next one.
Vance was not relaxed. He was staring at his glass. He had been quieter than usual since they left Bowen Street. And the quietness was not the comfortable quietness of a satisfied man, but the particular quietness of a man whose analytical mind has snagged on something that won't release.
"He wasn't scared," Vance said.
Puit looked at him. "What?"
"Webb. He wasn't scared."
Vance set his glass down and turned it once on the coaster, a precise quarter rotation. "When we came through the door, most people—even prepared people—have a physical response. Pupils, posture, breathing. He had none of that. He watched us come in and he looked at us the way a person looks at something they're trying to understand."
"People freeze," Puit said. "You know what shock looks like."
"Not that kind of calm," Vance said. "When I went for the secondary exit, he'd already clocked me. He was already adjusting. And when you got in his face, normal people lean back. He didn't move. He just looked at you."
"He's a mechanic, Stuart."
"Maybe," Vance said, and pulled out his phone. "But I want to run him. Full background, federal level. I want to make sure this man doesn't have a federal judge in his family or a connection to somebody we don't want connections to."
Puit waved his hand. "You're overthinking it. We have the badge. We have the unit. We've done this 43 times."
"I know how many times we've done it," Vance said flatly, and logged into the NCIC database through his secure mobile terminal.
He typed: Marcus Dion Webb, date of birth, Social Security number.
The screen ran its usual quick search and then did something that Vance had not seen it do in six years of running names on this terminal. It ran slow: 5 seconds, then 10.
Then the application's background turned the specific shade of red that indicated not a search result, but an access denial.
And in the center of the red screen, a bold text box appeared: RESTRICTED. File Department of Defense clearance tier 1 required. This inquiry has been logged. Cease immediately.
The cigar nearly fell from Vance's fingers. He looked at the screen for three full seconds, processing what it meant—not just the block, but the logged inquiry, which meant that somewhere in a federal system, a record now existed that Stuart Vance of the Fulton County Task Force had attempted to access the file of Marcus Dion Webb and had been denied, which meant that someone with the authority to monitor that kind of inquiry had potentially been notified of it within the hour.
He turned the phone toward Puit.
Puit read it. The celebration left his face like air from a punctured tire, all at once, completely leaving behind the posture of a man who has just been handed information he does not want and cannot return.
"State PD doesn't get DoD blocks," Vance said quietly. "The FBI gets DoD blocks sometimes. Tier one is special operations. Delta, DevGru, JWAC, CIA Special Activities. That's what tier one means."
He paused. "And the inquiry was logged, which means the moment I ran his name, someone somewhere received a notification."
Puit stared at the phone. "What the hell did we just steal from?" he said.