The second car took his breath away slightly more than the first, a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z28, a production variant so limited in number that collectors had been known to pay serious money for examples in far worse condition than this one. The frame number was readable. The rally sport trim was intact. He wrote that number down and drew a small circle around it.
Cars three through five were sedans from the 1950s and early 1960s. A '58 Chevrolet Bel Air, a '61 Ford Galaxie, and a '63 Buick Riviera. All recoverable. All worth money after proper restoration, though not at the level of the first two.
The sixth car stopped him completely. He had to crouch down and look at the badge from a particular angle to make sure he was reading it correctly. A 1971 De Tomaso Pantera. An Italian-American sports car produced in limited numbers through a partnership between the Italian coachbuilder and Ford's engine division with total production across all years numbering only around 10,000 units. Finding one in any condition was unusual.
Finding one in a forgotten garage in the northeast with its chassis present and its mid-engine compartment sealed but intact was the kind of thing that happens in stories, except this was not a story yet. It was still just a cold building with a flashlight beam moving through it. And a man in a work jacket writing numbers in a notebook with a hand that was not entirely steady.
The last two cars were too far gone. Floor pans collapsed, body panels corroded through, but they held usable components. And components had value, too.
He wrote everything down. His rough estimate, sitting on an overturned milk crate in that garage with the notebook open on his knee, was somewhere between $400,000 and $600,000 in restored market value if the work was done correctly. He had paid $1,000 for the building and everything inside it.
He walked the surrounding blocks in the afternoon. He knew this area in the way that people who grew up nearby know a neighborhood not from maps, but from repeated presence. The garage sat on a corner lot, where two secondary roads intersected, approximately a quarter mile from an on-ramp to a federal highway, and directly adjacent to a bus corridor that the city transit authority had been quietly planning to expand for the past 18 months.
Three vacant lots sat immediately behind the garage, facing the secondary road, and they were listed for sale at prices that reflected their current appearance, abandoned, unlandscaped, surrounded by chain link. Nobody had connected those lots to the infrastructure map yet. Caleb had an acquaintance from his engineering years, a man named Marcus who now worked in municipal planning, and he called him that evening. He asked a simple, neutral question about the development zone classifications for that quadrant. Marcus gave him a simple, neutral answer.
The entire block sat inside what the city's internal planning documents called a phase two commercial development priority zone, meaning that within 12 to 18 months, the infrastructure upgrades would be formally announced, and land values in the zone would shift accordingly. Caleb thanked him, ended the call, sat at his kitchen table, looked at the numbers in his notebook, and smiled. It was the first time he had smiled without reservation since the night he was laid off.