"Hodge-itch," he said. He did not say it unkindly. He said it as if he were filing it.
"The registration is in the glovebox," she said. "I'd like you to know before you ask that I'm not going to open the car for you to search it. But if you'd like me to get the registration out myself, I'll do that."
"I don't need the registration."
"I thought you said—"
"I ran the plate," he said. "I know who it comes back to. It comes back to a business on Morgan Ford."
"Hodžić Motors. That's my shop. It was my father's. Now it's mine."
He did not seem to hear her. He was looking through the windshield again, down at the base of it, on the driver's side, where a small metal plate was riveted to the top of the dash under the glass, and she saw his lips move, very slightly, and she realized that he was reading the numbers on the plate. She realized, a second later, the way you realize you have left the stove on, that he was not reading them like a man trying to remember them. He was reading them like a man checking them against something he already knew.
The color went out of his face. Not all at once. It drained down out of his cheeks and his forehead in a slow wash, like someone had pulled a plug, until the red was only across his nose, and the rest of him was the gray of a sidewalk.
For a moment she thought he might be sick, or that his heart was doing something it should not, and she said, "Sir?" and took half a step toward him before she could stop herself.
He put a hand up. Not at her. At the air, as if to keep it back. He stood with his palm out and his eyes on the little plate under the windshield, breathing through his mouth, and then he dropped the hand and looked at her, and whatever had drained out of his face came back into it as something harder.
"It's a salvage," he said.