Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover by Mike Cooper Page B

air—the day had turned beautiful, clear and sunny, a light breeze bringing the smell of trees and moss down from the hills around us.
    I parked to one side. Dave came out from the shop, a sponge in one hand.
    “Hiya, Silas!”
    “Hey.”
    Funny thing—he looked less like me every time I saw his face. Increasingly I saw the individual personality engraved there: the laugh lines and a crease above his nose and a faint scar on one cheekbone.
    “Putting a shine on the Charger,” he said. “Don’t mind if I finish up, do you? I need to get the wax on.”
    “Want help?”
    “No! No, that’s okay.”
    The hood was closed today, whatever tuning he’d done yesterday complete. Swirls of light-colored wax covered most of the car’s exterior, everything except the driver’s-side panels. Dave knelt, dipped the sponge in a bucket of water, then the can, and gently wiped more on.
    “I like the old-fashioned paint,” he said. “There’s a shop over in Uniontown did this for me. But it needs waxing regular.”
    I remembered buffing my folks’ car in high school—Saturday afternoon, warm in the bright sun, baseball on the radio. For a year or two there I cared a lot about what I drove and how I looked in it.
    Bouncing around in Humvees and MRAPs, the vehicles constantly getting shot and blown up and breaking down, somehow ended that simple pleasure. Cars were just dull machines to me now.
    Not that I’d say so to Dave. “Looks real nice.”
    “Needs to sit an hour.” He wrung the sponge out, put it to dry on a shelf and carried the bucket to spill out the water on the gravel. “Want a beer?”
    “Nope. Too early.”
    “Beer’s pretty much all I drink.”
    So much for a quick goodbye.
    We sat in the same spot, next to a workbench in the first bay. The refrigerator was close to hand, a battered wooden chair and two stools were available and an old CRT television sat on a pass-through counter into the office. That room was smaller and just as cluttered as the shop, albeit more with stacks of grimy paper than metal parts and tools.
    “I been thinking,” he said.
    “Uh-huh.” I hadn’t known Dave long, but he seemed to start a lot of conversations that way.
    “What I was saying yesterday, about the scrap and the casinos and all, you know I was messing, right? All that petty-ass lawbreaking—only a fuckwad would do that.” He drank some Rock Green Light. “I mean, more than once.”
    “Hard to disagree.”
    “Right. Because you go to jail, and listen—I know—jail’s fucked up. You do not want to be there.”
    In my career I’d come to see that, no, some people
did
want to be in jail, but of course that only strengthened Dave’s point.
    “So why aren’t the
bankers
behind bars?” he asked. “I figure you can explain this to me. Those assholes on Wall Street pretty much destroyed the world economy, right after they sent all our jobs to China. And what happens?—they keep getting, like, million-dollar bonuses at Christmas. And buying yachts and shit, going skiing in France.”
    It was almost poignant how limited Dave’s imagination was. I’ve spent some time in the plutocracy. As a mere hired hand, of course, somewhere between the pool boy and the first footman, but I’ve seen some of the estates. Private islands, castles on the Rhine, Connecticut-sized cattle “ranches.”
    Not to mention that a million dollars was more or less cafeteria change. Real bonuses, the kind the managing directors hand themselves, can run ten or a hundred times that.
    “It’s not complicated,” I said. “They run the game. The house always wins.”
    “And the politicians—?”
    “Owned. Everyone knows that.”
    “Yeah.” Dave tipped his chair back. “Well, that ain’t right.”
    I almost laughed. “Who are you, Wyatt Earp?”
    “No. But why not? Town needs a sheriff.”
    “Good luck with that.”
    “I guess it’s not what you do, huh?”
    “No.” I felt a pang of . . . something. Embarrassment?