Emma looked at him with the considered expression of someone taking a long-term view on a situation. She doesn't know yet, she said, that she was wrong. No, Cole said. Not yet. He picked up his phone and started composing a text with the workshop address.
And outside the kitchen window, the Tucson afternoon was going golden long, the desert doing what it did in that last hour of light, turning everything the color of something rare. His hands were steady. His mind was very fast and very quiet. He'd spent eight years not thinking about a small facility in England and a car that didn't exist. Now someone had sent him the car, whether they meant to or not, and someone else who was connected to the story had showed up at the auction, and the NDA had expired 3 years ago, and the evidence was in his shop documented in 400 photographs.
And tomorrow, Victoria Hale was coming to Tucson. Cole set the phone down and looked at the flowers Emma had put on the table, cheap dahlias, bright orange, listed sideways in the glass, and thought that whatever was coming next, it was already in motion. It had been in motion since the moment he saw that stamp. Victoria Hale arrived at 7:58 in the morning, 2 minutes before the time Cole had given her, in a rental car that was considerably nicer than anything that usually parked in the industrial strip off I-10. She was dressed differently than the auction, no blazer, just dark jeans and a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.
And she stood outside the roll-up door of the workshop looking at the signage for Bennett Restoration with an expression Cole couldn't read from across the parking lot. He'd been there since 6:00, hadn't slept much. He opened the side door before she could knock. Coffee's inside, he said. She came in without ceremony and looked immediately at the car.
Or what remained of it, now further disassembled than it had been in Nevada. The surviving body panels laid out on moving blankets across two workbenches with his photo documentation printed and arranged beside each piece. The chassis tub sat on a low rolling stand at the center of the bay, stripped and clean under the overhead lights. Victoria walked toward it slowly. She didn't touch anything.
She moved around the tub the way Cole had moved around it at the auction. Not looking for something specific, just reading it. He poured two cups of coffee from the machine on the desk, watched her, and waited. After maybe 3 minutes, she stopped at the front of the tub and looked at the series of stamps on the interior face of the firewall section. "XP7. " She said quietly.
"You know what that means? " Cole said. It wasn't a question. She'd said, "You know what that car is? " at the auction, and she'd known exactly what she was bidding on, and now she was reading a prototype code with no surprise on her face at all. Victoria turned around and took the coffee he held out. "I know what it means.
I didn't know how much of it would still be readable. " She looked back at the tub. "It's in better condition than I expected. The tub protected itself. That's what tubs do. " Cole leaned against the workbench. "Your turn. " "How did you know to be at that auction? " She wrapped both hands around the mug.