I was still riding the high of winning. I liked winning even if I didn't show it much. Maybe it was a validation thing. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about why.
What I was thinking about was the Charger.
I'd been sitting on the decision for a week. The Z and the Charger were both tied to me anybody who knew me knew those cars. Which meant anybody who might eventually be looking for me knew those cars too. The Z I was keeping. But I needed the Charger to stop being officially mine while still being practically mine. There's a difference. I understood that difference better than I used to.
So I did the logical thing.
I posted it on Facebook Marketplace. Looking to sell or trade. Uploaded clean photos, priced it to sit, and then opened a separate tab and started shopping for motorcycles.
I wanted one anyway. That part was completely real. And it was exactly the kind of thing people who knew me would believe without pulling on it Jordan selling a car to get a bike, yeah, that tracks, that's him. The cover worked because it wasn't entirely a cover.
I scrolled through listings for two days. Cruisers and street bikes both. I liked both but I had a specific vision and the vision said cruiser something I could strip down and rebuild, something that would feel like mine by the time I was finished with it. I found one two cities over, a guy asking a thousand, clearly just wanted it gone. I offered eight hundred. He took it without thinking about it. I paid him and offered him two hundred more to drop it off since I didn't have a truck. He said yeah. It showed up in the driveway four days later leaking from two places and missing the mirrors, exactly how I wanted it.
I marked the Charger as sold on Marketplace the same afternoon.
* * *
Mom came home that night and stood in the driveway looking at the bike for a long moment. Still in her work shoes. Bag on her shoulder. I could see her running the math.
"I sold the Charger," I said. "Got this to flip. Should make something on it."
She looked at me. The specific look she used when she was deciding how much to push.
"Ok," she said. "Just please always be careful."
"Of course," I said.
She went inside. I stayed in the driveway a minute longer and then followed her.
The Charger was in a storage unit two miles away. I'd rented it the week before under a name that wasn't going anywhere. The red wrap I'd ordered was coming Thursday — deep, not loud, the kind of red that reads almost black depending on the light. New tint the same day. After that it would stop being identifiable as mine and start being identifiable as nothing. That was the whole point.
* * *
The message from Virgil came in on Wednesday.
He was throwing a New Year's party. He'd heard about the tournament, heard about the shows, wanted to know if I could perform. Two weeks out.
I read it twice. Thought about it for about thirty seconds.
I said yes.
It was a lot to be running at once the bike, the competition, jobs for Zen, and now a live set on New Year's Eve. But that was just my life now. Everything moving in different directions at the same time and me threading through all of it without letting any one piece touch the others. I was getting good at that. Better than I'd expected to be.
* * *
The week went like this.
Mornings I worked on the bike in the driveway with the radio going. It was coming together faster than I expected I had a feel for what it needed and I liked the work, liked having something physical to put my hands on. Gia came out once and asked what I was doing. I told her fixing it to sell. She said cool and went back inside.
Afternoons I was on the music. Final bracket of the competition, two rounds left. I was thinking through what to play, running the catalog, pulling songs and putting them back. The right song for the right room. That was always the game.
Nights I was thinking.
The gun had been sitting in my closet since I bought it from Fez and Ashtray and that wasn't a long-term solution. So I spent an afternoon in the storage unit with the Charger sitting under the tarp, waiting for its wrap, looking like nobody's car and I built a space inside the driver's seat. Not obvious. You wouldn't find it unless you knew exactly where it was and what you were feeling for. It took patience and a specific understanding of how the seat was constructed, which I had because I'd taken apart the same model twice before on a different car for a different reason.
When I was done I sat in the driver's seat and looked at the storage unit wall for a minute.
Easy access if you knew where to look. Nothing if you didn't.
I got out, locked up, drove home in the Z.
Two weeks until New Year's.
I had work to do.
I found out about the motorcycle before I found out about anything else that was happening. He told Mom and me he was flipping it and I believed him, which is the thing — he doesn't lie to you outright. He gives you the part of the truth that closes the conversation and lets you walk away satisfied. The bike was real. The plan to flip it was probably real. Everything underneath it was something I wasn't going to find out about until later.
That's the thing about Jordan's version of lying. You don't catch it in the moment. You catch it after, when you're looking back at something and you realize the shape of it was always wrong, you just didn't have the angle to see it yet.
I didn't have the angle yet.