The tire shop was on the Boulevard in Colonial Heights, between a pawnshop and a Vietnamese nail salon. It was a cinderblock building painted a hopeful shade of yellow that had faded to the color of old teeth. Daniel parked across the street and sat in the truck with the engine off for eleven minutes by the dashboard clock. He watched men in coveralls roll tires in and out of the bays. He watched the traffic. He watched the metal staircase bolted to the side of the building that climbed to a single door with a green welcome mat in front of it, the kind with a joke printed on it that he couldn't read from across the street.
He had been trained in the use of force for seventeen years. He knew exactly how many seconds it took to get up a flight of stairs and through a door. He knew that a man with a damaged left hand would be slow to guard his left side. He knew where a man's throat was, and his knees, and the soft place under the ribs. His body wanted these things. He felt it in his forearms and his jaw, a hum, like a vehicle idling. He let it hum. He sat with it the way you sit with a dog that has gotten loose and is circling, and you wait to see whether it will come to your hand.
He thought about Owen at the bus stop that morning, the hood up, the backpack too big. He thought about what it would mean to that boy for his father to be in the back of a Colonial Heights police cruiser by lunchtime. He thought about Ruiz. He didn't know why, but he thought about Ruiz, nineteen years old, from Tucson, who had a girlfriend named Marisol and wanted to be a firefighter.
He got out of the truck and crossed the street and climbed the stairs.