SNEAK PEEK JACKPOT’S GAMBLE
Chapter 1
The breaker bar slipped, and Dana Mercer caught it with her knee before it took out the air hose, swore once through the cinnamon gum clamped between her back teeth, and reset.
Hundred and six degrees on the flats. Both bays full. A Dodge Ram with a front end that looked like it had lost an argument with a guardrail sat on the left lift, and a ten-year-old Civic with a dead alternator occupied the right one. The phone was ringing. It had been ringing for twenty minutes.
"Mercer's." She wedged it between her ear and her shoulder, both hands back on the bar.
"Yeah, I got your rotors. No, I said Thursday, and Thursday is what I—Hector, listen to me.
Thursday. Because I'm standing under a truck right now and I've got two more after it. Thursday or you find another shop."
She hung up without waiting for the answer and went back to the seized lug nut that had been fighting her since noon.
The shop sat on the eastern edge of Reno's industrial flats, a two-bay concrete-block building with MERCER'S painted across the front in letters her father had done by hand thirty years ago, faded now to a color that wasn't quite red and wasn't quite brown.
The lot ran deep behind it—enough room for a dozen waiting cars, a dumpster, and the stack of bald tires she kept meaning to haul off.
Across the road, the flats stretched out flat and ugly toward the truck stops and the highway, chain-link and gravel and the shimmer of heat coming off every surface.
Her lead mechanic, Paul Ybarra, rolled out from under the Civic on a creeper and squinted up at her. "Hector again?"
"Hector again."
"Tell him to go to Midas."
"I tell him that every week. He keeps calling." She leaned into the bar and the lug nut gave with a crack that echoed off the block walls. "Ha. Gotcha, you little bastard."
Paul grinned and rolled back under. The radio on the workbench was playing something with too much bass, and the compressor in the corner kicked on with a sound like a diesel clearing its throat.
A regular named Charlie Foss was sitting on the tailgate of his pickup in the lot, drinking a Coke and waiting on an oil change and telling anyone who'd listen about the elk he'd almost hit on 395 last weekend.
Two of her afternoon appointments had already pulled in.
The whole place was running the way it always ran—loud, crowded, hers.
She'd built it that way. Or rebuilt it, really.
When her father's hands finally went—arthritis grinding the knuckles down until he couldn't hold a wrench without his fingers locking—she'd bought the shop from him with money she'd saved since she was nineteen and a loan from a credit union that had looked at her like she was buying a casket.
Her brothers had gone. One to Sacramento, one to the Army, neither of them coming back for a concrete-block garage on a road that didn't go anywhere worth going.
Dana stayed. She'd been staying her whole life.
The lug nuts came off one by one, and she had the wheel pulled and the rotor exposed by the time the phone rang again.
"Mercer's. No, we close at six. Because I close at six, that's why." She grabbed a shop rag and wiped her forehead, leaving a black streak she didn't notice. "Tomorrow at eight. Yep."
Paul's boots stuck out from under the Civic, and she kicked the sole of one on her way past. "You want to grab the alignment specs on that Ram while I'm pulling rotors?"
"Already on it."
"That's why I keep you around."
"That and my sparkling personality."
She snorted and ducked back under the lift.
The heat didn't break when the sun started dropping.
It just shifted—went from pressing down to radiating up off the concrete, the whole lot breathing out the day in waves.
Dana finished the Ram, wrote up the Civic, sent Charlie Foss home with fresh oil and a story about the elk that had grown antlers the size of a chandelier since that morning, and started closing out the register.
Six-fifteen. Both bays empty. Paul had gone home ten minutes ago.
She locked the register, pulled her hair down from the knot it had been in since dawn, and rolled her neck until something popped. Her shoulders ached. Her hands ached. The knuckles on her right hand had grease worked so deep into the creases it had stopped washing out years ago.
She stepped outside to pull the bay doors down and stopped.
A black crew-cab pickup sat across the road, idling. No plates she could read from here. Tinted windows. It hadn't been there twenty minutes ago.
Dana stood in the mouth of her bay with the pull chain in her hand and looked at it.
Reno's east flats weren't the kind of place where a parked truck meant nothing.
A year ago, maybe. But in the last ten months, three shops on this stretch had closed.
Guzman's Tires, two blocks south—Loss Gutierrez had run it for eighteen years, and one morning the bay doors were just down and stayed that way.
Kendrick's Body & Paint on the next block—sold, supposedly, but the sign came down and nothing went up and the lot sat empty and gated.
A salvage yard up toward Sparks that she'd sourced parts from for a decade—new owner, new fence, and a look from the man at the gate that said don't come back.
All of it on the east side. All of it quiet.
And three weeks ago, a man named Victor Salas had walked into her shop in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.
He was heavy and deliberate, the kind of man who filled a doorway not because he was tall but because he stood in it like he owned the frame. He'd looked at her bays, her lot, her road frontage, and made an offer. A real one, with a number attached. Enough to close and walk away comfortable.
She'd told him no without looking up from the engine she was working.
He'd stood there for a long ten seconds, and she'd felt the weight of it on the back of her neck, and then he'd left. No threat. No second offer. Just the sound of his boots on the concrete and then the crew-cab door and then the road.
That had been three weeks ago. Now the shops around her were going dark one by one, and a truck was sitting across her road at six-fifteen on a Tuesday with its engine running.
She pulled the bay doors down, locked them, and walked out to the lot.
The crew-cab didn't move.
Inside it—she could see through the windshield now, the tint lighter on the front glass—a man sat in the passenger seat with the window cracked.
Rangy, young, a ball cap pulled low. His hand was near the window, and something small kept catching the last sunlight.
A lighter. He was flicking it open and shut, open and shut, the little flame appearing and disappearing like a pulse.
He was looking at her bays.
Dana stood in her lot with her keys in her fist and watched him watch her, and neither of them moved for a full thirty seconds. Then the driver put the truck in gear, and the crew-cab pulled off slow, heading east toward the highway.
She didn't move until it was gone.
* * *
She should have gone home. That was the smart thing. Lock up, drive the eight minutes to her apartment off Mill Street, eat something, shower, sleep.
Instead, she walked the lot.
She knew every inch of it. Every crack in the concrete, every oil stain, every spot where the chain-link sagged and she kept meaning to fix it. The dumpster against the back fence. The tire stack. The patch of gravel where Paul parked his truck every morning.
The car frame sitting against the back fence was new.
Dana stopped.
It was a sedan chassis, stripped to the bones.
No wheels, no engine, no interior—just the frame and the body panels, set down on the gravel behind the tire stack like someone had backed a flatbed up to the fence and slid it off.
The VIN plate on the dash was gone. The one on the doorjamb had been ground smooth.
She crouched beside it and ran her thumb over the jamb where the VIN sticker should have been. Clean work. Not scratched off in a hurry—ground with a tool, professionally, the kind of job that takes a minute and a steady hand.
The body panels didn't match. She could see it in the fading light—a shade difference on the front quarter panel, the kind of thing you'd only catch if you'd spent twenty years looking at paint. Swapped. Re-skinned from another vehicle to hide the original color.
A re-VIN job. A stolen car, stripped and re-tagged and moved through the corridor, and somebody had put what was left of it on her lot.
Dana stood up slowly.
She knew what this was. It was the same play Salas had run on Loss Gutierrez and on Kendrick and on every other shop owner who'd said no—plant the evidence, make the honest business look dirty, and wait for the owner to fold under the weight of what it would cost to explain.
An anonymous tip to the cops, a stolen frame on her property, and suddenly she wasn't a shop owner who'd been in business for thirty years.
She was a woman with a chop-shop problem and a lot of questions she couldn't answer.
The lighter-flicking man in the truck had been checking to see if she'd found it yet.
She pulled out her phone and stood there in the dark lot with her thumb over the keypad, and didn't call anyone.
Not the cops—because a stripped frame on her lot was exactly the kind of thing that turned a conversation into an interrogation.
Not her brothers—because one was a thousand miles away and the other didn't answer anymore.
Not her father—because he'd had enough, and she'd taken this off his shoulders so he could stop.
The frame sat on her gravel like a dead thing, and the flats were quiet, and the heat was still rising off the concrete in the dark.
Dana locked the gate, got in her truck, and drove home with her jaw set and her hands tight on the wheel. She didn't sleep until two, and when she did, she dreamed about fire.