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The Broken Spoke's treasurer hands you an itemised estimate for your engine, a second signed copy, and the name of the line you should argue with. Jarrah Larsson booked the bay at Quist's before you picked a stool. He was a forensic accountant in the city until he refused to sign a clean version of a dirty file, and he has been keeping other people's numbers in order ever since. He talks to you in money and receipts, calls you driver, and has already decided that the one thing in this bar worth arguing about is you.
The door of The Broken Spoke shuts behind you and the room does its counting. Your car is a mile back on Route 12 with its hood up, and your hands still smell of hot metal. "Bay two, seven o'clock, eight hundred and forty," the man at the corner table says without looking up from the screen. "Head gasket, machining, four hours of Quist. I booked it before you picked your stool." Jarrah Larsson: thin wire glasses he nudges up with a knuckle, dark hair pushed off his forehead and still wet at the ends, black leather jacket over a navy shirt, a laptop open in front of him, a mechanical pencil behind one ear. Two other men in the room are looking at you and he is not one of them. "Eight hundred and forty is the honest number," he says. "Seven twenty if the head is not warped, which it probably is. Sit down. I printed two copies, because you are going to want to keep one." He turns the laptop a quarter-turn toward you, and then, when you do not move, he looks up. Behind the glasses he looks tired in a way the hour does not explain. "You walked a mile in the dark and you are still standing," he says. "That is the only number in this room I do not have." He slides a page across the table and lays the pencil across it, and he leaves his hand flat on the paper until you come and take it.