Page 6 of Enzo (Redcars #1)
SIX
Enzo
Jamie, Rio, and I were standing in the break room, locked in a heated debate over the damn stapler on Robbie’s list. I wasn’t even part of the conversation—just nodded at the right times, tossing out automatic answers, my thoughts a million miles away. Truth was, it had been impossible to focus on anything all morning, knowing Robbie was locked in that freaking room. He’d been more lucid in the last few hours, yeah, and that was something. He’d been here over two weeks now and I hadn’t stopped watching.
Listening. Bracing and waiting for the next scream, the next sob, the next sound telling me he was back in that dark place. And when he did scream, when he sobbed and I heard him retching as though his body was trying to force the memories out, I saw red. I grabbed the axe we kept in the back and was halfway to the door before Rio stopped me, arms wrapped around my chest, stopping me from messing up.
Helping him had ceased being about duty about five minutes after I’d scooped him up out of the alley. It wasn’t about being a decent guy or doing the right thing—no one ever said I was a decent guy. It was instinct now. His survival was important to me, and somewhere in the broken nights Robbie had carved out space in me. He wasn’t only someone I wanted to help. He was someone I needed to see safe. Someone who’d gone from a ghost behind a locked door to the person I thought about when I closed my eyes. I wasn’t anyone’s hero and that scared the hell out of me.
“Why a stapler?” Jamie pressed, and I focused back on what he and Rio were discussing.
“He’s not trying to staple an open wound closed, is he?” Rio asked, wide-eyed.
The thought hit me like a truck. My stomach flipped. Shit. I hadn’t considered that. I bolted toward the side room, heart thudding. I knocked on the door.
“Robbie,” I called, trying to keep my voice even.
“What?”
“Why do you need a stapler?”
“To staple things.” The doh was implied, and kinda sassy for a man who’d been dying only a week earlier. I liked that. It made me feel warm inside.
Behind me, Rio made a face and mimed, asking more. Of course, he did.
“Not to, uh…. staple yourself?” I asked, wincing at how stupid it sounded out loud.
Silence stretched between us, and I was about ready to break down the damn door.
Finally, Robbie said, “Paper.”.
Relief washed over me so fast I almost swayed. I snapped my fingers. “Jamie, get me a stapler.”
Jamie tore off toward Logan’s office and crashed through the door as if he were hunting treasure. A second later, he came out with the stapler and a fresh box of staples, victorious.
Logan followed him, clearly unimpressed. “That’s my stapler!”
“Robbie wants it,” I said, grabbing it from Jamie and heading back toward the room.
Logan was baffled. “Okay then… don’t lose it. I like that one. Also, why? No, I don’t want to know. He okay?”
“Better,” I murmured. He was far from okay, but he’d kept a small amount of food down, and he’d taken the vitamins I’d added to the tray—or at least they weren’t on the tray now. For all I knew he’d tossed them in the corner of the room. I hated this so much. I wanted control, and Robbie being in there wasn’t in my control at all.
I knocked, the sound dull against the heavy door. A beat passed. Then another. The lock clicked, and the door cracked open enough for Robbie to peer out, his eyes wary. The knife was still in his hand, gripped tight—not raised, but not lowered either.
“I’ve got it,” I said softly, holding out the stapler. I let the staples follow in a gentle arc, tossing them low so they landed near his feet without alarm.
His eyes flicked to the items, then back to my face. A cautious half-smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, tentative, as if it hadn’t been used in a while and wasn’t sure it would be welcome. And then, the door closed again—not slammed, simply shut. Firm, but not final.
It occurred to me then that Robbie had asked earlier about a crankshaft sensor and whether we’d been paid for it, though he hadn’t said which one. I had no idea what he meant—only that it mattered to him. So I gestured for Jamie to keep an eye on the door and stepped into Logan’s office.
“Hey,” I said. “Robbie wants to know if we’ve been paid for a crankshaft sensor.”
Logan blinked at me from behind his desk, looking as if I’d asked him to solve a nuclear physics calculation.
“A what… who… um… which one?” he asked.
I shrugged. “No idea. Just... a crankshaft sensor.”
“Why?” Logan said, rubbing at the back of his neck. His desk was a disaster—piles of paperwork, open folders, and old invoices held down by cups of cold coffee. None of us were numbers guys, least of all Logan. But as the new owner of Redcars it all fell on him to make sense of the accounts.
“I have no fucking idea,” he muttered, dragging his laptop toward him. He opened a spreadsheet, stared at it for a solid thirty seconds, then huffed and slammed it shut again. “I don’t fucking know.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long sigh. “I don’t fucking know anything.”
I peeked into Robbie’s room. “Which crankshaft sensor?” I asked.
Robbie didn’t glance up. “Quote 765-slash-2,” he said, same as before. But this time, his voice carried more weight. He flipped open the notebook without even glancing at the page. “That one came from the blue Civic with the snapped timing belt. See here?” He pointed to the stack of invoices on the desk. “I matched it to the order we got from Jasper Auto—green form, top right corner torn, but it still shows the last three digits of the VIN.”
He moved as though he’d rehearsed this, each connection crisp, precise. “We logged the part under internal reference code JN92—linked to vehicle ID 4CXM227, the blue Civic with the snapped timing belt. The original sensor failed during ignition testing—Rio flagged it in the diagnostic. I matched that to invoice #04498 from Jasper Auto, subtotal $72.83—green form, top right corner torn but the VIN ending in 227 is still legible.”
He tapped the notebook, still not checking it—as if he had the whole thing memorized. “A replacement sensor came in two days later under UPS tracking 1Z37748E9031021740—it was bundled with the valve covers for the old Chevy and a serpentine belt we didn’t order but got credited for on invoice #04511. I matched up the shipment discrepancies with the intake logs from Receiving—Rio had initialed the manifest but flagged two inconsistencies. The serpentine belt wasn’t part of our original request, and the packing list marked it as a bonus part, but the system tried to bill us anyway. I filed a claim with Jasper’s distributor interface and found their refund confirmation in the recycling box, which is stapled to the back of invoice #04511. Then I piled everything the other shipment trackers—on the Non-Match Deliveries pile.”
“Um—”
“Install was documented as Enzo-Rep-12—three labor hours logged against your code, and I cross-referenced that with timecard 88A, the one from the Wednesday you stayed late. Filed the labor invoice under JN92-LB, amounting to $180 plus shop fees. That’s how I matched the trail.”
I didn’t say a word. Just watched him. His hands never trembled, voice never broke, in fact he sounded like he was talking by rote, his eyes focused elsewhere.
“That customer might have paid in full—and we have a carbon copy receipt stapled to the folded work order, but the staple tore out when I was sorting them, and the amounts don’t match.” He finally looked at me. “That’s why I linked them. Order, part, labor, payment.”
I caught sight of the open page he’d said listed this all. It was blank. The fuck? I glanced around the room and then at the pile of books he’d made next to his bed—long titles, a couple of them open to pages, dense law textbooks, thick technical car manuals, old manuals on pre-digital filing systems, and a fraying copy of something that looked like a university-level statistics book. Fuck knows where these all came from, but had he read through these? Studied them?
Robbie was clever. More than clever. If he read all of this and understood even five percent of it, then he wasn’t just smart—he was a damn genius. No wonder the numbers poured out of him like breath. This wasn’t memorization. This was structure. Systems. Patterns. He wasn’t parroting information—he was building a map in his head, one invoice, one torn corner at a time.
He saw me glance at the notebook, and then met my gaze, and there was fear in his eyes.
I stepped closer, one foot inside his room, and all hell broke loose.
“Get out!” Robbie shouted, his voice sharp and cracking with panic. The notebook slammed shut in his hands. “Get out, Enzo!”
I froze, stunned. “Robbie—hey, I didn’t mean anything. I just—how do you remember all that?”
But it was too late. His expression twisted, his breathing sharp and shallow as he backed toward the door like a cornered animal.
“Don’t,” he warned, voice shaking. “Don’t ask. Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m not?—”
The door slammed in my face before I could finish.
The sound echoed through the bay like a gunshot.
“What did you do to the kid?” Logan asked as he passed by, his tone somewhere between concern and accusation.
“Nothing.”
He knocked on Robbie’s door, “Hey Robbie, thanks for the heads-up on that invoice.”
“Okay,” Robbie said after a pause.