A sudden thought strikes him. He flips open his tiny titanium phone and presses it to his ear. He calls Jose (his locksmith, always on the move) and arranges to meet him at the building.

Arrangements made, Ryan flips his phone closed and taps the steering wheel in time to a Celine Dion song.

When Ryan arrives back at the Windsor Machine Works, Jose is already there, bending over the open trunk of his always-breaking-down Justy. Jose is sorting through picks and tension tools and extractors. Choosing his implements carefully.

Ryan is flooded with inexplicable anger. The thought of another man sniffing around her doorstep enrages him. What if he’d decided to tamper with her before Ryan had got there? What if he’d decided to put his unkind picks into her unwilling locks?

“How long have you been here?” Ryan asks casually.

“Just got here,” Jose tosses off. “‘Bout to leave, though. Bad neighborhood. They shoot you for nothing around here.”

Ryan imagines punching him in the nose.

Jose doesn’t speak as he makes the key. When he is finished, he fits the bright new thing into the old door, and turns. The door swings open, releasing a smell of ancient oil and something else, strange and indefinable, like steel shavings rusting in honey.

“What the hell are you thinking, man?” Jose says. He stands with his hands on his hips, squinting into the gloom. He shakes his head as if trying to shake off raindrops of impending doom. “This place will finish you.”

Ryan snatches the key away from him with a growl.

“Get out,” Ryan says. “Get the fuck out.”

He does not watch or wave goodbye as the Justy clatters away.

* * *

He walks past the front desk, pushes open a creaking door, and he is on the manufacturing floor. The gals at the county assessor’s office say that their oldest records indicate that this building was used to manufacture machine parts during the First World War.