He was getting enough business that he didn’t have to go all the way downtown to the Detroit courts too often. What surprised him the most, he was organized. He planned his calls carefully, sometimes knocking on a door as early as four in the morning and handing the guy the paper before he had his eyes open. He served on the average of fifteen to twenty legal papers in a twelve-hour day, put upwards of two thousand miles a month on his car, and grossed between twenty and twenty-five thousand a year. Not bad, considering he was getting five or six bucks a service from the courts-zip if he failed to serve the paper-and twelve or fifteen, plus mileage, from the attorneys. Ryan was good and he knew it, and so did the court clerks and the attorneys who called him to handle the tough ones. They could take Ryan’s word for it: if a defendant couldn’t be found, then he wasn’t around anymore, or he was dead. They knew his word was good and that he never signed the affidavit on a service he didn’t complete-like the Belle Isle Bridge servers, guys who were known to drop a summons in the Detroit River (or a trash can) if locating the defendant appeared too difficult, or if it took them into a rough, inner-city neighborhood.

Ryan lived alone. He had a small one-bedroom unit in a fairly new apartment building in Royal Oak. He had been married once. He married a nice quiet girl who came into her own during the five years of their marriage and turned into a tough little hard-headed woman who liked to pick and find fault and was always right. He’d ask her, “What’s it like being always right?” And she’d say, “You should hear yourself. No more Mr. Nice Guy, huh? Boy, have you changed.” And things like that. He hadn’t changed. He had gone by the book and purposely picked a sweet little June Allyson and discovered too late that when you take the girl next door into a different life she isn’t the girl next door anymore. So he said fuck it-going through the motions of playing house, being someone he didn’t want to be-and got a divorce.