It settles like a decision. Metal oil-cans over Gavin's head. The headliner puckers at the dome light cutout; torn foam sifts on his knuckles.
"On," Rick says—useless and true.
"Angle breach," Gavin answers himself, eyes on the chain across the alley mouth. "Madison—hood."
"Already," she says, leaning out the passenger window. The face on the cowl grins upside down without meaning it, palms welded to paint. She blows the rest of the broken glass teeth away with a forearm and brings the hammer down on the wrist. Once. Twice. The knuckles go loose; the hand peels, reluctant.
From above, the roof weight crawls forward, feeling for a seam to punch through. Nails rake the headliner where the vanity light wants to live. The sound is a zipper getting angrier.
Gavin puts the van at forty-five to the hanging chain and a rusted conduit that drops across the alley like a low shoulder. "Heads," he says.
"Down," Rick says automatically.
He feeds throttle, then feathers back at the last instant so mass does the persuasion. The bumper shoulders the chain; links climb and choose to go; the conduit kisses the roof seam, finds meat, and peels the rider a foot backward. It doesn't let go; it chooses the dent above the second row and becomes heavier there.
"Partial," Madison says, eyes up. "Still sticking."
"Copy. Alley is narrow—use it," Gavin says. The brick walls are close enough to feel in his teeth. He keeps the right mirror folded and lets the body side kiss old chalked graffiti with a dry shhhh that sounds like chalkboards he never had to use.
The hood clinger recovers—palms slap again. Madison traps a forearm against the pillar with her hammer, slides the bolt cutters over bone, and levers. The hinge pops; the arm stops being arm and starts being a length of something inconvenient. She flings it. It skips off asphalt and vanishes under the rear wheel with a rubbery thump.
"Roof," Rick says, jamming the towel bar up through the headliner bulge. The bar meets rib; the weight shifts and instantly retakes position. It is not tired. It is a problem that likes being a problem.
"Sign bracket," Madison calls. "Right wall."
"Take it," Gavin says, grinding a breath more left so the roof shelf hits a rusted L-bracket that once held a painter's swing. The bracket grabs, bites fabric, and peels a flap, then snaps. The clinger slides; the ceiling bows. A hand punches through near Rick's ear, fingers blind and sure.
Rick pins the wrist with the towel bar and reaches for the pipe wrench in the cargo well without looking. The wrench's head is the size of a heart. He swings it up through the torn cloth in a short, mean arc. The curved teeth take the wrist bones and argue; the argument ends. The hand withdraws in a flurry of smeared dust. The roof weight scrabbles forward again out of reach, smart enough to learn up hurts.
"Three o'clock," Madison says. "Two more joining."
Gavin keeps them centered in the alley. Brakes are soft—he feels the pedal sink a whisper farther with every test—but the spare holds, the steering talks truth, and the world is a corridor he can own for twenty yards at a time.
Ahead, the alley bows right under a dock catwalk: a steel grate platform with angle-iron cross bracing hanging low enough to scalp a tall truck. A wet line leaks from an ice machine to a floor drain; the alley smells like syrup and bleach having a fight.
"Catwalk," Madison says.
"That's our razor," Gavin answers. "Hold tight."
He keeps speed steady. Not fast—fast wastes distance you may need—but not slow, because slow is permission. The right slider scrapes a dumpster handle with a bang and a shower of paint chips. The roof weight goes rigid; it senses the underhang.
"Bar up," Rick says, stabbing through the headliner again just to give it the wrong timing. The clinger freezes to brace. The crossbar kisses the roof. It bites meat and seam in the same breath. The weight peels backward like wet cloth off a nail. For a moment it rides the edge like a gymnast who forgot how to land. Then it loses and sloughs across the windshield.
Glass blooms into white frost. A crack forks at eye height, a rivery line that wants to be a map of where not to drive. The body sticks half on the hood, half into the wiper cowl, one knee against the glass as if kneeling to pray. Hands slap for purchase. The mouth does that fish thing.
Gavin does not flinch, because flinching is steering. He puts two inches of left hand into the wheel and lets the body slide. It goes over the fender and twirls on asphalt, arms pinwheeling, then becomes small in the mirror's remaining oval.
"Clear," Madison breathes. She wipes her eyes with a wrist, leaving a comet smear.
Rick exhales something that isn't a laugh and isn't not.
The alley spits them into a back street threaded with power lines. Mailboxes lean like drunks. A dog watches from a porch with its head pressed to the slats. Farther off, blue and sodium light make a bruise over the rail yard.
"Rail crossing," Madison says. "One block left, then two blocks straight."
"That's our wall," Gavin says. "If the train is where I think it is."
"And if it isn't?" Rick asks.
"Then we make a wall the stupid way," Gavin says. "With cars." He doesn't mean it, not yet, but he lets the words exist.
They take the left. The cracked windshield scatters streetlight into a snow of stray photons; the wipers tick once and smear hope across the ice. Gavin leans a hair for a cleaner slit of view. On the right, a liquor store's sign chases itself in red and dies. On the left, a barber pole turns and turns and doesn't promise anything.
A shape runs out of a side yard along their quarter, slips on fallen camellias, and eats brick with a sound that reminds Gavin of practice turf burns and also of nothing he has ever liked. It stands and comes again, unembarrassed. Madison rolls her window down another inch and raps its face with the hammer as they pass; it spins without expression and clatters into a recycling bin that gives up all its hollow sounds.
"Crossbuck," Rick says. "I hear the bell."
They hear it then: clack—clack—clack—paired steel rhythm under the night. Air thrums with a distant horn—two long, one short, one long: a law that still lives. The crossing arms begin to drop one block ahead, red lights punching the air. A line of three cars sits on their side of the tracks, all angled wrong, like they'd argued about a last-second turn and lost.
"Decision," Madison says.
"Through the gap before the full drop," Gavin says. "Then the train is our friend."
"Brakes," Rick says.
"Engine and line," Gavin says. He downshifts and lets the motor drag their eagerness to a controlled want. The pedal is mush with opinions. He takes that personally and does not let it run the conversation.
Figures flood behind them into the street from the alley mouth they left—a ribbon of movement that treats distance as a bad habit it can break. One of them uses the hoods of the wrong-parked cars like stepping stones; two misjudge and eat antennae and don't care.
"Window," Madison says.
"Up," Gavin says, and she cranks as the red lights begin their alternating blink: left-right-left-right like a heartbeat that can't pick a lane. The crossing arm swings down in patient, bureaucratic kindness.
Gavin slides right of the waiting cars, riding the gutter to keep his angle. He kisses the horn like it's an old friend and not a new lie. A sedan noses left to give him nothing; he takes the nothing and turns it into something with inches. The spare hums approval; the soft pedal sinks and gets one last respectable bite.
"Middle car has room," Rick says. "Four feet."
"Three," Gavin corrects, but his hands make four.
A woman sits in the leftmost waiting car with her forehead on the wheel. She raises her head at the horn and blinks slow. She does not reach for her door. She is a question for another chapter.
"Headlight," Madison says.
The track bends left out of a stand of eucalyptus. The locomotive's light shows in the trees as a geometry lesson: two rails that used to be parallel but are not now, because speed will make anything converge. The horn answers its own law again. The sound is bigger than the street.
"Time?" Rick asks.
"Less than enough," Gavin says, which is more honest than any number. He threads between the last waiting sedan and the little house where the crossing arm's motor hums about duty. The arm falls toward the hood.
"Down," he says, and ducks his head even though he is inside. The arm slaps the hood and skates up the windshield, catches the cracked seam, and bounces into the air. The rubber edge leaves a smudge. The van's nose crosses the first rail.
Something hits the rear quarter. One of the pack decided to be a comet. The van skews. The cracked glass makes the world into triangles. Gavin corrects. Small hands. Quiet hands. The rear tires find the shiny steel and pick up their feet for a breath, then drop.
On the far side of the crossing, a delivery truck sits dead with its hazards doing nothing. Its rear bumper noses the opposite curb. There's a slit between the bumper and a mailbox post thick with stickers. Two inches, maybe three.
"We won't fit," Rick says.
"We will," Gavin says. His shoulders relax to trick his hands into honesty. He changes the wheel one half-inch left. The mirror that still lives will not live through this; that's fine. The van threads the slit the way a letter finds a mean slot.
Behind them, the pack hits the near rail and chooses to understand it wrong. Two fall; one trips and turns falling into running like a good athlete. The crossing arm on their side bonks a head and doesn't care.
The locomotive clears the eucalyptus. Its horn is a law and a laugh and a hate. Its headlight fills the street into the color of new money. The engineer leans on the cord like a prayer. The engine is close enough to make the bell tower of a church three blocks away ring by suggestion.
"Rear wheels," Madison says. She doesn't finish.
Gavin is still on the second rail. He gives the van one more breath of throttle and asks the rear to be light. It thinks about it.