The rain came in off the lake and stayed for three days, and by the end of it every case in this city had been closed on a technicality.

That is how the work is done here. A man is not charged with what he did. He is charged with what the margin says, and the margin does not care what was locked in the car.

They found the sedan on the fourth level of the municipal garage, windows fogged, one sodium lamp buzzing overhead and water running down the ramp past the tyres.

Bryce Young was inside it. He had 24.58 points on him and no way out.

Jack had taken Caleb Williams out instead. Williams came back at half past the hour with 9.22 and a story that did not survive being asked twice.

The difference between the two men is 15.36. That is not a clerical slip. That is a man walking past the right door, stopping, thinking about it, and walking past it again.

Jack won by 0.9.

Gabes was the one standing on the other side of the margin when the rain stopped. He worked 134.08 that night, the fourth-best figure anybody put on the street, enough to beat six of the nine other men in the city. He is the champion. He is 0-2.

Nobody took a statement from him. In this town you are not asked what you did. You are asked who you were standing next to.

The body turned up at the bottom of a stairwell off the avenue, face down in the wet.

The coroner has looked at Daniel eighty-five times across seven seasons. He pulled the sheet back and did not say anything for a while.

80.92.

Lower than anything in all eighty-five of them. There is no file in the drawer that goes down to where he was lying.

Then they turned out his coat, and there it was: 16.9 he had never spent. Cab fare, rent money, the price of not being in that stairwell, folded and dry in the inside pocket.

So they went to the property locker and got the belt out and buckled it back onto him. It had been off him for exactly one week.

The man who put him there worked clean.

Bolek came out of the rain with 165.06, beat every single other man in the city that night, nine for nine, and left 1.3 behind him on the whole job. One point three. You could dust that room for a year and get nothing.

He wore the belt himself the week before for leaving half his strength in the house while he went out. Nobody has ever accused him of being unable to learn. They have only accused him of choosing when.

Every city has a man who keeps walking, and here he does not even bother with an overcoat.

Eric/Blakey put up 108.46. That figure loses to six of the nine other men who were out working that night. He beat Bryan by 3.62 and went home 2-0 and third in the standings, and across two weeks he is 5-13 against the field. Those two facts have been in the same room twice now and they still will not shake hands.

Bryan is the one he beat, and Bryan went one for nine against the rest of the city while doing it, and dropped three places in a week. In this town that is the distance between a name on a door and a name on a list.

There is exactly one clean conviction on the sheet.

Bill, 150.52, second-best of the night, 16-2 against the field across two weeks and 2-0 in the only column that pays out. I said last month to check whether his luck held. It held, and it turns out it was not entirely luck.

He still shut 23.52 in a drawer and went out without it, which is the single thing about him that has not changed since the opening week. He has begun winning the right cases for the wrong reasons so consistently that the reasons are starting to look like a method.

Mario was the man across the table from him. Mario played 95.24 percent of everything he owned, the tidiest housekeeping anywhere in the city, every door locked, every light off. Bill hit him for 35.36 regardless. The honest man gets the same weather as everybody else, and he gets it standing outside.

In the records room on the ground floor there is a card with Justin's name along the top and 97 stamps on it.

Three more and the clerk moves it to the other drawer, the one with the brass handle, the one that has been opened four times in fifteen years.

Nate took 26.12 off him and left 2-0, top of the table, a hundred already in his pocket since the opening week. Justin went down the steps into the rain at 0-2 with the drawer still shut and the clerk gone home.

The rain will come back. It always does.

On level four of the garage the sedan was still there in the morning. Fogged glass, doors locked, 24.58 sitting in the passenger seat exactly where it had been left.

Nobody came looking for it.

Jack is 1-1, and in this city that is the same thing as innocent.