“The first step in retracing yours is here,” I said, parking my car in front of a wooden shack that stood in front of a chain link fence. The sign on top of it read “Larry ‘n Son’s Towing”.

  “Bro, what is this place? A junkyard?” asked John Doe.

  “It’s an impound lot,” I said, though there was a fair amount of junked cars stacked behind the fence. “Didn’t the doctors tell you how you wound up at the hospital?”

  “I think they might’ve,” said John Doe, scratching his chin. “There was a lot happening when I woke up, so I don’t remember.”

  “You drove,” I said, getting out of the car. “Witnesses say you came running out of your vehicle and into the E.R clutching your head. You were in such a rush that you left it parked right in front of the entrance with the keys still inside. Hospital had to move it, so it ended up here.”

  “Bro, that’s so lucky. We can find out who I am with the license plate or something right?” said John Doe, smiling. “Wait… Why didn’t the hospital do that in the first place?”

  “Good question. Amnesia is a pretty common affliction to fake when trying to avoid paying for hospital visits, so the car you came in should have been the first place they looked to find out who to send the bill. We’re here to find out why they didn’t.”

  I walked to the service counter that was cut into the shack with John Doe in tow. The kid behind the counter couldn’t have been older than eighteen. He must’ve been the “son” in “Larry ‘n Son’s”. He was a skinny guy, with spiked hair that was painted blue at the tips. He wore a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off and band patches sewn in. He had a few tattoos, but not as many as the blonde girl behind him. The girl was pretty, with a pixie cut, a plaid half top, and shorts. The guy’s tattoos appeared to be mostly hardcore aesthetic, but the girl’s looked political. The acronym “ACAB” inked into the top of her exposed collarbone. All Cops Are Bastards.

  “Larry and Son’s,” said the guy, “Larry is out, I’m his son, got your ticket?” The kid sounded apathetic. It was clear he’d rather be anywhere else, probably wishing he was out with the girl standing behind him, judging by how he was checking her out before I showed up to the counter.

  I looked up at John Doe to ask if the hospital had given him a ticket, but he shook his head “no”.

  “As it happens I don’t,” I said. “But I don’t need to take the car home, I just need to look at it.”

  “Hey,” said John Doe from behind me. “Bro, if it’s my car It’d be cool to get it back.”

  “If it’s at all possible, then we’d like to take the car as well,” I said to the guy behind the counter, opening my wallet to flash a couple hundred dollars in cash. My “charity” was very generous when it came to on the job resources.

  The guy looked at me and John Doe, then with a bored expression said: “Man, look, no ticket, no car. We’re not a dealership, okay?”

  “What about just looking at it?”

  “No ticket, no car.”

  “Could you at least give us the license plate?”

  “No ticket,” repeated the guy, “no car.”

  I looked behind the shack toward the fence’s gate. I thought about how easy it would be to pick the lock if I came back later at night. I decided to see if there were any other options to exhaust from the guy behind the counter.

  “What happens to the cars that don’t get picked up here?”

  “They get sold at a police auction.”

  Bingo.

  “So it’s gonna get sold eventually?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess, but not here. Not by us.”

  “Listen,” I said, bringing my hands together, powering up to get this guy to bend. “My big friend here is suffering from a bout of amnesia. There’s a car inside that may belong to him, and if it does, then it could help us discover his identity. If we don’t take this car, then instead of helping a poor man with amnesia, it’s going to be sold off to fund the police.”

  “Look man, I–” started the guy, but the girl with the pixie cut behind him piped up.

  “Hey, Tim, he’s right,” said the girl. “If we let that car sit there then it’s just going to buy donuts for the pigs. At least let him look at it. Can’t hurt, right?”

  “But my dad–”

  “You don’t even like your dad,” said the girl, “c’mon, please?”

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  “But–”

  “Don’t you want to stick it to the system in a way that matters? Help instead of giving some pigs more gun money?”

  The guy behind the counter started to sweat. I don’t think he cared what the cops did with their money, or to whom, but he cared about what the girl thought of him. So he relented.

  “Okay,” he said to me, “I can let you take a look at the car. Which one is it?”

  I described the car to him. It was a red family van, the kind with sliding doors. He looked it up on his system, and it turns out they only had one such car.

  “Are you sure this is it?” he asked after he found it on his system.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “License plate says it belongs to a cripple.”

  “Huh,” I let out.

  “Like, paralyzed?” asked John Doe.

  “Yeah,” said the guy behind the counter, whose name was apparently Tim.

  “Yo, Nando, bro, what was I doing with a paralyzed guy’s car?” he whisper shouted to me.

  “I don’t know,” I told him honestly.

  “Do you still want to look at this car?” asked Tim.

  I did. Tim led us to the car, which sat all its lonesome in the corner of the fenced in dirt lot.

  The first thing I noticed was the handicap license plate.

  “Think you could get us the address linked to the plate from your system?” I asked Tim, flashing the cash I’d shown him earlier.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever man,” he said, stomping off.

  John Doe and I started taking a look at the red van.

  The exterior had scratches at the bottom of the rear passenger door, the one behind the driver’s. The scratches were deep enough to expose the bare door of the car, but not deep enough to be considered anything other than superficial damage. Combined with the fact that the front door was missing any of these scratches suggested that the damage had come from long term repeated scrapes and not any one time accident.

  It was a used car, or otherwise had been owned for a long time. The age of the car meant that all the van’s faux leather seats were discolored from years of wear. Particularly, the front passenger seat had lots of scratches near the front where the legs would normally sit, with similar damage to the seat behind it. In contrast to the rest, the driver’s seat looked practically new. In fact, it was a different make and model than the rest of the seats in the car. It looked expensive.

  Two metal rods that came together so that they could be held in one hand were strapped to the gas and brake pedals.

  “Fancy,” said John Doe.

  “What, the seat?”

  “Yeah bro! Those things are expensive.”

  “Is it like, a massage chair?” It was the only thing I could think of. I’d heard that those paralyzed beneath the waist needed to massage their legs to prevent blood clots.

  “Nah bro, check it out.” John Doe hopped into the red van and fished out a white remote that connected to the seat. He pushed a button, and the seat lifted itself out of the car and lowered itself practically to the ground. John Doe then started shifting the seat back into place. “It’s a power lifter seat. These babies are pricey bro. It explains the scratches too.”

  “How so? The chair didn’t touch the frame at all.”

  “From the wheelchair. Check it, if you needed to get the wheelchair inside, then you’d have to take it apart. Pull the wheels off, the back, and the cushion.”

  “And you’d be setting it up against the car for leverage, got it.”

  “Yeah bro, if you’re in a wheelchair, you’re gonna have scratches on your car.”

  “That explains the ones in the interior as well, but… why do you know all that?”

  John Doe thought about it while sitting in the power seat. “Uh… maybe I work with wheelchair bound people?”

  “Maybe. If so, then whoever owns this car would know you, and they’d have come looking for you. There wasn’t a missing person filed for anyone matching your description, however there might be a car theft filed. Our friend Tim might be able to help us with that.”

  “Bro, please, no! I would die if I found out I stole a paralyzed dude’s car. Maybe I bought it?”

  “Maybe, maybe,” I said, making noise while I scratched my chin and thought about the possibility. “If you bought it, then it was very recently. Our friend Tim said it showed up as belonging to someone disabled on his system. So either the purchase is still being processed at the DMV or…”

  “Or I stole a disabled bro’s car.” John Doe looked crestfallen. “I must’ve been a real butthole.”

  “Hey,” came the voice of Tim. “I found you an address. Guy that owned this car lived at the Margo Assisted Living Facility in town.” Tim handed me a printout with the address.

  “Thanks for that friend,” I said, taking a look at the rest of the printout. Besides the address it had a name. Gavrillo Hodzic. “So, can we take the car? It looks like our next stop is going to be the assisted living facility, might as well drop it off there.” And there’s something I wanna see.

  “Fuckin fine, yeah. I don’t care anymore.”

  “Bro!” said John Doe. “We can’t just buy a stolen disabled person’s car!”

  “We’re not,” I said, finalizing the under the table translation with Tim by handing him a wad of cash. “If this guy is at the assisted living facility, we’ll be delivering it to him. This car has been sitting here for a week, maybe he couldn’t afford the ticket?” I pointed at the printout, which had a copy for an invoice on it. “The ticket here is highway robbery.”

  John Doe deliberated internally for a minute, closing his eyes. He seemed to be seriously weighing the morality of the situation. “Okay,” he finally said. “It’s like we paid the ticket for him, we’re just giving him back the car. It doesn’t make up for stealing it, but it’s better than it staying here.”

  “There you go.”

  “But what about your car? Are you going to leave it here?”

  “You’ll drive the van, and I’ll drive my car.”

  “Bro! I don't know if I know how to drive though!”

  “Relax, I’m sure you do. You have a hard time with details about yourself, but you seem to do alright with facts and skills. Try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll arrange for something.”

  John Doe relented, hesitantly switching the car on when Tim came back with the key. I sat in the passenger seat and watched him try to drive until I was satisfied with his performance. He did fine. Although, I couldn’t help but notice that he chose to drive with the hand controls instead of the foot pedals.