Nate stood beside me on the middle step, his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his brown canvas jacket.

He didn’t lean against the stone pillar or join the four men talking quietly by the brass handrail.

“That’s Vance,” Nate whispered, nodding at the man in the quilted vest.

“He owns twenty rental houses on the east side of town.”

“Does he bid at tax sales a lot?”

“He buys anything under thirty thousand,” Nate said.

“He puts in cheap carpet and turns them into Section 8 rentals.”

“We have forty-one thousand five hundred total,” I said.