I looked at the smug, self-righteous set of his face, and inside I let out a cold laugh.
"Fine. Free market, buying and selling. I'll grant you that."
"But what about all the public parking spaces for miles outside the complex?"
"What gives him the right to wave around some document nobody can even prove is real, and collect fines off everyone?"
Clark Perry's expression flickered, but he pulled himself back together fast.
"Anything outside the complex is the traffic enforcement unit's business, and the city's. What's the point of coming to management about it?"
"If you feel that hard done by, go file a police report."
He waved a hand at me, the gesture of a man showing a guest out.
"That's enough, Miss Swanson. I'm a busy man. If there's nothing else, you'd best head back."
I held his gaze a few seconds, then turned and walked out of the management office.
Back home, I opened the residents' group chat.
The thing had completely blown up.
"This property management is obviously in on it with Lucius Armstrong!"
"I asked around today. Manager Clark Perry, the property manager, is actually Lucius Armstrong's own uncle!"
"No wonder he's so brazen. He's got someone backing him."
Alison Ball posted a long message in the chat.
"Everyone, listen up. I just had someone look into this."
"This Lucius Armstrong is a repeat offender!"
"He pulled the exact same thing over at Fairmont Court next door. Bought up every single parking space the same way."
"Same rent too, five grand a month. Had that whole complex miserable."
"Complaining did no good either, because the head of Fairmont Court's property management is the same uncle, Clark Perry!"
Reading that, the last of my confusion cleared.
So it was relatives working the con together. No wonder they dared to hog everything this openly.
They'd set their minds on fleecing us residents for every dollar we had.
I scrolled through the messages, each one furious and each one helpless.
Everyone was complaining, everyone was pointing fingers, but no one could put forward an actual solution.
And since Lucius and the property people weren't in this chat, everyone spoke freely.
I posted a message.
"Everyone hold on, let me run some numbers for you."
The chat went quiet in an instant.
"If we rent his spaces at five grand a month, that's sixty grand a year."
"Every cent of that is him fleecing us on purpose."
"I did the math. If we pool our money and build a new parking lot nearby,"
"split among all of us, the cost per person works out even cheaper than buying a space in this complex."
The moment that message landed, the chat boiled over.
"Build our own lot? Can that even work?"
"Build it where? Is there any open land around here?"
Alison was the first to jump in.
"I think Caroline's right! Why should we swallow this humiliation?"
"The people next door have been fed up for ages too. I'll pull them into the chat, and we'll all chip in together!"
Watching everyone rally behind it, one corner of my mouth curved into a cold smile.
"As long as we stick together, we build our own lot and never have to take this kind of abuse again."
Just as the funding for the lot was nearly gathered,
a resident from the complex next door raised a question:
"That empty patch of land between the two complexes, the one we just agreed to build the lot on,"
"the owner is a real mystery. Where do we even go to contact him about buying it?"
"I heard Clark Perry's property company wanted to buy it up for an expansion before. They reached out over and over and got turned down every time."
"They never even got a meeting with the owner. Can we really pull this off?"
I leaned back against the couch, fingers tapping lightly at my phone screen.
"Don't worry. The land, I can handle."
I didn't spell it out in the chat, that the land was actually what my grandfather had left me.
I'd wanted to keep it as a keepsake, so in all these years I'd never touched it.
When Clark Perry had reached out before, hoping to buy it cheap, I'd refused without a second thought.
I never imagined this land, meant to be kept for remembrance, would turn out to be the key to breaking us free.
If my grandfather could see it from wherever he was, I think he'd be happy too.
