Sarris is sixty, wears a fleece, and does about four hours of what could fairly be called crime in an average week. The rest is legitimate and dull: coin machines, tow contracts with two townships, a storage facility with a waiting list. The drugs are a service he permits to happen near his businesses in exchange for a share, and the debts are the part he likes, because a debt is a person who has to answer the phone.

He is not frightening in the way the genre usually wants. He is frightening because he is reasonable and patient and has done this for thirty years without ever needing to be anything else. He has never in his life had to consider the possibility that a man who came to talk about his daughter's money was a serious person.

His mistake

He escalates on a schedule. Casey's debt moves from money to leverage on a Tuesday because Tuesday is when he reviews the ledger, and he does it without malice, the way you send a second invoice.

He is not the antagonist of the book. He's the inciting incident with a face — the ordinary, local, solvable problem that a father can actually go and address. Everything past the halfway mark is a different order of thing, and Sarris is not in it. He never learns who Ray was. From where he sits, an insurance estimator came to his tow yard and something went badly wrong and the police were no help, and after a while he stops thinking about it.

That indifference is deliberate. The man the whole first act is pointed at turns out to be a small-business owner who moves on, while the thing Ray actually woke up is still filing paperwork three states away.