A town whose locks were made to be opened.

Mount Wanda Lock Works covers Martinez and the towns around the strait from a van, working out of the old center near Main Street. The name belongs to the hill standing over the south side of town. Eight neighborhoods sit inside the city and the van reaches them in 10 to 27 minutes: Downtown Martinez about 10, the waterfront and marina 13, Alhambra Heights 15, Muir Station 17, Vine Hill 19, Morello Park 21, Alhambra Hills 24 with its longer driveways, and Virginia Hills 27 at the far south edge. Eighteen minutes is the average. Pacheco, Pleasant Hill, Concord, Lafayette, Benicia across the bridge and Hercules get the same price list, at 14, 18, 21, 24, 26 and 29 minutes. Somebody picks up at four in the morning, on a Sunday, and on the Fourth of July.

The idea behind this business fits in one line: the locks in this town are older than the locks anywhere near it, and old locks were built to be opened, cleaned and put back. Martinez has been the county seat since the nineteenth century, and the center it grew is late Victorian and Edwardian, with deep porches, bay windows and turned posts above brick and timber shopfronts. In the edge of those doors sits a cast bronze body rather than a cylinder in a hole, and inside that body are levers, springs and a bolt that a person can service on a cloth in twenty minutes. What stops them is grease gone hard, grit that came in through the keyhole, and paint. Paint deserves its own sentence, because the cut edge of a leaf downtown shows the coats stacked one on the next like a section cut through a wall, and that same paint has narrowed the rabbet until a bolt leaving the lock correctly has nothing left to land in. So the first things out of the van here are a scraper and a screwdriver, not an order form. Where a door genuinely has to resist somebody, a modern cylinder goes on and that gets said in plain words rather than avoided. Running alongside the old center is the other half of the work, because a county seat is a working town: offices around the courthouse, shops on Main Street, sheds and yards by the water, and the plants east of town whose gatehouses never close. Those doors want master systems, exit devices, shopfront hardware and keys that can be changed between shifts.

One price list covers the whole city, and the $89 visit is a component of every number on it rather than a line waiting at the end. Getting back into a house is $125 to $229, into a car $99 to $189, into a shop, an office or a yard building $135 to $245. After a forced door, putting the jamb, the keeper and the lock back is $165 to $429. Rekeying is $27 to $44 a cylinder, and cylinders after the first sit at the bottom of that range because the trip is already paid for. Hardware work is $119 to $315, and that same line pays for pulling a bronze body, servicing it and refitting it. A keypad or app lock is $185 to $459, a safe opened $189 to $509. On the commercial side, exit devices run $289 to $739 a door and shopfront hardware $152 to $449, while master key systems and access control carry no published range, since both get counted opening by opening on site and quoted afterward. For vehicles: a key $149 to $399, a fob $95 to $189, an ignition $175 to $435, motorcycle keys $119 to $275. The clock adds $45 from 8pm and $85 from midnight, folded in while you are still deciding. Ninety days on the labor, and that covers a rebuilt case and a moved keeper as squarely as a lock out of a carton. Two things stay off the list on purpose: garage door springs, cables, panels and opener motors. That is a different trade, and you hear so on the call instead of after a van has arrived.