Chapter Fourteen · Diesel
Chapter Fourteen
DIESEL
Church ran three hours that Monday night and for the first two of them Diesel Harrow let other men talk.
He had learned that from his father, who had learned it somewhere worse. A president who speaks first gets agreement. A president who speaks last gets the room.
So he stood at the head of the table with his hands on the back of the chair and let Scout ask his questions and let Dutch say his piece and let Cutter lay out the money one more time, and he let Cinder Sullivan have the floor for nine straight minutes without one interruption.
“I’ll say it plain and then I’ll sit down,” Cinder said.
“Say it.”
“There’s a shop in Buchanan with a hoist and a false bulkhead and four bolts, and there’s a man in Roanoke with a house on Grandin Road.
” Cinder was not smiling, which was new.
“Both of them can be gone by Thursday. I ain’t talking about anything that touches a person.
I’m talking about a fire in an empty building at three in the morning and a machine that don’t work anymore, and I want to be real clear that I know exactly what I’m proposing and exactly what it costs, and I’m proposing it anyway, because Casey Voyles is dead and we have spent two weeks making photocopies. ”
He sat down.
The room stayed with it, which was why Diesel had loved that table his whole life. Sixteen men and not one of them jumped on it.
“Anybody?” Diesel said.
Rook, from the wall. “Burn that shop and you’ve destroyed the only physical evidence in the county. That bulkhead is the case.”
“There’s nineteen carriers, Rook, there’s nineteen bulkheads.”
“There’s nineteen bulkheads we can’t get to and one we can.”
“Anybody else.”
Pike Danner put his hand up, which he had never once done in the years Diesel had known him, and the room turned.
“I’d like to say a thing about the fire,” Pike said.
“Go on.”
“I ain’t against it.” He turned his cap around in his hands.
“I want that on the record because I know what everybody thinks I’m about to say.
If we burnt that shop I’d sleep fine, and I’d drive the truck we did it out of.
” He swallowed. “But my name’s on forty-one bills of lading in my own hand.
If it comes to a courtroom, I’m the one that’s got to sit up there and say I didn’t know.
And a jury’s going to look at me and decide whether they believe an old man in a club vest from a hollow.
” Pike looked up. “So I’d sure like the rest of it to be clean.
That’s all. I need the paper to be so clean that the only thing they’ve got to disbelieve is me. ”
Nothing moved in that room for a good five seconds.
“That’s the answer,” Cutter said quietly.
Cinder let out a breath through his nose and put both hands up, palms out, and said, “All right, Pike. All right.”
“There’s one more thing on the table before you go, boss,” Cutter said, “and I’ll put it up because nobody else will.”
“Go ahead.”
“Teal’s offer.” Cutter addressed the middle of the table.
“Three controlled loads and we get the insurance filing restored inside a week. I know why we’re saying no and I agree with why.
I want it said out loud in this room that saying no costs this club four contracts, fourteen jobs, and probably the yard, because in about six months somebody in here is going to say we never even considered it. ”
“We considered it,” Diesel said.
“Say the reason.”
“The reason is that his case has nineteen carriers in it and we’re number seven, and a man does not run loads for the office that’s building the indictment.
” Diesel looked around the table. “And the second reason, which is Grace’s, is that the minute Pike Danner drives a federal load he stops being a witness and starts being an agent, and every defense lawyer Renner can afford will spend a week on it. ”
“That’s what I wanted said.” Cutter sat back. “That’s all.”
“Then here’s mine,” Diesel said.
He came around the table and stood at the corner of it where he could see all of them.
“We don’t burn anything and we don’t touch anybody and we don’t do one single thing that a prosecutor can put in a sentence with the word retaliation in it,” he said. “And we are not going to sit on ninety pages either, because Cinder’s right about that part and I want him to hear me say it.”
Cinder tipped his chin.
“Teal told us this morning that his file has nineteen carriers in it,” Diesel said. “Nineteen companies. Little outfits. Four states. Every one of them getting used the exact same way we were, and every one of them about to get indicted for it, and not one of them knows.”
He let it get quiet.
“So we tell them,” he said.
Sixteen men looked back at him.
“We take Grace’s binder and we take the photographs and we drive,” Diesel said.
“One at a time. Every carrier on that list, in person, in daylight, to the owner, at his own yard. We don’t ask them for anything.
We don’t want anything from them. We show them what’s in their own trailers and we hand them a copy and we leave. ”
Scout said, “And then what?”
“And then it ain’t our story anymore.” Diesel put one finger on the table.
“Right now Renner has one problem, which is a hard drive in a hollow in Botetourt County, and if he makes that problem go away he is completely fine. The day nineteen carriers in four states have the same ninety pages sitting on nineteen desks, there is no thing he can burn, and no woman he can find, and no insurance filing he can kill, that gets him out from under it. He’d have to buy nineteen silences.
And two of those carriers have already been given up by him to the DEA, so at least two of them are going to be extremely interested in the name of the man that did it. ”
Cutter had his head down and his thumbs hooked in his belt.
“It’s slow,” he said.
“It’s slow.”
“And the first door we knock on, if that man picks up the phone to Renner instead of reading page one, then Renner knows every move we’ve got by suppertime.”
“Yeah,” Diesel said. “He does.”
“And you want to do it anyway.”
“I want to do it anyway, because the alternative is being the only ones who know, and being the only ones who know is exactly the condition he built this whole thing to keep us in.” Diesel looked around the room.
“Copperhead’s been a closed club in a closed town for forty-two years, and we have been proud of it, and it worked right up until a man in a suit figured out that a closed place is the easiest place on earth to hide something in.
Nobody looks. Nobody talks to the next county.
That’s the whole design and we built half of it ourselves. ”
Dutch Voyles said, from the back, “Then it’s a change.”
“It’s a change.”
“Well.” Dutch put both hands on his knees. “I’m eighty-one and I’ve had about all the education I want this month. Call the vote.”
Sixteen yes. No abstention.
He went up the mountain at midnight and Evelyn was awake, because she was always awake, and she had the list on the kitchen table with a road atlas open beside it and had already worked out something nobody at the table had.
“You’re going to do them in Grace’s order,” she said.
“That’s the plan.”
“Don’t.” She turned the atlas around. “Grace ranked them by likelihood of cooperation, which is the correct legal instinct and the wrong operational one. Do them by distance from Roanoke, farthest first.”
Diesel put his hands on the back of her chair and looked at the map.
“Say why.”
“Because whoever else is watching is in Roanoke, and every hour of drive time you put between him and the door is an hour he can’t cover.
” Her pencil moved. “And because the far ones are the ones he cares about least, which means they’re the ones he’ll get to last, which means they’re the ones still worth getting to. ”
“That’s good.”
“It’s obvious.”
“It’s obvious after you say it.” He left his hands where they were. “That’s a different thing.”
Evelyn did not turn around, and he watched the back of her neck go pink, and neither of them said one word about a church parking lot, and after a moment she cleared her throat and moved the pencil to the next county.
They started Wednesday.
The list was nineteen names and Grace had ranked them, and the first was a family outfit outside Wytheville called Setzer Brothers Transport, four trucks, forty-one years old, two brothers in their sixties.
They took Grace’s Subaru and left the bikes at home, and Diesel wore the vest anyway, and there was an argument about that in the yard at six in the morning which Diesel won with one sentence.
“If I go without it, I’m a stranger in a coat,” he said. “With it, I’m a man from a club they’ve heard of, and either they’ll talk to me or they won’t, and I’d rather find out in the first ten seconds.”
Setzer Brothers Transport was four trucks and a gravel lot and a shop building with a hand-painted sign, and it looked so much like Harrow Salvage that Diesel felt it in his chest coming up the drive.
Same scale. Same stacked pallets. Same forty-year-old air compressor running out of the same open bay.
The younger Setzer met them in the lot and would not let them past the gate.
Diesel had expected that, and had brought Grace instead of Rook for that reason, and it did not matter.
The man stood with his hand on the chain and looked at the vests and at the binder in Grace’s arms and his face closed like a door, and he said, “I don’t know what you all are selling and I don’t want it. ”
“Mr. Setzer, I’m an attorney. This is a...”
“I know what he is. I can read the back of the jacket.”
Grace tried three more sentences. She was good, and none of it landed, and all the while the man kept looking past them at the road.
In the end Diesel said, “Sir. One question and we’re gone.”
The man waited.
“Do you run cold-side work at a place called Cardinal, up in Buchanan?”
Something happened in Setzer’s face. It was very fast and he put it away, and he said, “No,” and it was the single worst lie Diesel had heard in twenty years.
“All right,” Diesel said.
He took the binder out of Grace’s arms and set it down on the gravel inside the gate, and stepped back from it, and put his hands in his pockets.
“That’s yours,” he said. “It’s got a lawyer’s card in the front of it and every page in there is a public record or a document your company generated. Nobody’s coming back out here and nobody wants anything from you.”
Setzer looked at the binder on the ground.
“Why,” he said.
“Because a man in Roanoke has been using my trucks for two years and I only just found out, and there’s a boy in my town got buried Saturday.” Diesel started for the car. “And because when I found out, wasn’t one soul in four states that thought to tell me. I figured I’d break that.”
He was almost to the passenger door when Setzer said, “Hold on.”
Diesel stopped.
The man stood at the gate with his hand still on the chain and his jaw working, and he looked back at the shop building where a second man about ten years older had come to the bay door and was standing in it, watching, and had been for some time.
“How many of us,” Setzer said.
“Nineteen.”
Setzer bent down and picked the binder up off the gravel and did not open it, just held it against his side, and said, “You’uns get on now,” and turned around and walked back toward his brother.
They were four miles down 11 when Grace said, “He knew.”
“He knew.”
“Not the way we know. He knew the way a man knows a thing he’s decided not to look at.” She had the seat belt in both hands. “Diesel, he’s going to call somebody.”
Diesel’s phone rang at three forty that afternoon, twenty minutes outside Roanoke on the way to the second name on the list.
He looked at the screen and handed it to Grace, who put it on speaker on the console.
“Mr. Harrow.”
“Aldridge.”
“Wytheville,” Aldridge said. “Truly. In the vest, with the attorney, at a gate, in daylight.”
Grace made a note without any expression at all.
“You’ve made an interesting choice,” Aldridge went on, and he was not pleasant now, and it was the first time.
“You couldn’t be bought and you couldn’t be quieted, so you’ve decided to be loud.
I want to give you real credit for it. It’s the only move on the board that works, and I did not think you would find it. ”
“Then we’re done talking.”
“Almost.” A pause. “Mr. Harrow, do you know what you have actually done this afternoon? You have handed me a list. Up until this morning I had one problem in one hollow. Now I know precisely which nineteen doors you intend to stand in front of, and I know the order, because your lawyer will have ranked them sensibly, and I am going to get to most of them before you do.”
The line went dead.
Grace took the phone off the console and turned it over and looked at the call length like it was a piece of evidence, which by then Diesel understood it was.
“He was reading from something,” she said.
“What?”
“He said nineteen doors. He didn’t say the carriers, he didn’t say the list. Nineteen.
” Grace’s voice had gone very careful. “Diesel, our figure of nineteen came out of Teal’s mouth this morning at nine fifteen in a room over a hardware store.
It is not in the binder. It is not in Evelyn’s drive, because her side of it has twenty-two entities and we culled three. Nineteen is a DEA number.”
The truck went half a mile.
“Six hours,” Diesel said.
“Six hours,” Grace said. “From a proffer conversation in my office to Aldridge saying it back to you on a highway.”
Nobody in the truck said anything for a mile and a half.
Then Rook, from the back seat, said the thing that Diesel had been keeping his hands still about for the last ninety seconds.
“Boss,” he said. “Whoever’s next on that list. We just made ’em a target.”