Chapter Twenty · Diesel #2
“I’m not scared. I want to be honest about that because I think I’m supposed to be.” Her arms tightened. “I’m furious. I have been furious since the porch light and I didn’t have anywhere to put it.”
“I know where you put it.”
“Do not be smug at me at one in the morning.”
“I’m going to be smug about that one for a while,” Diesel said, “and you’re going to let me.”
Afterward he carried her there anyway, because the floor of a farmhouse in February is a floor in February, and she laughed at him the entire way down the hall with her arms around his neck, and the third step made noise, and neither of them cared.
She fell asleep on him at half past one with her hand flat over his heart.
Diesel lay awake and did the thing he had been doing for eleven days, which was hold a woman and lie to her by omission at the same time, and he was fully aware that a man who could do both of those in the same hour was not a man he particularly wanted to be.
Tomorrow, he thought. Grace’s office. The card, the walk, Ammen, all of it, on a table, in front of Grace and Cutter and her, and let it be four people’s problem instead of one man’s secret.
He fell asleep having decided it.
At seven twelve Friday morning, Diesel called Grace from the yard office with the memory card sitting on the desk in front of him.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“You’re calling before eight, so either somebody is dead or you finally decided to tell me the thing you’ve been keeping from me.”
Diesel looked through the glass at the shop.
“Second one.”
There was a pause.
“All right.”
“I want you, Cutter, Evelyn, and me in a room.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough I ain’t doing it twice.”
Grace was quiet for half a second longer than he liked.
“I’m in court until noon, I have a jail visit after, and Cutter is supposed to be in Wytheville this afternoon. I can put everybody in my office tomorrow at nine.”
Diesel put his thumb against the edge of the memory card.
“Tomorrow works.”
“No,” Grace said. “That was scheduling. I’m asking whether tomorrow works.”
He looked again through the glass.
Pike was not there. Diesel had taken him off Fridays entirely two weeks ago.
“It’ll hold one more day.”
“You certain?”
He had spent eleven days telling himself he was not certain enough to accuse a man he had known thirty years.
Now he was certain enough to tell four people.
Those were not the same thing, and he knew it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m certain.”
“All right. Nine o’clock. Bring everything. And Diesel?”
“Yeah.”
“If you change your mind about whether it can wait, you call me. I don’t care if I’m standing in front of a judge.”
“I know.”
He hung up.
For a while he sat there with the card between two fingers.
He could take it home and tell Evelyn now.
That was the plain fact of it.
He could walk into the house, put it on the kitchen table, and say Pike’s name. He could call Cutter and make him come up the mountain. He could tell Grace enough over the phone that by nine tomorrow there would be nothing left except paperwork.
Instead he slid the card into the little envelope he had been keeping it in and put the envelope back in the drawer.
One room, he told himself.
One telling.
Everybody gets the same facts at the same time, nobody reacts before Grace says what the facts actually mean, nobody goes after Pike, nobody warns him, nobody does something they cannot take back.
It sounded responsible.
That was what made it dangerous.
Cutter came through the office at eleven and stopped with one hand on the door.
“You look like hell.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Diesel said.
Cutter’s hand stayed on the knob.
“What’s tomorrow morning?”
“Grace’s office. Nine.”
“For what?”
Diesel looked at him.
Cutter looked back.
Then his expression changed by almost nothing.
“You finally got something to say.”
“Tomorrow.”
Cutter stood there another second.
“Your call, boss.”
He went out.
Diesel sat alone in the office after the door shut and understood that those three words had not felt like permission.
They had felt like a receipt.
At three forty, Diesel left the yard.
He had nearly twenty hours until Grace’s office, and for the first time in eleven days he had convinced himself that keeping the secret until morning was not hiding it anymore.
It was scheduling.
The phone went at eight twenty on Friday evening and it was Renata.
“Mr. Harrow.” Her voice was wrong. “Is Pike with you?”
Diesel sat up out of the recliner.
“Pike’s off.”
“I know he’s off.” A breath. “He come by at four and took the scrap run to Salem. It was on the board for Tim in the morning and he took it. He said he’d have the truck back by six and he’d square it with you himself.”
“Renata.”
“He didn’t scan out at Salem. The yard down there closed at six and the ticket never got run.” She was talking fast now. “And it’s eight twenty and his phone’s going to voicemail and I have called it nine times and Del’s called it and she’s the one told me to call you.”
Diesel was already reaching for his boots.
“How long’s that run.”
“Fifty minutes each way.” Renata’s voice cracked all the way through, which Diesel had never once heard it do. “Mr. Harrow, it’s four hours.”
Evelyn was already up off the couch with her coat.
“Call Cutter,” Diesel said, pulling a boot on. “Then Rook, then Scout, then Cinder. Tell them the scrap route to Salem, both ways, and tell them nobody rides alone, and tell them I said nobody stops for anything on the shoulder no matter what it looks like.”
“Diesel.”
“And call Grace and tell her to call the sheriff and file it now, tonight, on the phone, before we’re out the door, because I want a time stamp on this that ain’t ours.”
“Diesel.”
He stopped with the second boot in his hand and looked up at her, and Evelyn Chase was standing in the middle of the front room with the phone already in her hand and her face gone white to the lips.
“You took him off the schedule,” she said.
“I know it.”
“That’s why he took that run.”
Diesel Harrow put his boot on and stood up and did not say one word, because there was not one word to say, and because the true one would have taken forty minutes and Pike Danner had been missing for four hours.