Chapter Four · Diesel
Chapter Four
DIESEL
By two in the morning she had taken over the whole room.
Diesel stood at the end of the bar with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand and looked at what she had done to forty years of Copperhead’s front room, and could not decide whether he wanted to laugh or put a fist through the wall.
The pool table was covered in paper. She had pulled the fitted cover, laid brown craft paper over the felt, and built something on it that ran the length of the table in columns, and she had done it with a carpenter’s pencil out of the drawer behind the bar because nobody in the building owned a marker that worked.
There were banker’s boxes stacked three high along the wall in an order that meant something to her.
There were fuel receipts fanned across two card tables.
There was a laptop she had refused to plug into anything and a printer she had asked permission to use twice.
She had taken off her coat around midnight. Under it she was wearing a grey sweater with a hole starting at the cuff, and she had her hair shoved up off her neck with a pencil through it, and she had not looked up in an hour and ten minutes.
Scout had fallen asleep sitting up in the corner. Rook was at the window doing nothing, which was Rook’s whole gift.
Diesel had run this table since he was thirty and in that time he had made exactly four decisions he considered serious, and he was aware, standing at the bar at two in the morning, that he had made the fifth one at about a quarter past ten with three words and no discussion at all.
My place.
He had not planned to say it. He had heard himself say it, and had watched Cutter’s jaw shift, and had known immediately that his vice president was right and had gone ahead with it anyway.
The vote was what bothered him. He had wanted her at the ridge before he asked the room, then held the vote anyway.
He watched her pick up a fuel receipt, hold it at arm’s length, frown, put it down two inches to the left of where it had been, and go still with her fingers resting on it.
She had been at this for four hours without eating, without asking for anything, and without once looking at the door.
Diesel had spent his whole life around men who were good at a thing, and he knew the look of somebody being good at a thing, and it did not usually make him feel the way this was making him feel.
He set that aside on a shelf where he kept a number of items he had no intention of taking down.
The front door let in a slab of cold and Cutter with it, and the door shut, and Cutter stood there and looked at the pool table long enough to be making a point.
“She’s got the Bristol boxes out of order,” he said.
“She’s got the Bristol boxes in her order.”
“That table’s from 1962.”
“It’s got paper on it.”
Cutter grunted. He crossed to the bar, poured coffee he was not going to drink, and set his elbows down and kept his eyes on the bar, which was how the two of them had held every hard conversation since they were seventeen.
“How thin are we,” Diesel said.
“You want the number or you want the picture.”
“Number.”
“Eighty-one thousand in operating, and thirty of that’s spoken for by the March insurance.
Four notes on the trucks. The lowboy is worth more than the two flatbeds put together and it’s the one that’s paid off, which is the kind of luck we have.
” Cutter turned the cup a quarter turn on the bar.
“We are one bad quarter from selling equipment, and we have been for two years, and every man at that table knows it and none of them say it out loud because you don’t. ”
“I know it.”
“You know it. You don’t feel it.” Cutter finally looked over.
“Nobody in this club is going to starve. That’s not the thing.
The thing is that yard employs fourteen people who are not patched, and most of them have kids in the county school, and if the required insurance filing lapses, they’re not out of a job, they’re out of the only job inside forty miles that has insurance on it. ”
Diesel drank cold coffee and said nothing.
“So when a man drives down here and offers to put freight on our authority,” Cutter said, “I need you to understand that I heard that offer too. And I’m not going to take it, and I’m going to vote the way you vote, and I’ll stand where you tell me.
But I am not going to stand there and pretend I didn’t hear the good part of it.
Because if I pretend that, then in six months when I’m angry I’ll have nowhere to put it, and I’ll put it on her. ”
That was the closest Cutter Reeves had come to an apology in fifteen years.
“Noted,” Diesel said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re still wrong about my place.”
“I know I’m wrong about your place.” Cutter pushed off the bar. “I’m wrong about it the way a smoke alarm’s wrong at two in the morning.”
By four the building had gone quiet in the particular way a building goes quiet when everybody in it has agreed to stop talking without agreeing to leave.
Grace had gone home at three thirty with her legal pad against her chest and a look at her brother that Rook did not return.
Scout was properly asleep. Cinder had been outside for an hour doing whatever Cinder did outside for an hour.
At twenty past four, Pike came in the back with frost in his beard and a thermos under his arm.
“Boss.”
“Pike.”
“Truck’s warm, chains are on the deck, I got the straps re-tagged like you said.
” He stamped his boots and looked at the pool table with mild interest, the way he looked at everything, which was one of about six reasons everybody in the county liked Pike Danner and nobody could ever remember why. “Somebody doing taxes?”
“Something like that.”
“Tell ’em they missed April.” Pike unscrewed the thermos, decided against it, screwed it back.
He was fifty-two years old with a bad knee and a wife who taught kindergarten in Salem and a boy at Radford who was, at any given moment, the sole thing Pike wanted to talk about.
“Del’s got her observation Thursday. Whole class does a thing with paper plates.
I said I’d be back Wednesday night and she says that’s what I said in November. ”
“Was it what you said in November?”
“It was exactly what I said in November.” Pike grinned into his beard. “Five o’clock. Buchanan, Staunton, Hagerstown, back Wednesday.”
Something went through Diesel that he did not recognize for a second because it had been years.
“Say the first one again,” he said.
“Buchanan.” Pike’s grin faded a degree. “It’s on the sheet. It’s been on the sheet a year and a half. Twenty minutes off the interstate, they got the yard where we drop the empties and get the reefer looked at. Why?”
At the pool table, Evelyn Chase said, “Oh.”
She said it under her breath, the way people say things when the floor moves.
Diesel was across the room before he had decided to be.
She had her hand flat on a column of craft paper and she was not looking at him. There were three sheets of dispatch printout laid in a row with tiny pencil marks all down the margins and a fuel receipt on top of the middle one.
“Say it,” Diesel said.
“Route seven.” Her voice was steady and her hand was not.
“You run three loads a month north out of the yard, Buchanan, Staunton, Hagerstown, and back. You’ve run it since August of two years ago.
It’s a good route. It’s your cleanest route, it’s the one your safety score is built on, and it is the only route you have where the truck sits for more than forty minutes at a facility that isn’t yours. ”
“The reefer shop.”
“The reefer shop.” She turned the middle sheet around so he could see it, and put the pencil down on a line.
“Forty-one times in two years that truck has gone into that yard with one trailer and come out with the same trailer number, same seal number, and a fuel burn that does not match the weight on the outbound bill. Not once. Not twice. Forty-one times, and every single one of them is a load that got heavier by between nine hundred and thirteen hundred pounds between there and Hagerstown, and the paperwork says nothing changed.”
Diesel put both hands on the edge of the pool table.
“They’re not swapping the trailer,” he said. “Show me one.”
She did not ask which one. She pulled a sheet out of the second row, laid a fuel receipt beside it, and put the pencil tip on a figure.
“November the fourth, last year. Outbound bill says thirty-one thousand two hundred pounds of palletized dry goods, Buchanan to Hagerstown, two hundred and six miles.” The pencil moved.
“That is your truck, your driver, your fuel card. Thirty-eight point one gallons burned on that leg. Here is the same tractor, same driver, same road, three weeks earlier at thirty-one thousand four hundred pounds. Thirty-six point four.”
“That’s nothing.”
“It is nothing,” she agreed. “It is nothing forty-one times in a row, always north out of Buchanan, and never once on the leg going the other way. Nothing that only happens in one direction stops being nothing.”
“They don’t need to swap it. They put it in yours.
” She said it flat, the way she had said felony.
“Under the floor, in the nose, I don’t know the method, I only know the weight.
You haul it four hundred miles for them under an authority they didn’t have to build, past three scales that wave you through because in six years you have never once given anybody a reason to open you up.
And if a dog ever hits that trailer, the name on the authority is Harrow. ”
Behind Diesel, Pike said, “Now hold on.”
Nobody answered him.
“How much,” Diesel said.
“Per load, at street, I would not want to guess. But I can tell you what they were carrying it as on their side, because their side is on the drive.” Evelyn’s throat worked. “Forty-one loads. Eleven point four million dollars of it has moved through the Gap on your paper.”
The woodstove ticked.
Rook had come off the window and was standing at the end of the table with his arms folded. Scout was awake and had not made a sound. Cutter was in the hall doorway and Diesel had not heard him come.
“Boss.” Pike’s voice had changed. All of the mildness had gone out of it and what was left sounded a lot older. “Boss, I have driven that route since August of the year before last.”
“I know it.”
“I never once.”
“Pike.” Diesel looked at him, and made sure he was looking at him, and said it plain, because there was going to be one chance to say it before everybody in the room started thinking. “Nobody at this table thinks you knew.”
Pike stood there with his thermos in his hand.
“Then what do we do,” he said.
Cutter said, “We pull the run.”
“No,” said Diesel.
“Diesel, that truck goes out at five with a marked route and a woman upstairs who can name the yard, and if they’ve had eyes on us since last night, they know we know.”
“They don’t know we know. They know we got offered ten thousand dollars.
” Diesel straightened up off the table. “If we pull the run, that tells them. First time in two years that truck doesn’t roll on a Wednesday and they’ll have that yard cleaned out by Friday and moved to a carrier we’ve never heard of, and we’re standing here holding a drive that proves something about a place that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s not a win. That’s a receipt.”
The room stayed quiet.
“So the run goes,” Diesel said. “On time. Same sheet, same stops, nothing different about it in any way, and at Buchanan we find out how they get it in there, with our own eyes, because right now all we have is a number that a woman found in a box, and I am not going to war on a number.”
Cutter’s face did something complicated. “You’re going to follow it.”
“I’m going to follow it.”
“With what, four bikes in February on the interstate at sixty-five behind a man who’s going to be looking in his mirror?”
“With the lowboy,” Rook said, “and a load on it.”
Everybody turned.
“Nobody looks at a lowboy,” Rook said, and shrugged. “It’s the only thing on the road slower than the truck.”
Diesel felt the corner of his mouth move, which it had not done in about six hours.
“Get it loaded,” he said.
Then he looked at the clock over the bar, which said four forty-one, and then at Pike, who had not moved, and who was going to have to drive four hundred miles today knowing what was under his floor and acting like a man who did not.
“Pike. You still want the run?”
Pike Danner screwed the cap off his thermos, and this time he drank from it, and put it down on the pool table beside a column of numbers that had just rearranged his life.
“Del’s got that thing Thursday,” he said. “I’d like to be back for it.”
“Then you’ll be back for it.”
Pike nodded once and went out the back the way he had come in, and the door shut, and the cold he let in hung in the room afterward the way it does.
Diesel stood and looked at the pool table.
Forty years his father and then he had kept this club out of exactly this, by never taking the good year, by turning down a great deal of money in a hundred small increments, by being the most boring carrier on the corridor.
It had not mattered at all. They had not needed him to say yes.
They had simply used him, for two years, on a route he signed off on himself every single month, and he had put his own name on that paperwork forty-one times with his own hand.
Behind him, quietly, Evelyn said, “I want to say something and I think you’re going to hate it.”
“Say it.”
“You couldn’t have caught this.” She had her arms wrapped around herself and she was swaying a little on her feet, four hours past the end of what she had.
“It is designed to be invisible from where you sit. It is only visible from their side and my side, and the only reason I am standing in this room is that I was too stubborn to let go of a forty thousand dollar variance in a quarterly.”
Diesel looked at her a long beat.
“You’re right,” he said. “I hate it.”