Chapter Sixteen · Diesel
Chapter Sixteen
DIESEL
The gate was standing open when he got there at twenty past four and that was how he knew before anybody told him.
“Two ten,” Cutter said. “Give or take. Renata’s boy come by at midnight to get his tools and it was here.”
“Gate?”
“Opened with a code.”
“Same code?”
“Same code.”
Diesel stood in his own gravel and looked at the empty slot.
They had taken the trailer with the false bulkhead in it.
Not a truck, not the lowboy, not the fuel in the island or anything in the shop worth money.
They had backed a tractor into a locked yard at two in the morning, hooked to the one piece of equipment in four counties that had a welded steel plate on a piano hinge behind the reefer unit, and driven it out through a gate that opened for them.
“Grace is on her way,” Cutter said. “Rook’s calling it in to the sheriff.”
“We’re calling the sheriff.”
“Grace says we call the sheriff on everything from here out and we do it inside the hour, every time, because the day this ends up in front of a jury she wants a stack of reports with dates on them.” Cutter turned the flashlight off.
“Her words were, and I’m quoting, we are going to be the most annoying victims in the history of Botetourt County. ”
“That’s about right.”
Diesel walked the fence line anyway, because he needed twenty minutes.
The creek was up from the rain and loud.
Out past the second fence the four trucks sat nose out in their row the way they had sat every night of his adult life, and none of them had moved in three weeks, and none of them was going to move again after the twenty-ninth of the month, and he walked past them with his hands in his coat and kept his eyes ahead.
The thing that got to him was not losing it.
He had lost four contracts, had an insurance cancellation hanging over his authority, and had walked away from a hundred thousand dollars he had never had, and he had discovered that he could stand in a shop bay and tell fourteen people about it without his voice going.
He was not going to come apart over a trailer.
What got to him was the arithmetic.
They had known which one. There were seven trailers in that yard on any given night and four of them were the same make and year, and the difference between trailer 4 and trailer 6 was a number stenciled six inches high on the nose and a weld nobody could see from outside.
Aldridge could have found that out ten ways.
But somebody had to know that Copperhead had figured out about the bulkhead at all, and that they had pulled trailer 4 off the road and parked it, and that Grace Walsh had photographed the plate on a Tuesday and had a chain of custody form in a file.
Nobody outside the table knew that.
By four fifty the yard had people in it who had no reason to be there.
Cutter had called nobody. Rook came because Rook was already awake, and Scout came because Rook called him, and then Dutch Voyles’s truck came down the road at four forty with its one working headlight, and eight minutes later Pike Danner pulled in still buttoning his shirt, and by five there were nine men standing in a gravel lot in the cold at an empty trailer slot with nothing whatsoever to do about it.
Nobody had summoned them. Somebody had called somebody and that was the entire mechanism, and it had been the entire mechanism for forty-two years, and Diesel stood at the office door and watched his club assemble itself around a rectangle of empty gravel.
Aldridge had taken a trailer. He was going to take more than that before this was over.
He was never going to be able to take that.
Grace got there at five and Teal called at six twenty, unprompted, which Diesel had not expected.
“I’m not calling as an agent,” Teal said. “I’m calling as a man who is going to read about this in a report in nine days. Tell me what’s gone.”
Grace took the phone.
By eight the sun was up and the sheriff’s deputy had been and gone with a case number, and Grace had the whole officer table in the yard office with the blinds up because she said blinds down looked like a conspiracy.
“Damage assessment,” she said. “Real one. Sit down, all of you.”
They sat.
“We have lost the physical exhibit. That is a genuine and serious loss and I am not going to talk around it.” She had a legal pad and never once consulted it.
“What we have not lost: forty-one photographs of that plate from nine angles with a scale in frame, taken by me, with my signed and dated custody memorandum. The trailer’s build sheet and title.
Two independent witnesses who saw the bulkhead in place.
And the fact that a stolen trailer report now exists at the sheriff’s office with a date on it, which means that if that plate ever surfaces anywhere in the United States, it surfaces attached to a theft, and the person holding it has a much worse day than we just had. ”
“There’s one more thing in the good column and it is the largest item on the board,” Grace said.
“Six days ago there was one binder. There are now eight, in six states, in the hands of people with no connection to each other, including one that a fire marshal in Wythe County watched a man describe on the record while his shop was still smoking.”
“Eight,” Cutter said. “There’s six copies and ours.”
“There are eight.” Grace kept writing. “Ms. Chase mailed six on Tuesday and I have had one in a box in Lexington since the day I printed it, and I did not tell any of you either, and if we are going to have that argument we can have it after the coffee.”
Diesel felt Cutter look at him and did not turn his head.
“That’s the good version,” Cutter said.
“That’s the accurate version. Here’s the bad one.
” Grace put the pad down. “A defense attorney will now stand up and say that the only evidence of a modification to that trailer is photographs taken by the club’s own lawyer of a trailer the club has conveniently allowed to disappear.
I would say it. I’d say it well. And there is no answer to it except the eight other things we have, which is why we spent the last two weeks making sure there are eight other things. ”
The office took a beat with that.
“There’s a bigger problem,” Diesel said.
Everybody turned.
“They took four.”
Grace’s face changed.
“They took four,” he said again. “Out of seven, four the same make, and they backed in and hooked the right one on the first pull at two in the morning in the dark. And whoever told them which one had to know we’d found the plate, which nobody knew outside this room and that office.”
Nothing stirred in the yard office.
Cinder said, mildly, “Or Grace’s office.”
“Grace’s office is a lock and a lawyer,” Rook said.
“I ain’t accusing Grace of anything, I’m saying there’s two rooms and everybody keeps counting one.
” Cinder had his boot up on the chair rail.
“Boss. I’m going to say the ugly thing again because that’s what you gave me the patch for.
First the gate code, thirty-nine nights over two years.
Now the gate code again and the right trailer.
That ain’t a man who found something. That’s a man who’s still here. ”
“I know it.”
“Then say what we’re doing about it.”
“Nothing,” Diesel said. “Today. Out loud.”
Cinder’s eyebrows went up.
“I mean it. Nothing out loud, nobody gets watched, nobody gets asked, and no man in this club looks sideways at another man in this club, because the second we start that, Renner has beat us without spending a dollar.” Diesel leaned on the desk.
“That’s the actual weapon. Not the fire and not the trailer.
Sixteen men who quit trusting each other.
He has been running the same play since the first night.
He offered me money in front of my own people and then he triggered the insurance cancellation so they’d wonder if I could’ve stopped it, and now this. ”
“So we do nothing.”
“We do it quiet,” Diesel said. “And it goes through me.”
Which was, he would think later, the exact sentence Cutter Reeves had warned him about in a shop building at half past midnight, said out loud, in daylight, in front of everybody, and not one person in that room caught it.
Scout caught him in the lot at nine.
“Boss.” He had his phone out and his ears were red. “You got a minute where nobody’s around?”
“Say it here.”
“No sir, I need the shop.”
They went in the shop and Scout pulled the roll-up down.
“When I done the sweep, week before last,” he said.
“For bugs. I did the buildings like you said, and I didn’t find nothing else, and I told you that and it was true.
” He was talking fast. “But while I was up on the ladder at the gate I put a camera on the light pole. It’s a game camera.
Trail cam. I bought it with my own money at the Tractor Supply because I was mad, and I never told nobody, because it wasn’t club equipment and I figured if it come to nothing I’d look like a kid. ”
Diesel felt the whole morning tilt.
“Scout.”
“It’s motion trip, infrared, and it don’t record to anything, it just writes to a card in the body.” Scout was holding the phone like it might go off. “There ain’t no network on it. Nobody could’ve known it was there unless they climbed the pole.”
“Show me.”
Scout brought it up.
The clip was eleven seconds and it was black and white and grainy the way those things are, and the timestamp said 2:07:41, and it showed the inside of the gate from about twenty feet up.
A tractor backed into frame. It had no markings. The plate was covered with something.
Then a man walked out of the bottom of the frame toward the keypad.
He was in a Copperhead cut.
Diesel watched him cross fourteen feet of gravel.
He watched him stop at the box and stand there for four seconds with his back to the pole and his head down, and punch the code, and turn, and walk back the way he had come with his hands in his pockets, and go off the bottom of the frame, and that was the whole eleven seconds.
The camera never got his face. Not once. Not a quarter of it.
“I’ve watched it about forty times,” Scout said. “You can’t get him. Hood’s up under the cut and he never looks anywhere but down, and I think he knew where the pole was, boss, I think he knew there was a pole.”
“Play it again.”
Scout played it again.
Diesel watched fourteen feet of gravel.
He was aware of his own heartbeat, and of the smell of the shop, and of Scout Carlisle standing next to him at nine in the morning holding a phone with both hands, nineteen years old and proud and terrified, having done the single most useful thing anybody had done in a month.
He watched the man walk.
There is a thing that happens to a body over thirty years. A knee goes, or a hip, and the man compensates, and the compensation becomes the walk, and after a while nobody in his life sees it anymore because they have watched it come across a parking lot four thousand times.
Diesel had watched this walk come across a parking lot four thousand times.
“Boss?”
He kept his eyes on the screen and made his face do nothing at all, and it was the hardest thing he had done since the church hall.
“Nobody sees this,” Diesel said.
Scout blinked. “Sir?”
“You pull that card and you give it to me right now, and you put that camera back up on that pole, and you do not tell Rook, you do not tell Cutter, you do not tell Grace, and you do not tell Cinder.” He put his hand out.
“This is not me doubting you. This is the best thing anybody’s brought me since this started and I’m going to say so at the table when it’s time. ”
“But not now.”
“Not now.”
Scout dug the card out and put it in his hand, and Diesel closed his fist on it, and the boy looked at him with an expression that Diesel was going to think about a great deal afterward, because it was not confusion.
It was relief. Scout had watched it forty times too.
Diesel came out of the shop into the daylight with a memory card in his fist and nine men in his yard, and Cutter Reeves caught his eye across forty feet of gravel and lifted his chin, which meant anything?
Diesel shook his head.
He drove up his own mountain at ten in the morning, which he had not done on a workday in nine years, and he sat in his truck in his own driveway for six minutes without turning the engine off.
Then he went inside, and Evelyn Chase was at the kitchen table in a sweater with her hair up in a pencil and two legal pads in front of her, and she looked up, and her whole face changed when she saw him.
“What,” she said.
He had the card in his pocket. It was the size of a postage stamp.
There were four people alive who could tell him what to do about it and one of them was sitting eight feet away with a pencil in her hand, and every single thing she had ever said to him about deciding for other people was true, and he knew it.
“They took trailer 4,” Diesel said. “Out of seven.”
“They knew which one.”
“They knew which one.”
Evelyn set the pencil down.
“Diesel,” she said. “That’s somebody at your table.”
“Yeah,” he said.
And then he did not say the other thing.