Chapter Twenty-Two · Diesel
Chapter Twenty-Two
DIESEL
That is the first thing Diesel understood, coming up it at forty miles an hour behind a state police car with its bar going: there was nothing out here.
No houses for the first two miles. No mailboxes.
A hunt club gate. A cell tower with a dead light.
It is the kind of road a man drives once in his life by accident and never again, and Pike Danner had no earthly business on it, and everybody in every vehicle on that mountain knew it before anybody found anything.
They found the truck at eleven eighteen.
It was not on the road.
There is a place at two point four miles where the shoulder drops away and the ground goes down about twenty feet into a creek bed through second-growth scrub, and in daylight you would see all of it from the road, and at midnight in February you would drive past it for six hours, which is what the world had done.
The trooper’s spotlight found the underside of the trailer first.
Diesel was out of the truck before it stopped rolling.
He got about fifteen feet down the bank before Rook Walsh got both arms around his chest from behind and held on, and Diesel was a bigger man and had been in a hundred fights and could not break it, because Rook was not fighting him.
Rook had simply decided to be an anchor, and had put his feet in the ground, and was going to be one.
“Boss.”
“Get off me.”
“Boss, they got to go first.”
“That’s Pike down there.”
“I know who it is.” Rook’s voice was in his ear and it was doing something Diesel had never heard it do.
“And there’s a trooper on that bank right now, and if you go down there and put your hands on that truck then everything about tonight belongs to us instead of to them, and Grace told me on the phone at nine forty to say them exact words to you if I had to sit on you. ”
Diesel stopped.
He stood on that bank with a man’s arms around his chest and made himself go still, and after a moment Rook let him go, and neither of them said anything about it then or ever again.
The truck was on its side in about eighteen inches of water with the cab facing back up the slope.
It had gone off nose first and rolled a quarter turn and stopped against a rock shelf, and the scrap had come out of the bed and was scattered forty feet down the creek, and the driver’s door was against the ground.
They had to bring a wrecker up from Roanoke to lift it, and that took an hour and ten minutes, and during that hour and ten minutes Diesel Harrow stood at the top of the bank in the cold with sixteen men and did not sit down and did not talk.
Pike Danner was still belted in.
He had been dead a long while. The trooper told him that quietly and away from the others, in the way of a man who has done this a hundred times and has learned that the one mercy available is to say a true thing plainly and early.
“Five, six hours,” the trooper said. “He didn’t lay down there conscious for long. If that helps.”
“It don’t,” Diesel said. “But thank you for saying it.”
At half past midnight the second trooper came up the bank with a flashlight and a camera and asked, in the flat way they ask, whether anybody knew of a reason Mr. Danner would have been on this road.
“No,” said Diesel.
“Any medical issues you’re aware of? Anything with his heart?”
“He had a rod in his right leg from 2011 and he had a bad knee and he took something for his blood pressure. That’s all I know of.” Diesel kept his hands in his coat pockets. “Trooper, before you write single vehicle on that.”
“Sir, I ain’t written anything yet.”
“I know it. I’m asking you to look at the left rear of that truck before anybody puts it on a hook.”
The trooper took a beat with that.
Then he went and got the other one, and the two of them went down the bank with the light, and they were down there for six minutes.
When they came back up the older one had his notebook out and his whole manner had changed.
“There’s transfer on the left rear corner,” he said. “Above the tail light. Blue.”
“Blue.”
“I’m not going to speculate about it standing on a bank at one in the morning and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t either.
” He was writing. “But I’m calling it in as a crash investigation, not a single vehicle, and I’m going to want to talk to everybody at that yard tomorrow, and nobody touches that truck when it comes up, it goes to the state lot on a flatbed. ”
“Thank you.”
“Mr. Harrow.” The trooper stopped writing. “Is there something going on out here I ought to know about.”
Diesel looked at him.
“There is a great deal going on out here you ought to know about,” he said. “You’re going to want a lawyer named Grace Walsh in the room, and about six hours, and I’d rather do it once, properly, than badly right now.”
There was one more thing and Diesel got it from the younger trooper at ten past one, while the wrecker cable was coming down the bank.
“His phone was in the cab,” the trooper said. “It’s going in the evidence bag with everything else and you’re not going to see it any time soon, and I’m telling you this because I’d want somebody to tell me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Screen’s not broke. It was face up on the passenger seat.” The kid was young enough that he had to look at the creek to say it. “Twenty-two missed calls.”
Diesel stood at the top of a bank on Bent Mountain and thought about a woman with a laminated name tag calling a number nine times and then calling Renata, and about Renata calling it, and about thirty-one people in a room, and about the fact that for three hours a phone had lit up over and over in an empty cab eighteen inches above a creek.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
He got back to the clubhouse at ten of two.
There were still nineteen vehicles in that lot. Every light in the building was on.
He came through the door and thirty faces came up and he went past all of them, because Del Danner was in a folding chair at the end of the long table with Dorene Voyles holding both her hands and Evelyn Chase sitting on the floor beside her chair.
Diesel walked the length of that room and got down on one knee in front of her.
He had known this woman for thirty years. She had made him a plate at Christmas since he was nineteen. She had told him, at his mother’s funeral, that he was allowed to sit down.
“Del,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’d like to say it anyway. I think he’d want it said.”
“Then say it, honey.”
“Pike’s gone.” Diesel’s voice went and he let it.
“He went off Wolf Creek Road at about a quarter past five this evening and it was fast, and the trooper says he wasn’t conscious hardly at all, and he was on a road he had no business on, and I do not believe for one minute that he put himself there. ”
Del Danner nodded slowly, four or five times.
“He was supposed to be sweeping a shop,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“He come home Wednesday and set down at the table and said the boss took him off the road because a jury don’t need to see his face.
” She was looking at the middle distance.
“And I said Pike, that don’t sound like Diesel, and he said, Del, it’s the first thing he’s told me straight in two weeks, and he ate his supper. ”
Diesel Harrow knelt on the floor of his own clubhouse in front of a kindergarten teacher and had nothing at all to say.
“I ain’t asking you tonight,” Del said. “But there is a thing you’re going to have to tell me, and I want you to know I already know there is one.”
She put her hand on the side of his face for a second, the way she had when he was nineteen, and then she took it away.
Cinder was waiting for him in the lot.
He was leaned against the front of Diesel’s truck with his hands in his pockets and no toothpick, and he had been out there long enough that his shoulders had frost on them.
“I ain’t going to say it,” Cinder said.
“Say it.”
“No.” Cinder pushed off the fender. “Two weeks ago I stood in a church parking lot and told you I’d be all right with any answer as long as you’d considered the question.
You considered it. You said no and you had reasons and they were good ones and Pike stood up in that room and gave you the best one, and I sat down. ”
“Cinder.”
“So I ain’t going to stand in this lot tonight and tell you I told you so, because I didn’t, and because that man in the creek is the one who talked me out of it.
” Cinder’s jaw worked. “But I’m going to be at that table Monday, boss, and I’m going to have something to say, and I want you to have the weekend knowing it’s coming. ”
“That’s fair.”
“Yeah.” Cinder walked past him toward his bike, and stopped, and did not turn around. “He asked me Thursday if I knew what he’d done wrong.”
Diesel did not move.
“What’d you tell him.”
“I told him nothing, because I didn’t know nothing.” Cinder got a leg over the bike. “You want to think about what it was like for him to have to go around asking.”
He went to the yard at three in the morning by himself.
The office was cold and he did not turn the heat on. He sat down at the desk in his coat and opened the drawer and took the book of gate codes out and took the envelope out from under it, and put the card in the reader on the office laptop, and clicked the file.
Eleven seconds.
He had not watched it since the shop. He watched it four times.
A tractor backs in. A man comes out of the bottom of the frame in a Copperhead cut with his hood up under it. Fourteen feet of gravel. He stops at the box. Four seconds. He turns and goes back the way he came.
The walk was the walk. It was still the walk. Diesel watched it a fifth time and it was still Pike Danner’s hip on the fourth step, both directions, and something in him that had been holding on to a shred said there, see, you weren’t wrong, and he hated himself for the sound of it.
Then he watched it a sixth time.
And on the sixth time, for no reason at all, he stopped looking at the man’s legs.
The man came up to the keypad. He did not lean in. He did not bring the light on his phone up, and he did not look at the box, because a man who has punched a code a hundred and six times does not need to look at the box.
He raised his hand and punched it.
His left hand.
Diesel Harrow sat in a cold office at ten past three in the morning and clicked it back eleven seconds and watched it again, and again, and a seventh and eighth time, and it was the left hand every single time, quick and flat and certain, six digits without looking.
Pike Danner had written a seal number at five in the morning by flashlight forty-one times.
Right handed.
Every log, every ticket, every bill of lading in twenty-six years of boxes in the room next door, in the same cramped right-handed print, and Diesel had a photograph in his mind of the man cutting cake at Casey Voyles’s funeral with a knife in his right hand for two hours.
He sat there.
Outside, the creek was up and loud and the sky over the ridge had not started to do anything yet, and it was going to be four hours before it did.
Diesel Harrow set both hands on the desk on either side of the laptop and looked at the frozen frame of a man crossing his gravel, and finally said it out loud, in an empty office, because there was nobody left in the world he had any right to say it to.
“It wasn’t him,” he said.
He said it again, because the first one had come out too small for what it was.
“It wasn’t him.”
And then the whole shape of it came down on him at once, in order, the way a thing does at three in the morning when there is nobody to interrupt.
A man who is stealing from you does not get framed by the people he is stealing for. That was the first piece and he had been too certain to pick it up when Grace practically handed it to him. Renner had no reason on this earth to burn his own way into that yard.
Unless the point of the trailer was never the trailer.
They had come in at two in the morning and taken the one piece of equipment that they knew Copperhead had found, wearing a cut, at a keypad, under a light pole, doing the walk of a fifty-two-year-old man with a rod in his leg.
Not to get the trailer. To make Diesel Harrow look at the man who had signed forty-one bills of lading in his own hand and to make him do it alone, because Aldridge had spent one evening in a gravel lot in February watching him and had understood him completely.
He had understood him better than Cutter. Better than Grace. Better, for eleven days, than she had.
Sixteen men who quit trusting each other. That’s the actual weapon.
Diesel had stood in this same office and said that sentence out loud, correctly, to his own officers, and had then gone out into the yard and executed the play himself, for free, without anybody having to lift a finger.
They had not needed a man inside Copperhead at all.
They had needed the president to be exactly who he had always been.
Diesel Harrow sat in the cold with his hands on a desk and understood it with total clarity and about eleven days too late.
Pike Danner had taken that scrap run to Salem because a man he had trusted for thirty years took his work away in front of sixteen people and would not tell him why. He had driven it alone because nobody was riding with him. Nobody was riding with him because Diesel had put him on the yard.
He did not cry. He was aware of a kind of distant surprise about that.
At four o’clock he closed the laptop and put the card in his shirt pocket and went out and stood in the middle of the lot where he had stood the night Aldridge came, in the open, with nothing behind him.
Then he took his phone out and called Grace Walsh, at four in the morning, on the night Pike Danner died.
She picked up on the second ring, awake.
“I need you and Cutter and Evelyn in your office at seven,” Diesel said, “and I need you to bring a legal pad, because I have been sitting on something for eleven days and every bit of what happened tonight comes back to it.”
There was a pause on the line.
“I’ll make coffee,” Grace said.