Chapter Twenty-Six · Diesel
Chapter Twenty-Six
DIESEL
He heard the car and knew it was Grace’s and knew it was not Grace driving, because Grace took the last cattle guard at forty and whoever this was had slowed for it.
Diesel put the poker down and did not go to the door.
He had spent five days learning that there was no move he could make toward her that was not, at some level, a decision made on her behalf, and so he had made none, and it was the single hardest piece of discipline of his life and he had failed at it a dozen times a day in his head.
The car door. The steps. And then she was in the doorway with her coat still on and her keys in her fist and her face doing something he could not read at all.
“You need to sit down,” Evelyn said.
“I’ll stand.”
“Diesel. I’m going to say a thing and I don’t know what it’s going to do to you, and I would rather you were in a chair.”
He sat down in the recliner.
She stayed standing. She did not take the coat off.
“The plate on the back of Cecil Ammen’s drawing comes back to a 2013 Ford F-250 registered to an individual,” she said. “His name is Wendell Prine. He is fifty-eight years old, he lives in Buchanan, and he has been the shop manager at Cardinal Cold Chain since it opened.”
Diesel’s hands went still on the arms of the chair.
“In August of 2014,” Evelyn said, “a pallet load shifted on him during unloading and crushed his right leg. Comminuted fracture of the tibia and fibula. Surgical fixation. The Workers’ Compensation Commission awarded him twenty percent permanent partial disability to the right leg and published the opinion, because they publish all of them, and they have since 1918. ”
The stove ticked.
“Say the rest,” Diesel said.
“The winter before all of it, somebody broke into the clubhouse through the back and took the till and a case of liquor.” She had her keys so tight he could see it.
“That’s why you got the alarm. That’s how Blue Ridge Security got in the building.
And nobody ever checked what else was gone, because when you take the till and the liquor, that’s the whole story and everybody stops looking. ”
Diesel Harrow sat in his own chair and heard, very distinctly, a thing come loose in his chest.
“They took a cut,” he said.
“They took a cut.”
“Winter of 2018.”
“Before there was a keypad or a route or a load. Before Cardinal existed as anything but a building.” Her voice cracked on it.
“Diesel, he wore it one time. One time, in two years, on a camera he did not know was there, and he did it to be seen, and he was the only man in four counties they could have sent, because he was the only one with a leg like Pike’s. ”
He was not in the room. He was in a shop with the roll-up down and a nineteen-year-old holding a phone in both hands, and Scout was saying I’ve watched it about forty times, boss, you can’t get him, and Diesel had said nobody sees this, and had put a memory card in his pocket.
“It was never one of mine,” he said.
“It was never one of yours.” Evelyn came two steps into the room.
“Not one night. Not in two years. There is no man at that table who ever opened that gate and there never was, and the entire thing was built in a winter before any of this started by somebody who had already worked out what a closed club in a closed town would do to itself with the idea.”
Diesel put his hand over his eyes.
He did not make any noise about it. He sat in a recliner in a farmhouse on a ridge with his hand over his eyes and his elbow on the arm of the chair, and Evelyn Chase crossed the room and did not touch him and did not say it was all right, and stood there, and let him have it, the way she had in a church parking lot a lifetime ago.
When he took his hand down she was crouched in front of him with her forearms on his knees.
“I want to say the second half before you say anything,” she said. “Because Grace made me promise, and because she was right, and because if I don’t say it now you will build something wrong out of the first half tonight and I will not be able to get it back out of you.”
“Say it.”
“This does not undo it.” Her eyes were level with his. “You had a card with no name on it and you held it eleven days and a man got isolated and died, and that is true tonight and it will be true in ten years, and Grace says you have to carry it and she is right.”
“I know.”
“But you have been carrying it as the wrong thing.” She tightened her hands on his knees.
“For five days you have been sitting up here believing you were a man who was wrong about his friend. You weren’t.
You were hunted. A professional built a trap in 2018 out of the one fact about you that everybody who has ever loved you has known for thirty years, which is that you would rather take a thing on alone than let anybody else touch it.
He did not guess that. He watched you for twenty minutes in a gravel lot and he knew. ”
Diesel Harrow looked at her.
“That ain’t better,” he said. “It’s worse.”
“Yes,” Evelyn said. “It’s worse and it’s true, and you get the true one.”
He got up out of the chair.
She stood up with him and they were about a foot apart and neither of them moved, and then he said, “I ain’t going to reach for you. I’ve had five days to think about it and I ain’t going to.”
“I know.”
“So you’re going to have to say it.”
“That is the most infuriating thing about you.” Evelyn’s chin went up and her eyes were streaming and she was, he saw, laughing, or something in the same family. “I would like it noted that I came up this mountain having decided nothing.”
“It’s noted.”
“And I would like it further noted that I got as far as the cattle guard still having decided nothing.”
“Noted.”
“Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m coming home,” Evelyn said, “and there are terms.”
“Say them.”
“One. You do not get to carry anything alone anymore. Not eleven days, not one day. Not because you’ve earned a rule, but because I cannot do this again and I would rather tell you that in a well-lit room than find out at four in the morning in six months.
” She took a breath. “Two. When you want to decide something for me, you say it out loud instead. You already did that once, on the porch, about the safe house, and it was the best night of my life and you have not done it since.”
“That’s two. What’s three.”
“Three is that I get to be angry about Wednesday night for a while, at unpredictable intervals, and you do not get to be reasonable about it.”
“I can do the first two,” Diesel said.
“And the third?”
“The third one I’ve been looking forward to.”
And then she reached for him.
She got a fistful of his shirt and came up on her toes and he had both hands in her hair before he had entirely agreed to it, and she made a sound against his mouth that undid five days in about four seconds, and her keys hit the floor somewhere behind him.
“Say it,” she said.
“Which one.”
“You know which one.”
“You’re mine,” Diesel said, against her mouth, “and I’m yours, and I have been standing in this house for five days not saying it out loud because I didn’t have the right to.”
“You have the right to.”
“Say it again in about ten seconds.”
“You have the...”
He got her up off the floor.
They did not make it down the hall this time either, and afterward he carried her there anyway, and she said something into his neck about how a pattern was forming, and he said that was correct, and she laughed and it came apart into something else halfway through and he held onto her until it stopped, which was a while.
Later, in the dark, with her hand flat over his heart the way it always ended up, she said, “Tomorrow you have to tell sixteen men.”
“Tomorrow I have to tell sixteen men.”
“And Del.”
“Del first,” Diesel said. “Six in the morning, at that table, and she’s bringing something because she said she would.”
“Do you want me there?”
He turned his head on the pillow.
“That’s a real question,” he said, “and I’m going to give you a real answer instead of the polite one, because that’s the terms.” His hand kept moving on her back.
“Yes. I want you there. Every one of them. And I ain’t going to ask you to be, because you’ve got your own reasons and they ain’t mine. ”
“I’ll be at all three,” Evelyn said.
Del Danner came at six and brought a pound cake in a dish with masking tape on the lid.
Diesel made coffee and told her about Wendell Prine and a crushed leg and a stolen cut, and Evelyn sat at the third chair and did not say one word unless Del looked at her, and Del looked at her twice.
When it was finished Del sat with both hands around her cup for a good while.
“So it was a picture,” she said.
“It was a picture.”
“Somebody made a picture of a man walking, and you looked at it, and you seen Pike.” Del turned the cup. “And they made it for you special.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Del Danner nodded slowly.
“Well,” she said. “That’s a wicked thing.”
“Del, I want to say plain that it don’t change...”
“Don’t.” She put her hand up. “Don’t you dare. I have been mad at you for eleven days and I’ve had a lot of practice at it now and I’m not giving it up because a man in Buchanan’s got a bad leg.” She set the cup down. “You still didn’t tell him. That’s yours. That’s going to be yours a long while.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“All right then.” Del pushed the dish across the table.
“But I’ll tell you what it does change, and then we ain’t doing this again at my table or yours.
Pike come home Wednesday and he said, the boss took me off the road and he told me straight.
And I’ve been laying awake thinking my husband died being lied to by a man he loved. ”
She stopped and got it back.
“And now I know he died being lied to by a man that was being worked,” Del Danner said. “It don’t fix one thing. But I’ve been carrying the first one and I’d rather carry the second one, and you’re going to let me have that, because it’s mine and not yours.”
Diesel put both hands over his face.
Del Danner reached across his kitchen table and patted his arm twice.
“Eat that cake,” she said. “You’ve got thin.”
Sixteen men in the room at seven that night, and this time Diesel Harrow told it inside four minutes, at the head of the table, with Evelyn Chase standing beside him and Grace at the end with the workers’ comp opinion and the registration printout and the deposition exhibit, all of it going hand to hand around that oak while he talked.
He did not editorialize.
When he got to the cut, Dutch Voyles said, out loud, “That was Cletus Ridgeway’s bar and the till had nine dollars in it,” and half the room made a sound because half the room had been at the meeting where they voted to buy the alarm.
When he finished, nobody clapped and nobody cheered and nobody said one word for about four seconds.
Then Scout Carlisle stood up so fast his chair went over backward and said, “Boss, I want to say I never once thought it was Pike,” and burst into tears in front of sixteen men, and Rook Walsh got up and put an arm around his shoulders and did not say anything, and Cinder came around the table and took the boy’s face in both hands and said something to him that nobody else heard.
Diesel stood at the head of his table and let the room have it, and did not try to run it, and understood that this was what he had taken away from them for eleven days.
Teal called at ten the next morning, in the middle of the drive down to the clubhouse, and Diesel put him on the speaker because that was the rule now.
“I need about ninety seconds and none of it is good,” Teal said.
“Go.”
“My supervisor got the resource authorization Friday. It went upstairs in Richmond and came back approved, and I found out about it this morning from a paralegal who assumed I already knew.” Paper moved.
“They’re going to the grand jury. Nineteen carriers, conspiracy and possession with intent, and the presentation starts in twelve days. ”
Diesel looked at the road.
“Number seven,” he said.
“You’re number seven.”
“And Renner.”
“Alton Renner is not named in the presentation in any capacity,” Marcus Teal said, “and I have just been formally advised, in writing, that my continued reliance on outside material of unverified provenance is being reviewed.”
Diesel pulled off onto the shoulder above the church and put it in park.
“Say that last part in English.”
“In English, somebody told my supervisor that I have been meeting with the targets of my own investigation, which is true, and which I have documented every single time, which is also true.” Teal’s voice was very level.
“They will not fire me. They will take the file. It goes to a task force out of Richmond and it gets worked by people who have never driven Wolf Creek Road, and the nineteen names go in the indictment because the nineteen names are already in the presentation binder, and nobody in that building will ever run a lien index.”
Beside him, Evelyn had gone completely still.
“How long have you got,” she said.
“Days. A week if the paperwork is slow, which it usually is.”
“Then we go around them,” Grace said, out of the other phone, because Grace had been conferenced in since the second sentence. “Agent Teal, I’m going to say a name and you’re going to tell me whether I’m about to make everything worse.”
“Say it.”
“Danielle Ford.”
There was a pause long enough that Diesel checked the screen.
“She read my April memo,” Teal said. “She’s thirty-four, she has fourteen months in that office, and if she takes this to her own chief and he says no, her career is a very different shape by Christmas.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“No.” Another pause. “You asked whether it makes it worse. It makes it worse for her and better for the case, and I have been the only person willing to say that sentence out loud for eleven months and I am extremely tired of it.”
Diesel looked out the windshield at the church, and past it at the graveyard, where there was a mound of red clay with no stone on it yet.
“Set the meeting,” he said.