Chapter Twenty-Eight · Diesel
Chapter Twenty-Eight
DIESEL
Twelve days until the insurance cancellation took effect, nine until the grand jury, and six until Danielle Ford knocked on a door in Buchanan.
Diesel kept the count on a piece of cardboard nailed inside the office door at the yard, in grease pencil, and every morning he crossed a number off, and nobody had asked him to stop.
The yard did what a yard does when there is nothing to haul.
Renata ran the scale for six local loads a week and spent the rest of her hours reconciling twelve years of gate tickets because Grace had asked for them.
Tim Farrow rebuilt a brake system on a truck that was not going anywhere.
Scout tore the shop apart and put it back together and painted the floor.
Dutch Voyles came every single day at seven and sat in the office in a chair by the heater and mostly did not talk, and the day Diesel understood that Dutch was there so the building would not be empty was a bad afternoon.
They put men on Cecil Ammen.
It took a whole church meeting to work out how to do it in a way Grace would sign off on.
What they landed on was this. Two Copperheads with no criminal history, in a personal vehicle, on the public shoulder of a state road within sight of the old man’s driveway, six in the evening until six in the morning, in rotation.
A thermos and a phone. Instructions to call the sheriff about anything at all and to get out of the car for nothing.
Grace wrote the instruction sheet. Every man signed it. She kept the sheet.
Cecil Ammen came out the third night with a plate of biscuits and stood at the driver’s window arguing with Rook Walsh for twenty minutes about whether it was necessary before leaving the biscuits.
He came out every night after that.
“You know what he asked me,” Rook said, at the table on Thursday.
“What.”
“Asked me was we going to be there Saturday, when that lady comes.” Rook looked into his coffee. “I told him we’d be wherever Grace says. And he says, well, I’d feel better.”
“That’s a seventy-six-year-old man saying he’d feel better with a motorcycle club on his road,” Cinder said. “Write that on the wall.”
The other thing that happened that week was that the town started showing up.
It began with Charlene, who came out to the yard on Monday with a foil pan and told Renata it was for whoever, and did not explain herself, and did it again Wednesday.
Then a man Diesel had gone to school with dropped off two cases of oil he said he had no use for.
Then the Ruritan Club called Grace’s office and asked, awkwardly, through two intermediaries, whether there was a fund.
There was not a fund. Grace set one up in four hours.
By Thursday there was nine hundred dollars in it and a hand-lettered coffee can on the counter at Rowe’s with PIKE’S BOY, RADFORD written on masking tape, and Diesel had to go sit in his truck about that one.
He had spent forty-two years in a town that did not talk about things, and it turned out that not talking about things was not the same as not doing them, and he was aware that he had been given the exact same information about his own club twice in two months and had needed both.
Alton Renner called on Thursday afternoon at ten of four.
Diesel was in the office at the yard with Evelyn across the desk from him and a box of gate tickets between them, and the phone rang with a Roanoke number he did not know, and he almost did not pick it up.
“Harrow.”
“Mr. Harrow, my name is Alton Renner.”
Evelyn’s head came up.
Diesel put the phone flat on the desk and hit the speaker and picked a pen up and wrote RENNER 3:52 on the back of a fuel receipt and turned it around so she could see it, and she was already reaching for a legal pad.
“I know who you are,” Diesel said.
“I imagine you do by now.” The voice was warm and unhurried and about sixty-five years old and had the specific flat Roanoke Valley vowels of a man who had never once had to soften them for anybody.
“I want to start by saying that I have not been well served by the people who have been representing my interests in this, and that I have only recently understood the full shape of it, and that I am calling you myself because that seemed the decent thing.”
“You’re recorded.”
“I assumed I would be. I’d have thought less of you otherwise.” A chair sound. “Mr. Harrow, I’d like to buy your company.”
Diesel looked at the ceiling.
“Say that again.”
“Harrow Salvage and Hauling. The yard, the equipment, the scale, the buildings, and the goodwill, which in your case is considerable.” Papers.
“I’m prepared to offer nine hundred thousand dollars, which is between two and three times what a broker would tell you it’s worth in its current posture, and I’ll assume the four equipment notes on top of that, and I will guarantee in writing that every one of your fourteen employees keeps their job at their current wage and their current benefits for a minimum of three years. ”
Evelyn had stopped writing.
“You’ve done your homework,” Diesel said.
“I’ve had a great deal of it done for me and I did not enjoy learning how much.
” A pause that was, Diesel thought later, extremely well made.
“Mr. Harrow, I am aware of what has happened to your business over the last two months. I am aware that an insurance filing was canceled on information that should not have been available to the person who provided it. I am aware that a building burned in Wytheville and that a piece of your equipment was stolen and that a man in your employ died on Bent Mountain, and I want to say to you directly that I have no personal knowledge of any of those events and that if I learn that anyone acting on behalf of my company had knowledge of them, I will take that to the authorities myself.”
Diesel let that sit on the desk between them like a thing on a table.
“That’s a good sentence,” he said.
“It’s a true one.”
“It’s a good one either way.”
Alton Renner laughed. It was a nice laugh.
“Mr. Harrow, may I say the actual thing? I’m sixty-six years old and my father started that company with two tractors, and I have spent forty years building it into something that puts two hundred and ten drivers on the road, and I have a granddaughter who is going to run it.
” His voice did not change at all. “I am not a man who is interested in a war in Botetourt County. I am a man who would like a great deal of noise to stop, and I have found that the reliable way to stop noise is to pay more than it costs.”
“And what happens to the noise.”
“The noise takes nine hundred thousand dollars and a three-year employment guarantee for fourteen people who did not do anything to anybody,” Renner said, “and moves somewhere with a lower cost of living, and lives an entirely pleasant life, and I never think about any of it again. I want to be clear that I mean the offer sincerely and that it is not conditioned on anything. There is no piece of paper you have to sign about a hard drive.”
Evelyn wrote three words on the legal pad and turned it around.
HE’S FRIGHTENED.
“No,” Diesel said.
“Would you like the weekend?”
“I’ve had the weekend. I had it in February.
” He picked the phone up off the desk. “Mr. Renner, I’m going to say one thing and then I’m going to hang up, and I want you to have it in your ear tonight.
Pike Danner drove for me for twenty-six years and he ate breakfast at a diner in Buchanan forty-one times while men in a building across the road put something in his trailer.
He didn’t know. He never knew one thing, not one time, and he wrote the seal number down in his own hand at five in the morning because his daddy taught him to. ”
The line was quiet.
“And you have known, every day, for six years,” Diesel said. “So there ain’t a number. There was never going to be a number.”
“Mr. Harrow.” Alton Renner’s voice did not change one degree. Diesel remembered that more than the words that came next. “I understand you’ve been spending some time up in Daleville.”
Diesel’s hand stopped.
“Say that again.”
“It’s a nice little town,” Renner said. “My wife’s people are from over that way.”
Then he hung up.
Diesel Harrow sat in an office in a salvage yard with a dead phone in his hand and looked across a desk at Evelyn Chase.
“Call Grace,” he said. “And then call Rook and tell him I want four men on that road tonight instead of two, and I want the sheriff’s non-emergency number in every one of their phones, and tell him I said the same rules. Nobody gets out of the car.”
Evelyn was already dialing.
“Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“He said that on a recorded line.”
“He did.”
“He said a completely innocent sentence about a town on a recorded line, ten seconds after you told him there was no number.” Her eyes had gone bright and hard.
“Grace is going to be sick about it, because it isn’t a threat and no jury will ever hear it as one, and it is the single most frightening thing anybody has said in this entire thing. ”
“Yeah,” Diesel said. “That’s the man.”
“He also did something else and I want to say it while it’s fresh.” Evelyn had the legal pad up. “Nine hundred thousand dollars, plus four equipment notes, plus a three-year employment guarantee for fourteen people. Do you know what that is?”
“An insult.”
“It is about one point four million dollars.” She tapped the pad twice.
“And it is not conditioned on the drive. He said so out loud, twice, unprompted, which is a thing a man says when he has been told by a lawyer to say it. Diesel, he offered one point four million dollars for a salvage yard in a hollow with no active authority and he asked for nothing in return.”
Diesel came back and sat on the corner of the desk.
“Say what that means.”
“It means the drive stopped being his problem.” Evelyn’s eyes had gone somewhere else, doing the thing they did. “He is not buying silence anymore. Silence is gone, there are eight binders in six states and a lien in a courthouse. He is buying the yard.”
“Why would a man want a yard he can’t haul out of.”
“Because the yard is where the second set of gate logs are, and the twelve years of tickets Renata is reconciling in that room, and the office that box came out of, and every piece of paper that Harrow Salvage generated for two years that we have not read yet.” She looked up.
“There is something in this building we haven’t found, and until four o’clock this afternoon I did not know that, and now I do, because he just offered me one point four million dollars for it. ”
He got up and went to the door of the office and stood in it looking out at the yard, at Dutch in the chair by the heater and Tim Farrow bleeding a brake line and the four trucks in their row with nothing to carry, and then he turned around.
“I want to say a thing out loud instead of deciding it,” he said.
Evelyn put the phone down against her shoulder.
“Go ahead.”
“I want you at Grace’s Saturday, from Friday night, and not at the ridge.
” He said it and made himself keep saying it.
“Not because of what he said. Because there’s one road up my mountain and one house at the top of it and everybody in this county knows both of them, and because Saturday is the day a federal prosecutor knocks on a door in Buchanan, and I do not know what Renner does Saturday night and neither does anybody else. ”
“That’s an ask.”
“That’s an ask.”
Evelyn Chase looked at him across a desk with a box of gate tickets on it.
“Yes,” she said. “Friday night through Sunday. And I want two things back.”
“Name them.”
“One. You are at Grace’s with me, because whatever you’re worried about at the top of that mountain applies to the man who lives there and I am not doing the version of this where you send me somewhere safe and go sit on a ridge by yourself being noble.”
Diesel opened his mouth.
“That was not a negotiation,” Evelyn said. “That was the first term of your own agreement, read back to you.”
He shut his mouth.
“Two,” she said, and her voice changed. “Come here.”
“Renata’s forty feet away.”
“Renata has been married thirty-one years and has seen considerably worse.” She stood up. “Come here, Diesel.”
He came around the desk.
She got two fistfuls of his shirt and put her forehead against his sternum first, which she had not done before, and stood there breathing for about four seconds before she looked up.
“I’m not frightened,” she said.
“I know it.”
“I want that understood, because you’re going to spend Friday night watching me for it.” Her chin came up. “The man threatened a seventy-six-year-old widower on a recorded line by mentioning where his wife’s people are from, and what I feel is not fear.”
“Say what it is.”
“I want to take his company apart with a pencil,” Evelyn said, “and I want him to be alive for all of it.”
Diesel Harrow got a hand under her jaw and kissed her in the office of a salvage yard with the blinds up and Renata Sowder forty feet away at a scale booth, and he took his time about it, and when he finally stopped Evelyn had to hold onto the edge of the desk.
“That was a lot,” she said.
“That was on purpose.”
“Was it.”
“You’ve spent six weeks being the smartest person in every room you walk into and about eleven days of it being the only one who could stand up.
” He put his thumb along her jaw. “So yeah. That was on purpose, and there’s more of it Friday, and you’re going to be in a house in Fincastle with a lawyer down the hall so I’d get your expectations right. ”
Evelyn laughed, which he had not heard in two weeks.
“Diesel Harrow.”
“Ma’am.”
“Renata is looking directly at us.”
“Renata,” Diesel said, without turning around, “has known since the second week.”
He walked her out to the truck at six with his hand at the small of her back, which he did now, every time, in front of everybody, and had started doing the week after the table and had never once mentioned.
Tim Farrow was closing the bay. Scout was hosing the apron. Dutch Voyles was still in the chair by the heater with his coat on, and he raised two fingers off his knee as they went past, and Evelyn raised two back.
“They all do that now,” she said.
“Do what.”
“The two fingers. Every one of them. It started sometime around the Ammen deposition and nobody told me it was happening.”
Diesel opened her door.
“That ain’t for you being mine,” he said. “I want to be plain about that, because you’d hear it wrong. That’s for the courthouse.”
Evelyn stood in the open door of a truck in a gravel lot and found she could not say anything for a second.
“Get in,” Diesel said, “before I do something about that face in front of Dutch.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He leaned in over her with one hand on the roof and took his time about it, and by the time he straightened up Scout Carlisle had turned the hose on something that did not need hosing and Dutch Voyles was studying the ceiling of a building he had been in for forty-two years.