Chapter Thirty · Diesel
Chapter Thirty
DIESEL
Thirty-six hours turned out to be forty-one, and they did not get to the end of them.
Sunday was quiet in a way that Diesel did not trust from about ten in the morning.
He went to church with Grace because Grace made him, and sat in a pew he had not sat in since his mother’s funeral, and shook twenty hands afterward and heard three people ask how Del was doing, and drove back to Fincastle and did not eat lunch.
At four he called the yard.
Renata picked up on the second ring, which she should not have been there to do.
“You’re supposed to be at your daughter’s.”
“I got two boxes left and I ain’t sleeping anyhow.” Paper moved. “Mr. Harrow, there’s a car been up on the county road three times today.”
Diesel put his coffee down.
“Describe it.”
“White or silver, four-door, nothing on it. Come by at nine, and about noon, and about twenty minutes ago.” Renata’s voice was steady in the way of a woman who has decided to be. “It don’t slow down at the gate. It slows down about forty foot past it, where you can see into the lot from the road.”
“Renata, I want you to do four things in order.”
“Go ahead.”
“Turn off the office light. Go out the back, get in your car, and go to your daughter’s in Troutville. Call the sheriff’s non-emergency from the road, not from the yard, and tell them what you told me. And call me when you’re in her driveway.”
“What about the boxes.”
“Renata.”
“I’m going.” A drawer. “But I’m taking the two boxes.”
She called from her daughter’s driveway at four thirty-one.
Church ran at six on a Sunday for the first time in the history of the Copperhead Motorcycle Club, and Grace Walsh stood at the end of the oak table with a legal pad and ran most of it, which was also a first.
“I want to be extremely precise about the next twelve hours,” she said, “because there is a version of tonight that ends with a federal case and a version that ends with this club being the story, and the difference between them is going to be decided by a series of very small choices made by tired men in the dark.”
Sixteen men, plus Evelyn, plus Renata’s two boxes on the pool table.
“Here is what we know,” Grace said. “Alton Renner offered one point four million dollars on Thursday for a building. He was refused Thursday at four. On Saturday a federal prosecutor spent four hours in Wendell Prine’s kitchen.
Prine does not show up for work at seven o’clock tomorrow morning, and the moment he does not, every person in that organization knows exactly what has happened. ”
“So they’ve got tonight,” Cutter said.
“They have tonight. And what is in that office is twelve years of scale tickets that put Wendell Prine’s name and a trailer number on a certified instrument eleven times, which is the only physical corroboration of his notebook that exists anywhere on earth.”
Cinder said, “Then we ought to move ’em.”
“We already did.” Grace put her hand on the two boxes. “These are the eleven tickets and the surrounding months, and they go into my office safe tonight and to Ms. Ford’s hand tomorrow morning, and Renata Sowder has already made two photocopy sets and mailed one of them from Troutville.”
“Then let ’em have the building,” Dutch said. “It’s paper.”
“That is the question,” Grace said, “and it is Diesel’s to answer, and I’ve told him I’d put it to the room.”
Diesel stood up.
“Here’s the answer and then I want it argued,” he said. “We don’t let ’em have it, and we don’t fight ’em for it. We’re going to stand in that lot and watch ’em, in the open, with the lights on.”
The room made a sound.
“Say it plain, boss,” Rook said.
“Plain.” Diesel put his knuckles on the oak.
“Everybody in this club that ain’t got a felony, and that’s eleven of us, is going to be standing in that gravel from ten tonight until the sun comes up.
Lights on. Phones up and recording, every one of us, from the second a vehicle turns in.
Grace on the speaker in my truck. The sheriff’s non-emergency called at nine forty-five to advise that we have had trespassers three times today and that we will be on our own property overnight, so there is a log entry with a time on it before anything happens. ”
“And when they come through that gate?”
“Nobody moves toward ’em. Nobody says one word except me. Nobody has a thing in his hand but a telephone.” He looked around the table. “They can walk into that office and take every box in it and we will stand in the lot and film ’em do it, and Grace says that’s better for us than stopping ’em.”
“It is substantially better,” Grace said. “Video of four men removing property from a business at two in the morning nine days before a grand jury is worth more to Danielle Ford than the boxes are.”
Cinder Sullivan stood up.
Diesel braced for it.
“I’m for it,” Cinder said.
Somebody laughed out of pure surprise.
“Don’t.” Cinder was not smiling. “I want to say why, because about four weeks ago I stood in a church lot and asked this man to burn a building, and he said no, and I want the record to show what changed my mind and it ain’t Pike.
” He put his hands on the back of a chair.
“It’s that we been fighting a man for two months who has never once had to be in the room.
Everything he’s done, he’s done through somebody else, on paper, in the dark, and he has been able to do it because nobody could ever see it happen. ”
“Go on,” Diesel said.
“So tonight we make it happen where it can be seen.” Cinder’s jaw was tight. “Ain’t nobody ever filmed him. Not once in six years. Let’s be the first.”
Dutch Voyles said, “That’s the best thing you ever said, son.”
“I know it,” Cinder said, and sat down.
They voted at six forty. Sixteen yes.
“Last item and then we go,” Grace said. “Every man who is going to be in that lot signs this before he leaves this room.”
She held up a single sheet.
“It’s four lines. It says you understand you are on private property for the purpose of observing and recording, that you will not approach any person or vehicle, that you will not carry a weapon, and that you will comply immediately with any instruction from a law enforcement officer.
” Grace put it on the pool table with a pen on top of it.
“I am going to keep these. If this goes to a courtroom, I want a piece of paper with sixteen signatures on it dated before anything happened, because I have been doing this for nine years and I know what a prosecutor does with a motorcycle club standing in a yard at two in the morning.”
Dutch Voyles was first to the table.
Then Diesel said, “One more thing, and this one ain’t a vote.”
He turned and looked at Evelyn Chase, who had been standing against the wall with a legal pad for forty minutes and who already knew, and who had her chin up.
“I’d like you at Grace’s tonight,” Diesel said, “and I’m asking, and I’m going to say the whole reason out loud in front of everybody so you can weigh it instead of taking my word for it.”
“Go ahead.”
“You are the only person in this county who can read what’s in them boxes and say what it means, and Ms. Ford needs you in a room at eight in the morning, not in a gravel lot at two.
” He kept going before she could. “And there’s a second reason and it’s the honest one.
If you’re in that lot I’m going to be looking at you instead of at them, and eleven men are going to be looking at me, and that is a worse plan for everybody in it. ”
Not a man in the room said anything.
Evelyn Chase looked at him for a moment, and then she looked around at sixteen men, and Diesel watched her decide to say it out loud too, which he had not expected and which he was going to think about for a long time.
“That’s a good ask and I’m going to say yes to it,” she said. “And I want everybody in this room to know that nearly seven weeks ago he would not have asked. He’d have put me in a truck.”
“That’s true,” said Grace.
“He’d have put you in a truck,” said Cutter.
“All right,” Diesel said. “That’s enough of that.”
They were in the lot by nine forty and Diesel called the sheriff’s office at nine forty-four and gave his name and his address and reported three suspicious passes by an unmarked white sedan and advised that the owners of the business would be on the premises overnight.
The dispatcher gave him a call reference number. He wrote it on the back of his hand.
Then they stood in a gravel lot with the fuel island light on and the shop bay open and every overhead in the yard burning, and waited.
It was thirty-one degrees. Somebody brought a burn barrel. Scout brought four thermoses and a folding chair for Dutch, who was not supposed to be there and who had simply arrived, and who sat by the barrel with a phone in his hand that his great-granddaughter had taught him to record with.
It was a strange four hours and Diesel would carry them a long time.
For four hours, nobody said Renner’s name.
They stood around a burn barrel in a yard with nothing to haul, and Scout told a story about a transmission, and Cutter corrected two details of it, and Dutch Voyles told the one about the 1979 run to Bristol that everybody had heard forty times and that got funnier every year, and at some point Cinder Sullivan sang about four words of something and got shouted down.
Somewhere around eleven Rook said, out of nothing, “Pike’d have brought the little heater.”
“He’d have brought the little heater,” Cutter agreed.
“And that stool.”
“And he’d have set on it right there,” Dutch said, pointing with his chin at a spot on the gravel, “and not said nothing all night, and about four in the morning he’d have said one thing and it’d have been the funniest thing anybody said.”
Nobody added to that. Nobody had to.
Diesel stood at the edge of the light and understood that this was a wake, the second one, the one that does not have a church attached to it, and that it was happening because those men had a reason to be standing in the cold together and had needed one for three weeks.
At midnight the sheriff’s cruiser came down the road, slowed at the gate, and the deputy raised two fingers off the wheel and drove on.
At one twenty, nothing.
At two oh six, Rook Walsh said, “Boss.”
Two sets of headlights came down the grade with their brights off.
Diesel Harrow stood in the middle of his own lot with his phone up in his left hand and his whole club spread out behind him in the open, all of them lit, all of them recording, and watched a black F-250 and a white sedan come through his gate at four miles an hour.
The sedan stopped forty feet out. The truck went past it and stopped closer.
The passenger door of the sedan opened, and a man got out in a grey wool overcoat with the collar down, and he was not wearing gloves.
Diesel had thought about this exact forty feet of gravel for two months.
He had thought about it standing in it in February with a man’s card in his back pocket, and lying awake on a ridge, and on a bank above a creek on Bent Mountain, and every version of it in his head had ended with him walking across it.
He did not walk across it.
“That’s far enough,” Diesel said, and did not move, and every man behind him held too, and that was the entire discipline of the thing and he could feel every one of them holding it.
“Mr. Harrow,” Aldridge said.
“You’re on video,” Diesel said. “All of you, from four angles, and the sheriff’s got a call reference from four hours ago, and my lawyer’s on an open line in that truck. I’m telling you that first because I want it to be a choice.”
Aldridge stood in the light and looked at a line of men holding up telephones.
And then he did something Diesel had not planned for at all.
He laughed.
“Oh, that’s good,” Aldridge said, and he sounded almost delighted. “That is genuinely good. Mr. Harrow, do you know how long I have been doing this? Nobody films. In eleven years, nobody has ever filmed.”
“Then get in your car.”
“I’d like to. I want you to understand that I would very much like to.
” Aldridge put his bare hands in his coat pockets, and something in his face changed, and he had stopped looking like a man who was enjoying himself, which he had not stopped since February.
“But there’s a fella in that truck behind me who came down from Hagerstown Friday, and he does not work for the same people I work for, and he has not been told about the telephones. ”
Diesel did not take his eyes off him.
“Rook,” he said. “Left, wide, and stop.”
“Boss.”
“Everybody else stands exactly where they are and keeps the phone up.” He raised his voice enough to carry to the truck.
“You in the F-250. There are eleven cameras on you and a call reference number with the Botetourt County Sheriff from four hours ago, and every man in this lot has both hands where you can see them, and that is going to stay true for as long as you’re on this property. ”
Nothing moved in the truck.
“Mr. Aldridge,” Diesel said. “Do you want to go get him?”
“I would, and I’m not going to, and I’d ask you to think about what that tells you.
” Aldridge had not taken his hands out of his pockets and had not moved one step forward.
“Mr. Harrow, I want to say something to you on your own recording and I would like it preserved, and I am fully aware of what I am doing.”
“Say it.”
“I have worked for that organization for eleven years and I have never once been afraid of it.” The pleasantness was entirely gone now.
“On Thursday afternoon my employer made you an extremely generous and entirely lawful offer and you refused it, and on Friday morning somebody who is not my employer brought a man down from Maryland, and I was not consulted, and I have spent two days trying to find out who asked for him.”
Behind Diesel, very quietly, Cutter Reeves said, “Boss, that ain’t a bluff.”
“No,” Diesel said. “It ain’t.”
And then the driver’s door of the F-250 opened.