6. Grant
SIX
GRANT
Jessika meets me at the salvage yard the next morning.
This surprises me. I expected to drive out to the ranch. Instead she pulls up in her blue Ford at eight-fifteen with two coffees and gets out in boots and jeans and a brown canvas jacket, her curls loose this morning and her expression already sharp and ready.
Her maple brown skin glistening in the morning sun. I remember that she was always tall and she wore it elegantly.
She hands me a coffee without ceremony.
"I need to see where you work," she says. "Before we go anywhere together. I need to understand who you are now."
I respect the directness of that. So I give her the tour.
Briar Auto and Salvage isn't pretty. It's five acres of working salvage yard, stripped vehicles, useful parts catalogued and accessible, an organized chaos that makes sense to me even when it looks like disaster to everyone else.
The garage has three bays, all functional, the kind of heavy equipment infrastructure that takes years to accumulate.
I bought it two years ago with savings I'd been building since before prison, supplemented by the settlement from a civil suit I rather not think about.
"You own all of this," Jessika says, walking along the parts rows. She's looking at everything, not the judgment I half-expected, just genuine assessment. The attorney's eye for evidence of what a situation actually is versus what it appears to be.
“Two years."
"How many employees?"
"Three. Mack full-time, two part-time guys on weekends."
"Profitable?"
"Enough."
She looks at me. "Enough means you're not getting rich but you're not going under."
"Yeah."
"Who's the NA contact on those flyers in the office window?"
She's already read them. Of course she has.
"Me," I say. "I coordinate the Briar County chapter. Have for a couple years."
A pause. She takes a sip of coffee.
"You sponsor people," she says.
"Two guys right now. Had four before that."
"Why?"
I look at her. "Why what?"
"Why do you do it? You could just, not do it. You've got a business. You're functional. You did your time." She watches me carefully. "Why take on other people's recovery?"
I think about Dave in that church basement six years ago. The way he sat across from me, no pity, no judgment, just that particular quality of patient attention that says I'm not going anywhere.
"Because someone did it for me," I say. "And I didn't die."
She's quiet for a moment.
"Your nephew," she says. "Eli. He came by the ranch last week."
"I know. He told me."
"He helped Nova with one of the horses. She said he was gentle with the animals."
"He's a good kid." I pause. "Making some bad choices. Trying to keep him from making the specific choices I made at his age."
"Does he listen?"
"Sometimes." A corner of my mouth moves. "More than I did."
We walk back toward the parking area. The morning is cold and bright, the particular hard October light that makes everything look very defined, very clean.
"Tell me about the night you testified," I say.
She goes still.
"I testified against you," she says slowly.
"I know. Tell me what you remember."
A long pause. She wraps both hands around her coffee cup.
"I remembered seeing you and Morgan at the Days Inn on Route 7," she says.
"Three nights before the overdose. I was driving past and I saw your truck in the lot and I saw both of you, you were parked out front and it looked like, an exchange.
Something passing between hands." She pauses.
"Morgan told me the next day that you'd given him money for something.
He was vague about what. He seemed—" she closes her eyes briefly, "—elevated. The way he got."
"Uh-huh."
"I connected those two things. I shouldn't have. I know that now. I made an assumption."
"You saw me give Morgan cash. In the parking lot of the Days Inn."
"Yes."
I take a breath. "I gave him cash because he owed two weeks of back rent and his landlord was threatening to put his things outside. Morgan called me at ten o'clock that night and asked if I could bring him three hundred dollars before morning."
She stares at me.
"That's—"
"What you saw." I meet her eyes. "That's what you saw."
"And the elevation, when he?—"
"He'd already relapsed before I got there.
I didn't know. He was high when I arrived and I was angry about it and I gave him the money anyway because I didn't want him on the street.
" I pause. "I should have made him call you that night.
Should have made him tell your father. I thought I was protecting him. I was just enabling."
Jessika looks away. Her jaw is tight.
"We were all enabling," she says quietly. "In our different ways."
Silence.
"Who got him back on heroin?" she says. "After four years clean."
"I have a name. But I need more than a name before I say it out loud to anyone."
She turns to look at me. "Why?"
"Because the man whose name I have has significant relationships in this county. And if I start making accusations without ironclad evidence, I don't just end up in a courtroom. I end up in the ground."
The morning air sits between us.
"It's that serious," she says.
"Morgan found something on county land. Morgan gets back on heroin, helped along, I think, by someone who needed him compromised. And then Morgan disappears." I hold her gaze. "Yes. It's that serious."
She takes a breath. "Then we need to go to his trailer."
"Yes."
"Let's go.”