It was eighteen minutes after twelve when Louis pulled his cruiser onto the rut-laden lot that fronted the U-Pick salvage yard. There were four cars parked up against the tall fence, one of them Hattie’s root beer-colored Fairmont. He snapped up his field jacket and leather gloves from the passenger seat and pushed on in through the heavy steel door. Tip Moody looked up from his rollaway chair behind the plywood counter, his thick fingers working a pocket knife at an apple.
“How do, Sheriff,” he called out. A long, snaking red peel wound over his lap and onto the floor. “What brings you here on this fine day?”
“Meeting Hattie.”
“Oh, what kind of trouble has that woman gotten herself into now?”
Louis laid his gloves on the counter and fished his arms through his jacket sleeves. “No trouble,” he said. “Not that I’m aware of, anyway.”
Tip curled his lip so that his missing tooth-hole peeked through. “Hattie!” he hollered. “The police have come for you.” He looked at Louis and gave a little lift of his eyebrow.
Hattie appeared from the back carrying a set of hubcaps like it was a stack of pancakes. “You’re late,” she snapped.
Tip said to her, “What are you up to now, lady?” He gave Louis another eyebrow crook. “You know she’s supplied about ten percent of them totaled cars out there.”
“Ha ha, you sure are a kick in the pants, Tiparillo.” She shook her head at Louis. “And people wonder why I cut you loose.”
She and Louis went out the back door together, to the expanse of the yard where long-forgotten cars lay stacked like cordwood, mashed, flattened roofs, branches of rust spreading over the hulking piles in creeping orange veins. Every car in the place was a story, of course. A fanfare birth off the factory line in some rust belt state. That joyous run over a long stretch of interstate, handled with kid gloves in those first weeks like it was a newborn babe. Maybe there was a family trip to the mountains, or a long haul to the ocean, the noise of hollering children, a precarious pass over a rain-soaked highway. No matter the story in the middle, all of it ending in a horrific tragedy, blood and glass and broken bones. It was something to consider that for each metal carcass in there, a person’s day, or perhaps their entire life, had been ruined in the blink of an eye.
“I already looked it up,” Hattie said. “You were so late I figured I might as well make use of the time.” She led him past the smooth, cracked ground, among makes and models of rigs that spanned decades, some built in factories that didn’t even exist anymore. Along the perimeter of the yard the more usable units sat parked, a vast car lot crowded with its mangled inventories. Crippled vehicles with holes where doors should be, sliced upholstery showing through, fenders ripped from the frames. Mechanical roadkill, all of it being slowly picked clean.
“Bullseye.” Hattie thumped Louis on the arm and pointed to a sedan about a half-dozen cars from the end of the row. It was a burgundy Skylark with the telltale gouge of a tree or telephone pole kiss at its front end. Where the trunk should have been, an empty space stared black up into the sky. There was no evidence of the old lid anywhere nearby; nothing leaning against or lying next to the car. Louis knew that people typically pulled the parts and took them home to do the install in the space and comfort of their own garage. But for the bigger stuff—doors, fenders, trunk lids—it wasn’t unusual to just pull on into the yard and do the work there, pitching the old piece to the side, to be compacted later.
He dug his hands into his pockets. “Looks like whoever it was that swapped it out must have hauled the old one away with him.”
Hattie snorted. She walked from the car and stood in the drive, hands planted on her bony hips like it was a piece of her own car that had up and disappeared. “He could of,” she said with a shrug. “But I doubt it.”
They started at the closest cars, both of them haunching down and leaning one way or the other to try and get a glance underneath. Louis ducking into the narrow spaces between bodies that had been dropped haphazardly in place. There were the piles of twisted metal, only the littlest bit parts still left deep inside them. An engine block from a ’52 Nash, maybe. The steering column of a mid-forties model International—things like that. About five minutes into all of this, Hattie called out.
“Here it is,” she said. She waved Louis a few rows in, back to the skeleton of what had been an old pickup truck. She took hold of the blue tarp that had been draped over the bed and yanked it free, the sweep of a magician in some great reveal.
It was, in fact, exactly what he had wondered about all this time, what he imagined he might see. If what might have happened with the Russian indeed did happen to the poor fellow. In the center of the trunk panel were two or three raised points, like rocks had been thrown from the backside. But not rocks at all. These dents were less specific. They’d been made not with a hard object or concentrated force, one that might create a pinnacle, or a central point. These were softer, divots surrounded by a wider circumference. As if pressed, or pounded with a rubber mallet, rather than a hammer.
He took hold of the lid’s edge and flipped it, setting it down on the outer rim of the truck bed. Squatting down close, he leaned in tight to the gray fabric insulation on the underside, torn and loose, hanging like skin from a rotting fish. It did not take long before he spotted the rust-colored smudges, blotted in and among the linty fabric.
“Damn it to hell,” he said. “I’m gonna have to call for someone to come pick this up.”
“If you say.” Hattie hovered over him, her shadow a slender stripe over the panel. “Should I keep this from Tip?”
“I need you to not say anything to anyone,” Louis said. He stood up and turned to face Hattie. She held her arms folded at her chest, gazing at the trunk as if it was a discovered fossil, an artifact of something she had absolutely no concept of.
“Nobody?” she asked.
“Nobody.”