I didn't waste breath answering him. I scooped the pry bar off the ground, pivoted toward the dispatch office, and took the wooden steps in a single stride. The exterior door was solid steel-sheathed ply, but what stopped my hand was a heavy hardened padlock snapped through an exterior sliding hasp. Someone had deliberately locked Arthur Vance into his own office from the outside, turning the tin-roofed structure into a sweltering oven under the midday sun.
Through the wire-reinforced window, Arthur’s hollow eyes tracked my hands. Sweat plastered his thin white hair across his temples. He pointed a shaking, bloodless finger downward toward the rusted aluminum mail slot cut into the base of the door.
"Nathan," Arthur’s voice came through the slit, thin and rasping from screaming into empty acreage against the roar of the highway. "The hasp... pry the lag bolts. The padlock is case-hardened alloy."
I wedged the flat chisel edge of the bar behind the mounting plate. Harlan was already back on his feet ten yards behind me, but he wasn't charging. He was digging his cell phone from his greasy vest pocket, backing toward the shadow of his Ford F-250 parked near the scale-deck. Harlan was a bully with a lever, not a brawler willing to trade broken teeth once his bluff failed. He was calling in whatever cover he had bought.
I set my boots against the frame and threw my entire weight against the steel bar. The dry-rotted Douglas fir jamb shrieked and splintered with a loud crack as four lag bolts tore free from the weathered wood. The door swung open inward on screeching brass hinges.
Suffocating heat rolled out from the dark interior, smelling of old paper, stale motor oil, and copper. The tin roof amplified the scorching sun, radiating heat down into the dead air like a cast-iron broiler. On the wall, the landline cable had been sheared clean through with heavy wire cutters, the gray core dangling limp against the baseboard. Beside the wastebasket lay Arthur's empty prescription bottle for carvedilol, kicked under the lower shelf out of reach.
Arthur slumped against the laminate counter, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the desk to keep his knees from buckling. His work shirt was soaked through with sweat, clinging to his protruding ribs. He looked like an apparition of the man who had hired me six years ago when the state parole board considered me unemployable trash and refused to sign my work release.
"Water," he whispered, his throat catching dryly on the syllable.
I dropped the pry bar on the linoleum, unhooked the aluminum canteen from my belt, and held it to his mouth. He drank in desperate, shuddering swallows, spilling dark droplets down his gray chin before I gently pulled the rim back so he wouldn't choke his lungs.
"He cut the lines yesterday morning," Arthur breathed, sinking back into the swivel desk chair. "Took my truck keys off the hook. Took my heart medication off the bathroom shelf. Told me if I signed the voluntary transfer for the rigs, he’d drive me down to the clinic in Hood River. When I refused, he slammed that exterior hasp, padlocked it, and walked out."
"He told me you died Tuesday night in a Portland hospice," I said, my voice low and tight. "Said the yard was under court receivership."
Arthur let out a ragged, bitter laugh that ended in a dry, hacking cough. He reached onto the desk with his left hand, picked up the yellow carbon document he had pressed against the glass, and thrust it into my fingers. "Look at the header, Nathan. Look at the date."
It was an official Oregon Department of Transportation Commercial Vehicle Title Assignment and Bill of Sale. Stamped across the top in fresh red ink was today’s date, July 16, timed at eleven-fifteen this morning. The document listed three tri-axle Kenworth log trucks, two Caterpillar skidders, and the Peterbilt outside—easily half a million dollars in working iron—all assigned for a token sum of ten thousand dollars to an entity named Boyd Hauling & Salvage LLC.
Beneath the buyer line, Harlan’s bold signature looped across the box in thick black ink. But beneath the seller line, where Arthur Vance’s name was neatly printed, the signature was an absolute forgery—a cramped, shaky imitation that didn't even attempt to replicate Arthur’s sweeping draftsman script. Beside it was a purple notary stamp bearing the name of Sandra Cleary, a mobile notary whose small bail-bond office sat right across from the county courthouse in the valley.
"He brought her out here at noon," Arthur said, his fingers digging into my leather sleeve with surprising strength. "He didn't let her step inside. He kept me locked in the back file closet with a rag wedged in the door crack so she wouldn't hear me kicking the baseboard. Harlan told her I was bedridden in a care home, signed the papers on the hood of her sedan, and handed her two hundred dollars in cash. Then he tossed this yellow copy through the mail slot and said by sundown the flatbeds would haul every wheel off this lot."