The Call About Bay Two

My phone rang before six, and a stranger's voice said the words "your shop's brake job" and "flipped his truck on Route 9" in the same breath.

I sat up so fast the sheet slid off my shoulder. "Is he alive?"

"Vic Delgado, yes. His daughter too. Broken leg, cracked ribs. They're stable." The dispatcher read off the details in a flat, practiced voice. "Your invoice says Voss Auto Care finished a brake-line replacement on his truck Tuesday afternoon."

Mike was already awake beside me, watching my face instead of asking what was wrong. He knew that call meant the shop before I said a word.

I drove to Voss Auto with my coffee untouched in the cup holder. Ryan was already at the front counter when I got there, keys in one hand, phone in the other, talking to someone in a voice too calm for six thirty in the morning.

"They're saying it's ours," I said.

"I heard." He didn't look up from the phone. "I already called the insurance company. Got ahead of it."

"Got ahead of what? Ryan, a man and his kid are in the hospital."

He set the phone down, finally, and looked at me the way you look at someone about to make things worse by asking questions. "The investigator's going to want a statement from whoever worked the ticket. I gave her what I know."

"I didn't work that ticket. I don't even know which bay he was in."

"Bay two." He said it too fast, like he'd practiced it. "You closed it out at the register, Dana. Your name's on the invoice."

Something cold dropped through my chest, worse than any bad month the books had ever shown me. I hadn't touched a wrench that day. I'd been behind the counter running cards and printing receipts, the same as every Tuesday, and somehow that put my name on a truck that ended up folded against a guardrail on Route 9.

"Whose name is supposed to be on it?"

Ryan picked the phone back up. "We'll figure it out when the investigator calls. Don't say anything to anyone else until then."

That was the moment I understood the call before six wasn't the emergency. Ryan already knowing the answers was.