They Towed My Truck

The dashboard clock on Eli's borrowed sedan read 8:52 when I finally reached the impound lot, and the counter window didn't open until nine.

My truck sat behind the chain-link, boot-free, plate visible, towed off a public street two blocks from the site for what the paperwork called an expired registration sticker that had six weeks left on it. Renshaw hadn't needed a real reason. He'd needed four hours of my morning gone before the state board's Friday noon filing window closed for good.

"You could still make it," the lot attendant said, sliding my keys across the counter at 9:04, "if you don't hit the bridge traffic."

I called Bridgeway from the parking lot. Marta didn't pick up. I called the union hall next, because Eli's foreman had pulled him off the framing crew that morning for what the dispatcher called "a scheduling review," the kind of phrase that meant nothing and everything at once.

Gus Farrow was waiting by my truck when I got back to the site, arms crossed, his orange hard hat pushed back off his forehead.

"He's not going to stop at your license," Gus said, low, not looking at me directly. "He had your brother's union rep on the phone this morning asking about his attendance record. Three weeks in, and suddenly somebody's building a file on him."

"Why are you telling me this, Gus?"

"Because I've got a crew that trusts me to tell them the truth about what's safe to stand on." He finally looked at me, and whatever had been holding his face steady for twenty years on Renshaw's payroll had started to slip. "Friday's real, Nora. Whatever you've got, you'd better have it before then."

I checked my phone. 11:41 in Columbus, the state board's office two hours further east, the filing window closing at noon their time no matter what the clock behind me said.

Nineteen minutes.