Chapter 80: Ivey
Rufus Ivey had been dead for three years. His son ran the yard now and his name was also Rufus and everybody called him Rue.
He was about fifty, wearing a fleece with a different company's name on it, and he was eating a sandwich at a desk with four computer monitors on it, three of which were off.
I let Theo do the talking for the first two minutes and then I could not stand it, because Theo did not know what to ask.
“Do you keep purchase records from six years ago?” I said.
“Seven years,” Rue said. “State makes us.”
“Not the state. The federal rule.”
He stopped chewing.
“Yeah,” he said. “Federal.”
Salvage yards keep records because of stolen parts. There is a reporting system, and there are audits, and a yard that cannot produce a chain of title on a unit loses its license. That is the only reason any of this was possible. Not justice. Auto theft enforcement.
I gave him the VIN off the insurance letter. Seventeen characters. He typed them with two fingers and got one wrong and I read it back to him. The screen took about nine seconds.
“Got it,” he said. “Bought at auction, twenty-ninth May, four hundred ten dollars.”
“What did you do with it?”
He turned the monitor about fifteen degrees toward us, which cost him nothing and which I still think about.
“Parted the front clip,” he read. “Hood, both fenders, headlamp assemblies, radiator support. Sold the doors. Sold the seats.”
My hands were flat on the counter. I made them stay there.
“Sold the seats,” I said.
“Both fronts and the rear bench. Went to a guy in Ohio.”
“When?”
“Same summer.”
“And the shell?”
He scrolled. “Sold whole. Twelfth of September. Six hundred dollars.”
“To.”
“B. Kessel. Wheeler's Gap.”
I wrote it down. B. Kessel, Wheeler's Gap, twelfth of September, six hundred dollars.
“Do you have an address?”
“Route 3, and then a box number. That's all we take.”
Theo said, “Would the shell still have—” and I put my hand on his forearm, which I had never done before and have not done since.
Because if you ask a man in a salvage yard whether a car still has a computer in it, he starts to think about whether that computer is worth money.
Rue looked at us.
“Still have what,” he said.
“Paperwork,” I said. “Title jacket. Sometimes people leave the registration in the glovebox.”
“Glovebox went with the dash.”
“Then never mind.”
He went back to his sandwich. We were outside in under a minute.
On the way out I bought a four-dollar alternator I did not need, so that we had been customers.
We were forty minutes out of Bellhaven before Theo said anything.
“You lied to him.”
“I didn't answer him.”
“That's the same thing.”
“No,” I said. “It isn't, and it matters that it isn't, because I'm going to be asked one day under oath whether I lied to anybody in this, and the answer has to be no.”
He thought about it.
“Fine,” he said. “But you did it fast.”
“Yes.”
“You do a lot of things fast.”
“I had six years to plan things,” I said. “I just didn't know what I was planning for.”
The seats were gone. I want to be clear about the size of that, because at the time I thought it was the end. The driver's seat is where the seat track sits. The rail, the detents, the height adjuster, the whole assembly.
If somebody wanted to know where the driver's seat had been on the ninth of March, the obvious way is to measure the seat in the car.
The seat was in Ohio. Or a landfill in Ohio. Or on a car in Ohio being driven by a stranger who had adjusted it four hundred times since.
That road is closed permanently and I closed it in my head at sixty-two miles an hour and did not mourn it. Because the seat is not the only record of the seat.
The module is bolted to the floorpan, under the console, on a bracket with two 10-millimeter bolts. It is not a seat part. It is not a body part. Nobody sells it. Nobody wants it.
And on this car, on that model year, one of the things the module writes down is the state of a switch mounted on the seat rail.
Not the seat. The switch's answer about the seat, frozen at the moment the airbags fired.
I said all of that out loud in the truck, plainly, at a normal volume, and Theo listened without interrupting once. At the end he said, “So we need the shell.”
“We need the floor of the shell.”
“In Wheeler's Gap.”
“Route 3, box number, six years ago.”
He looked at the road atlas, which was open on his knees, and found it before I did.
“It's ninety-four miles,” he said. “There's one road in.”