I Told the Mob Boss I Would Not Be Bought, So He Offered to Be Sold novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Rail

In her barn office she makes Anson put his paddle number on the rail, writes three terms on the back of a lot card, and he agrees to all of them without a word of argument.

The office is a plain room at the front of the barn with a woodstove and a wall of sale bills going back to 1961.

I turned on one lamp and left the overhead off.

Anson Gaillard stood in the doorway and looked at the room the way I look at a lot before it goes on the block.

Then he took the chair on the far side of my father's desk.

His two men stayed outside by the sedan.

"Sit," I said, and then, "You already did."

"I'm told you set the terms in this room."

"You were told right."

I opened the drawer and took out a stack of lot cards, the three-by-five kind with a number printed on the front and a blank back.

I put one in front of him.

"Paddle number," I said.

He looked at the card.

"Put it on the rail, Mr. Gaillard. That's a bidder number and a name. Nobody bids in my barn without one."

For a moment I thought he would walk out.

Then he took a plain black pen from his breast pocket and wrote 1 on the card, and under it, in a small square hand, his name.

I took the card and set it on the brass rail my grandfather screwed to the desk to hold the day's paper.

"Now," I said. "You said name it."

"I did," he said.

"You said the engagement ended, the note cleared and the house free and clear."

"I did."

I shook my head.

"The engagement's ended already. I did that myself, and you didn't pay for it."

A muscle moved in his cheek, the first thing his face had done all night.

"Fine," he said. "The note."

"Eighty-one thousand dollars, owed to a bank that's going to call it Monday, which you told me in the parking lot and I already knew."

I turned a second card over and clicked my own pen.

"Term one. The note is cleared in writing, to Marchant and Daughter, with no strings on the barn and no name on the paper but mine."

"Yes."

He said it so fast that I stopped writing.

"You didn't ask what the strings would cost," I said.

"No."

"Most men argue the first term."

"I'm not most men," he said.

"No," I said. "Most men blink."

I wrote it down.

"Term two," I said. "Whatever you want from this firm, you tell me what it is before you take it. Out loud, in this room."

"Yes," he said.

I wrote it down.

"Term three. Nothing in my barn gets moved, opened or bought without my signature."

His eyes went to the window and came back.

"Yes."

I looked at him for a while.

In twelve years on the block I have watched hundreds of men raise a paddle.

I know the half-second before a man gives up a number he can't afford.

He had not given me that half-second once.

"You haven't asked what I want for it," I said.

"What do you want for it?"

"I'll tell you when I know what you're really buying."

I pushed the card across the desk.

He picked up his black pen and I picked up mine, and we both reached for the corner of the card at the same moment.

My hand covered his.

It was warm and dry and heavy.

Neither of us moved.

I felt a pulse jump in the side of his thumb under my palm.

It was a very small thing, and it went straight through me.

He did not turn his hand over.

His eyes stayed on mine, level and unreadable, and the lamp ticked, and the stove ticked.

I took my hand back.

"Paddle down, Mr. Gaillard," I said. "You're not the high bidder yet."

For the first time his mouth moved at one corner, no more than a quarter inch, and then went flat again.

He signed the bottom of the card under mine.

I tucked it into the front pocket of my shirt.

"I'd like to see the barn," he said.

"Why?"

"Term two. I'm telling you before I do it."

I laughed before I could stop myself.

"Fine."

I took the flashlight from the desk, and we walked the whole length of the old cattle barn.

We passed the pens my grandfather built, the feed room, the loft ladder, and the auction ring with its tiered benches and the raised oak block where I stand.

He walked slowly with his hands behind him and looked at everything.

He looked at the pen gates, the rafters, the old scale and the framed photograph of my father holding a gavel.

I noticed that he did not look at the tack room at the end of the south wall.

Nobody does.

It has a heavy door and a padlock newer than every other lock in the building.

My father kept the key on his gavel and never told me why.

I had never asked.

At the big door Anson stopped.

"Your father kept this place well."

"My father kept it in debt," I said. "That's different."

He gave me a longer look than any of the others.

I was about to say something sharp when headlights swept across the gravel outside and swung in a long arc over the office window.

A car came up the barn drive and stopped.

It was a long dark Buick that I had known since I was six years old.

The headlights stayed on.

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