The Man Stalking Me Said Stop Working Alone, and the Kind Vet Was the One Who Let My Tire Down novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Plate

Matt's POV

The woman in the booth called the sheriff on me at ten to three, and I watched her do it.

I sat in the sedan with the engine off and the monitor's blue glow showing through the garage's back window.

She sat at her desk with her phone to her ear, her braid over one shoulder.

I could not hear her.

I did not need to.

I had given her my plate by standing still.

I had known she would call somebody, and I had stood there anyway.

Eleven weeks ago a county payroll list had come across Pavel's desk, because Ravnik Salt supplies the garage's storage barn and the county pays us by the load.

Pavel reads every name.

Across the lot, she set the phone down and pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes.

He had said, "Kallio," in a voice I had not heard from him in years.

I had said, "Eveleth?" and he had nodded.

I knew the name from a file in my own warehouse, a binder shelved in a back bay with the old county salt contracts.

I had never opened it.

She picked the phone up again, and I watched her mouth shape a word I could not hear.

Pavel opened it that night, and found a signature on the last page that matched.

Aarne Kallio, county inspector, dead three years.

He and his wife had gone off Highway 169 on the first black ice of a November, and the road had never been salted.

The county had called it weather.

I had read the date twice and said nothing, and Pavel had watched me say nothing.

"The daughter's on payroll," he had said.

"Dispatch.

"Overnight."

I had put my pen down.

"Which garage?"

"The one on the west side," he said.

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