The first thing I noticed was the empty rectangle of dry pavement where my truck had been sitting all night.
It had rained hard the evening before, one of those flat gray downpours we get in early spring that drums on the porch roof and turns the whole street the color of wet cement. By morning the rain had stopped and everything was soaked, the grass, the driveway, the mailbox post, all of it dark with water. Everything except a single truck-shaped patch of dry concrete right where my Silverado should have been. The rain had fallen around it all night. The truck had shielded that ground. And then, sometime before dawn, the truck was gone and the dry patch was left behind like a chalk outline at a crime scene.
I stood on the porch in my socks with a cup of coffee going cold in my hand and I could not make the picture in front of me mean anything. My name is Terrell. I was thirty-four years old that morning. I had built my whole working life around that truck, and I stood there staring at the place where it used to be like a man who has forgotten how to read.
My first thought was that it had been stolen. That is where your mind goes. You think, somebody came up my driveway in the middle of the night and took my truck, and now I have to call the police and file a report and figure out how I am going to get to the Petersen job by seven. I had a full week ahead of me. I run a small trades operation, framing and finish carpentry mostly, some tile, whatever the season brings, and the truck is not a luxury. The truck is the business. The ladders ride in the bed. The compressor, the miter saw, the good cordless set, the job boxes, all of it lives in that truck. Without the truck I am a man with a tool belt and no way to get it anywhere.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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