Chapter 14 - Counteroffer
Arden swiped the green bar with a shaking thumb and set the phone on the metal table between the massive deed book and Harold Higgins’s typewriter.
"Arden?" Grant’s voice came through the small speaker, tinny, shrill, and breathless. The background was filled with the rhythmic thump of windshield wipers and the hiss of wet tires on an open highway. "Arden, pick up! I know you're there! Don't you dare play games with me right now!"
Arden looked at me. I shook my head, motioning for her to stay quiet.
"Listen to me," Grant yelled, his arrogance fracturing into sheer, unadulterated desperation. "The feds froze Wallace’s operating accounts in Akron an hour ago. Somebody leaked the transfer sheets from Whispering Oaks. The state troopers have a warrant out for Wallace’s arrest, and they’re looking for the Navigator!"
He took a sharp, gasping breath.
"Where is the black binder, Arden? I know you took it from the closet! If you hand that over to your mother or her lawyer, you’re dead! Do you hear me? You signed the incorporation papers! You signed the tax waivers! If I go down, you spend ten years in a federal penitentiary in West Virginia while your precious mother watches your life burn! Bring that binder to the rest stop on I-77 south of Canton. Wallace has an attorney waiting with an offshore trust assignment. If we sign it over tonight, Vance gets his money back and the feds drop the civil attachment!"
I leaned down over the phone.
"Grant," I said, my voice cutting through the speaker like dry sandpaper over wood.
The other end went dead silent, save for the wet hum of the highway.
"Leona?" Grant’s voice dropped, the bluster instantly replaced by venom. "Give the phone to my wife, you miserable old—"
"Your wife is sitting in the Portage County courthouse watching Harold Higgins stamp a criminal cloud-of-title notice against your father's forged lien," I said. "And the binder you left under the dresser is already being photocopied for the United States Attorney’s office in Cleveland."
"You're bluffing," Grant hissed, but the terror was bleeding through his words. "You don't have the jurisdiction. Wallace has friends in the state house—"
"Wallace doesn't have a friend left on earth who isn't wearing a wire," I told him. "And Raymond Vance isn't waiting for your offshore trust assignment, Grant. Raymond Vance was on my porch three hours ago, offering to sell your skin to cover his losses."
A sharp intake of breath hissed through the receiver.
"Here is what is going to happen," I said, leaning closer to the microphone. "You're going to turn that Lincoln Navigator around. You're going to drive it to Whitcomb Auto Repair. You're going to walk into my shop bay, hand over the keys to Arden's car, and sign the quitclaim deed relinquishing every square inch of the house on Meadow Lane that my forty thousand dollars paid for."
"Go to hell!" Grant screamed. "That house is in my name! Wallace owns the mortgage!"
"Wallace owns nothing," I said calmly. "Wallace is about to be an inmate at the Lorain Correctional Institution. And if you aren't standing in my shop office by four o'clock this morning with those signatures, I’m going to personally hand the original 1993 receivership records to the criminal division, along with the proof that you used my credit card to finance Wallace’s escape money."
"You kicked me out of your house, Leona!" Grant shouted, his voice cracking into a shriek. "You treated me like dirt! You acted like you owned everything! You think you can just break my life because of one joke at Thanksgiving?"
"It wasn't a joke, Grant," I said, every word weighted with twenty-seven years of grease, steel, and survival. "You kicked my chair because you thought an old woman who worked with her hands was too weak to hit back. You forgot that people who work with iron know exactly where the stress fractures are."
I tapped the red end-call button.
The sub-basement returned to silence, broken only by the steady, metallic *clack-clack-clack* of Harold Higgins’s typewriter.
Harold pulled the sheet from the roller, applied a heavy red ink stamp to the margin, and pressed the county seal into the corner with a mechanical clamp that groaned under his weight.
"There you go, Leona," Harold said, pushing the crisp document across the table. "Certified curative affidavit of record. Any action Raymond Vance’s syndicate tries to take on Whitcomb Auto Repair is dead in the water until a probate judge holds a hearing on Wallace’s 1994 forgery. That buys you ninety days, at least."
"Ninety days is enough time to rebuild a Peterbilt from the frame up," I said, sliding the certified filing into my coat alongside Thomas’s original records.
I turned to Arden. She was standing by the shelves, her head down, her hands clasped in front of her.
"Come on," I said.
"Where?" she whispered.
May you like
"Back to the shop," I told her. "Raymond Vance’s Lincoln has been sitting at the end of my gravel driveway since we left. It's time to show him what kind of hand I have."
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