What he saw now was not what he remembered from childhood. The equipment shed on the north side of the property had lost most of its roof on one end. The metal sheeting buckled and pulled back, one wall leaning in a way that suggested it was one bad windstorm away from going down completely. The office trailer, a double-wide that his father had used for records, tools, and on more than one occasion apparently as a place to sleep, had a cracked window and a door that didn’t close all the way. Mason could see a coffee maker on the counter inside through the glass, sitting there like it was waiting for someone to come back. The trucks were everywhere. That was the thing about a junkyard that photographs didn’t capture. The sheer weight of it. Not just the number of vehicles, but the physical mass of all that dead metal, arranged in rows that had probably once been organized and had drifted over the years into something closer to chaos. Semi cabs without engines, flatbeds with their frames twisted, box trucks with their rear doors hanging open, vegetation starting to grow up through the floorboards. A school bus, inexplicably, in the back corner, painted over with gray primer and sitting on four flat tires.
There was also, he noticed, a newer section closer to the front near a gravel apron that widened out beside the entrance. Half a dozen vehicles that didn’t look like complete losses, older, beat up, but not stripped. Some with their engines still in them. Mason crouched down next to the nearest one, a mid-90s flatbed heavy duty, the kind of truck that used to run farm freight. He looked under the frame. He reached up and touched the front axle, looked at the brake hardware. “Salvageable,” he said out loud to no one. He stood up, looked around the yard. He could see what his father had been doing in those last couple of years, or trying to do. There was an area near the center of the yard that had been partially cleared, the old wrecks pushed to the edges, the ground graded flat. Someone had started laying gravel. Maybe a quarter of the planned area was done before the project had apparently stopped. A parking area. That’s what it was going to be. His father had been trying to build something. He just hadn’t had time to finish it.
Mason sat on the bumper of the school bus in the back corner and called his accountant. Linda Cho had been doing his taxes for 6 years. She was sharp, she was direct, and she genuinely liked Mason, which was why she didn’t pull any punches. “I’ve been waiting for you to call,” she said when she picked up. “The estate stuff.” “Yeah.” “Walk me through what Gerald told you.” He did. She listened without interrupting, which was unusual for Linda, and when he finished, she was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “First question, what’s your current liquid situation?” “About 11,000 in checking. I’ve got a small retirement account, maybe 43, 44,000, but pulling from that would cost me the penalty plus income tax, so call it 30 grand after the hit.” “And your income?” This was the part he’d been bracing for. “The job at Trail Boss ended last month. The whole logistics division got restructured.” “I know. I’m sorry. That was a solid position.” “Yeah, well.” He looked at the gray sky. “It was.”
“Mason,” Linda’s voice shifted slightly, professional but not cold. “I want to be straight with you. Even if you had 100,000 in cash right now, that wouldn’t be enough to carry this property long enough to build anything on it with the debt clock running. You’re looking at 60 days, maybe 90 if you can stall the bank with a hardship letter and some partial payments.” “I know.” “Selling is the rational move.” “I know that, too.” Another pause. “But you’re not going to sell.” “I haven’t decided anything yet.” She made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh. “Sure, you haven’t. Let me ask you this, then. What do you see out there? Because I know you’re out there. I can hear the wind.” Mason thought about the graded ground, the started gravel, the flatbed with the solid axle. “I see something that was being built,” he said, “before it stopped.” “Okay,” Linda said. “I’ll run some scenarios. Don’t do anything for a week. Let me look at the numbers.” “I appreciate it.” “And Mason, if you find a buyer in the meantime—” “I’ll think about it.” “You won’t,” she said, “but I appreciate you saying that.”
So, the buyer came to him before he even listed it. It was 4 days after the visit to Gerald’s office. Mason was at the yard again. He’d been out every day, walking the property, making notes in a small spiral notebook, cataloging what was there, what could move, what was too far gone. He had the notebook open on the hood of one of the trucks and was sketching a rough layout of the property when a car came through the gate. It was not the kind of car you saw on state roads near Gallup very often. A black Range Rover, clean in the way that suggested it had been washed within the last 24 hours. The kind of clean that required effort to maintain in this part of the country. A woman got out. She was maybe a few years younger than him, early 30s he would have guessed. She was dressed in a way that occupied the specific zone between professional and practical. A dark wool coat over clothes that were probably expensive without advertising it. Boots that were actually boots and not the fashionable kind. Dark hair pulled back. No visible jewelry except a watch that she glanced at exactly once as she got out of the car. She walked toward him without hesitating, which told him she knew who he was and had come specifically for him.