Part 3 — Two Trackers
Deputy Ochoa turned over the old tracker and read the name engraved on the back plate. It said Virgil Haney, with a phone number I knew by heart. Mrs. Haney grabbed my arm again, but this time she was smiling through her tears.
Virgil had put the first tracker on that truck himself, in 2018, after somebody stole it from the feed store lot. He bought a small unit, stuck it up behind the bumper and told nobody except me, because he said a truck mechanic ought to know where his customers truck was. I had forgotten.
The battery gave out that spring, which was why the unit had gone quiet. It had never been watching Mrs. Haney. It had been watching over the truck, the way Virgil watched over everything he loved.
The second tracker, the newer one in the sandwich bag, was a different matter. Wendell had put it on the day after the funeral, and the blue ink in the slip of paper matched his handwriting on a church bulletin. He had been following Mrs. Haney in a gray sedan for weeks.
The back of the slip said the next Friday and the name of the church fellowship hall, where Mrs. Haney would be setting out the potluck from noon to two. Wendell planned to slip into her empty house while she was there, search the desk for Virgils life insurance papers and the safe for his coin jar.
One tracker was a husband protecting a truck, and the other was a friend who forgot what the word friend means.
Deputy Ochoa and two other officers waited in the house on Friday morning. Wendell let himself in with a copy of her key at ten forty and was arrested in the hallway with a flashlight and a pair of gloves.
He was charged with burglary, stalking and attempted theft. Wendell pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced him to jail time, with an order to stay away from Mrs. Haney and a fine large enough to cover her new locks.
The coroner, when asked, confirmed what Virgils doctor had always said. His heart had simply stopped in the parking lot. It was nothing more than a good man dying on a spring afternoon.
I fixed the pull in her truck that same week. A bent tie rod, nothing more. I left Virgils old tracker on the bumper, with a fresh battery, and I told Mrs. Haney that now there was one more thing in the world still looking after her.