I stepped out to the open bay, phone in my hand, and the man I had never seen was standing there looking past me at the car. Twenty years flipping impound cars in Camden taught me to keep my voice flat, so I did not let on a thing. I told him I could not release any vehicle without a title and ID, and asked him to wait right there while I checked the paperwork.
Then I dialed, in plain sight, and it was not a bluff. It was the police, and I said it loud so he could hear: I had found something wedged in a trunk well that did not belong, on a car that came off their own auction, and there was a fella here claiming it.
The man went stiff. He did not run. And when the first cruiser rolled up inside ten minutes, the whole thing came apart the way these things do in the daylight.
What I had found pressed into the bottom of that trunk well was a locked steel cash box, and the man claiming the car was not a killer. He was a bail bondsman, and the car had belonged to a client who skipped. Inside that box was the collateral, cash and papers, that the client had hidden before he ran.
The bondsman had been tracking that car through the auction records for weeks, not to hurt anybody, but because that box was his to recover and the county had auctioned the car off before anyone thought to check the trunk.
The police opened the box right there on my workbench. Cash, a stack of documents, and, tucked underneath, the thing that made the whole strange day worth it: a folder of paperwork that helped the county close out a case that had been sitting open for half a year.
The bondsman had every right to what was his, once it was logged and cleared. But the cash inside was not all his. A good portion of it, the papers showed, belonged to an elderly couple the skipped client had swindled before he ran.
Because I ran it through the police instead of just handing the box over, that couple got their money back. A detective told me later they had near given up hope of ever seeing a dime of it.
I never did resell that car fast. But I slept easy. Twenty years buying blind out of impound, and that is the one time the trunk paid off for somebody who needed it.