Part 3 — The Twin Truck
Shelby held out her phone to the deputy, and he zoomed in on the windshield of the truck she had photographed. Behind the glass, in the driver seat, sat a heavyset man in a ball cap, with a camera in his lap. Deputy Reyes said nothing for a moment. Then he told me, very calmly, that he had seen that face before, on a bulletin from Utah.
The truck in my yard had been a wreck, but its VIN was a good one. That was why somebody wanted it so badly. Reyes explained over the next hour. A ring of thieves had been stealing late-model pickups across five states, then cloning the identity of a wrecked truck, swapping its VIN tags onto a stolen one, and selling the stolen truck as clean. They needed wrecks to copy. Mine had been bought by a middleman.
The box in the spare-tire well was their toolkit and their cache. The license plates came from trucks they had already stolen and retagged. The VIN tags in the zip bag were the paperwork. The flip phone was how the ring talked to the man who tied the whole thing together, a salvage-yard buyer named Gale Prewitt, who had sold me the wreck without knowing I would take it apart.
The text that said Where is it was from the ring boss, asking his courier to find the box. The man in the truck across from Shelbys apartment had been told that I had her address and might hand it over. He was not there to hurt her. He was there because he was sloppy and scared, and thought she might lead him to me.
It took one wrecked truck, one nosy photograph and one stubborn old driver to unravel a ring that had fooled five states.
Reyes set a trap. He asked me to reply to the text from the flip phone, in my own words. I typed, with two fingers, I have it. Meet me at the yard Friday at noon. At noon on Friday, an unmarked car sat behind the salvage lot, and a truck matching the picture rolled up slowly, with a man in a ball cap behind the wheel.
He was arrested without a struggle, and two more men were picked up within the hour at a motel in Evanston, along with the stolen twin of my wreck. The Wyoming Highway Patrol, working with the National Insurance Crime Bureau, tied the ring to over forty thefts in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho and Montana. Prewitt was charged with receiving stolen property and conspiracy.
The owners of the stolen trucks, many of them ranchers and tradesmen, got their vehicles back or were paid in full by the insurers. The total value was close to two million dollars. A rancher near Kemmerer wrote me a letter about his mothers old pickup, and I read it aloud at the kitchen table. Shelby wiped her eyes without looking at me.
The reward came to eight thousand dollars, which I did not ask for. The sheriff told me to keep it, and the insurer insisted. I paid for a brand new rear end, and a full tank of gas, and I took Shelby and her boyfriend out to supper in Green River. She told the waitress, with a very straight face, that her father was a famous detective.
My old half-ton runs quiet now. The howling is gone, and the replacement axle came out of a junkyard in Casper, from a truck with a clean title and a clean history. I checked the VIN myself. On Sunday mornings, I drive it slowly down I-80, past the exit where I used to haul freight, and I honk once at the mile marker, just for luck.
