Part 3 — Wendells Second Tracker
Deputy Ochoa read the last line aloud. The place where Mrs. Haney would be the next Friday, when her house sat empty, was the First Southern bank on Main Street. The handwriting was Wendells. The plan was to empty her home while she stood in line to deposit a check.
He had worked it out carefully. Wendell Pruitt, Virgils fishing buddy from church, had put the second tracker on the very day of the funeral. Every morning from his own phone he saw where the truck went, and every Friday he picked a window to move through the house.
The first tracker was another story. When the deputy checked its serial number against a purchase record, it came back to Virgil himself. He had installed it in 2018 when the truck was stolen from a church lot and recovered a month later. The battery had died that spring, as the deputy had said.
That detail eased Mrs. Haney more than anything. She had feared that her husband was being watched by someone for years before he died. Instead the old tracker was the memory of a man who looked after his truck the way he looked after her, and Wendell had simply never known it was there.
Deputy Ochoa did not need much. The next Friday, Mrs. Haney drove to the bank at two oclock, as the slip said, in the old truck with its pull to the left. Two unmarked cars waited at the other end of her street. Wendell parked behind the house and let himself in with a key he had copied from Virgils ring.
He walked into the kitchen and found Deputy Ochoa sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. Wendell said only, I was bringing her casserole dish. The deputy pointed to the pillowcase in his other hand, the one holding Virgils coin jar and his wifes jewelry.
He was arrested for burglary, stalking by electronic device, attempted exploitation of an elderly person, and tampering with a vehicle. The life insurance questions, it turned out, had been fishing for a policy number. Two small boxes on a truck frame told two stories, one of a man who watched out for his wife and one of a man who watched for his chance.
I made no charge for the repair. The pull to the left was a bent tie rod that I straightened and aligned in an hour. I tightened the lugs, rotated the tires, and checked the frame bolts for any other surprises. I found nothing but forty years of honest rust.
Mrs. Haney drove the truck out of my shop under her own power, her hands steady on the wheel, and she did not look in the mirror once. She stopped at the door and told me the gray car had not been behind her since.
She keeps the old tracker in a dish by her kitchen window. Virgil, she says, always liked knowing where things were. On Sunday evenings she drives out to the feed store lot where he passed, sits a while, and comes home by the long road.
