“Yes, sir?” he barked without looking up.

“I wanted to have a look around the yard.” A woman’s voice echoed softly.

“Oh, pardon me, ma’am.” The man looked up and smiled momentarily, then went back to his form, writing as he talked. “Scrap is fifty cents a pound. It might be more if you find a specific part, but we can see when you come back in. Just go have a look around; you have to bring your own tools, but we can help you load it up when you’re ready to leave.”

“I’m looking for something specific.” The woman peered down at him, observing his name tag. “Bob,” she added belatedly.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you.” He set his pencil down, then reclined and crossed his arms behind his head. “It’s a dump.” He laughed. “We try to at least separate the junk cars from the tin cans, but what you see is what you get.”

“Bob, you received several truckloads of scrap metal on this date, and from this location.” The woman set a piece of paper down on top of the form Bob had been working on. Bob picked it up and adjusted his reading glasses, then looked up at her over them.

“Well, as I said; it’s a dump,” he said slowly, growing more concerned as the moments passed. “I might be able to point you in the right direction; I mean, we don’t catalog the stuff.”

The woman walked around the side of the desk, stepping up beside Bob’s chair, and he straightened nervously in his seat. “I hear you boys had some trouble here last night,” she said casually.

“No trouble.” Bob furrowed his brow. “Some kids snuck in; it happens.”

“That’s not what I heard.” The woman studied a picture on the wall. “Your daughters?” She asked lightly.

“Yes, two and five.”

“They are beautiful.” She paused. “Do you treat them well?” Bob was taken aback.

“Of course, I do,” he said, trying to hide his indignation. There was a long pause; the woman tilted her head, still looking at the picture.

“I heard you called the police because you thought someone was trapped in the scrap heaps out there,” she said. Bob didn’t answer. “I heard”—the woman continued, leaning in closer to the picture—“that you thought you heard screaming, and sounds of distress and panic. Something was trapped; a child was trapped, you thought. Maybe several.”

“Look, we run a clean business and we have a good reputation.”

“I’m not disputing your reputation. Quite the opposite. I think what you did was honorable, running to the rescue in the middle of the night, cutting your legs on jagged scraps of metal as you ran blindly through the yard.”