Eventually it became clear that no one was going to fess up to the crime, so Colby took each of the nine warehouse workers to a glassed-in room for an interview, one at a time. He leaned across and stared into their eyes, nose to nose, pounded the table and kicked over a chair or two for effect. When he interviewed Danny and Tony individually, his antennae shot up, but neither cracked, and Colby just naturally gravitated toward the two black guys because one of them had a record, and, well, they were black. Colby actually didn’t have any tire tread evidence, or any evidence to speak of. His main tool was intimidation, and when that didn’t work, he didn’t have many arrows left in his quiver. The truth was, this level of criminal escapade was pretty much beyond his sleuthing powers. Danny and Tony breathed a sigh of relief as they watched the patrol car turn out onto Fairmount Road and head off to parts unknown. Of course, had Colby and his partner thought to delve into this mystery a little deeper and actually bothered to visit the home of each employee, they eventually would have discovered the saws beneath a tarp behind the Turners’ shed. But lunch beckoned, and that put an impromptu end to the investigation.

That night Danny and Tony unloaded the saws in Chardon. They didn’t get five hundred but rather one hundred and fifty bucks. On the drive back, they started arguing about how stupid it was to risk jail over such a low take. They blamed each other, and then sat in silence until Tony burst out laughing.

“Man, did you see the look on Old Man Tager’s face this morning?”

“Yeah, and that cop thought he was spooking us, but I knew all the time, he didn’t have nothin’,” Danny lied.

And this was pretty much the way things went for the next year on their petty crime spree. Good old Turner luck kept them going until it finally ran out.

CHAPTER 3

There Are No Coincidences

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
—Robert Frost