One
The truck was where I thought it would be, parked in the guy’s yard. A ten-year-old, sixteen-foot Ford box truck, black, no markings, maximum cargo weight of four and a half tons. Contents were six pallets of hardwood flooring stolen from my client, Bill Parsons, a wholesaler and distributor who’d stepped up to fill a need for a major construction company that had run short and was facing a deadline on several blocks’ worth of new homes in a Kingston development.
Parsons was a friend of mine, and he’d reached out for help because the loss of the cargo might put him out of business. It wasn’t insured; he was a hand-to-mouth kind of guy.
The thief was the brother of one of his warehouse employees. The two had arranged to sell the load to a buyer in North Bay, and it was scheduled to leave in the morning.
The house was a two-bedroom bungalow on a five-acre lot on a side road just north of Kingston. I hired a Uber guy to drive me out of town, up to Yarker Road, and got him to let me out at the mouth of a long driveway leading up to a farm. Once he was gone, I walked in the dark for a kilometer back to McConnell Road and down to the guy’s place.
He had a Quonset-type steel building for cows and a workshop or whatever; a fenced-off pasture filled with last year’s bales of hay; and a small tractor parked next to a manure pile. Word was that he was a former construction foreman fired for suspected theft.
He’d parked the truck nose in, so when the motion sensors triggered his yard light, I was able to stay on the dark side while I jimmied the door open. I eased in and began to hotwire it. I heard footsteps and slid back out.
He came around the end of the truck and rushed at me. The door was still open, so I body-checked him inside and slammed the door on him, smashing his legs. He went down but clipped me on the calf with a tire iron I hadn’t seen in his hand. I kicked it away and gave him the next one in the chops.
Game over.
I dragged him clear and fished a ring of keys on a lanyard from his pocket. Easier than trying to hotwire the damned thing.
I opened the back and checked the load. Still there.
Off I went.
© Michael J. McCann 2026