Chapter 2 - THE COST OF DOING RIGHT
I stared at the two dispatch records until my heater had cleared the frost from the windshield.
A manager could misunderstand a delay.
He could even be cruel about it.
But changing a time-stamped record was something else.
I photographed both pages and sent copies to a personal email account before I returned to the shop.
By lunch, my assigned work orders had doubled.
Every job lay in a different county.
Every estimated arrival was almost impossible.
Curtis stood beside the dispatch board, pretending not to notice me.
"Busy day?" I asked.
"We all make sacrifices," he said.
Tasha barely looked up.
I knew she had given me the printouts, and I knew she was terrified of being caught.
On the drive to my first job, I called my mother.
She lived alone in the small brick house where I'd grown up.
She had been postponing a furnace replacement since November.
"How did the promotion interview go?" she asked.
"It got complicated."
"Caleb."
She always knew when I was hiding trouble.
I told her about the family, the tow, and the warning.
There was a long silence.
"Would you stop again?" she asked.
"For those kids? Absolutely."
"Then don't let a dishonest man convince you that you made the wrong choice."
I wanted that to be enough.
It wasn't.
That afternoon, an emergency replacement compressor was missing from my assigned van.
The warehouse clerk insisted it had been loaded.
The inventory system said I had signed for it.
My signature appeared on a tablet screen above a delivery time when I had been forty miles away.
I asked to see the original transaction.
The clerk shook his head.
"Curtis locked it."
At 5:20, Curtis called.
"Customer says you're late again."
"The part assigned to me isn't on the truck."
"Excuses create patterns."
"Someone entered a false signature."
"Careful, Caleb. Accusing coworkers is a serious matter."
He ended the call.
I sat in the van outside the customer's loading bay with a borrowed compressor on my lap and realized he wasn't waiting for me to fail.
He was building the record that would prove I had.
That night, an unfamiliar number appeared on my phone.
"Is this Caleb Mercer?" a woman asked.
"Yes."
"My name is Nora Hale. I'm calling on behalf of Daniel Whitcomb, the man you helped during the storm."
My stomach dropped.
"Is his family okay?"
"They're safe. He'd like to pay you back."
"He doesn't owe me anything urgent."
"He thinks he owes you more than money."
She hesitated.
"Before we arrange a meeting, I need to ask you something."
"What?"
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"Has anyone at North Ridge Mechanical punished you for stopping?"
