Raf's impound lot has a cat named Escrow, and she only sleeps on abandoned cars.
Not towed cars. Abandoned ones. The ones nobody is ever coming back for.
"She's never wrong," Raf told me the first time I drove out. "Watch her."
Escrow was curled on the hood of a white box truck in the back row, between a burned-out sedan and a boat trailer with no boat. Behind her sat five more just like it, with the same ladder racks and the same peeling decal of a cartoon wrench giving a thumbs-up. The dust on the windshields was thick enough to write your name in.
I didn't think about those trucks again for four months.
Raf runs six wreckers and two acres of gravel off an interstate exit. Fender benders, cars dragged out of fire lanes, the occasional pickup fished out of a drainage ditch at 3 a.m. It's good money with ugly hours. What she wanted was the big stuff: jackknifed semis and rollovers, the calls that pay $8,000 to $14,000 a pop.
In March the county opened the heavy-tow rotation for forty miles of interstate. There was one rule: a 50-ton rotator parked on your lot by inspection, Friday at 9 a.m. Miss it and the outfit across the river gets that stretch for three years.
She found a used rotator two states away. The equipment lender would carry the rest if she put $70,000 down by Thursday.
So I went to Hollis.
Hollis was a rep at a funder I'd sent a dozen files to. Fast, loud, ended every call with "we're printing money, brother." He approved her Monday. $70,000 at a 1.36, $95,200 back, $580 a business day. I'd make $5,600 and sleep fine, because her deposits ran over $90,000 a month and this was a truck that made money, not a patch on a hole.
Wednesday, 4:40 p.m., my phone lit up.
"Bad news, brother. Underwriting flagged towing. Restricted industry. It's a 1.49 now, and we're holding back nine grand as a reserve."
I did the math out loud so he'd have to hear it. "That's $104,300 back. And she nets sixty-one. She needs seventy. You know she needs seventy."
"Then she finds nine somewhere."
"By tomorrow?"
"Not my clock."
I called four other funders. Two were closed and one wanted seventy-two hours. The fourth laughed at the word "tow" and hung up.
I called Hollis back and put Raf on with us. She listened to the whole thing with her engine idling in the background, and when he finished she said, very calmly, "So I lose the interstate for nine grand."
"Look, sweetheart, I've been burned on this exact type," Hollis said. "Last year we funded a mobile mechanic outfit. Six trucks. Guy took our money and vanished. Trucks and all. We've been hunting for them for a year. Anything with a wrench on it, I price for the guy who runs."
Raf didn't say anything.
I heard her truck door open, then gravel crunching on a long walk, then a different sound entirely: a low, lazy meow.
"Hollis," she said. "What did those trucks look like?"
"White box trucks. Ladder racks. Stupid cartoon wrench on the side, giving a thumbs-up."
"Read me a VIN."
There was a pause long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped. Then papers moving, and Hollis reading seventeen characters, slowly, like a man who already knew.
Raf read them back to him. Every one matched.
"Police tow off the shoulder last April," she said. "All six. Nobody claimed them. Storage is sixty-five dollars a day, per truck. That's $70,200, give or take a Tuesday. The crusher comes Monday."
Nobody on that call breathed for a while.
"What do you want," Hollis finally said. Not a question.
"The 1.36. No reserve. Wire by noon."
"And my trucks?"
"Your trucks cost $70,200. I take checks."
The wire hit her account at 10:07 the next morning. $70,000 even. At 10:15 her bookkeeper emailed Hollis an invoice for storage, with photos. At 2 p.m. a flatbed showed up and started hauling the box trucks out of the back row, one at a time, the cartoon wrenches giving their last thumbs-up to the gravel.
Friday at 8:51 a.m., the rotator rolled onto her lot, yellow and enormous and nine minutes early. The inspector walked around it twice and signed.
Hollis never called me again. Fair enough.
When the last box truck pulled out, Escrow jumped off its hood, stretched, and strolled across the lot in the sun. She hopped up onto the warm hood of my car, turned around twice, and lay down.