Claim Jumper

The rain had followed Hugh Oakley the whole way up the mountain road. Two hours of it. His rental Peugeot's wipers were worn out and the last switchback had nearly put him in a ditch.

He was thirty-four, an adjuster for one of the big auto insurers, and he had driven three hours to value a salvage yard nobody else wanted to touch. This was supposed to prove his method worked. Instead it had proven the booking agency couldn't count.

The cabin sat at the end of a gravel track. Converted hunting lodge, stone walls thick as his forearm, one light burning in the window. There was a second car already parked under the lean-to. A mud-caked Peugeot Partner with KLINE'S SALVAGE AND PARTS stenciled on the side.

"No," Hugh said, to nobody.

He went in anyway. Because his name was on the booking, and because turning around meant driving back down that road in the dark.

Inside, Justine Kline was standing at the woodstove in a flannel shirt and work boots, feeding it a log. Thirty-two, owner-operator, and the single most irritating person he'd met in eight years of adjusting. She looked up. Her face did something complicated.

"You have got to be kidding me."

"Believe me, the feeling is mutual."

"Oakley." She said his name like it tasted bad. "They sent you."

"They sent both of us. There's a glitch. I called the agency from the last village. Nothing else available for forty kilometers. They're crediting me the weekend."

"Well they're not crediting me, because I have a yard to run and a partner to buy out, and I don't have time to drive back down that hill in the dark. So you leave."

"Why would I leave? I booked first."

"Prove it."

He pulled up the confirmation email. She leaned in to look, which meant she was close enough that he could smell woodsmoke and diesel on her, and she made a disgusted noise at the timestamp.

"Ten minutes before mine. Of course. You'd fight a nun over a parking spot."

"I'd win, too. I take tonight, you take tomorrow, or we figure something else out."

"Or," she said, "neither of us is stupid enough to drive that road again tonight, and one of us takes the floor."

"You have a bag on the bed."

"It was here first. Possession is nine-tenths."

"That's not how possession works and you know it. You run a salvage yard. Half your inventory is somebody else's property."

"It's abandoned property, and it's mine now. Same rule."

Hugh looked at the bed. It was a wide old thing, an actual double, under a quilt that had maybe been quilted by somebody's grandmother. Then he looked at the floor, which was stone, and at the fire, and he decided he'd rather argue about something he could win.

"Fine. Floor's yours or mine, we'll sort it later. Where do I plug in my laptop?"

"Kitchen. Don't touch the kettle, it sticks."

* * *

They got the laptops set up on opposite ends of the table and it took her about twenty minutes to start gloating.

"Let me guess your method, Oakley. Book value times condition modifier. Spreadsheet. Nineteen columns."

"It works."

"It works for sedans. I've got three hundred wrecks out there and half of them are imports with parts worth more whole than scrapped. Your spreadsheet can't see that."

"My spreadsheet is exactly how the contract gets awarded. If the insurer wants a method, I give them a method."

"So you're proud of being a cog."

"I'm proud of being right." He tapped his pen on the table. "What's your data even on? You showed up to a digital valuation job with a paper ledger?"

She reached into her shirt pocket and tossed something on the table. It landed with a clatter. A floppy disk. Actual three-and-a-half-inch floppy, hand-labeled in marker. INVENTORY 2019.

"Whole yard's on there," she said. "My system's older than your career. You want the data, read the disk."

"Nobody has a floppy drive, Justine."

"I do. Bought one last month specifically so smug consultants would have to come to me. Except you're already here, so I win twice."

"There's no way a whole inventory fits on one floppy."

"Compressed. And cataloged better than anything you've ever produced. Go on. Read it. If you're so smart."

He snatched it off the table. She grabbed his wrist before he'd gotten it two inches, and then her hand was over his hand on the disk, and her fingers were warm and rough with old scar tissue across the knuckles, and neither of them let go for a beat too long.

"Give it back," she said.

"You dared me to take it."

"I dared you to read it. Not to walk off with it like some auditor."

He let go. She took the disk and put it back in her pocket, and her cheeks had gone a little pink, which he chose not to think about.

* * *

Dinner was tinned soup, two kinds, her lentil and his vegetable, and they ate at the table with the fire going and the rain hammering the roof. The conversation stayed on business for almost ten full minutes, which had to be a record.

"Your partner," Hugh said. "The silent one. What's the buyout situation?"

"None of your business."

"He's relevant to the valuation. If the yard's carrying hidden debt, that changes everything."

"There's no debt. He fronted the capital nine years ago, he wants out now, I'm paying him what the shares are worth. Which is why I need the valuation low and you need it high, and that, Oakley, is our whole weekend in one sentence."

"At least we're honest about it."

"We're not honest about anything. You told the barbecue that a bare-metal respray takes six weeks."

"Two years ago and you're still on that. It does take six weeks. In winter. With rust."

"With rust it takes four, if the guy knows what he's doing. Which your guy clearly didn't, because you hired him off a coupon."

Hugh pointed his spoon at her. "The barbecue was a massacre and you know it."

"It was a barbecue. You turned it into a massacre by explaining engine displacement to a woman who builds engines."

* * *

Afterward he washed the bowls and hung his jacket on the peg by the stove to dry. It had gotten soaked in the walk from the car. Then he sat back down to work and she went out to check her car, and it was maybe twenty minutes later, coming back for a pen, that he saw her.

She was standing at the peg. His jacket was in both hands and her face was pressed into the collar. Eyes closed. Breathing in. Slow and deliberate, the way you breathe in something you want more of.

He stopped in the doorway. She hadn't noticed him.

She breathed in again, deeper, and her shoulders dropped, and something about it made his neck feel hot.

Then her eyes opened and she saw him and the jacket hit the peg like it had burned her.

"Diesel," she said. "It smells like diesel. I was checking if the fire had caught the fabric. You hung it too close, it's a fire hazard, you could have burned the whole cabin down."

"The peg is a meter from the stove. It's fine."

"Well it's fine now. Because I checked!"

Her cheeks were red. Bright red, all the way up to her ears, and she walked past him back to the table without making eye contact, and sat down, and opened her laptop, and typed absolutely nothing.

Hugh went back to his own end of the table and looked at his screen for a while without reading any of it.

* * *

He woke at some point past two. The fire had burned down to coals. He got up to add a log and that was when he saw her.

Justine was asleep on the floor in front of the hearth, on top of her sleeping bag, wearing his sweater. His gray sweater, out of his duffel, the one he'd packed for the drive. It was too small on her across the shoulders and it had ridden up above one hip and she was curled toward the warm coals with one hand under her cheek.

He stood there with a log in his hands and did not know what to do about any part of that sentence.

She had gone through his bag. She had taken his sweater, the thief, off the top where it sat, and put it on, and then taken the floor she'd claimed as a point of principle, instead of the bed, ten feet from the