The Expediter

by John Boyd, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The kitchen phone rang at nine-forty on the first Tuesday in November, and Irene Wojcik wrote 9:40 on the steno pad before she picked it up.

The pad lived on the shelf under the clock with a Bic clipped to the spiral. She had kept the same kind on her desk in Material Control at the locomotive plant for thirty-one years and she used it the same way: the time on the left of the rule, who called and what they said on the right, and a line under anything that mattered. When she retired in 2004 the girls in the office gave her a carton of twelve as a joke. She was on the last of them.

At first nobody was there. Then there was breathing, and a wet sound, and a young man's voice that cracked in the middle.

"Gram?"

"Matty?"

"Gram, I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She wrote Matty and stood with the receiver against her ear. Outside the window over the sink the first lake snow of the year was coming sideways across the yard, small and dry. It wasn't sticking yet.

"What happened? You sound terrible."

"My nose. I broke my nose on the airbag. Gram, I hit somebody. There was a lady and they're saying she's pregnant, and they arrested me, and I'm in Buffalo, and they gave me one call and I didn't want to call Mom."

"Is she all right? The lady?"

"I don't know. I don't know. My lawyer's here. Can you talk to my lawyer? Please don't tell Mom."

She wrote nose. airbag. Buffalo. lady, pregnant. don't tell Mom. The line rustled and a different man came on. He was older and he was in no hurry, and his voice had the warmth of the man who read the farm prices on the radio at six in the morning.

"Ma'am, my name is Greg Hollins. I've been appointed to represent your grandson this morning. Am I speaking with his grandmother?"

"You are."

"First of all, he's not hurt beyond the nose, and he's being treated well. I want you to know that. He's a good kid, and he's very scared."

"What does he need?"

"He was arraigned at nine. The judge set bail at eight thousand four hundred dollars. Now, that sounds like a great deal of money, and I'm sorry, it is. The good news is the court works with an approved bonding agent, and if the bail is posted in cash the bonding office can send a courier to you. That way you don't have to drive to Buffalo in this weather."

"Cash."

"Cash, yes ma'am. And it does have to be by one o'clock. At two they transfer him over to the county, and once he's in county it gets a whole lot harder and slower, and he could be in there through the weekend."

She wrote 8,400. cash. courier. by 1:00. 2:00 county.

"There's one more thing, and I'm sorry to have to say it. Because there's an injured party, the judge has put a gag order on the case. That means you can't discuss it with anyone, family included, until after the hearing. If it gets out, it can go very badly for Matthew. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

She wrote gag order and drew a line under it. Then she drew a second line under the first.

---

In 1986 a man named Sutter, who ran a foundry in Ohio that poured the truck frames for the Dash 8 locomotives, had told her on a Thursday afternoon that her frames would ship Monday morning, absolutely, as long as she didn't go upstairs and get his plant manager on the line, because that would only slow things down. She wrote it in the right-hand column and underlined it. She called the plant manager at four-fifteen. The frames had not been poured. Sixty-one locomotives sat in the erecting bay for nine days waiting for them, and it would have been thirteen if she had waited until Monday to find out.

There were a lot of Sutters over thirty-one years. The parts changed and the names changed. What they said stayed the same. Don't call anybody, it'll only slow things down.

---

"Mr. Hollins, is he at the holding center on Delaware?"

"That's right, ma'am."

She wrote Delaware: yes.

"Can I talk to him again? Just for a minute."

There was a small pause. She didn't write it down, but she noticed it.

"Briefly. They're very strict in here."

The rustle again. The breathing.

"Gram?"

"Honey, listen to me. You're going to be all right. Did somebody see to Rocco?"

A shorter pause.

"Yeah. Yeah, Gram, Jess has him. He's fine. He's fine."

She wrote Rocco: Jess has him and underlined it, and underlined it again, and a third time, hard enough that the pen went through to the page beneath.

Rocco had been Walt's beagle. He died in 2011, the spring after Walt. He was buried under the lilac at the back fence, and Matty, who was nine, had dug half the hole and then cried too hard to dig the rest.

"Okay, honey. Put Mr. Hollins back on."

"Ma'am?"

"I'll have to go to the bank."

"That's fine. That's fine. Now, banks today, they ask a lot of questions when a person takes out cash, and that's for your protection, I'm glad they do. But because of the gag order you can't tell them it's for Matthew. If the teller asks, it's simplest to say it's for a contractor. A roof, a furnace. People pay contractors in cash all the time."

"A furnace."

"A furnace is good. I'll call you back at eleven-thirty to see how it went. Is this the best number?"

"This is the only number."

"Eleven-thirty, then. You're doing the right thing for him."

He hung up. She wrote 11:30 — call back, and then, under it, in smaller letters on the right, name? with a question mark. Then she put the pen down.

He had talked to her for nine minutes. He had called her ma'am eleven times. He had never once said her name.

---

She did not sit down.

Her cell phone was in her purse on the chair by the back door, where it always was. Lisa's number went straight to voicemail. Lisa worked nights in the ICU at Hamot, and from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon her phone lay face down on the dresser with the do-not-disturb on, and it had done so for eleven years. Irene didn't leave a message.

She called Matty. It rang five times and gave her his voicemail, the one he'd recorded at nineteen, laughing at something off to one side. She hung up before the beep. He drove for Reinhardt Freight out of the yard on the Bayfront, and Reinhardt's rule was that the phone stayed in the cradle and nobody picked up while the truck was moving. Matty kept the rule. He had told her so at Easter, a little proud of it.

She turned the steno pad over to the cardboard back. Down the left side of the cardboard, in ink, she had the numbers that weren't in the phone because the phone could lose them: the furnace man, the township, Father Bialas, Lisa's charge desk, Reinhardt dispatch. She had got the dispatch number the winter before, when the Thruway closed and Matty was stuck for two days at a truck stop near Batavia, and she had wanted a voice at the yard that could see where he was on a screen.

A man answered on the second ring. "Reinhardt, this is Dale."

"Dale, my name is Irene Wojcik. I'm Matt Kaminski's grandmother. Nothing is wrong. I need to know where his truck is."

"Ma'am, I can't really give out where we're delivering."

"I didn't ask you where he's going. I asked you where he is. You've got him on the computer in front of you."

A short silence. A keyboard.

"He's on 80 westbound. About six miles east of Brookville. He's doing sixty-two."

"When did you talk to him?"

"He checked in at nine-fifteen. Ma'am, is everything all right?"

"How did he sound?"

"He sounded like Matt. He was complaining about the coffee at the last place he stopped."

"Thank you, Dale."

She turned the pad back over and wrote 10:02. Dale @ Reinhardt. Matty on 80 by Brookville, 62 mph. coffee. She looked at it for a while. Then she found the township police on the back of the pad, but she dialed the regular line, not 911, because nobody was dying.

---

Sergeant Ray Haller came at twenty to eleven. He stamped his boots on the mat and took them off without being asked, and stood in his sock feet on her kitchen linoleum with snow melting on his shoulders while she showed him the pad. He read it from the top, the way she would have, running his finger down the times on the left.

"That's the second one this fall in the township," he said. "Third in the county that I know of. The other lady in the township paid."

"How much?"

"Eleven thousand, two hundred. They called her back the next day for the hospital bills. She paid that too."

"Who comes for the money?"

"They don't come themselves. They send a kid. Somebody who answered an ad on his phone. Delivery driver, two hundred dollars a run, you pick up a package and drive it to a parking lot in Cleveland or Pittsburgh and somebody takes it off you. Half of them don't know what's in the envelope. The other half know and don't want to."

"So you'll get a kid."

"We'll get a kid and a car and a phone. The phone's what we want. The kid's phone has been talking to the people who talked to you." He tapped the pad. "Did they tell you what time?"

"One o'clock. They're calling back at eleven-thirty."

He looked at the clock over the shelf. "I want Kostka in the other car, and he's working a crash out on 5 that'll keep him till one, maybe after."

"How much more?"

"Half an hour'd do it."

She went to the drawer by the stove and got out a white envelope from the box of them she kept for the parish collection. She put in the coupon inserts from the Sunday paper, cut down with the kitchen scissors to the size of a bill, and squared them on the table until the stack was the right thickness. Walt had been paid in cash on Fridays for the first twelve years they were married, and she knew what eighty-four hundred-dollar bills looked like in an envelope. She licked the flap and pressed it shut with the side of her fist.

Haller watched her do it and didn't say anything.

---

The phone rang at eleven-thirty-one. She wrote 11:31 and let it ring a second time.

"Ma'am, it's Greg Hollins. How did it go at the bank?"

"It went fine. The girl counted it twice. They gave it to me in hundreds."

"Did she ask any questions?"

"She asked if it was for a contractor and I said yes, the furnace."

"Perfect. You did great. That's exactly right." The warm voice got warmer. "Now, here's what happens. The courier's name is Tyler. He'll be at your house at one. He'll say he's from the bonding office, and you just give him the envelope. Don't write anything on it. Matthew will be released as soon as it's posted, and he'll call you himself this afternoon."

"What does Tyler drive?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What kind of car. I'm not opening my door to a stranger. I want to know what to look for."

"I — I don't have that in front of me, ma'am. I can find out."

"Find out. And it has to be one-thirty."

"Ma'am, I explained about the transfer at two."

"I have to be at Lisa's at one. My daughter. She's sick, I'm bringing her soup. I can't put that off, she'll want to know why, and I can't tell her why. You told me that."

Haller, at the table, didn't move.

"Ma'am, one-thirty is cutting it very close."

"Then it gives you half an hour. You told me the court is two blocks from the holding center."

She had no idea where the court was in Buffalo. He did not tell her she was wrong.

There was a pause on the line, and in the pause she could hear other voices behind him. A lot of them. Telephone voices, all talking at once, as if he were sitting in a long room full of desks with the windows shut. She wrote room. many phones.

"One-thirty," Hollins said. "I'll let the bonding office know. It's a silver car. Ohio plates."

"Silver. Ohio. One-thirty."

"You're doing the right thing for him, ma'am."

He hung up first. She wrote 1:30 — silver — Ohio and underlined it, and turned the pad round so Haller could read it.

"They folded on the time," he said.

"Sutter always did," she said.

Haller got up and went out to his car to get on the radio. She put the envelope on the table by the door and made a cup of tea and drank half of it standing up.

---

At one-twenty-two a silver Nissan with Ohio plates came down the street slowly, the way people drive when they're reading house numbers, and went past, and turned around in the Paskos' driveway, and came back and stopped at the curb in front of her house. The snow had started to stick on the lawns but not on the road, and the tires left two wet dark lines in it at the edge of the street.

The boy who got out was nineteen or twenty. He had a grey hooded sweatshirt and no coat, and white canvas sneakers that were soaked dark before he was halfway up the walk. He had his phone in his hand. He looked at it, and then at the number on the porch post, and then at the phone again.

She opened the inside door and kept the storm door shut.

"Hi. I'm Tyler? I'm from the bonding office. I'm supposed to pick up a package."

"What's the name of the bonding office?"

He looked at his phone. "It's just — they said the bonding office."

"Wait there."

She got the envelope from the table and opened the storm door enough to hand it out. He took it with both hands, the phone still in one of them.

"Thank you, ma'am. Have a good day."

"Your feet are wet."

He looked down at them as if they belonged to somebody else. "Yes ma'am."

He walked back down the path holding the envelope against his chest so the snow wouldn't get on it. He had the driver's door open when the township car came round the corner from the end of the street and stopped across the back of the Nissan, and the second car, an unmarked grey Impala, pulled across its nose. Haller got out of the first one and Kostka out of the second, and neither of them hurried.

Tyler didn't run. He looked at the one car, and at the other, and then back up the walk at her standing behind the storm door. Then he put the envelope on the roof of the Nissan and put his hands down flat on either side of it, on the wet silver metal, before anybody told him to.

Haller said something to him she couldn't hear. The boy nodded. Kostka took the phone out of his hand and held it up to look at the screen.

She closed the inside door and went back into the kitchen and wrote 1:24. Tyler. hands on roof. no coat.

---

At one-fifty-eight the kitchen phone rang.

She wrote 1:58 and picked it up and said nothing.

"Ma'am? Ma'am, it's Greg Hollins." The warmth was still there, but the tempo had changed. "Did the courier come by?"

"He came."

"Did you give him the envelope?"

"I gave him the envelope."

"Okay. Okay, good. Because we're not able to reach him, and we need to post the bail before two, so I just want to confirm he left your house with it. What time did he leave?"

She looked out of the window over the sink. Both cars were still at the curb. The Nissan's doors were all standing open and Kostka was bent into the back seat with a flashlight in the middle of the afternoon. The boy was in the back of Haller's car. The snow was sticking to the road now.

"Mr. Hollins," she said, "what's my name?"

Nothing on the line. Behind him, the long room full of telephones went on talking.

"Ma'am, I —"

"You've called me three times today. You've told me what to say to my bank. You've told me what to say to my daughter. What's my name?"

The line was quiet for four seconds. She counted them by the clock over the shelf. Then there was a click, and the tone.

She hung the receiver back on the wall. She wrote Hollins. hung up. on the right-hand side of the pad, and on the left-hand side, under 1:58, she wrote 2:00, and did not underline it.

Then she called Lisa's charge desk at Hamot and left a message for her daughter to call her mother when she woke up, it wasn't an emergency, and she put the kettle back on.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Nōnīs Octōbribus (7 October 2026), ā Iōhanne Boyd per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Boyd, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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