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hour, I had Joel Tobias’s credit history laid out on my desk. There were no outstanding warrants against him and, from what I could see, he had never been in trouble with the police. Since he had been invalided out of the military just over a year earlier, he seemed to have worked hard, paid his bills, and led what, to all appearances, was a regular, blue collar existence.
    One of my grandfather’s favorite words was ‘hinky’. Milk that was just about to go off might taste a little hinky. A tiny, almost inaudible noise in his car engine might lead to suspicions of undiagnosed hinkiness in the carburetor. For him, something that was hinky was more troubling than something that was outright wrong, simply because the nature of the flaw was undefined. He would know that it was there, but he would not be able to tackle it because its true face had not yet revealed itself. What was wrong could either be dealt with or lived with, but what was hinky would come between him and his sleep.
    Joel Tobias’s affairs were hinky. His rig, with a sleeper, had cost him eighty-five thousand dollars when he’d bought it. Despite what Bennett had said, it wasn’t quite new when he picked it up, but it was as good as. At the same time, he’d also purchased a ‘dry van,’ or box trailer, for another ten thousand. He’d put five percent down, and was paying off the rest monthly, at a rate of interest that wasn’t excessive and might even have been considered pretty favorable, but he was still eating about twenty-five hundred dollars a month in payments. In addition, that same month he’d bought himself a new Chevy Silverado. He’d negotiated himself a pretty good deal on it: eighteen thousand dollars, which was six thousand off the regular dealer price, and he was paying that loan off at 280 dollars a month. Finally, the payments on the mortgage on his house in Portland, just off Forest and not far from the Great Lost Bear, as it happened, came to another thousand a month. The house had been his uncle’s, and had already fallen into arrears when it was left to Joel in his uncle’s will. Taken together, it all meant that Tobias needed to be taking in almost five thousand dollars each month just to keep his head above water, and that was before he paid for insurance, medical coverage, gas for his Chevy, food, heating, beer, and whatever else he needed to make his life comfortable. Add in, conservatively, another thousand dollars per month for all that, and Tobias’s annual earnings would have to be in the region of seventy thousand dollars after taxes. It wasn’t completely unattainable, given that, as an owner-operator, Tobias could expect to earn about ninety cents per mile, plus fuel, but he’d be working long hours to do it, and would need to put in the miles. In addition, he was probably receiving compensation for his injured hand, and maybe for his leg as well. At a guess, he was pulling down somewhere between five hundred and twelve hundred dollars tax free each month for his injuries, which would help some with his bills but would still leave him with a lot of cash to earn on the road. His credit rating remained steady, he hadn’t defaulted on any of his loans, and he was paying contributions into his IRA.
    But according to Bennett, or the impression he had gained, Tobias wasn’t working all the hours God had given him. In fact, Tobias didn’t seem to have many financial worries at all, which suggested that there was money coming in from somewhere other than what he earned by driving, or received in comp; that, or he had money stored away, and was subsidizing his business from his savings, which meant that he wouldn’t be in business for very long.
    So there it was. Joel Tobias was hinky. There was cash coming from elsewhere. It was just a matter of establishing the source of that additional income, and something that Bennett had told me meant that I could hazard an educated guess at that source. Bennett had said that