Misgivings: Day 18

Word Count: 108,126

Summary of Events:

Greyson was bothered by the fact that the bumper sticker struck him as familiar, and so pondered it all through supper. Eventually he remembered that the bumper sticker was a custom one that had been made in memory of his late coworker, and that the minivan belonged to one of his other coworkers, Vernon. He texted Vernon, asking if his van had been stolen, but then realised he could get wrongfully accused of being involved in the theft, and so lied when Vernon probed him with questions about his having seen the van, saying that he'd encountered it on the highway, being driven by a strange man, before stewing inwardly about what he'd gone and done…

Excerpt of the Day:

He hoped that by giving Vernon a ballpark for where to look for his van the police might be able to find it without realising Greyson wasn’t involved in the group, and without Mr. Fransbergen realising that Greyson was the one who’d ratted him out.

Sliding his hand off his face, Greyson sighed. He felt like he was between a rock and a hard place because the only place he’d been able to find to live was a place where crooks regularly dropped off stolen vehicles for dismantling and illegal sale, and had chosen his friend — likely without a clue that there was any connection — to be one of their victims, probably because he took such good care of his vehicles, and vehicles in good shape like that were going to command better prices than vehicles that were on their last legs.

Greyson wasn’t really surprised that there was criminal activity going on all the way up here, after all, he’d found Grande Prairie to have been host to a good deal of crime, having not realised until he moved there that it had a surprisingly high crime rate for a city of less than a hundred thousand people.

Indeed, Grande Prairie had one of the highest crime rates in Canada, which Greyson had not realised, nor had he expected, but since he was within an hour’s drive of Grande Prairie, he wasn’t really surprised that there was crime in the countryside, as chop shops weren’t probably the sorts of places that ought to be in urban environments, nor even too close to them.

Having a chop shop hidden out here on a chicken farm was almost the perfect cover, as it was rather far away from Grande Prairie, as well as most of the major thoroughfares. It would take a lot more searching for the police, who would definitely start in the easy places, such as in the city, close to the city, and along major routes.

There was a part of Greyson that even wondered if Mr. Fransbergen deliberately didn’t maintain his driveway in order to prevent the police from suspecting that his place was a chop shop, but Greyson wasn’t sure if that would dissuade them.

Nevertheless, of all the places he’d had to find to live, he’d had to find this one, and he’d had to be forced here by a confounded water main failure. If not for that water main failure he wouldn’t have had to move, and probably would’ve ended up staying down in Grande Prairie until one of the proper rental houses had opened up, which he would’ve preferred to living in a dodgy trailer on a dodgy farm with dodgy people engaged in dodgy business.