But then I looked past the gate, down at the massive steel girders and thick timber planks of my grandfather's bridge—the bridge that I owned free and clear, the bridge that the gate was hovering directly over.
Officer Jenkins had said I couldn't destroy their gate. He never said a word about what I could do with my bridge.
A slow, wicked smile spread across my face. Brenda Carmichael wanted to play high-stakes games with property lines. She wanted to trap me. She was about to learn a very hard lesson about physics, engineering, and a blue-collar worker with nothing but time and heavy machinery.
I pulled my phone back out and scrolled through my contacts until I found the number for Tommy Mitchell. Tommy and I had worked together for fifteen years. He owned a commercial crane and rigging company, and more importantly, he owed me a massive favor for pulling one of his sunken excavators out of a mud bog two years prior.
"Tommy," I said when he picked up. "What are you doing this Friday night?"
"Sleeping, hopefully," he grumbled. "Why? What kind of trouble are you in, Artie?"
"I'm not in trouble," I said, my eyes fixed on the iron gate. "But I need to move something heavy, and I need to do it at exactly 2:00 in the morning, quietly."
"How heavy?"
"About forty tons of steel and timber," I replied.
There was a long pause on the line. "Are you stealing a bridge, Noah?"
"No," I said, the smile stretching wider. "I'm just taking mine back."
Friday night arrived wrapped in a thick, unseasonably cold autumn fog, which was the greatest stroke of luck I could have asked for. The dense white mist rolled off Miller's Creek, swallowing the manicured lawns of Oak Creek Estates and reducing visibility to less than thirty feet. It was the perfect cover for a heavy machinery heist.