Several callers said they would pay whatever he asked.
Cedric did not raise his prices.
He stood in the warehouse and looked at the fleet he had refused to sell four months earlier. Every unit had been tested within the previous 30 days. Every one of them had a maintenance record in Kendra's files.
He made the decision quickly. The fleet would go out, and payment arrangements would be settled after the emergency had passed.
Kendra noted the financial risk without arguing against it. She knew as well as Cedric did that the calls represented exactly the kind of long-term customer relationships the rental business was built on, and you did not earn those relationships by holding machines back while the county lost power.
Cedric and Kendra, along with the technicians still on staff while Damon was away, worked through the first night delivering and commissioning units across the area.
The nursing home got priority. The clinic received the second unit. The food-processing plant, the cold-storage operation, and the poultry farms that had been among Cedric's earliest customers followed.
By the time the sun came up on the second day, generators acquired from salvage yards, estate sales, and equipment liquidations across nearly a decade were running in facilities spread across three counties.
Each hour they ran, they produced revenue for Boone Reserve Power. More importantly, each hour they ran without failure demonstrated something no sales pitch could have replicated.
The most serious problem came on the second night, close to midnight, when the food-processing plant called to report that one of the large-capacity units Cedric had installed was showing unstable voltage output.
If the generator failed, the facility stood to lose tens of thousands of dollars in inventory before any backup arrangement could be made.
Cedric drove out himself rather than sending anyone else.
He arrived to find the machine running but erratic, the output needle moving in a pattern he recognized immediately as a connection fault rather than an internal component failure.
He did not start pulling parts.
He did what Raymond had taught him to do more than a decade earlier in a workshop on County Road 42. He looked first at what the machine was still doing correctly, identified the systems functioning within normal parameters, and used that information to narrow where the fault had to be.
It took Cedric less than 20 minutes to find a connector in the exciter circuit that had vibrated loose during transport and the initial load. He seated it, verified the output, and watched the needle settle.
The plant manager asked how he had known where to look.
Cedric told him he always checked what was still working before he looked for what was not.
It was the same principle Raymond had explained to a teenager with a broken water pump, and it was still the most efficient diagnostic approach Cedric knew.
The revenue from that storm season resolved the immediate cash crisis. The $38,000 in uncollectible debt did not disappear from the books, but the emergency rental income offset enough of the shortfall that Boone Reserve Power could meet its obligations without liquidating anything.