Repo Madness

by W. Bruce Cameron

  Alan, of course, was in full priss. “I am telling you, you don’t want to mess with these people, Ruddy.”

  “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” I had no keys and no tow truck. How was I going to get my hands on the Jeep?

  The sun was pretty close to setting. I figured Zoppi would be leaving his place of business soon, probably to go put a horse head in somebody’s bed, if Alan was to be believed.

  I parked well down the road, behind an abandoned cherry stand—in the summer you can stop at any one of a hundred family-owned stands lining the highways and buy a lug of sweet cherries fresh off the tree. In the winter there is nothing except maybe free ice. I grabbed a pair of pliers out of my toolbox, then hiked back to the parking lot and tried the door to the Jeep. Unlocked, but no keys under the rug or behind the visor.

  “Someone could come out any second!” Alan hissed.

  I popped the hood and went to look at the engine, cringing in anticipation of a car alarm, but there was none. I pulled the pair of pliers out of my pocket and disconnected the positive wire off the battery, letting it droop. I shut the hood, slapping the grease off my hands and onto my pants.

  “So now you have smears of oil all over your clothes,” Alan stated disgustedly.

  “Makes me almost as bad as the mafia, doesn’t it?”

  The furniture shop was in a cluster of faded retail buildings huddled together on this stretch of road, as if people had started to develop a town and then lost their nerve. To sit indoors and keep my eye on the Cherokee, I had a choice between pet grooming or a tiny café. I picked the café and settled down with a cup of coffee at the front window, logging into their free Wi-Fi.

  Becky had started offering free Wi-Fi at the Black Bear, too. People start giving away everything for free, how is a bill collector supposed to make a living?

  Alan made distressed peeping noises as I surfed the Web on my smartphone. “I hate this. I just start to read something, and you change it,” he complained.

  I ignored him and was soon frowning at Wikipedia. “‘A human body cools twenty-five times faster in cold water than in air,’” I read aloud.

  “So? What are we doing?”

  I glanced around the café. There were no customers, and the woman behind the counter had gone into the back room. “I’m thinking about what Amy Jo said. Lisa Marie wasn’t in the car when it sank. What if that means she got thrown out? Maybe the back window was open. We hit the water going, what, fifty? That could propel a person pretty far. Maybe Lisa swam to the opposite shore that night. I was pretty out of it. And those stoners didn’t know to look for anyone else. If she got tossed twenty yards or so, woke up when she hit the water, and headed for the opposite side, it could explain how she survived.”

  “Twenty yards?” Alan repeated skeptically.

  “The point is, Alan,” I responded agitatedly, “maybe what Amy Jo meant was that Lisa Marie started off in the backseat, but she wasn’t in the car when it sank. The water that night was forty-eight degrees, which means by this chart I’m looking at, she could have gone more than thirty minutes without drowning. You could swim that channel in a third of that.”

  The woman came out from the kitchen. “You need something, hon?” she asked. She’d obviously heard me talking.

  “No, I was just…” I gestured with my phone. She nodded in understanding and went back through the swinging doors. Cell phones have made it possible for all sorts of lunatics to operate in society.

  “So then what?” Alan pressed.

  I was frozen, though, staring at the screen. This habitual position reminded me that I hadn’t texted with Katie in hours. I thumbed the message app and double-checked. Nothing from her.

  “Is that what I think it is? A conversation with my daughter?” Alan asked excitedly.

  “Yeah, I was just looking to see if she had sent me a text message. She usually checks in regularly.” Maybe not when we were on a break, though. I scrolled back through the past to show him what I meant.

  “Well, that’s revealing,” he said dryly.

  “What is?”

  “I’m looking at what she is saying. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asks. ‘I miss you. What time will you be home?’ she says. ‘Thinking of you today. Can’t wait for the weekend.’”

  “Yeah?” I had a feeling I was about to receive the benefit of another lecture from my fiancée’s father.

  “Then look at you. ‘Fine,’ you say. ‘Seven thirty,’ you say. ‘I have to work the bar Saturday.’ See a pattern?”

  “You mean the pattern where she asks a question and I answer it?” I snapped, irritated because I understood exactly what he was getting at.

  “Don’t you think she deserves more than just information?”

  “It’s the information age,” I retorted. “That’s what texting is for.”

  He was silent.

  “Fine.” I sighed. I thought about it for a moment, and then typed this: It really meant a lot to me that you came to see me in the hospital. I was glad to see you. I don’t understand why you need a break. I think it is crazy that you’re moving out.

  “Maybe just end it at hospital,” Alan suggested.

  “But it is crazy that we’re living apart. What the hell does a break mean when it is in the middle of a relationship? That’s like saying, ‘My legs are tired. I think I’ll break one.’”

  “Just erase everything after ‘glad to see you,’” he insisted.

  I did what he said and sent it. “Okay.”

  “Okay. So tell me about Lisa Marie,” he suggested.

  “Right. So she gets thrown out of the car. If she spent much time in the water, she would have collapsed. She needed help. When I got to the hospital, I was unconscious, and I guess they warmed me up gradually.”

  “So it’s late at night, and she’s gotten to the opposite shore. Many people there?”

  “In November? No, it’s mostly summer places, but there could have been a few locals. She could have made her way to a house. Or,” I speculated with growing enthusiasm, “what if a car came along and picked her up?”

  “Why would a car come if the ferry had shut down operations?”

  “Dammit, Alan, this isn’t helping!

  “Ruddy. You’re forgetting that she died. She was found in the water. Five days later.”

  “I am not forgetting that,” I snapped. “What I am saying is that if she was thrown from the car and made it to shore, someone would have helped her or they would have found her body right there. And whoever helped her…”

  “Whoever helped her changed their mind and dumped her back in the lake to drown,” Alan concluded.

  “Shut up, Alan.”

  “Ruddy…”

  “Just shut up!” I glanced over, and the waitress was standing behind the counter, regarding me with round eyes. My phone was on the table, nowhere near my ear. I smiled weakly, left a tip, and went outside, my hands in my pockets. Alan wisely didn’t say anything.

  Zoppi, when he emerged though the back door, looked more like a bellhop than a criminal warlord. He was thin and pale, with jet-black hair that was more perfectly combed than a toupee. “Looks like he forgot his machine gun,” I told Alan as I strolled over, acting nonchalant. Zoppi got into his car, reacting angrily when he turned the key and nothing happened.

  “So now what?” Alan wanted to know.

  Zoppi opened his door, and I was right there. “Hey! Car won’t start?” I called cheerfully.

  He was surprised but not suspicious to see me. “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t I take a look? Pop the hood,” I offered.

  Shrugging and not at all grateful, Zoppi slid back into the car and tugged on the lever. The hood bucked up an inch, and I raised it. “Try it now,” I called after pretending to do something to the engine.

  Zoppi swore. “Nothing!” he shouted. “Goddammit!”

  “Hey, okay, let’s switch places,” I suggested.

  I slid in behind the wheel a
s Zoppi went around to the front. “Well, the goddamn battery’s disconnected!” he shouted at me.

  “Really?”

  Zoppi moved the cable, and the second it touched the battery terminal, the interior lights came on and bells started to ping. I turned the key, and the engine caught. “Great!” I enthused. “Shut the hood!”

  Zoppi reached up and slammed the hood down, and I had it in reverse and was backing away from him before he could even register what was happening. I kept going until I was twenty yards down the road, then pulled a snow-aided U-Turn and headed north to Traverse City.

  “What if the battery cable falls off and the car stops?” Alan asked worriedly.

  I was watching my rearview mirror but saw no signs of pursuit. Maybe Zoppi was trying to start the motorcycle. “It won’t stop. Once the engine is running, it keeps going, even if there’s no battery.”

  “I think you made a big mistake, Ruddy. Now Zoppi knows what you look like.”

  “Good. Maybe next time he sees me, it will remind him to make his car payments.” I grinned at myself in the mirror, my soul full of the happiness that only making off with a good repo can give somebody.

  “I wish just once that you would listen to me.”

  “That’s funny, because I wish just once that you would stop talking.”

  Alan didn’t have a retort for that one.

  Half an hour later I pulled into the bank parking lot, went in, and asked to speak to Mr. William Blanchard.

  * * *

  William Blanchard was portly, with a neat, graying mustache and very short hair sparsely covering his head. He actually looked like a pretty friendly guy, and his handshake was warm and soft—hard to picture him hurting anyone; he looked like somebody’s favorite uncle. He wore a sharp navy suit with a white shirt and a muted tie—a banker outfit, in other words. He blinked his light-brown eyes in surprise when I told him I had Zoppi’s Cherokee in the back.

  “That fast?” His face lit up in a boyish grin. “I just called it in to your boss yesterday.”

  “It was right there at his place of business.”

  Blanchard leaned back, his chair springs groaning in alarm as his considerable heft tested their strength. He seemed eager for details, so I walked him through my little ruse, and he laughed so hard, his face turned red. “Well, you are certainly the right man for the job,” he concluded.

  I optimistically interpreted that to mean we had just landed the account for Kramer Recovery of Kalkaska. I wondered if Kermit would give me a bonus.

  “Do me a favor. Shut the door a minute.”

  The bank had locked the outer doors and most of the employees had left, but I did what Blanchard had requested. When I sat back down, his demeanor had changed somehow—less avuncular, more crafty, maybe.

  “Something’s going on,” Alan suggested superfluously.

  “So, Ruddy, I asked around about you,” Blanchard said, his eyes watching me unwaveringly. “I know you’re an ex-con, and I heard some people were threatening your sister’s business and you took care of them with, uh, extreme prejudice.”

  Since that wasn’t my interpretation of events, I opened my mouth to object, but he held up a hand.

  “No, that’s okay. Don’t need to discuss that. Not why I asked you to shut the door. Have another job for you, something up your alley. Interested?” A small smile played at his lips, as if he had a wonderful gift he couldn’t wait to give me.

  I waited. I had stopped liking our Mr. Blanchard so much.

  “All right,” he said decisively. “Here’s the deal. Last summer I took a group of guys out on my boat for a weekend cruise. All businessmen, clients of the bank—important clients. Had drinks, had some, uh, female company, played poker, fished. All fun, right? And one of my guests, we’ll call him John, wasn’t so good at cards the first night. He’s not from around here, but after he lost a couple grand at Texas Hold ’em, everyone warmed up to the guy. Liked him so much, in fact, that on the last night, just to give John a chance to get some of his money back, we all decided to raise the table stakes.”

  “Let me guess what happened next.”

  Blanchard nodded, giving a cold chuckle. “John’s luck got better. A lot better. After a while I had to issue some markers to a few people, which was okay by me.” He shrugged. “I am a lender, after all.”

  “And so now…,” I prompted.

  Blanchard slapped his meaty hand on his desk, suddenly furious. “And now those sonofabitches got together and decided they were played. They said John hustled them. And get this: They voted—they voted—that they shouldn’t have to pay their markers to me. I told them it wasn’t my fault, that no one made them keep betting, and that I had to pay their debts to John, but they don’t care.”

  “I don’t think this guy had to pay John anything, except maybe a fee to fleece his friends,” Alan observed.

  “Jesus,” Blanchard muttered, bringing himself under control. “So. All right. I’ve got forty-three thousand bucks outstanding between four guys. I need you to go collect it. By whatever means necessary, capisci?”

  “He’s asking you to go beat up a bunch of local businessmen. Can you believe this guy?”

  “I may not be the right man for this particular job, Mr. Blanchard,” I replied slowly.

  “I’ll cut you in for ten percent of whatever you can squeeze out of those assholes,” Blanchard continued. “You get it all, I’ll round it up to five thousand dollars.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. “I’m in,” I said.

  9

  The One-in-Five Drop

  Blanchard had a bank teller drive me back to the cherry stand where I’d parked. The guy looked like a twelve-year-old in a suit, a nice kid who tried to talk about basketball over Alan’s strident insults. According to the voice in my head, I had agreed to become a contract gorilla hired to extort money from innocent businessmen.

  “For chrissakes, Alan, all I agreed to is to go talk to a few people who owe some money. That’s what I do,” I pointed out when we were alone in my vehicle.

  “Blanchard said he told them if they didn’t pay the money he cheated them out of, he was going to ‘send someone.’ That’s a pretty obvious threat.”

  “Probably he meant he was going to hire Tony Zoppi. Oh no, wait. Tony doesn’t even have a car.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Did you hear the part where I’m going to make five thousand dollars?”

  “If you collect every penny.”

  “Oh, I’ll collect it, all right. Then, I don’t know, take Katie on vacation. Maybe we’ll go to Hawaii with the Wolfingers.”

  “I obviously won’t allow my daughter to date a hired thug,” Alan said icily.

  I didn’t advise that I couldn’t think of any way he could stop me, because I was moodily reflecting on what Katie might think of my new assignment. She might agree with her father’s interpretation.

  My phone beeped as I was pulling up in front of my house. I looked down and saw a smiley face emoticon, followed by one blowing me a kiss. “Yes!” I exulted.

  “What’s that? Did my daughter draw that with her phone?”

  “Um…”

  “She’s always been so amazingly gifted.”

  “And I’m not arguing with that, but actually the phone can sort of do it for you. They’re called emoticons.”

  “Really? So you can do one back?”

  “Repo men don’t send emoticons,” I replied darkly.

  “Right, you just send facts. ‘I’m fine.’ ‘I have to tend bar Saturday.’ But when you send what I tell you to send, she draws a face blowing you a kiss, with a little heart.”

  “I did not send what you told me to send,” I said testily. “Those were my words; you just suggested I make the text shorter.”

  “Let’s send her something back. Can you do a flower?”

  Because the buttons were ridiculously tiny, I wound up sending her a heart, a flower, and a cheeseburger.

  * * *


  A slow night at the Black Bear. Buoyed by all the money I was going to make off Blanchard, I sent a couple of beers over to the Wolfingers’ table. Claude was wearing a lei fashioned from what looked to be some flower-shaped earrings from Wilma’s collection. Since Wilma’s tastes ran hot pink and electric blue, the effect was less Hawaiian and more Lady Gaga. They were still in the happy phase of their drinking, and raised their mugs in good cheer. Claude gestured for me to join them, and I nodded that I would, in a minute.

  Jimmy was behind the bar, fiddling with a new wine bottle opener Kermit had bought. He stuck a needle in the cork, pushed a button, and then pulled the opener out of the cork to an audible hiss. “I don’t get it,” Jimmy muttered.

  “It looks like it injects carbon dioxide into the bottle and forces the cork out,” Alan observed pedantically.

  “Here’s an idea: Use a corkscrew,” I suggested.

  “He should stop pulling the needle out. Just keep pushing the button,” Alan urged, as if this was the most important issue facing humanity.

  “Here.” I reached out, and Jimmy handed me the bottle. I shoved the needle in and put my thumb on the button, and the cork popped out with a champagne noise. “There, technology saves the world,” I pronounced. “So, Jimmy,” I said as I watched him pour a couple glasses of Chardonnay for some customers in the corner. “I met your buddy William Blanchard.”

  He glanced up sharply, his dark eyes widening in alarm. “Yeah?”

  I shook my head. “You don’t have to worry about this guy. He’s definitely a jerk, but he doesn’t hurt people.”

  “No, he hires you to do it for him,” Alan observed snidely.

  “He’s as harmless as Tony Zoppi,” I said.

  Jimmy frowned. “Who?”

  “I still think, though, that being with a married woman is a really bad idea, Jimmy.”

  The look he gave me then caught me up short. Jimmy’s always been cheerfully black-and-white, shaking off adversity and facing the world with open optimism. It’s an untroubled approach to life that I sometimes envy—I’m usually grappling with a little more complexity. But now in his gaze I saw deep conflict, a swirl of doubt and what-ifs.