That was all he needed to do. Stay away from that kind of trouble.
2
__________
Frank woke to the grinding of a big diesel motor pulling away, sat up, and saw gray light filling the sky. When he opened the door and tried to get out of the Jeep his cramped muscles protested, and he felt a quick razor of pain along the left side of his stiff neck. He was hungry now, the alcohol long since vanished from his cells and the Gatorade calories burned up. He took the edge off with a Snickers bar and a bottle of orange juice from the vending machines, ate while he studied the big map on the wall. He’d come closer last night than he’d realized; Tomahawk was only one hundred miles ahead.
The closer he got, the more his resolve wavered. Maybe it would be best to pretend he’d never gotten that message from Ezra, didn’t even know Devin was on his way back. Maybe he’d just spend a little time in the cabin, stay for a weekend, catch some fish. It would be fine as long as he didn’t see Devin Matteson. If he stayed away from Devin, if it was just Frank and Ezra and the woods and the lake, this could end up being a good trip, the sort of trip he’d needed to take for a while now. But if he did see Devin . . .
What are you doing here, then, if it’s not about Devin? he thought. You really think this is some sort of vacation?
Whatever part of his brain was supposed to rise to that argument remained silent. He drove with the windows down as the gray light turned golden and the cold morning air began to warm on his right side. Past Wausau the smell of the place began to change—pine needles and wood smoke and, even though there wasn’t a lake in sight, water. There would be a half-dozen lakes within a mile of the highway by now. He knew that both by the change in the air and from the map in the rest stop, this portion of the state freckled with blue.
The smells were triggering a memory parade, but Frank wasn’t sure if he wanted to sit back and watch. It was that sort of place for him now. The deeper he got into the tall pines, the faster the memories flooded toward him, and he was struck by just how much he’d loved this place. It was one thing to recall it from somewhere hundreds of miles away, and another to really be here, seeing the forests and the sky and smelling the air. Maybe he’d stay for a while. The summer stretched ahead of him, and the money wouldn’t run out. Blood money, sure, and spending it while hating the methods that had earned it made Frank a hypocrite at best and something far darker at worst, but it was there.
The first few times he and his father had made the trip, the highway had been two-lane this far north. Then the tourism dollars began to knock on the right doors down in Madison, and soon the four-lane was extending. Frank’s mind was on the cabin, and he blew right past the Tomahawk exits before remembering that he had nothing in the way of food or supplies. He’d have to come back down after he’d unpacked, grab some lunch and buy groceries and then head back to the lake.
He exited at an intersection with County Y, a narrow road slashing through the pines, and had gone about a mile down it when someone in a silver Lexus SUV appeared behind him. From the way it came on in the rearview mirror Frank knew it was really eating up the road, had to be doing seventy at least. As the car approached, it shifted into the oncoming lane, the driver planning to pass Frank without breaking stride. Had to be a tourist, driving like that. The locals had more class.
It was that thought that made him look at the license plate. He probably wouldn’t have done it otherwise, but now he wanted to prove his theory correct, so his eyes went to the plate.
Florida.
The car was gone in a silver flash then, swerving in ahead of him and pulling away. The muscles at the base of his neck had gone cold and tight and his breath seemed trapped.
Florida.
It didn’t mean anything. A strange little touch of déjà vu, sure, but it didn’t mean anything. Yes, the Willow Flowage was an isolated place and a damn long drive from Florida, but there were several million cars with Florida license plates. There wasn’t even a chance that Devin Matteson was driving that car.
“Not a chance,” Frank said aloud, but then that message from Ezra filled his head again—I got a call from Florida . . . he’s coming back—and he pressed hard on the gas pedal and closed the gap on the silver Lexus. A closer look was all he needed. Just that minor reassurance, enough that he could go on to the cabin laughing at himself for this reaction.
He kept accelerating, closed until he was only a car length behind. Now he was leaning forward, his chest almost against the steering wheel, peering into the tinted rear window of the Lexus as if he’d actually be able to tell who the driver was.
There was only one person in the car, and it was a male. He could tell that much, but nothing else. He pulled a little closer, almost on top of the Lexus now, staring hard at the silhouette of the driver’s head.
“It’s him.” He said it softly, exhaled the words, no justification for them at all but somehow he was positive—
Brake lights. A flash of red, one quick blink that he saw too late because he was too close, and then he hammered the brake pedal and slammed the wheel left and hit the back corner of the Lexus at fifty miles an hour.
“Shit!”
The back of the Jeep swung right with the impact, then came back to the left and sent the front end sliding, a fishtail that was threatening to turn into a full three-sixty. Even as the skid started Frank could hear his father’s voice—turn into it, turn into it, your instinct will tell you to turn away, but you’ve got to turn into it. He heard it, recalled those old lessons in the half second that it took him to lose control of the car, and still he turned away from it. It had happened too fast and the instinct was too strong. He turned away from the skid, the tires shrieked on the pavement, and then any hope of getting the car back was gone.
Frank was saved by bald tires. He’d lectured himself on the tires a dozen times, thinking they’d kill him someday if he didn’t get them replaced, but instead they saved him. The pavement was dry, the Jeep was a top-heavy vehicle, and if the tires had been able to grab the road well he probably would have rolled. Instead, because there was hardly a trace of traction left on the worn rubber, he slid. He saw whirling trees and sky and then the Jeep spun off the shoulder and into the pines. He heard a crunch and shatter just as the airbags blew out and obscured his vision, and then he came to a stop.
The airbag deflated and fell away, leaving his face tingling, and for a few seconds he sat where he was, hands still locked on the steering wheel, foot still pressed hard against the brake, blood hammering through his veins. It was amazing how fast the body could respond—you’d spend an hour just trying to wake up on a normal morning, but throw a crisis out there and the body was ready for a marathon in a split second. He reached over and beat the airbags aside with his hands and saw spiderwebbed glass on the passenger window, the door panel bent in against the seat. Bad, but nothing terrible. He could probably drive away.
What about the Lexus? Devin Matteson’s Lexus. He was sure of it again, absolutely certain, and without any pause for thought he turned and reached behind his seat, found the metal case, flicked the latch and opened it and then he was sitting behind the wheel with a gun in his hand.
Reality caught up to him then. Sanity caught up to him.
“What are you doing?” he said, staring at the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”
He slid the gun back into the case and closed it and opened the door—after a glance in the sideview mirror to make sure he wasn’t going to step out in front of a truck, survive the accident only to get squashed when he was on foot—and then got out of the car. He walked around to the front and saw that he wouldn’t be driving anywhere. The right front tire was blown out and the wheel bent inward, crunched down beneath the mangled front quarter panel. If he’d handled it right, turned into the skid instead of away, he might’ve been able to keep the Jeep straight enough to avoid the trees. Then he’d be left with a dent and a drivable car, instead of this mess.
He’d lost track
of the Lexus at the moment of impact, and now he was surprised to see how far behind him the car was, a good hundred feet at least. The driver had made the shoulder as well, but the car was facing the wrong direction and angled against the trees that lined the road.
Looking up at the car made his previous suspicion come on again, and again he thought of the gun, had to shake his head and move away from the Jeep before the urge to go for it got any stronger.
“It’s not him,” he said. “It’s not him.”
At that moment the driver’s door on the Lexus opened and Frank’s breath caught and held for a second until the driver stepped out onto the road.
It was not Devin Matteson. Not by a long shot. Even from this far away he could tell exactly how ludicrous the idea had been, could tell that he’d just caused a dangerous accident over an utterly absurd moment of paranoia.
He walked toward the Lexus as the driver began to survey the damage to his vehicle. Frank’s first thought, watching him—the dude’s on speed.
The guy, tall and thin with a shock of gray hair that stuck out in every direction, was dancing around the Lexus. Literally dancing. He’d skip for a few steps, twirl, lift both hands to his face and then prance back around the other side. He was talking to himself, too, a chattering whisper that Frank couldn’t make out, and he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that there’d been another car involved in the collision.
“Hey.” Frank got no response and walked closer. “Hey! You okay?”
The guy stopped moving then and stared at Frank in total confusion. Then he looked up at the Jeep and nodded once, figuring it out. Up close, Frank saw that he wasn’t too old, maybe forty, the gray hair premature. He had a long nose that hooked at the end and small, nervous eyes set above purple rings that suggested it had been a while since he’d had a full night’s sleep. His hands were still moving, too, fingers rippling the air as if he were playing a piano.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay. Yes, everything’s fine. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll just call Triple-A. You can go on now.”
Frank raised his eyebrows. “Just call Triple-A? I hit you, man. You’re going to want to hang around and get this worked out for insurance.”
The guy was shaking his head. “No, no, I hit my brakes, just slammed on my brakes, not your fault at all.”
Not his fault at all? What the hell was he talking about? Frank had been tailgating so bad he’d slammed into him as soon as the guy slowed. It was clearly Frank’s fault. The guy must be nervous, that’s all. Shaken up. Collision like that, at nearly highway speeds, who wouldn’t be?
“What I’m saying is, we need to call the police,” Frank said. “Get an accident report made, so we can make this square with the insurance company, right?”
The gray-haired guy winced and rubbed his forehead as if a pain had developed there. He probably had a bad driving record. Maybe a few accidents, and driving a car like that Lexus, his insurance rate already had to be high. He was worried about the money. Didn’t understand that Frank was liable for all the damage.
“Tell you what,” the guy said. “It’d be a big help to me—a big help—if we didn’t get an accident report made.”
So he’d been right—bad driving record. Unless it was something more serious. Hell, maybe the guy was on drugs. Frank frowned, studying him closer, looking for the signs. He just seemed amped-up, that was all. Buzzing. His eyes were clear, and he was cogent enough in conversation. A Starbucks addict, maybe.
“I’ll pay for your damage,” the gray-haired man continued. “I know what you’re thinking—as soon as I can, I’ll take off and stiff you on the bill. But I promise that won’t happen. We can take care of it right now. Find a repair shop, and I’ll take care of the bill beforehand.”
“I hit you,” Frank said again.
“Don’t worry about that. It was my fault, my responsibility, and I don’t want an accident report made, okay?”
Frank shook his head and walked a few steps away, looking at the Lexus. It was even more beat to shit than his Jeep. The front end was crumpled, there was a gash, maybe three feet long, across the passenger side of the car from the contact with the trees, and steam was leaking out of the hood.
“Please,” the man said, and there was a desperate quality to his voice that made Frank look back with surprise. Whatever trouble this guy had with his driver’s license—if he even had one—was serious. Frank stood there on the shoulder as two cars buzzed past them, nobody stopping, and looked at this weird guy with the nervous hands and panicked eyes. Why not give him a break? It was Frank’s fault, so it was only fair to let this guy handle it in whatever way he wanted.
“All right,” he said, and the look on the gray-haired man’s face, the way it broke with relief, was enough to convince him he’d made the right call.
“Thank you. Oh, man, thank you. I’ll call a tow truck. The car’s got a navigation system, you can find anything with it, we can pick any repair shop you want, I’ll show you the choices . . .”
3
__________
Jerry was staring at Nora’s ass again, in that way he had where his eyes seemed to bug right out of his head, nothing subtle about it, but she wondered if she was allowed to care today—she’d done the same thing that morning as she got dressed, looking her butt over in the mirror like some sort of sorority girl instead of a woman with wrench calluses on her palms. You did something like that, could you get upset when a guy allowed himself a stare? Maybe she’d earned the leer. Karma.
The glance in the mirror was important, though, a morning reminder that Nora was still very much a woman. This before putting on the jeans and the heavy work shirt, tucking her hair into a baseball cap so it wouldn’t hang free and invite a painful accident. She’d learned that lesson one afternoon when she’d used the creeper to check up on Jerry’s work and rolled right over her own hair. Stafford Collision and Custom was open by seven thirty, and from then until six or six thirty when she shut the doors and turned the locks, Nora would interact with few females. It was a man’s business, always had been, but she liked the touch she brought to it and thought the customers did, too. Granted, they were her father’s customers and probably kept returning more out of loyalty—and pity—for Bud Stafford than for his daughter, but the shop still did good work. On those rare afternoons when a particularly difficult job was done and the car driven out of the shop, Nora might even let herself believe they did a better job now. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, of course, but she did have an eye for detail that her father couldn’t touch. Too bad an eye for detail wasn’t enough to keep the bills paid.
The phone rang out in the office, and Nora straightened up and looked back at Jerry, who promptly flushed and averted his eyes. Even when you didn’t catch Jerry, he thought you had. Jerry would’ve made a piss-poor criminal.
“I’d like you to take another pass over that front quarter panel,” Nora said.
“Huh?”
“Nice orange-peel finish in the paint, Jerry. I know you can see that, and you know how I feel about it. Doesn’t matter if it disappears in the shadows, you can see it in the sun, and that’s when people care about their cars looking the best. They go home and the first sunny Saturday morning they wash the car and wax it and see that orange peel. And then you know what happens? They don’t come back.”
She walked away from him, got into the office just in time to grab the phone before it rang over to voice mail. She was always forgetting to take the cordless handset out into the shop with her, and she knew they’d lost business because of it. When a body shop doesn’t answer, people just call the next one in the phone book; they don’t wait and try again. She’d been one ring away from losing this call.
“Stafford Collision and Custom, this is Nora Stafford.”
She sat on the edge of the desk and took notes on one of the old pads that still had Bud Stafford’s name across the top. The caller wanted a tow truck for two cars that had wrecked up on C
ounty Y. Her last tow driver, who’d also been a prep man and part-time painter, had picked up a drunk driving charge three months back and to keep him would have required bearing an insurance rate spike that she simply couldn’t handle. In reality it was a welcome break—the shop’s financial situation was going to dictate firing somebody anyhow, and the drunk driving charge gave her an excuse. She’d let him go and couldn’t afford to hire a replacement. But two cars—including a Lexus—that was business she couldn’t turn down, either. Jerry could drive the tow truck, but he wasn’t covered by the insurance policy, and she needed him to finish repainting that Mazda this morning. She’d have to handle this one herself.
She got the details of the wreck’s position and promised to be out within twenty minutes, then went back into the shop and told Jerry where she was going. He just grunted in response, not looking at her.
“What’s the problem, Jerry?”
“Problem?” He dropped the rag that was in his hands. “Problem should be pretty obvious. You got me wasting all my time repainting work I shouldn’t have had to paint in the first place.”
She waved a hand at him, tired already, the argument by now just like the dying water heater in her house—too familiar, too annoying, too expensive to fix.
Jerry was a body man, a fine body man, none better in town. Didn’t have the eyes for a top-quality paint job, but that wasn’t the problem so much as the way he felt disrespected when asked to paint. If she could afford to bring someone else on board, she would, but that explanation hadn’t appeased him.
“Jerry, this is not a big deal. If you’d done it right the first time, I wouldn’t have asked you to repaint it. Instead, you half-assed the job and then tried to make up for it with the buffer, like usual.”
“Damn it, Nora, last time I painted cars it was with—”
“Single-stage lacquer, spray it on, buff it pretty, don’t have to mess with no damn clear coat . . .”
Envy the Night Page 2