Nora mocked his voice perfectly, capturing the drawl so dead-on that Jerry pulled back in anger and grabbed his rag again, tightened his fist around it. He was a small man, only a few inches taller than she was, but strong in the wiry way that comes from years of physical labor. What was left of his hair was thin and brown and damp with sweat.
“All right,” he said. “So I’ve told you before, if you remember all that. Think you’re clever saying it back to me, I ’spose. But if you was clever you’d understand, instead of using it to make fun of me. Your daddy understood. I’m not a combination man. I do body work. Been doing it since back when you was playing with dolls and putting on training bras and learning to paint your nails.”
Same old shit. He’d start bitching about his workload, then begin with his what-a-pretty-little-girl-you-are routine, slighting her gender either directly or with what he thought passed as slick humor.
“Tell you something, Jerry? When I was learning to paint my nails, I was also learning how to paint a car. Now it’s time that you do.”
She turned and walked away from him, heard the bitch muttered under his breath and kept on going, out of the shop and into the tow truck. Sat behind the wheel and let the engine warm and lifted her hands to her face and thought, I would’ve cried about this. A year ago, maybe even six months ago, I would’ve cried.
Not any more, though. No way. But was that entirely a good thing?
She wasn’t going to think about it. Pointless exercise. What she needed to think about was the cars waiting for her up on County Y. That was more than a pleasant surprise—it was salvation. She’d spent the morning trying to determine which bills she could be late on. It was down to that now, down to creating a rotating schedule of missed payments because otherwise she simply could not keep the doors open. Now here was a phone call offering enough work to keep those wolves distracted, if not completely at bay. And to think, she’d been one ring away from missing it altogether.
It felt longer than twenty minutes. The gray-haired guy kept up a constant stream of chatter, the words sounding more nervous each time there was a pause, as if he were scared of silence. When a car passed by, though, he’d stammer the way you do when you lose your train of thought, stare intently at the vehicle until it was out of sight. A couple of times, people slowed and put their windows down, ready to offer help, and the gray-haired guy just waved them off and shouted that everything was fine, go on, have a nice day.
It was a hell of a nice day, though. If the Lexus driver would shut up for a few minutes, Frank wouldn’t have minded it at all, standing out here. It had been a long time since he’d lived in the city, so it wasn’t as if he’d arrived in the woods fresh from garbage-riddled streets that stunk of exhaust fumes. Even so, this place felt different. For one thing, there wasn’t a building in sight. Turn right, turn left, see trees and blue sky, nothing else. A pair of hawks rode the air currents high above, staying on the south side of the road. Must be a clearing back there, something offering prime hunting ground for the birds. Frank could’ve watched them for a long time, if this jazzed-up dude would let him. Instead, he was busy fending off meaningless questions and observations.
He was relieved when he saw the tow truck at the eastern end of the road, and a minute later it had pulled up beside them. The driver opened the door, and Frank felt his eyes narrow, saw matching surprise on the gray-haired man’s face. The driver was a woman, and a good-looking one, that much evident even with her face shadowed by a baseball cap. She hopped down onto the road—the truck was too high for her to just step out; she couldn’t go an inch more than five-three and might go an inch less—and walked around to face them.
“Sorry about the wait, guys. I got moving as fast as I could.”
“No problem,” Frank said, and he was going to shake her hand when the gray-haired man interrupted.
“If it’s no trouble, can we do this car first?” He pointed at the Lexus.
The woman wore jeans and boots and a denim work shirt, sleeves rolled to expose thin forearms. There were grease stains on her clothes, and both the pants and shirt were loose, giving her a shapeless look. She didn’t wear any makeup, but her eyebrows—not a feature Frank would ordinarily notice—had been carefully attended to, well shaped. Cool green eyes, now fastened on the Lexus driver.
“There a reason that one needs to go first?”
He gaped at her for a second, then looked at Frank and forced a smile.
“Well, I was just hoping . . . I’ve got a meeting to get to, and I was sort of—”
“In a hurry,” the woman finished.
He nodded.
“Right,” she said. “Well, I can give you the first tow unless this gentleman has an objection.”
Frank shook his head.
“Great,” the woman said. “Here’s how we’re going to do this—I’ll get the Lexus rigged up, tow it back to the shop, and you guys can ride with me, unless you’ve got someone coming to get you.”
This time Frank and the gray-haired man shook their heads in unison.
“Okay. Well, probably be easier to figure out your situations from town, unless you’d rather stand out here on the edge of the road.”
“Sure,” the gray-haired guy said. “Town’s fine.” But he was looking down the road with a frown.
The woman walked over to the Lexus and knelt beside it, studying the front end. Frank turned away when she bent over to see under the bumper, not wanting to stare. When was the last time a guy had wanted to check out a tow truck driver, anyhow? She straightened up and walked back to the truck, climbed in and put it in reverse and had the thing centered in front of the Lexus in half the time it would’ve taken Frank.
“I have to winch you out of that ditch before I can get it ready to tow,” she told the gray-haired guy. “Looks like the Jeep is sitting clear enough already.”
She hooked the winch beneath the front bumper of the Lexus, went back to the truck, and turned it on. The chain went taut and the gears hummed and the Lexus slid away from the trees and up the ditch, shedding a tangle of branches and broken glass in its wake. When she had the car on the flat surface of the road, she shut the winch off, went back and fussed with the chains for a few seconds, and turned to the car’s owner.
“This thing’s all-wheel drive. We should use the dolly on the rear wheels to keep from hurting your axles or transmission. The thing about that is, we also charge an extra thirty dollars to use it.”
The gray-haired man stared at her, mouth open about an inch. Didn’t see many women winching your fifty-thousand-dollar car out of a ditch.
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re okay with that?”
“You think that the dolly will save time?”
“It’ll save your transmission.”
“Whatever. Faster the better. I want to get moving.”
She went back to the Lexus, and Frank thought her stride was slower, almost as if she were screwing with the guy because he was in such a hurry. It made a wry smile build on Frank’s face, and he turned before the Lexus driver caught it.
Once she had the wheel-lift under the front end of the Lexus—looked like a set of mechanical arms wrapped around the wheels—she strapped the tires to it for added security and disappeared behind the car. Frank and the gray-haired man stood together in silence, waiting. Eventually she walked back around to the front, gave the wheel-lift one last look, and then made a small nod of satisfaction and turned back to them.
“Go on and get in. Short straw gets to sit in the middle.”
Frank got to the passenger door first, pulled it open, and slid across to the middle seat as the gray-haired man climbed up beside him and the woman got behind the wheel.
“What’s your name?” Frank asked her.
“Nora Stafford.” She took one hand off the wheel and extended it. When they shook, he felt fine bones on the back of her hands, the skin smooth and cool, but hard on the inside, beneath her fingers
.
“I’m Frank.”
“Good to meet you, Frank.” She put the truck in gear and checked the mirror. “Who’s your buddy?”
“You know, I didn’t make his acquaintance yet, just his car’s,” Frank said.
“My name’s Dave O’Connor. Sorry. Should’ve introduced myself earlier. I’ll be paying for this, which brings up a, uh, a question. I was wondering . . . see, I’m from out of town, and I need this done fast, but, well, I don’t have my credit cards on me.”
“Credit cards?” Nora turned to him with surprise. “Sir, I think you’re going to want to make an insurance claim on that.”
“No, we’re not going to do that.”
“Um . . . I don’t mean to tell you your business, but this job is going to be several thousand dollars,” Nora said.
Frank shifted in his seat. He’d hit the guy, and his insurance should be paying for the damages, but the gray-haired man had been adamant.
“So what I was wondering was, I mean my question, well, could I give you cash? Because I’ve got some cash on me, see. And if I gave you that, you know, to get started, and then I could come back with a credit card or call you and give you the number . . .”
Nora’s face hardened just a touch, barely noticeable, a little frost in her eyes even though she didn’t take them off the road. There was something about the edge she showed in that moment, like the way she’d slowed down just because the gray-haired guy was in a hurry, that Frank found damn appealing.
“Two cars, both with substantial damage,” she said, her voice friendly. “Parts and paint alone are going to run up a decent bill, Dave. That’s without labor figured in.”
“I could give you two thousand dollars today. Surely that’s enough to get started? You aren’t going to burn through two grand in the first day.”
Nora kept her eyes ahead, and so did Frank, but in the few seconds of silence that followed he felt a shared curiosity with her—no credit cards on you, but two grand in cash?
“Well . . .” Nora nodded her head as if in discussion with herself. “Two thousand dollars is a sizable down payment. The bill for this work will run well over that, but it’s certainly enough to get us started.”
They were on the highway now, southbound toward Tomahawk, the tow truck’s engine throaty, straining to get its load up to speed. Nora’s thigh was warm against Frank’s. He looked at her hands on the steering wheel, saw no wedding ring. So it wasn’t her husband’s body shop. This was just what she did, drive a tow truck in a town like Tomahawk? A young girl, intelligent, with perfect teeth and eyebrows?
“You guys have someone to come get you?” Nora asked.
“Nope,” Frank said, and Dave O’Connor shook his head.
“I’ve got to get something figured out,” O’Connor said. “Like I told you, I’m in a bit of a hurry. Got a meeting that won’t wait all day for me.”
“A meeting at the Willow?” Frank asked.
“No. I, uh, I’ve got to get to . . . Rhinelander. Little bit of a drive left to make, so, you know, got to figure something out.”
Rhinelander. He’d been westbound on County Y, headed for Rhinelander? That was an interesting route, considering County Y took you out to the Willow, across the dam, and then looped back down to the old highway and into Tomahawk. O’Connor had been driving the exact opposite direction from Rhinelander, and not toward any highway where he could correct his course.
“Any chance you’d have a car you could rent me?” O’Connor asked Nora.
She shot a sideways glance at him. “I don’t rent cars. I fix them.”
“You don’t have anything around the shop? It’d be one day. One day, and I’ll give a couple hundred cash for it. I’ve got to make this meeting.”
Nora let a few cars pass before she answered.
“Only drivable vehicle I could give you—unless you want to drive the tow truck—is a beat-up old Mitsubishi that probably can’t do more than fifty without blowing up.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take it.”
“And if it does blow up on you, I’m certainly not going to take responsibility. I’m doing this as a favor.”
“It’s not a favor. I’ll pay you—”
“You won’t pay me anything. Sounds like you need something to get you to Rhinelander, and the Mitsu will do it. Slowly.”
“I appreciate that,” O’Connor said. “It’ll be a huge help. Save me the time of renting a car, and I don’t have time to waste.”
Something else it would save, Frank thought, staring out at the lumber truck ahead of them, was the process of renting a car. You couldn’t do that with cash—and Mr. Dave O’Connor seemed damn concerned with sticking to cash.
4
__________
Took Nora ten minutes to get Dave O’Connor in and out of the body shop. He had the cash out before she was even in the door, put it in her hand and waved away her offer of a receipt, said he knew she was trustworthy and he was in a hurry, now, could you show me that Mistubishi you were talking about?
So she took him out back and showed him the car, a rusted blue box of a thing they used for errands, running back and forth to the auto parts store. Had four-wheel drive, but that was about it. Windshield wipers were shot—how many times had she asked Jerry to replace them?—and two of the windows hadn’t moved in the better part of a decade. Dave O’Connor looked at it as if it were the next year’s model of his fancy Lexus. Took the keys and tried to press more cash in her hand.
While declining the money for the third time, she realized she was hustling him out of the shop almost as much as he was hustling her, and she knew why. There was something off about this guy, and, yeah, it started with the cash-only thing and the I’m-in-a-big-hurry thing but went beyond those, too. A meeting in Rhinelander? What the hell was he doing on County Y, then? License plate from Florida, no less. And the mannerisms, the tension . . . she pushed it out of her head. He’d given her more than enough money to hold the job, and it didn’t seem likely he was going to dash off and leave his expensive car. If he did, hell, she’d make a fine profit off that. How long did you have to wait to claim a mechanic’s lien?
So she let him take her car and drive off, didn’t fill out any of the standard paperwork, just accepted his money and his promise to return Monday. Even a few months ago she would never have believed she could agree to something as crazy as this, but a few months ago the shop’s debt was merely threatening, not suffocating her in the way that it was now. She stood in the parking lot and watched him go, two grand in cash in her pocket. It was enough to justify the breach of protocol. She was in a dream world when she walked back into the shop, and pulled up with surprise when she saw the young guy standing there, Frank. How old was he, anyhow? Appearance said he’d be a few years her junior, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. Acted older, though. Carried himself all steady and sharp-eyed, the way a man who’s seen a lot will do. The way her father had.
“Hey,” she said, and for some reason she tugged off the baseball cap, shook her light brown hair out.
“Hey. You get things settled with that guy?” He stepped closer to her, an easy smile on his face but the eyes not matching it, too thoughtful. A nice-enough-looking guy, runner’s body, good skin. Needed to grow the dark hair out, though, lose that military cut that made him look even younger than he was.
“A pocketful of money to prove it,” she said and gave him one raised eyebrow that made him nod.
“Feel safe about getting that Mitsubishi back?”
She laughed. “If I never see it again, that’ll only save me money.”
“Different sort of guy, wasn’t he?”
“Seemed a little on edge.”
“Uh-huh. Got a gun out of the glove compartment when he was moving his things into your car, too.”
That stopped her. Not just because of the gun, but the way he said it. Relaxed. Casual. And how had he even seen that? When O’Connor was busy switching his gear from the Lexus to the Mitsub
ishi, she’d been standing right beside him, with Frank all the way back at the shop, leaning against the wall.
“Handgun,” he said. “No big deal, I’m sure. Lots of people carry them.”
She didn’t say anything, just stood beside the door and stared at him.
“Look, I didn’t want to worry you,” he said. “It’s meaningless.”
“I know that. I was just surprised you saw him with it, that’s all. You were standing all the way over—”
“Good eyes. I’ve got good eyes.”
“I guess so.” Pretty eyes, too. Nora always liked blue eyes on a guy with a dark complexion. Something about the contrast. She pulled open the office door, stepped inside with Frank behind her.
“I’ll go back and tow your car in just a minute,” she said. “You know what you’re going to do for a ride?”
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Where were you headed?” If he said Rhinelander, she was going to be awfully uncomfortable.
“The Willow. Staying at a cabin up there. I’ve got some errands to run in town, though, groceries and the like, so I’ll deal with them first.”
“You aren’t going to rent a car?”
“No need. Once I get up there I don’t plan on leaving for a while.”
She pushed her hair back over her ears, the baseball cap still in her left hand. Over Frank’s shoulder she could see Jerry standing at the row of lockers along the far wall, getting ready to take a cigarette break. The doors to the paint booth were still open and the lights were off, which meant the Mazda wasn’t drying, which in turn meant Jerry hadn’t repainted that quarter panel yet. Good thing he was taking a cigarette break.
“Tell you what—if you can kill the afternoon in town, I’ll drive you up to your cabin tonight,” Nora said, refocusing on Frank again. “Come by around six?”
“You don’t need to—”
“It’s not a problem.”
“All right.” He nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”
“Sure. Six o’clock, right?”
Envy the Night Page 3