If there’d been good times when she was a child, Nora couldn’t remember them. Couldn’t remember the bad times, either, just a vague sense of tension. After the divorce Kate moved back to Minneapolis with Nora in tow. Nora’s relationship with her father had been slow building at best. He would come to Minneapolis about once a year, usually around Christmas, take her down to the Mall of America and patiently wander through girls’ clothing stores with her, laughing at the way she insisted on trying everything on. Her mother had only permitted a few visits to Tomahawk when Nora was young, and always came along, as if she were afraid Nora would never come back if left alone for a few days. It wasn’t until high school that Nora finally began to make a weeklong trip by herself in the summer. She and her father started writing letters more frequently then, a couple of times a month, exchanging photographs—her in a prom dress, him with a thirty-six-inch northern pike—and news. From the time she was a little girl he’d promised to put her through college. Her mother had remarried by the time Nora was ten, remarried to plenty of money, but on that issue Bud was firm—he would pay for college.
He and her mother just couldn’t live together, that was all. Everything Kate had found so charming about Tomahawk that first summer disappeared under a blanket of snow in November, and even when the thaw came and the tourists returned the luster was gone. And for Bud Stafford, moving to Minneapolis wasn’t an option. He’d been born into a pocket of the earth he considered superior to all the rest, and he’d never leave . . .
Someone was at the door. Nora put her feet back on the ground and started to stand up as the door opened. Not the front door of the office but the back door. Frank, she thought as the knob turned and the door swung inward. Had to be him. Then the visitor stepped inside, and as his silhouette filled the space she saw it was too tall, too broad. Without even seeing his face she knew him. It was the man who’d come by to ask about the Lexus.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t take a step forward. If the lights had been on, she would have, but since they were off, and the stranger clearly hadn’t noticed her standing back here in the dark, she kept silent and watched him.
He stood just inside the door and didn’t move. Letting his eyes adjust to the dark, maybe. Turned the knob back and forth, then looked from it back up across the room, probably thinking the door would’ve been locked if the shop were empty. It was dark, though, and the sign outside said CLOSED. After another hesitation, he swung the door shut very slowly, so it hardly made a sound as it latched. Then he walked farther into the shop, toward the Lexus that sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by its own trim pieces.
She should have said something as soon as he opened the door. Called out in a loud, authoritative voice, stopped him. But she hadn’t, and now he was inside and moving in a way that unnerved her. Cautious, on the balls of his feet, with attention to quiet. It was just past five on a weekday, in town, with plenty of people passing by outside, and this guy had walked into a business, that’s all. Somehow it didn’t feel like that, though. More like she was standing in a closet watching someone crawl through a window and into her home in the middle of the night.
Stop it, she thought. It’s your business, you’re in charge, and this asshole has no right to creep in here.
It wasn’t much, one brief bout of internal scolding, but it was enough to get her moving. She stepped to the side and reached out and up, flicked the light switch, and said “You want to tell me what you’re doing?” in as hard a voice as she could muster.
He moved at the first sound of her voice. Whirled and came toward her, fast and aggressive, and she had the sudden thought that surprising him like that had been a bad idea. The overhead lights were long, old-fashioned fluorescent tubes, and they didn’t snap on like an incandescent lamp would. There was a hint of a glow, followed by a short humming sound, and then the room filled with light. By that time the guy had closed the gap between them to about five feet, and Nora stepped back, stumbling over the stool. When she pulled up short, he did, too, but her sense of command over the situation was already gone. He’d frightened her—she knew it, and he knew it.
“I said—”
“I heard what you said.” His eyes took in the room around them, seeing the emptiness, the dark office behind her. It was obvious that she was alone. She wished she’d stayed on the stool, kept the lights off, just waited and watched.
“You have no right to be in here,” she said. “Can’t you read the sign out front? We’re—”
“Closed,” he said and took another step toward her, that damn belt buckle glinting under the fluorescent lights. “Yeah, I saw the sign. You usually sit here in the dark after you close up?”
“Maybe I should start to more often, if people keep breaking into my shop. Now get out. You want to talk to me, I’ll be back in on Monday.”
“I didn’t break in anything.” He was one pace away now. “Door was unlocked.”
“I want you out. I don’t know who you think you are, walking in here like this, but I want you out right now. I told you before, if this car’s owner wants to call me, he can. Otherwise, stay the hell away from here, unless you’d like me to call the police.”
“No, I don’t think I’d like that, at all,” he said. “And neither would you.”
The phone was in the office. All those times she’d had to rush back in to catch a call because she’d forgotten the cordless unit paled in comparison to this. Her cell phone was in the truck, where she always left it because she couldn’t be bothered with personal calls during the day.
“Get out,” she said again. He was in her space, almost chest to chest, and she’d backed up against the office door, which was still locked. To open it she’d have to turn her back to him, and that didn’t seem like a good idea.
“You’re going to listen to me, hon, and listen good,” he said, and a sour chill went through her stomach, the words and tone sounding like something a drunk would say as he advanced on his wife with a belt in hand. “You got no problem here, okay? Just tell me where the guy who drove this car went, and I’m gone.”
“I’ll ask you one more time to leave. Then I’m calling the police.”
He didn’t say anything. She gave it a few beats of silence and then went for the office door. The keys were already in her hand—had been since she sat down on the stool—and she reached for the lock, standing so close to the door her nose almost brushed it when she turned. Had the key raised but not inserted into the lock when his hand closed around her wrist.
Her first reaction was to reach back with her free hand and claw at his face. A year ago, it would’ve made an impression, too—long, French-tipped fingernails—but you didn’t work on cars with nails like that. Now her fingers slid harmlessly over his cheek. So she twisted and kicked at his knee, using her heel instead of the front of her foot. Caught him on the side of his knee, so his leg buckled, and for a moment he was off balance and she thought she’d get free. He didn’t lose his hold on her wrist, though, used it instead to jerk her forward and spin her around and then she felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and her face hit the door and she knew it was going to get very bad, very fast.
8
__________
The sign on the door said CLOSED, and there were no lights on in the office. Frank was early, too. So had she forgotten, or was she planning to come back? It was only five twenty. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the body shop with two full grocery bags in his hands and wondered what the hell he should do.
She didn’t seem like the type to forget. Too put together and in control for that. Things had gotten a little hectic there, with the gray-haired guy rushing everybody, and it was possible. She’d said six, though, and that was a while off, so maybe he should just wait.
He set the bags down by the front door and looked around, wondering what Nora Stafford drove. The only car parked on this side of the street was a black Dodge Charger a block away. No cars in the handful of parking spaces in front of t
he shop. Maybe she’d gone out on another tow. He’d check to see if the truck was still parked behind the shop. If not, he’d wait. If so . . . maybe wait a little less.
Leaving the groceries where they were, he walked around the building and into the back parking lot. There was a wire security fence around the lot to protect the towed vehicles, but the gate was open, suggesting she hadn’t left for the day. He went through the gate and into the parking lot and saw the tow truck parked there, his battered Jeep behind it. Okay, she wasn’t out on a tow. But the gate wasn’t locked, either. So where the hell had she gone?
At first, he thought he’d imagined the cry. Short and muffled, not a scream but a mild sound of outrage, or maybe pain. He tilted his head and listened and heard nothing but silence. Took a few steps toward the back door. Still no sounds, but now he could see light on the other side of the door. Then something fell inside, a clang of metal on concrete.
He saw them as soon as he opened the door. A tall man with his back to Frank, shoving Nora Stafford against a toolbox on the far wall. He had her arm twisted behind her back and his other hand covered her mouth while he used his weight to keep her pinned against that toolbox and spoke in a low voice. Frank probably could have made out the words if he’d tried, but he was already moving, crossing the concrete floor fast and quiet, sidestepping enough to keep himself positioned behind the tall man’s back, out of his line of sight.
It was maybe fifty feet from the back door to where they stood, and Frank made about forty of it before the guy heard him or sensed the motion. He twisted his head, saw Frank coming at him, and shoved Nora Stafford away. A small pile of bolts and a socket wrench hit the floor with her, bouncing off the concrete in a jingle of metal as the tall man reached under his jacket and brought a gun up.
For his thirteenth birthday, Frank Temple’s father gave him a musty hardbound book with a blue cover. Kill or Get Killed, the title. A close-quarters combat text. His grandfather’s book, then his father’s, now Frank’s. Read it, his father told him. All of it. Frank had. Two weeks later, his father challenged him to try to take a gun out of his hand. The first of many lessons.
The gun facing him now was a 9 mm automatic, and the man who held it was used to the sight of a gun having some stopping power on its own, because he kept lifting it, passing over Frank’s body and aiming for his face. He wasn’t planning to shoot. Frank knew that as he closed the rest of the distance between them. Put a gun in the face of most people, they’ll stop moving. That was the expectation. The reality was going to be a little different.
Frank’s first strike, delivered a quarter of a second before the next, was with the edge of his left hand on the wrist that held the gun. He moved his head down and to the right as he did it, and then the gun was pointing harmlessly away from him. The second strike was really two at the same time—he hit the tall man’s chin with the heel of his right hand while he brought his right knee up and into the groin. It was a simple move, using the momentum he already had from his forward rush, but it was effective. He actually missed with his knee, hit on the inside of the man’s thigh instead of the groin, but since the guy’s head had already snapped back the blow was enough to keep him going. He hit the same toolbox that he’d pinned Nora Stafford against, and now Frank caught the man’s wrist with his left hand and slammed it into the metal edge of the toolbox. The gun came free and bounced away. Frank ignored it, got his hand behind the other man’s neck while he released his wrist and then slammed him forward, using his leg to upend him and spill him onto the floor.
The guy took the fall well, rolled back onto his feet and lunged upward just in time to be greeted with the socket wrench Frank had recovered from the floor. He laced it downward with an easy stroke, about fifty percent of his strength going into the blow, but it was plenty. Caught the guy right across the back of his skull and dropped him back onto the floor.
It should have been done, but Frank was caught by the tide now, unsatisfied with just how damn easy this had been, wanted to grab that gun off the floor and put it to the bastard’s knee and blow a cloud of blood and bone onto the concrete. He went for the gun, saw it wasn’t on the floor, and looked up to see Nora Stafford standing with the weapon in her hand. Her eyes moved from Frank to the man at his feet, and then she held the gun out.
“Here.”
It was a Glock, no safety to remove, just squeeze that trigger and watch the thing kill. Frank knew the gun well. By the time it touched his palm, though, the flush of rage was gone, a cool calm sliding back into its place. He slipped the Glock into his waistband, cast one glance at the unconscious man on the floor, and then turned back to Nora Stafford.
“It would seem,” he said, “that you should probably call the police.”
Frank was worried about her until she came back out of the office. Was she going to fall apart, get hysterical, give him another problem to deal with before the cops showed? Then she stepped back into the room and stared at the tall son of a bitch stretched out on the concrete and he knew she was fine. The look was laden with anger and disgust, not fear.
“You’re early,” she told Frank.
He nodded. “Didn’t want my milk to spoil.”
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Wouldn’t want that, no. Thanks for the help. He just walked right in here . . .”
“You don’t know him?”
“No. He came in this afternoon and asked about the Lexus.”
Frank tilted his head. “Car that I hit?”
“You got it.”
He blew out a long sigh as a siren began to close on the body shop and looked to the side, where the partially disassembled Lexus stood.
“That guy was all wrong. Shit, I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier. Had a bad sense about him, but I was trying to ignore it. Figured it had nothing to do with me.”
That was total bullshit—Frank’s original sense about the guy was a personal thing indeed, but he didn’t see what would be gained from explaining that to Nora.
“I had the same sense, and told myself the same thing,” she said, “but I didn’t count on this.”
She was holding her right wrist with her left hand, rubbing it gently, and Frank saw for the first time the dark red streaks left on her skin, left by a firm and no doubt painful grasp.
“You okay?” he said.
“Fine.” She dropped her arm as if embarrassed to have her pain noted.
“What did he want?” Frank gestured at the unconscious man with his toe.
“To know where your buddy in the Lexus went.”
“No kidding?” Frank looked at the guy on the floor. He’d arrived pretty damn fast after the car was left at Stafford’s Collision and Custom. And if he didn’t know where Dave O’Connor had gone, then how had he found the Lexus?
Frank slid the Glock out of his waistband and looked at it. Good gun, not uncommon, but the sort of thing preferred by people who knew what they were doing. The guy he’d taken it from hadn’t been that bad, either. Just hadn’t expected Frank to be any good, that was the difference. The way he’d shoved Nora past him and cleared the gun in one swift, easy motion . . . he’d been around.
“He told me the guy’s name was Vaughn,” Nora said.
“What?”
“Dave O’Connor, right? That’s what he told us his name was. This guy, he said the person driving the Lexus was named Vaughn.”
“You see a driver’s license, any sort of ID?”
She shook her head, and he saw a spark of irritation in her eyes. Maybe at him for asking, maybe at herself for not getting it.
“Anything in the car?” Frank asked, but the sirens were in the parking lot outside, and Nora walked away from him, toward the door. The guy on the floor was starting to come back, rolling his right foot a little, eyes still closed, left side of his face pressed to the cold stone.
The cop came in with Nora, and Frank was surprised to see it was just one guy. About forty, ruddy faced, thick fingers. He was s
peaking into the microphone near his collarbone as he entered, reporting his position and situation, casting a scowl at the sight of the body on the floor. When he was done talking into his radio, he withdrew a plastic bag from his hip pocket and reached out to Frank.
“Gimme the gun.” His badge said MOWERY.
Frank dropped the gun in the bag, and Mowery sealed the plastic lock and jammed the gun, bag and all, into his belt. He nodded at the man at his feet.
“His gun.”
“That’s right.”
“You took it from him.”
“Uh-huh.”
“After he pulled it.”
“Yeah.”
Mowery studied Frank as if he weren’t sure he believed it. “What’d you hit him with?”
“Hands, at first. Then a wrench.”
“That seemed like a wise idea to you? Swinging on a man with a gun?”
“It worked.”
“Hmm.” Mowery squatted beside the tall man, whose eyes had fluttered open, leaving him staring blearily across the floor. “Looks like he’s ’bout ready to rejoin the world. Best that he do that with his hands cuffed, don’t you think?”
“Nobody else coming?” Frank said.
Mowery gave him a sour look. “We got a lot of county and few cars to cover it right now, son. You really think I need to bring all of them off the roads, help me deal with this? Seems to me it isn’t that difficult a situation.”
Should’ve been here five minutes ago, Frank thought. Like to see you come across that room when he showed the gun.
Mowery got the cuffs off his belt and fastened the man’s hands behind his back. The prisoner was fully conscious by the time the second cuff snapped shut, twisting his head to try to look back at Mowery. The movement didn’t work so well; he made a soft grunt that seemed driven more by nausea than pain and laid his cheek back on the concrete.
“I hit him pretty well,” Frank said. “Might have a concussion. Maybe need an ambulance.”
Envy the Night Page 6