I stared at them, their eyes hopeful and frightened, like children. The anger left me and I shook my head wearily. “People like this don’t pay what they owe other people, Becky.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I make my living off people like this.” I ran my hands through my hair. “Becky, I need to talk to you a minute.” I pulled her over so that we were standing under the protective arms of Bob the Bear.
“What are we going to do, Ruddy?” I had never seen Becky so frightened. I put an arm on her shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay, Becky. I’ll talk to Milton. He’ll give me the money and take a note on the house.”
She nodded. “I’ll pay it back, Ruddy, I swear—”
“I know, of course you will,” I interrupted. “I’m not worried about that. There’s just one condition.”
She searched my eyes. “Ruddy, no.”
I nodded. “I want Kermit out of here. He’s been nothing but trouble for us, can’t you see? This whole thing has been a disaster. He’s just using us for the credit card account. He wants his third.”
“No, he loves me,” Becky whispered in a tiny voice.
“Becky, you don’t have to settle for someone like Kermit!”
She made her calculation, standing there, and then straightened, pulling back from my arms. “No, Ruddy. If that’s the condition, then no deal.”
She turned from me and strode away, heading back into the kitchen to be with Kermit. I watched her go with my mouth open.
“She sort of called your bluff there, didn’t she?” Alan’s dry voice asked.
I walked out into the street so that Alan and I could talk. “I wasn’t bluffing.”
“Oh, really. So you’re just going to let the Black Bear go out of business, then?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what I was going to do.
Monday morning I was awake before dawn, agitatedly pulling on clothes and scooping up the court papers for Einstein Croft. Jake, afraid I’d drag him out for a walk at that unholy hour, wouldn’t even look at me as I headed out the door. Time to earn my fifty bucks.
Alan came awake on the highway. “We’re headed to East Jordan,” he noted.
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t we go up to Traverse City and find Wexler?”
“I think Wexler is doing a pretty good job of finding us. Besides, what do you want to do, just sit and watch him all day?”
“See what he’s up to,” Alan agreed.
“Well, that sounds like a complete waste of time to me. Besides—and this may be difficult for you to comprehend—but occasionally I involve myself with things that have nothing to do with you.”
“Ah, the good mood you were in all weekend continues to make its presence felt,” Alan observed.
He had no idea. I wanted to punch somebody. I wanted to punch him. I felt as if my skin itched, as if I was sitting on the bench while my team lost the game.
The gray overcast sky became gradually lighter, which is how dawn presents itself in a northern Michigan spring. I turned off my headlights and automatically twitched my fingers toward the repo switch, but I didn’t flip it—there was no point. I stopped twenty yards away from Einstein Croft’s new gate, chewing on my lip.
“So now what, we wait for him to come out and go to work?” Alan inquired.
“That’s the idea.”
“And what, follow him? How do you get him to pull over so you can serve him the papers?”
“I don’t know.”
“They probably aren’t going to let you back on the PlasMerc lot.”
“Probably not.”
“So how is this going to work?”
A light popped on in Einstein’s house. He was awake.
“You can’t very well serve him from a moving truck,” Alan argued. “He’s moving from behind the fence at his house to the fence at the factory.”
I put my truck into gear. “Good point.” I punched the accelerator.
“What are we doing?” Alan shouted.
“Improving my mood!”
I hit the fence full force with the front bumper of my truck and it popped right off the hinges. I charged up the steep driveway, rocking to a stop behind Einstein’s truck.
I got out, tasting blood in my mouth. I must have kissed the steering wheel.
“Are you out of your mind?” Alan asked.
I walked up the steps toward Einstein’s front door, which flew open. He charged out in his bathrobe, holding his rifle out in front of him. His face was full of fury and he pointed the gun at me and I lunged forward and grabbed the thing, twisting it up and to the side, pulling it from his grasp. I spun and threw the rifle over by where Doris lived. Einstein, his expression black, swung his fist at my face. I ducked the punch, then stepped in and slugged him in the chest. He sat down.
“Good morning, Mr. Croft.” I took the court summons and stuffed it in the pocket of his bathrobe. “You’ve been served.”
He was still sitting there as I backed my pickup down the steep driveway, over the broken gate, and out into the street.
“Can you do that?” Alan demanded.
“Did it.”
“Destroy property? Hit him?”
“Did you happen to notice the rifle he was pointing at my head, Alan?”
“I think maybe you’re upset about what is happening at the Black Bear and decided to take out your anger on Einstein Croft.”
“And I think I’m sick to death of your psychotherapy.”
* * *
Milt wasn’t particularly pleased to hear that the fence had become defective during my service of Einstein Croft. “I’ll call the sheriff, see if the customer filed a complaint,” he told me. “Also, I see in the paper this morning that the cosigner died a couple days ago.”
“Einstein’s father?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what this means for the account, I’ll call the bank today and ask. Maybe if there’s an estate, they’ll just sue that and won’t bother with writ of replevin.”
“So you punch the guy out a couple of days after his father died,” Alan translated for me after we left Milt’s office.
“Well I didn’t know that at the time,” I replied peevishly. “Otherwise I would have let him shoot me.”
My afternoon consisted of tailing a guy from his house to the hardware store and driving off in his pickup when he went inside. I wrote up the recovery and called Milt with a certain listlessness—it seemed like somehow the joy had gone out of stealing cars.
I perked up when it occurred to me I was near enough to East Jordan to see Katie. I called her at work and asked her out to dinner, and when she came to the door in a pair of jeans and a dark red sweater I realized that Alan was asleep and grabbed her for a kiss I’d been storing up for forty-eight hours.
“Whoa!” she said with a laugh. “I take it you’re glad to see me!”
During dinner in Charlevoix, at the Grey Gables where the whitefish was much better than the Black Bear’s, I decided nothing I had ever accomplished in my life was as important as making Katie Lottner smile. I felt better than if I’d crashed into a thousand fences. We lingered over coffee and dessert until the hostess turned up the lights so the cleaning crew could close up.
“Where to?” I asked as I slid behind the wheel of my truck.
Katie was giving me a mischievous grin. “Nathan and my mom are still out of town,” she informed me.
And Alan was still asleep.
“Good,” I said, starting the truck. She slid over next to me like a high school date and I prayed my thumping heart wouldn’t wake up her father.
As I hit the East Jordan city limits a patrol car swung out from behind me and then its flashing lights went on. I groaned aloud.
“Were you speeding?” Katie asked.
“Well … yeah,” I admitted. She laughed because she knew exactly why I had been in such a hurry.
I was ready for a confrontation with Deputy Timms,
if necessary, but the officer was someone I’d never seen before. He didn’t pull out his ticket book. “Mr. McCann?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Sheriff Strickland would like to speak to you. Would you step over to my patrol unit, please?”
The deputy used a cell phone to call the sheriff, which disappointed me—I’d sort of expected that he would use the radio. He handed the phone to me and I awkwardly held it to my ear.
“I’ve been looking for you all evening, where have you been?” Strickland asked without preamble.
“Charlevoix, sir. We went out to dinner.”
“We. Who’s we?”
“Katie Lottner, sir,” I told him, though I really didn’t want to.
There was a long pause. “Put her on a minute,” he instructed.
Just great. “He wants to talk to you,” I told her, holding out the phone.
“To me?” Katie took the phone. “Sheriff?” She listened, nodding. “Yes, sir. All evening. Starting at I’d say seven. Yes, sir. The entire time. Okay.”
She handed the phone back, eyes puzzled.
I’d used the time she’d been talking to Strickland to formulate a speech about how I could date anyone I wanted—a fast speech, due to her mother being out of town and Alan still asleep—but the sheriff surprised me.
“I need you to come to your house, Mr. McCann,” he said. It didn’t sound like a request.
“Um, can’t we do this tomorrow, Sheriff?” I asked, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice.
“’Fraid not, son.”
“But why?”
“Ruddy, there’s been a homicide in your living room. Occurred around nine o’clock this evening. I’m looking at a male, late twenties, shot in the head. I need you to come down here, help us identify him and figure out what happened.”
I gripped the phone, sucking in a deep breath.
Jimmy.
26
Free and Clear
The deputy gave Katie a ride back home and I drove through the black night toward Kalkaska, my chest feeling as if I held my breath the whole way. “Alan! Alan!” I kept shouting, trying to wake him up. I had never felt so alone in my life. I reached for my own cell phone, wanting to call my sister, anybody, but I couldn’t get a signal and in a fit of irrational rage I chucked the thing out my window. I can’t be the only person in the world who has ever done that.
My house was a circus of police tape and patrol cars. Strickland met me at the end of my sidewalk.
“Is it Jimmy?” I blurted.
He shook his head. “I don’t know who it is.”
I started to move forward, but he stopped me with a firm hand. “I’m going to take you into your house. You are to touch nothing, understand me, Ruddy? We walk in on the plastic. You look at the victim. We come back out. Got it?”
I nodded.
“You up to this, son?” he asked more softly.
I swallowed. “Yeah.” But I wasn’t, not if someone had killed Jimmy.
I followed Strickland into my house. I numbly registered broken glass on the carpet before I saw the sprawled body, his face turned away from me, the back of his head a bloody mess.
“Come over here.” Strickland gripped my arm and moved me carefully to where I could see the face. “Know who this is?”
He was a large man, muscular, a tattoo of some kind reaching blue tendrils from inside his shirt to the base of his neck. I shook my head.
“No. I’ve never seen him before.” My relief was so overwhelming I felt tears collecting in my eyes. I hastily raised a trembling hand and wiped them away. If I lost Jimmy I didn’t know what I would do.
Strickland frowned at me in concern. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I just … I thought it might be Jimmy Growe. He’s staying with me in the upstairs unit.” I let out a breath.
“I should talk to him, too, then. Know how I can get in touch with him?”
“No, not at the moment.” I was seized with another alarming thought. “What about my dog? Did you see my dog? He was in the house.”
“Hold.” Strickland snapped a radio off his belt and held it to his face. “Strickland here. Anyone have eyes on a dog?”
The silence gave me my answer even before someone came back and told the sheriff no sir, didn’t see any dog.
“Jake?” I shouted. Strickland grunted in feeble protest as I stepped off the plastic and went to my bedroom. The door was open and there, lying completely still, was my dog, sprawled motionless on the bed where he was never allowed.
I almost didn’t want to look at him. In the dim light from the hall, his eyes were open and he didn’t seem to be breathing. Why would Drake kill my dog? What kind of bastard kills a man’s dog?
“Oh, Jake,” I said softly. Strickland’s shadow filled the doorway behind me. “Jake, Jakey” I whispered. I put my hand on him. He was still warm.
His eyes looked at me.
“Jake? Jake!”
He feebly wagged his tail. I put my face to his neck, laughing into his fur. Probably he figured that with Drake breaking in and gunshots going off and the cops overrunning the place, all rules were out the window and he could sleep on the bed as long as he was quiet. “You crazy mutt. What kind of watchdog are you? There must be twenty people here.”
Jake’s look indicated I wasn’t paying him enough to be a watchdog.
“Come on, Jake,” I ordered. With a world-weary sigh, Jake eased off the bed and followed me into the living room.
Strickland escorted me back outside. “Your back window is broken and the back door was open. From the position of the body, it looks like he was standing there, looking out your front window at something, maybe a car in the street. We pulled a slug out of your paneling; that’s where it wound up after exiting.” Strickland was eyeing me carefully, seeing how I processed what he was telling me. I nodded, but my thoughts were on Jimmy. He was probably out doing something with some female.
“Pretty big fellow,” Strickland observed.
“Yeah.”
“The light on behind him, someone standing out here with a deer rifle would probably think it was you.” We looked at each other. “Anybody got reason to want to put a bullet in you, Ruddy?”
I evaded the question, jamming my hands in my pockets and turning back to my house. “I think you’ll find out that guy’s name is Drake. I don’t know his first name. He’s from Detroit. You look around, you’ll probably come across his car parked nearby.”
Strickland nodded. “I’ve got someone doing that right now. Who is this Drake person to you?”
I told him only that a business deal had gone south and that a man who claimed I owed him money had said he was going to come up to Kalkaska and talk about it.
“So he broke into your house?”
“He kind of implied it was going to be that sort of talk.”
Strickland didn’t like any of it—I had a feeling I would soon be back to “Mr. McCann.” I felt Alan come awake, making a startled noise when he saw to whom I was talking.
“You got anything else to say?” the sheriff asked.
“No, sir. This guy Drake threatened me and obviously came up here to have it out. He broke into my house and someone shot him from the street. But it wasn’t me, I was out with Katie Lottner.” There, now Alan knew everything.
“And that’s it.”
“Well…” I took a breath. “When you do ballistics on that rifle slug, you might compare it to what you took out of Alan Lottner’s body, see if they came from the same gun.”
“Ruddy!” Alan exclaimed, shocked.
Strickland stared at me. “What in God’s name are you implying?”
“It’s just a hunch, sir.”
“A hunch.”
“Yessir.”
Strickland leaned over and spat his toothpick out onto the grass. “Like your dream. Same thing.”
“Yessir.”
He mournfully shook his head. “Move along, McCann. My office will let you kno
w when you can get back into your house. Probably tomorrow.”
Jimmy and I spent the next two nights on cots in the back room of the Black Bear, Jake happily sleeping on the floor between us.
When we were kids, Becky and I thought sleeping in the bar was a special treat, and would stay up half the night telling spooky stories to each other. I was never scared, though, because I felt sure that Bob the Bear would protect us. Now, though, I was being hunted by Franklin Wexler—it was up to me to provide protection for everybody else.
Two nights twisting and thrashing on a rickety steel-springed cot with a thin, almost prison-issue mattress should have played havoc with my back, but I felt remarkably pain-free each morning.
“Yoga,” Alan said simply when I remarked on it.
“Yoga,” I repeated. “Alan, we talked about this.”
“What do you expect me to do when you’re asleep?”
“I expect you to lie there.”
“So stretching and exercising so you don’t wind up paralyzed from a night on that hideous contraption you call a cot is against the rules?”
“Doing anything is against the rules. What if Jimmy saw me doing yoga?”
“What if he did?”
“People like me don’t do yoga,” I snapped.
I was back to being the most exciting attraction in town. Everyone wanted to ask me who Drake was, why he broke into my house, and why he got shot. “I can’t talk about it while there’s a police investigation going on,” I said glumly. This was like trying to calm a crowd by setting fire to it: My lack of comment galvanized every gossip in town.
“They’re saying Kermit shot him, to protect me,” Becky told me on Friday.
“Maybe he did,” I speculated. Kermit was standing there, trying to figure out if he should look proud over this. Alan was asleep.
“What was the damage today?” I asked. With every mail delivery, more bounces arrived, and we had no new business to replace it.
“Just eight hundred,” Becky responded faintly.
“I’m going to go over and talk to Milt in a little while. I’ll borrow what, fifteen thousand?”
Becky’s eyes were sorrowful as she nodded.
Kermit cleared his throat. “I looked into new business, but we’re not likely to find someone to let us decimate the funds like that.”
The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man Page 26