A Demon in Waiting (Crimson Romance) (22 page)

“You’d better do more than just try to stay off my property, Mr. Vogel,” she hissed, eyes going to narrow slits and voice dropping about half an octave.

Matt thought the woman seemed extremely uptight and that he could probably fix that little problem for her with a couple of hours and a soft bed. Hell, he could probably do without the bed. It’d been a long time. He was a big guy. They could probably do it standing with no sweat off his back. He thought she looked like a screamer and chuckled at the thought.

“Mr. Vogel?” she pressed, looking annoyed now.

“Hmm?”

“Do we have an understanding?”

“Oh. Sure thing,” he said, smiling wider so his dimples showed.

She didn’t look convinced, but unclenched her jaw and unfolded her arms all the same. “I imagine I don’t need to show you the way out, then.”

“No, ma’am. I can find my way to the road plenty by myself.”

“Have at it then.”

“All right,” Matt said in a singsong voice, crossing through the open doors into the late-day sunshine and clasping his large hands behind his back. “Just holler if you fall again and need some help getting up,” he called back, chuckling while his new quarry fumed.

• • •

Matt really knew how to clear a room. The following Monday afternoon, Matt paid a visit to his friend Chad at E.A. Dillard’s Electronics on Virginia Road — E.A. Dillard’s: Serving Northern Chowan County, North Carolina, with overpriced television and radio repairs since 1958. There were two old ladies milling around gasping about how thin the new LCD televisions were. “Those are available on our payment plan, ladies. Perfect for the fixed budget,” Chad said cheerfully as Matt carefully edged his large body through the glass door. At six feet five inches tall and two hundred ten pounds, Matt had to be careful with nearly everything he did.

“Jesus Christ, Matt!” Chad coughed, pulling the collar of his undershirt up through the top of his plaid button-up and covering his nose with the cotton fabric. “You couldn’t have gone home to shower before you came here? Why should I ever go to the fishery when you bring the fishery to me?” The two little old blue-hairs hustled by the counter covering their noses with lacy handkerchiefs and let themselves out into the parking lot. “Damnit,” Chad mumbled. “I’ve been sweet-talking those window-shopping spinsters for two months now.” Matt shrugged and smirked. “Sorry, I was in a hurry. If you didn’t sneak out before your posted closing time every day I would have waited.”

Suitably chastised, Chad dropped the fabric from his face and opted to breathe through his mouth. “What’s up?”

“Do you have a satellite dish installation order for Welch Road?”

Chad furrowed his brow. “Uh, why?”

“Just look it up, will you?”

Chad sighed and jiggled his mouse to wake up his dinosaur of a computer and punched some keys. A couple of minutes later he confirmed. “Yep. Order was put in a couple of weeks ago.”

“By who?”

Chad gave Matt a look of suspicion, twisting his mouth to the side and raising both brows. “What’s it to you?”

“Stop playing coy, Chad. HIPAA doesn’t apply to satellite dish installers.”

Chad stared a little longer and then shrugged. “Fine.” Chad did some scrolling with his mouse. “A woman named Nora Fredrickson. It was a rush order. Said she needed Internet as soon as possible for her business.”

Nora
, Matt pondered, turning the name over and over in his mind. “What kind of business?”

“Don’t know. I just arrange to install the dishes. The satellite company does all the finance checking. Folks can’t even pay their bills here because we’re not authorized to receive the money.”

“Two weeks seems like a long time to wait for a rush order, huh?” Matt hooked his thumbs into his back pockets and assessed the “Nearly New!” collection of drip coffeemakers. Who would buy those things? The plastic that been white when new was yellow and the decanters were crazed. Obviously Chad oversold the condition of his appliances a smidge.

“It’ll be more like three weeks when all is said and done. Patricia is still out with the baby and the only time I get to do installations lately is after lunch. Don’t nobody come by then. They all just wait until five-fifteen for when I’m fixin’ to lock the damn door.”

Matt studied his old friend in silence for a moment, waiting for some sign that the guy was pulling his leg, but knowing he wouldn’t get it. In Chad’s mind, he was the sun and everyone else was just rocks orbiting around him. “You know, there’s a good chance that other people have jobs too, Chad. They’re doing you a favor by coming all the way out here to the goddamned sticks to fix their vacuums and shit. They could go to Elizabeth City for cheaper, probably, but they bring their business here because the place has been open so long. The least you can do is not snap their necks off in the door.”

“That sounds a lot like a lecture, man. You feelin’ all right? You need a massage or something? I know a place in Greenville where … ”

Matt put up his hands. “Don’t even say it. I’m probably exposing myself to any number of itch-inducing pathogens just by sharing air space with you right now.”

Chad gave an “if you say so” shrug and emerged from behind the counter to straighten the tags on the used LCD televisions. “So what’s your interest in the Fredrickson lady?”

Matt leaned against a nearby discontinued model deep freezer, hearing the lid groan slightly from his applied weight, and then thought better of it. “Oh, nothing. She lives on that old Greene parcel that me and Sissy, and half the damn county probably, hunt on sometimes.”

Chad stopped his rearrangement of the price tags and turned abruptly to look at his curious friend. “I thought that address seemed familiar. She moved into that rickety old house? I thought that thing got condemned.”

“Guess not. I mean, I didn’t go inside the house. I only saw the barn and she was cleaning stuff out. She mentioned her dish hadn’t been installed, so I figured I’d see if you were bunging up your schedule again.”

Chad’s jaw dropped in mock disbelief. “I resent that. I run a tight ship here. I’ve never missed an appointment.”

Matt stared at him blankly.

“Okay. Maybe just that one time.”

Matt gave a slow blink.

“Okay, look — I try to only miss one appointment a week. You know how it is, man. Shit happens.”

“Shit’s going to be happening at other repair shops unless you get your act together. Hope you know when my air conditioner broke last week I took it to the place in Elizabeth City.” Matt helped himself to one of the starlite mints in the charity solicitation display on the counter and dropped a quarter into the attached jar.

Chad approached, but Matt predicted the oncoming shove he was likely to offer and staved him off by holding his arm out in front of him. That usually did the trick. Matt was wearing a few fish scales on his sleeves as evidence of his day’s work. Chad held back.

“That’s fucked up. If my friends aren’t loyal, why should everyone else be?”

Matt shrugged his broad shoulders aloofly and balled the plastic wrapping from the mint into a tiny spherical speck. “I was loyal until I brought that big-ass window unit here in the back of my truck in the pouring rain at four o’clock and you’d decided to close early.”

“Bah! It’s fall. You don’t need air conditioning anyway.”

“Lie.”

An older model sedan pulled into the gravel lot and parked at an awkward angle between Chad’s SUV and Matt’s truck. They could just barely see the halo of white hair over the steering wheel or the head it belonged to. “Old lady,” Chad announced, perking up. “You need to clear out of here so I can work some magic. Your smell is bad for business.”

“Fine,” Matt said, lumbering toward the staff-only entrance behind the counter. He put one hand on the knob and waited for Chad to make eye contact with him. The old lady had one foot out of her car and had put the end of her cane against the gravel.

“What is it, man? Come on, get the hell out of here!”

“Tell me when you’re going to install the dish.”

“Why? What’s it to you?”

“Information is valuable. I may be able to use it to my advantage.”

“In exchange for what?”

“None of your business.” He jutted his chin toward the parking lot, a nod to the woman who was then hitching her giant pleather purse onto her bony shoulder.

Chad blew out a breath and scratched his head. “Uh, I dunno. Might be able to get Patricia to come watch the shop and bring the baby with her. You know how awkward that shit is, though.”

Matt closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Not my problem. I know the divorce isn’t final yet, but she does own half the shop so you’re going to have to deal with her. When are you going to install the dish?”

“God, why am I even friends with you? You’re a jackass.”

“Because I used to keep people from kicking your ass in high school.”

The old woman slammed her car door and then paused to examine the buttons on her key fob.

“Oh yeah … ”

“The dish?”

“I’ll do it tonight, I guess. Hope it doesn’t get dark before I have a chance to get out there.” The woman found the correct button and the car let out an anemic “beep!” as the doors locked.

“Good. I’ll hold you to it.” Matt pushed the door open and was just about to step through it when Chad called after him, “Hey! Is she cute?”

Matt shook his head, and as the door closed behind him he responded, “Not even a little bit. And way too smart for you, bud.”

• • •

Matt typically beat his sister home from work, and that day was no exception. He worked for the local fishery hauling in nets filled with flounder, trout, herring, and spot croakers from the Chowan River. He went to work before dawn, but was usually off for the day by two or so, which gave him plenty of daylight hours to ride his motorcycle and do maintenance on his thirty-year-old ranch house. The job was grueling and physically demanding, but Matt liked that he didn’t have to think too much while doing it. He did enough thinking at home, usually while showering the stink of fish off himself. That’s why his father had liked it, too.

He parked his truck next to the deck, leaving his lonely bike unaccompanied under the carport for the time being. Not that his sister Karen’s little coupe was much company, pathetic excuse for a vehicle it was. It wasn’t much heavier than a paperweight because it didn’t have an air conditioner, but it fit Karen’s meager budget and got excellent gas mileage. That car was the only thing Karen really had to pay for. Matt didn’t have to heart to make her chip in on household bills just yet, although he had recently drawn the line and given up on paying her exorbitant data charges on her cell phone. What the hell was she downloading all day, anyway?

Matt at age thirty-four had essentially been a single parent for the past ten years. His parents had died in a nighttime car accident on Highway 32 caused by a deer crossing the road. The driver of the truck approaching from the other direction said they didn’t have any good options. They could either hit the deer and lose control of the vehicle; swerve into oncoming traffic; or steer onto the narrow shoulder to the right of their lane. His dad chose the shoulder, but the jerk of the steering wheel made the tires lose traction on the rain-slick road and caused the car to fishtail toward the deep ditch. His dad hit the brakes to preempt their impact with the approaching guardrail, but the car not only drove into it, but over it. Fortunately, Karen, ten at the time, had been at summer camp and not in the car.

Their aunts and grandparents offered to take Karen in and the young man, living in a trailer near the fishery at the time, honestly considered letting them take her. Back then, Matt thought he was too young to be a parent, and resented the idea of spending a good part of his youth coddling a depressed preadolescent. In the end, Matt’s sense of fairness won out. Their parents hadn’t updated their will after Karen’s surprise birth and had left everything to their only child at the time. Matt knew that if they had anticipated an untimely departure that they would divided their assets fairly between the two. So, Matt moved back into his childhood home with his sister and thanked God regularly that she could get herself onto the school bus in the mornings without his assistance.

Living with his sister (he avoided saying that he “raised” her) had been a fairly easy chore until she turned sixteen and wanted to date. For the first five years of their living arrangement Matt didn’t date at all, which had been like going from a pack-a-day smoking habit to quitting cold turkey. Then he started to get, well, creative. A man had needs, so he had mastered the art of standing coitus in short order. During one particular camping trip with his girlfriend of the moment, who was sharing a tent with Karen and one of her friends, he and his lover took a nice half-mile hike into the woods in order to better “commune” with nature. Karen suspected nothing.

A few weeks after turning sixteen, Karen had asked her big brother to take her to the gynecologist so that she could be put on birth control. Matt had nearly choked on his beer at the out-of-the-blue request. All that time he had no idea his dorky kid sister had any interest whatsoever in the opposite sex. She still had teddy bears on her bed, for Christ sake. The look on her face when he’d said as much quickly pacified him, and as he had no interest in being an uncle in addition to a stand-in dad at the moment, he made an appointment for the very next week.

As adults, they studiously avoided any discussion whatsoever about their sex lives and neither ever brought an overnight date home. Karen had tried once and Matt successfully scared the fear of God into the guy over the breakfast table the next morning. He didn’t even have to say a word: he just kept staring at the little twerp over the top of his coffee mug, having been annoyed at the giggling from his sister’s room that had kept him awake for much of the previous night.

Matt stripped out of his smelly clothes and piled it all in the washer with a scoop of triple-action detergent. While the geriatric machine filled, he locked himself in the master bathroom with a wide-toothed comb and mound of Karen’s gel to tame his hair, thinking he should just cut the shit off.