Envy the Night (6 page)

“I hope I’m in the right place,” the guy said. “Friend of mine called and asked me to grab some things out of his car. I think he left it here . . .”

“What’s his name?”

The guy just smiled at her. Patient, as if she’d asked a worthless question but he was willing to ignore it.

“The car’s a Lexus SUV.”

“I didn’t ask for the car’s description. I asked for the guy’s name.”

“Vaughn,” the guy said. There was a hitch in his voice, though, like a game show contestant who second-guessed his answer at the last minute.

The longer he stood in the office, the more space he seemed to fill. She had trouble meeting his eyes as she shook her head.

“I’m sorry. Nobody named Vaughn has a car in here.”

“I’m rather certain he does. Perhaps there’s been some confusion over the name.”

“If there has been, then the car’s owner will need to come in and explain that to me. I’m certainly not allowed to release personal effects from a vehicle, sir.”

“How about we give him a call, together? You can ask . . .”

Dave O’Connor had left no phone number—or any other form of contact information—but even if he had, Nora wouldn’t have called. O’Connor had been weird enough, but this guy was almost threatening.

“No,” she said. “If the car’s owner—whose name is not Vaughn—calls me and explains this, then we’ll see how we can proceed. Until then, I’m afraid not.”

The guy’s eyes darkened and he seemed ready to object when the office door opened and Jerry ambled in, a socket wrench in one hand. He gave Nora and the guy a casual glance and then knelt in front of the little refrigerator she kept in the office, pulled out a can of Dr Pepper, and cracked it open before walking back into the shop. The visitor watched him go.

“It sounds to me like you might have the wrong body shop,” Nora said.

For a long moment he didn’t answer, just stared at the door Jerry had walked through as if it were something that called for real study. Then he nodded.

“Of course. That must be it. Apologies.”

He gave her a mock bow, lifting his hand to his forehead, then opened the front door and walked back into the parking lot. She stood up and went to the window in time to see him climb in the passenger side of a black sedan. That was why he’d left the engine running—he wasn’t alone, wasn’t driving. She got a clear look at the car as it pulled out to the street, a black Dodge Charger, one of the newer models. She’d made the mistake of complimenting the look, only to have Jerry ridicule her.
Nora, it’s a
four-door.
That ain’t a Charger, it’s a joke.

She couldn’t read the license plate, but the colors told her it was from out of state. Wait, those colors were familiar. A smear of orange in the middle of a white plate with some green mixed in. She’d just seen that on the Lexus. Florida.

It wasn’t five yet, but she turned the lock on the front door as she stood there gazing out the window. The odd feeling that had convinced her to get Dave O’Connor out of her shop and back on the road without any of the normal procedures had just returned, only this guy with the belt buckle made it swell to the edge of fear. He’d called him Vaughn. She had no proof that the Lexus driver’s name was actually Dave O’Connor. All that cash, the hurry he was in, the gun Frank had seen, none of it suggested anything good. Add a fake name to the mix, though, and she was beginning to feel stupid. She’d gone for the money despite all the obvious objections, let the guy dictate the situation. It wasn’t easy to imagine her father handling this in the same way.

Nora walked out of the office and back into the shop, watched Jerry working on the Lexus. The car was empty. Dave O’Connor had cleared all his things out when he left, including that handgun in the glove compartment. So he hadn’t called someone to come pick anything up.

“Jerry,” she said, “can you give me a minute?”

She wanted to talk to him, explain the situation and ask if he’d found anything in the car, more cash or guns or, well,
anything.
But when he turned around he had that irritated sneer on his face, ready to argue or mock her or do anything but listen.

“Well?” he said. “You got another problem needs me to fix it?”

“No, Jerry. It’s just . . . I was thinking . . .”

“Hope you didn’t hurt yourself.” That passed for humor to him, real wit.

“I was thinking you can go home early,” she said. “That’s all. It’s Friday, and we got some nice work in today, and you’ve done a good job this afternoon. So go on and get out of here. Enjoy the weekend.”

She walked away as the first flush of gratitude mixed with shame crept onto his cheeks.

__________

G
etting out a little early on a Friday was no reason to disrupt your normal postwork routine, so Jerry drove directly to Kleindorfer’s Tap Room, had himself a bar stool and a Budweiser before the clock hit five. Carl, the bartender, took one look at him coming through the door and asked if the Stafford girl had finally fired him. Jerry didn’t bother to dignify that with a verbal response, electing instead to go with a simple but clear gesture.

It was early enough that the room was almost empty, a couple of out-of-towners drinking Leinenkugel in a booth, nobody at the bar except Jerry, nothing on the TV except poker. Give it a few minutes, they’d switch over to that show where the black guy and the white guy argued about sports, neither of them knowing a damn thing to start with. Jerry and Carl tended to have better ideas than those two.

Jerry sipped his beer and watched the muted poker game and simmered over Carl’s comment. It had been a joke between friends, no offense meant, but it riled him anyhow. Not so much at Carl for saying at it, more at his own life for the circumstances that produced the line. Jokes about working for Nora were constant. Could hardly get through a day without hearing one. She’d been there almost a year now. Showed up from Madison dressed to the nines, walked into the body shop wearing jewelry and perfume and with her long fingernails
polished and told Jerry she was the new boss. Wouldn’t just own the shop, she intended to
run
the shop.

The afternoon Bud Stafford had his stroke, it had been Jerry who found him slumped under a Honda, his shirt smeared with primer from the fall onto the hood. Jerry knew it was bad; his hands shook while he dialed for the ambulance. At the time, though, he’d seen two possible outcomes—Bud would die, or he wouldn’t. The end result, this half-death, was a twist Jerry hadn’t considered. Nora’d called a few days after the stroke to ask him to keep the shop going while Bud was in the hospital. A week after that, she was in town and in charge. Jerry had tolerated it, because he figured Bud would come back. That’s what she kept telling him, insisting to him. Bud was going to be fixed up, and then he’d be back and she’d be gone, back down to Madison, finish up graduate school in
art history,
of all things.

He still couldn’t get his mind around that. Bud had been cutting that girl checks for years, putting her through school. Reasonable thing to do, providing the kid would accomplish something, walk out of there with a piece of paper telling the world she was useful, an engineer or an architect or a doctor, but Bud could never say what the hell she was going to do. Most practical man Jerry’d ever seen walk the earth would just shake his head and smile and say, “She’s a damn smart girl. I’ll let her learn, and when she’s done with that, she’ll do something big. Guarantee it, my man. She’ll do something big.”

Well, she wasn’t doing shit that Jerry could see except bitching a blue streak about things she didn’t understand and losing them business. End of every month, Nora would tell him that they’d kept the bill collectors at bay again, like it was something to be proud of. Didn’t realize those bills were paid only through a sort of pie-in-the-sky expectation that Bud would be back eventually. It kept a meager supply of work coming in. And, Jerry had to admit, kept him in the shop. So who was he to criticize the customers who did the same thing?

Ten, maybe fifteen minutes had passed while Jerry brooded—enough for a completed Budweiser and the order of a fresh one—when the door opened and closed behind him. Regulars finally showing up, he thought, until the new arrival sat down beside him. Long, lean guy with a shaved head and a tattoo on the back of his left hand, a weird symbol that meant nothing to Jerry. Had a camouflage jacket on over jeans and a T-shirt. Seventy degrees today, and both this guy and the one who’d come into the shop office to talk with Nora were wearing jackets.

Jerry turned back to the TV, and the new guy didn’t say anything for a few
minutes, not till Carl brought his drink—vodka tonic—and returned to the other end of the bar.

“You work down at that body shop, don’t you?” the guy in the jacket said. “Stafford’s?”

Jerry turned and offered his favorite expression for making new acquaintances—sullen, with the lip curled just enough to imply a little disrespect.

“I don’t think I know you, pal.”

“My apologies,” the guy said, making a little bow of his head. “Name’s AJ.”

Jerry didn’t answer, just drank his beer and looked at the TV.

“So you work at the body shop, correct?”

“Uh-huh. And I don’t give free advice on cars, and I don’t look at them after work on a Friday. So you got one that needs fixing, bring it in Monday morning and we’ll—”

“The car I’m interested in is already there,” the guy named AJ said, and Jerry paused with the bottle back on his lips but no beer flowing yet. He lowered it.

“The Lexus?”

AJ smiled. “Either you guys don’t have much business, or you’re a smart son of a bitch, Mr. . . . ?”

“Dolson. Jerry Dolson.” He took another drink and turned all the way around to face AJ. “You want to tell me what the deal is with that car? Who the hell you are, and who’s the fella you’re looking for?”

AJ reached into the front pocket of his jacket and came out with cigarettes, shook one out, and offered the pack to Jerry, who accepted. They lit up and smoked for a minute, neither saying a word. A group of five came into the bar and settled onto stools beside Jerry, talking loud and laughing, yelling drink orders at Carl.

“You work for that girl?” AJ said. “She really run the place?”

Jerry scowled. He had enough headaches over working for Nora without some stranger walking into a bar and pointing it out.

“She doesn’t run shit,” he said. “I worked for her daddy for, hell, a number of years. He had himself a stroke, and for some reason the girl decided not to sell the place. Got this idea of keeping it going till Bud comes back. But you want to know who
runs
that place, you’re looking at him.”

AJ sucked at his cigarette and nodded, like this was just what he’d expected. “She doesn’t seem like the car-fixing type.”

“She ain’t.”

“Problem is, she also doesn’t seem like the question-answering type. Friend of mine stopped by today, had a few inquiries to make about that Lexus you mention. The girl, she wasn’t too cooperative. Put on a bit of an attitude.”

“That’s Nora, all right,” Jerry said. He finished his beer, and before he could wave for another, AJ did.

“I got this one.”

Jerry didn’t thank him, just accepted the drink and consumed a few swallows of it, feeling a nice light buzz beginning. Beer in his right hand, cigarette in his left, a fine start to the weekend.

“Now, you want to come in here and tell me that Nora gave you a headache, that’s fine,” Jerry said. “But you just said that she, how’d you put it? That she wasn’t the question-answering type.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, seems to me I just asked you a question of my own. Don’t recall it getting answered.”

He felt a smug smile growing as he lifted the cigarette back to his lips. This guy think he was a total idiot? Come in here and bitch and moan about Nora, get Jerry loosened up to the point that he’d just forget about his own questions?

“Fair enough,” AJ said. He was using his thumb to clear a streak of condensation off his vodka glass. Not much of the vodka was gone.

“What I’m saying is, you want me to talk to you, you’re damn well gonna need to talk to me first,” Jerry said. “I don’t know you, I don’t know the son of a bitch drove that Lexus into the tree today, and I don’t have an interest in either one of you. Yet.”

AJ made one more swipe at the glass with his thumb, then lifted it and took a long drink before speaking, his eyes on the bar.

“Man who drove that Lexus, he’s of interest to me, Mr. Dolson. Not to you. Understand?”

“What did he do, steal something? Drugs, or money?”

AJ shook his head.

“What, then? What are you talking about?”

Silence.

“Your problem,” Jerry said, “is that you put that cute little box on the underside of the car instead of sticking it to the fella himself. You found the car all right, but your boy isn’t with it. Tough shit, huh?”

He laughed, and AJ lifted his eyes from the bar and locked them on Jerry’s, and then the laugh went away. This guy talked easy, voice soft and calm, but
there was a steel edge inside him. It showed in the way he kept rubbing that glass with his thumb. Some people would do that out of boredom or nervousness. With this guy, it was different. Like with each stroke of his thumb he was tamping down embers in a place nobody else could see.

“You’re an observant man, Mr. Dolson,” AJ said, his voice tighter.

“Wouldn’t have seen it ’cept I had to take the car apart,” Jerry said, and suddenly he was wondering if he should have played this card, let the guy know he’d found the tracking device.

“What did the girl say when you told her?”

“Haven’t told her.”

“So you found it and . . .”

“Threw it in my locker and figured I’d think on it for a day or two.”

Something loosened in AJ’s face.

“You told me you don’t know me, or the guy who drove the Lexus,” he said. “Told me you aren’t interested in us. And I say that’s just right. You shouldn’t be interested in us. We’re about to move right out of your life. But you can make some money before that happens. I expect you understand that’s an opportunity not to let pass by. Easy money, from someone who has nothing to do with you?”