Repo Madness (15 page)

She shook her head, a tiny motion. “I wasn't really looking at him. I was looking at you.”

“Okay, but you did see him, even if just a little,” I responded, forcing my voice to be gentle. “What do you remember?”

She swallowed. “He wasn't as tall as you are. He was sort of, you know, slender. I saw his hair. It was brown, but in the center it was missing, you know?”

“A bald spot?”

“Yes!” Momentary pleasure showed in her eyes—she was happy to have gotten this detail out—but then it faded. “That's really honestly all I can remember.”

“Ask her how she knows it was Lisa Marie Walker,”
Alan suggested.

Well, that was stupid—who else could it be? “Do you remember anything else? Anything at all would be helpful,” I prodded.

She shook her head. Some relief was showing in her expression—the secret she had bottled up inside her for so long was out in the open, finally, and I hadn't yelled at her. Not much, anyway.

“If she is only guessing it was Lisa Marie, then her testimony won't be enough to reopen the case,”
Alan lectured me.
“You have to ask her how she knows.”

Okay. “How did you know who the girl was?”

“Oh. Well, I didn't. I mean, not that night. But I did see her face. When she got out, she sort of stared up at the streetlight for a moment. That's how this whole thing started—I was reading about the accident, and I connected when it must have happened, after my birthday, but I didn't think much of it until I scrolled down to her picture and realized, oh my God, that's
her
.”

Amy Jo apologized to me again as I was putting my boots on. I told her it was okay, though there were so many ways it wasn't, and got her to agree that if it came to it, she would be willing to tell the prosecutor what she had just told me. It wasn't the prosecutor she had been afraid of; it had been me, Ruddy McCann, repo man.

“I guess I didn't realize just how important this conversation was going to be. I mean, I thought, you know, a medium. I don't really believe in any of that stuff,”
Alan murmured apologetically and, in my opinion, ironically, as I got into the tow truck. The person who claimed to be dead and talking to me didn't believe that there were people who could talk to dead people?

“How do you feel, Ruddy?”

“Feel?” I started the truck and steered back south. Time to see if I could collect some of Blanchard's money. “I don't even know. What am I supposed to feel? My whole life was ruined because of a lie. A lie even I believed. Should I be happy? Angry? I just feel hollowed out. My God. All I did wrong was drive her to Charlevoix. So I bear some responsibility, but not the way I thought. Maybe I failed to protect her, but I never killed
anybody
.”

“Somebody did, though. Somebody killed Lisa Marie Walker and threw her into the water.”

“Yeah. The guy who ‘helped' her.”

“We have to find who did that, Ruddy. She was murdered. We have to find the man who did it
.”

 

12

Back in Jail

Herbert Yancy seemed like the best person from Blanchard's list to start with, because he owed the most money—more than fifteen grand—and would therefore garner me the biggest fee. Collecting him would get me almost to where I could afford the Wolfingers' tickets. Yancy lived on a bluff overlooking Torch Lake—a beautiful, shockingly clear body of water right off Highway 31 between Traverse City and Charlevoix. Yancy's driveway was so long, it could have supported at least one cherry stand, maybe a rest area and a traveler's bureau. He had a separate garage with five doors, the one in the middle oversized so he could park his sailboat or maybe an armored car full of gold bullion. The house itself looked to have more bedrooms than the average hotel, and a grand wooden staircase built of redwood between the garage and the house descended through the trees down to the beach below. Or at least I assumed it was beach—this time of year the lake and the shore were both frozen solid and coated with white.

I got sidetracked on the way to the front door. A ladder was leaning up against the house, and I could hear someone up there, moving around on the back side—the lake side—of the roof. I put my hands on the rungs.

“We shouldn't climb up there,”
Alan fretted, so naturally I climbed up there. For all his nervousness, there wasn't really any reason to worry—the foot of snow provided surer footing up top than I would have had in the summer. At the peak of the roof I paused to take in the view: It's a nineteen-mile-long lake, and from up there I could see practically the whole thing, the stark black trees in the white snow along the shore, the evergreens, and one lone ice shanty, trying to kick-start the next Smeltania.

There was, indeed, a person on the roof. A guy was sitting, his back to me, down toward the lakeside lip of the roof, messing with some wires. In the winter, as the snow melts, water trickles to the gutters, where it hits the air and refreezes, the ice backing up like a miniature glacier, which wreaks havoc on the shingles. To prevent this, homeowners like Yancy had heating wires zigzagging along the edge of their roofs to keep the water liquid and moving along. Homeowners like me climb up on their roofs with a shovel. The guy had earbuds in, which was why he hadn't heard me come down his driveway. I picked up some snow, made a loose snowball, and tossed it in his direction. I didn't mean to hit him, but it caught him in the back of the head.

He overreacted, leaping to his feet and spinning around. I guessed maybe I understood how startling it would be for this to happen: You're fooling with wiring, listening to rich people music on your iPod, and some repo man pelts you with a snowball. Not exactly how you thought your day would go when you first woke up this morning.

“Yancy?” I asked as he yanked the buds out of his ears.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Are you Herbert Yancy?” I repeated in a cold voice.

“Yeah?”

“William Blanchard sent me to talk to you.”

I expected some sort of reaction but not what I got. Yancy's face paled in fear, his mouth dropping open. “Oh God.”

“Do you have to sound so hostile?”
Alan demanded.

“Look,” I managed to say—and then the guy turned and ran. On the roof! Where the hell did he think he was going? “Wait!” I yelled at him. I gingerly gave pursuit. We were running along the spine of the house and the fall on the lake side was a hell of a lot scarier than the driveway side, but I didn't particularly want to trip in either direction. “Would you just wait a minute?” I shouted angrily.

Though it was a pretty big house, it didn't go on forever. He was running out of roof, and the truth of this seemed to occur to him. He skidded to a halt, throwing a wild look back at me.

“What did Blanchard tell these guys you were going to do to them?”
Alan wondered.
“He's scared to death.”

“We need to talk, Herbert,” I declared sternly.

Yancy took a few steps in my direction, but he wasn't looking at me—he was staring at the twenty-foot gap between the house and the roof of the detached garage, backing up to make the leap.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

“Don't let him jump!”
Alan shrieked at me.

Okay, how was I supposed to stop him? “Wait! Don't!” I shouted.

Yancy took off running, his stride lengthening, and when he leaped, it was graceful and athletic and he nearly made it, hitting the gutters of the garage roof hard before falling back and crashing onto the wooden stairs, bouncing and tumbling down them and finally coming to a stop in a heap at the bottom, sprawling on the frozen beach.

He wasn't moving.

Just great.

*   *   *

It took me a few minutes to get down to where Yancy had come to rest.
“Why did you have to do that? I told you not to climb up here! He could be dead!”
Alan babbled shrilly—that's right, I don't care what he says: The man babbles.

Yancy was conscious, but not in the mood to talk. I could see by the way his leg was bent behind him that the bone had snapped, and his wheezing suggested he might have broken a rib or two as well. I pulled out my phone and called 911, giving them the address.

I checked my watch. I needed to wrap this up quickly so I could make it to see Schaumburg by four thirty, but I couldn't very well leave Yancy by himself.

“Why did you run away?” I asked him disgustedly. “I just wanted to talk to you. Did you think I was going to throw you off the roof, so you jumped off instead?”

His eyes were squeezed shut so that he could concentrate on his pain, and he didn't answer me.

“I can't see how your sarcasm is helping anything here,”
Alan chided.

“Whereas your complaining is oh so helpful,” I snapped back. I didn't care if Yancy heard me arguing with myself or not. I kept glancing at my watch, tracking the time as it ticked away.

Eventually the sound of sirens built in the distance. I went up the stairs to wave at the ambulance when it came down the long driveway, looking uneasily at my timepiece as the attendants pulled out a stretcher. To get to Schaumburg's on time, I needed to leave
now
.

Which I did, getting an odd look from the driver of the ambulance when I gave him a thumbs-up and slipped behind the wheel of my new tow truck. He clearly thought I should stick around to explain why Yancy had decided to descend the stairs from the roof of his house, but I figured once the patient stopped feeling sorry for himself, he could tell them just as easily as I could.

“Won't you get in trouble for leaving?”
Alan asked worriedly.

“Nah,” I told him. “I'm the Good Samaritan here. If I hadn't shown up to dial 911, Yancy could have frozen to death down there.”

“If you hadn't shown up, he wouldn't have fallen,”
Alan argued.

“We don't know that for certain.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

I was just turning onto the highway to head back to Traverse City when a sheriff's car came up behind me, moving very fast, its emergency lights on and flashing in an irritatingly ostentatious fashion. I eased over and the car followed me, stopped a dozen yards back. As I watched, Grant Porterfield and Dwight Timms got out of the car. The two of them were getting to be pretty chummy—it was almost cute.

Timms drew his weapon and pointed it at me. “Keep both hands on the wheel!” he shouted.

“Don't worry,”
Alan told me dryly.
“You're the Good Samaritan here.”

*   *   *

The county jail hadn't gotten any more attractive since the last time I was there. I used my one phone call to ring up Kermit, asking him to please contact Schaumburg and Katie, and oh, by the way, come bail me out.

“Tomorrow,” Porterfield suggested softly. In theory he wasn't supposed to be listening to my side of the conversation, but it was too quiet in the jail for him not to. “Nobody's getting bail this late in the day.”

I was alone in the jail—the crime rate in Michigan drops with the temperature, which was why the sheriff had nothing better to do than harass the local repo man. Timms shut the bars behind me and then stood, grinning, like I was a new pet he'd just put in a cage. Porterfield didn't smile, though, when he came down the narrow hall, carrying a chair that he put down on the stone floor, making a harsh scraping sound. Timms looked around for a place to sit and then, grunting, sort of leaned against the wall.

“Ruddick McCann,” Porterfield said with a sigh. “Did I not tell you no more repos in this area? Then you go and beat up poor Herbert Yancy. You know he is a good friend of mine?”

“I didn't beat up anybody.”

“That's not what he says.”

Alan groaned. I stared at the floor—if Yancy was telling people I put him in the hospital, I doubted anything I could say would make any difference. I'd go back to jail on a probation violation while the assault charges worked their way through the court system, and then I'd go back to prison.

“Look at me now.”

I glanced up into Porterfield's small pitiless eyes. He had leaned forward, his face pressed against the bars. “I told you no more repos,” he said in an almost gleeful voice. “You disobeyed me. People who disobey me wind up right where you are now. We clear?”

I looked away. Timms banged on the bars with his stick. “Hey! Answer the sheriff!”

“Jesus Christ, Dwight! You about broke my eardrums!” Porterfield barked, backing away from the bars.

Timms turned even more pale than usual.

“You have absolute shit for brains,” Porterfield seethed. “Did you not see that my face was right there? That
hurt
.”

“Sorry, sir,” the deputy mumbled.

Porterfield stood up, grabbing the chair. “I imagine you'll be our guest for some time,” he told me. “You think of anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable, you keep it to yourself.”

Timms smirked at me, and the two of them left. I stretched out on the narrow bunk and stared at the ceiling. “Well, at least I have a good excuse to give Schaumburg,” I muttered.

“If Yancy says you threw him off the roof, it is going to be your word against his,”
Alan observed helpfully.

“I do know that.”

I lay there, feeling the jail cell get smaller and smaller, snuffing out any sense of the outside world.
“What happens,”
Alan asked me finally,
“if Yancy does file assault charges? Would they still give you bail?”

“I imagine it will be easier for them to just violate me back behind bars for the duration of my probation.”