The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man (14 page)

“Becky,” I repeated. The friendly smile dropped from my face.

“Right.” He swallowed, but it was too late to back out now. “Becky. I was talking to her last night about this deal I have. See, you can run nonswipe transactions for your charge cards. So what I told her—”

“What you told Becky,” I interrupted.

A full thirty seconds passed by while Kermit contemplated the fact that he was hurtling down the highway with a man at the wheel known to have voices in his head. “Right. Becky.”

“My sister.”

“Your sister,” Kermit responded as if hypnotized.

“Who, if anybody ever hurt her, I would break his face into fragments.”

“Why don't you let up on the guy, Ruddy?”
Alan demanded.

“Yeah. Right,” Kermit said after a moment.

“Okay. So you were telling Becky…”

“Right.” He took a breath. “See, the Black Bear has what you call a merchant account, which I used to sell before I ran into some unfortunates and had to rehabilitate up here to the north with my uncle. That means that when someone hands you a credit card you can accept it and run it through your machine and the bank will credit your account.”

“Sounds good.”

“Right. So, if you run the actual card through itself, you get what is called a
swipe
account. But, if you don't have the card, you can still punch the numbers into the machine and you'll get credit for the transaction anyway. That's called a
nonswipe
. And you can do both!”

“Hot dog!” I said enthusiastically.

“So I got this client who can't get a merchant account. So you could, like, run his business through your machine, pay him his money, but you keep thirteen percent. Pay your three percent to your bank, and you're keeping ten percent of everything he sends you.”

“Ten percent,” I repeated dutifully, vacillating between not understanding and not caring.

“Right. He does credit card business, sends you the account numbers. You run them through your nonswipe account, and keep ten percent. Ten percent of a thousand dollars is one hundred. He can send you three thousand a day. You'll make twenty-one hundred dollars a week,” Kermit advised, as if reciting a catechism.

“Kermit.”

He looked at me.

“Is there something printed on the sign at the Black Bear that tells every person in the world with a get-rich scheme to stop in?”

“No, see, Becky thought it sounded like a great idea.”

“She did.”

“Yeah, honest.”

“Becky.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My sister.”

Kermit looked out his window in disgust. “She said you guys have had problems paying the bills. I thought this would help.”

“Becky said that?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah, Becky.
Your sister
.”

I hid my smile behind my hand. So maybe the guy wasn't a total idiot.

I expected him to ask me to drop him at his uncle's lot, but he said the Black Bear would be fine. He said it nervously, the way a boy acts when a girl's father wants to know where they're going on prom night.

I liked that.

The snow was falling steadily as I headed back to East Jordan. Twenty-seven degrees: a fifteen-degree drop in a couple of hours. “I'm joining the Witness Protection Club and moving to Florida,” I announced.

Alan wanted to visit the East Jordan cemetery first, which surprised me.
“I want to see if I'm buried there. I purchased a family plot when Kathy was born.”

“Then why wouldn't you be buried there, if you paid for it?” I asked curiously.

“Let's just see,”
Alan responded evasively.

“What aren't you telling me, Alan?”

“Oh, my God! Kathy! She's not a little girl anymore, she's … she's twenty-four. She's a grown woman.”

Alan began making an odd noise. I frowned, concentrating, then realized he was
crying
. “Hey, Alan, hey, you okay? Talk to me.”

“I'll never see my little girl again. She's all grown up. She grew up without me. I wasn't there, Ruddy. I'm her daddy and I wasn't there for her.”

I tried to imagine what he was going through. I thought about how I felt when I got the call from Becky telling me Dad was dead, how frustrated I'd felt that I had seen so little of him those three years. Mom was even worse, coming just six months later. “I'm sorry, Alan. Jesus, I'm really sorry.”

Alan directed me to the cemetery, going quiet as I pulled up to a heavy-gauge chain-link fence. There was not a headstone in sight.
“I don't understand,”
he said finally.
“This was the graveyard.”

I got out of the truck, the snowflakes landing on my face and melting. I walked up to the fence and grabbed it—it felt pretty new, coated with some sort of rubberized layer to prevent rust. From here I could gaze right down into the parking lot of the factory where Einstein worked. I scanned the area, looking for his truck.

“This makes no sense. This was the cemetery, I swear. The funeral home was about fifty feet from where we are standing, and the headstones went all the way down the hill.”

“Well, it's not here now, Alan. There's a factory, instead,” I sighed. Another indication that Alan was a figment of my imagination.

“What's happening?”
Alan shouted in frustration.
“My house, my office, even the town cemetery, they're all gone, just like the past eight years!”

I didn't say anything.

“You're thinking that this is just more proof that I never existed,”
Alan accused.

“Well yeah, Alan, I am.”

The noise he made in response was full of defeat.

“What do you want to do now, Alan? Got any more ideas?”

“Let's just go.”

I detoured down Main Street in case Katie was standing there with a dead battery. No such luck, though everything else about the day was pretty much the same. I swung the truck into the exact same parking slot and let a pleasant feeling akin to nostalgia wash over me. “I think I'll have a cup of java,” I remarked. “That okay with you, Mr. Lottner?”

“Sure,”
Alan responded listlessly.

I indulged myself by sitting at a small table and picturing what it would have been like if Katie had accepted my offer of coffee that day. Again, I was almost impossibly witty, and she laughed and laughed.

Alan winked out on me, off on one of his catnaps, and I took this as a sign that I should be impossibly witty on the telephone while I had some privacy. The woman who ran the coffee shop told me to help myself to her phone. I was pretty calm as I dialed, fully aware that Katie was most likely still at work.
I'm in East Jordan; before I leave, I want to make sure your battery is still …

I heard five rings, and then a click. “Hello, this is Katie Lottner. I can't take your phone call right now…”

What?
What?
I hung up, my heart pounding.

Katie
Lottner
?

 

 

10

I'm Not Dead

 

Could this really be happening? How could she have the same last name as Alan? Was she Kathy, his
daughter
?

What was my mind doing to me? Or was it God, trying to teach me some lesson I hadn't any hope of comprehending?

I'd met Katie before I heard any voices in my head. Had she mentioned her last name then? I tried to recall. Maybe she told me, and I forgot, but it was trapped there in my subconscious. Mix in a little location—East Jordan, where I met her and where Alan claimed to have lived and died—and the whole story was revealed to be nothing more than a rather mundane creation by an imagination too lazy to go very far for the ingredients of its hallucinations.

Shaken, I drove down to the little park located where the Jordan River empties into Lake Charlevoix. For most of its length, the Jordan isn't so much a river as a clear, cold brook. As it approaches the lake, though, it widens, slows, and forms what in other waters might be termed a bayou. The water here looks still, deep, and dark.

I felt Alan come awake, but I didn't say anything. The very fact of first name Katie, last name Lottner, was rendering me mute.

I turned my back on the river and gazed out at the lake. The water was the same shade of gray as the sky. We were both silent, contemplating. A long way out a boat broke from shore and headed north—I could see its wake flashing white in the frigid water, but the wind carried off the noise from the motor before it could reach my ears.
“It's best for me like this, when you are looking long distance and not moving your eyes so much. When you're focused on something close it makes me nauseated,”
Alan finally said.

“Well, do me a favor and don't throw up in there.”

“I remember coming down the Jordan River in a canoe with my daughter. We'd fish for trout. When you get down here to the end where the river flattens out, the current sort of dies, and you have to paddle pretty hard. She'd get tired. We'd pull up right about here. Then we'd sit and fish some more from the shore.”

“Your daughter, what was her name, again?”

“Kathy.”

“Kathy, what is that, a nickname for Katherine or something?”

“Actually it's ‘Katrine.' Marget insisted we name her something Swedish. I called her Kathy, Marget called her Katrine.”

“Katrine. Katie,” I said. Alan didn't comment. I sighed. “I've done that. Canoed down the Jordan River before,” I told him, returning to the original subject. Which was probably why Alan had the same recollection—we were both drawing from the same memory bank.

“Yeah?”
He pondered this for a few moments.
“It was near the Jordan where I was killed.”

I sat down, careful to keep my eyes on the horizon so he wouldn't get sick. Time to see what my imagination could come up with. I had a feeling Alan's murder would exactly match the circumstances from a T. Jefferson Parker novel I'd just finished. “Tell me about that.”

“I got a phone call from this guy who'd seen an ad for a listing in our office. There was this cabin out in the Jordan Valley, ten acres of land. Man who owned it used to hunt out of it. Then he died and his wife let it fall apart. Kids broke into it, and then somebody got careless and it burned down. When she died it went to her niece, I think it was. She put it up for sale, but she was from California and wouldn't believe me when I told her how little it was worth. It was a pretty little piece, about five hundred feet of riverfront, lots of hardwood. We went through the motions but nobody was interested at the price she wanted. So then this guy calls me, says he might make an offer, wants to take a look at it. I arrange to meet him and his wife, but driving out, I think I saw something I wasn't supposed to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Two guys. I think it must have been a drug deal, the way they reacted. I drove on past them to up where I had my listing, and a couple of minutes later I heard them coming up from behind. I turned and one of them had a shovel…”

“A
what
?” I demanded sharply.

“A shovel. He had this look on his face I'll never forget.”

I stood abruptly. “Can you show me? Show me where this happened?”

“Sure.”

Alan directed me back down Highway 66 toward Mancelona. Even with the forest still looking dead from winter and snow puddled in the shadows, the Jordan Valley is a spectacular remnant of glacial action, heavily wooded and hilly. We turned once, then again, bumping down a mucky dirt road that was doing its best to turn back into untracked forest. I dropped my truck into four-wheel drive and powered over some small trees that had been felled during recent storms. My heart was pounding now, and I felt a little sick. We topped a rise and I eased to a stop.

“What? What is it?”
Alan demanded anxiously.

“Here.” I stared without blinking at a small clearing off to the right. “This is where you saw the two guys, standing next to a truck. One of them you knew from somewhere before, but the one with the shovel was a stranger.”

“The one I knew had a toupee,”
Alan whispered.

“Exactly.” I pressed on the accelerator and shot forward. Without the autumn leaves it really didn't look much like the same place until the road ended at the remains of a burned cabin strewn across the forest floor. I slid out of the cab and walked up to where the front door had been, kicking at some loose bricks. “You were standing right about here.”

“How do you know this, Ruddy?”

“The other one, the stranger, husky with a tan. Green eyes. He walked right up and swung the shovel without even slowing down.” I rubbed my arm.

“Hit me between the elbow and the wrist. Broke the bone, I think,”
Alan murmured.

I pictured the guy with the shovel, the expression on his face. “Yes.” I turned and looked down the road. “So you ran back this way.”

“I was running forty miles a week at that point. Once I got twenty yards ahead, I knew they would never catch me. I could hear them panting, even after that short distance. And then the sound faded away.”

I found myself trotting back down the road, acting it out. “Didn't even notice their truck when you passed it,” I said as I huffed past the clearing where it had been parked. I slid and almost fell in the snow-covered mud but didn't stop.

“I was too busy thinking, trying to figure out why they had done it. Maybe if I had seen the truck it would have occurred to me to get off the road.”