The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man (22 page)

I coughed. “Sheriff, you're going to think this is really strange.”

His expression didn't change.

“I dreamt it.”

“I think it's ‘dreamed,'”
Alan advised.

“Is it dreamed, or dreamt? Anyway, it was a dream.”

He watched me take a long, stalling sip of coffee, his face hard. “A dream.”

“Yes, sir. I dreamed about the place, and I dreamt that Alan Lottner was buried right there, under that tree. So I just figured…” I spread my hands, wishing Alan would say something useful.

“You dreamt he was buried there.”

“Yes, sir. Dreamed.”

“Alan Lottner.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did you have this dream?”

“When? Oh, a couple of weeks ago. The night of the big windstorm? It was a very real dream, more like a vision almost. I just couldn't get it out of my head.”

“Can't get me out of your head. Cute.”
Alan snickered. I wondered how I might inflict pain on my good friend Alan.

Strickland leaned forward and stirred his coffee, carefully watching the black liquid swirl around. When he glanced up I could almost hear the steel jaws of the trap closing over me. “How did you know it was Alan Lottner?”

I took far too long to respond. “What?” I finally answered cleverly.

“In your dream you saw a body buried under a tree, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did you know who it was?”

“Well, I … um. Well, I told you I was a friend of Alan's long ago.”

“The body was so badly decomposed we had to use dental records to identify it,” Strickland advised me in clipped tones. “You could have been Lottner's twin brother and you wouldn't have known who it was.”

I opened my mouth to provide a reasonable explanation, but nothing came out and I shut it again.

“Let me ask you something, Ruddy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You seem to have your life back together. You and your sister own the family business in Kalkaska. I know Milton Kramer, you pick up repos for him, nice little income on the side. Off parole, clean start.”

“Sure.”

“Why do you want to protect him?”

“I … Sorry?”

The sheriff leaned forward and I felt my chair pushing into my back as I unconsciously tried to retreat. “Whoever you talked to in Jackson who told you where the body was buried. Whoever killed Alan Lottner. You're out now, you're a citizen. Why the hell do you want to put all that on the line for somebody you met in prison?”

Wonderful. I'd had more fun when I was in a sinking Toyota.

Strickland reached into his drawer and pulled something out, tossing it on his desk with a sound like a bouncing coin. It was a golden ring, skittering at me across the desktop so that I automatically caught it.

“Know what that is?”

I looked at it. “Kalkaska class ring.”

“From your graduating year. Ever see it before?”

“I had one like it,” I admitted faintly.

“Uh-huh. You said ‘had.'”

“Lost it.”

“Look inside. You see any initials?”

I swallowed. “RJM.”

“As in Ruddick Jourden McCann?”

I stared at him, speechless.

“Want to tell me how you ‘lost' it?”

“I was canoeing down the Jordan River after graduation with some buddies. There was a lot of horseplay. Fell in the water a bunch of times. When we got to East Jordan I noticed it was missing. Must have fallen off. You know. Cold water.”

“We found it in the same hole as Lottner's skeleton.”

“Right, I forgot. The ring!”
Alan exclaimed. And as soon as he said it, a piece of the dream came back—me reaching for something gold in the water, deciding I needed to get it back to the person who owned it.

“You have been lying to me since you opened your mouth, son,” Strickland said.

“No! Well, okay. I have to say, I
did
lose my ring, I don't
know
how I knew it was Alan Lottner. But you have to listen to me, Sheriff. I did have this dream, really, I did!” I closed my eyes briefly, remembering just how extraordinarily clear everything had seemed.

He's dead.

No, I'm not.

When I opened my eyes I saw Strickland regarding me, considering. He could sense some truth leaking into my narrative but wasn't sure what it was.

“I think I've got enough to charge you with accessory after the fact right now as it is, McCann. This is a murder investigation and you'd do well to remember that.”

I swallowed.

“I do not know how to say it more plain than this: You do not want me and you to wind up on opposite sides of this thing.”

“No, sir, I do not.”

I watched him watch me, feeling like I should be holding my breath. Probably it was only the fact that he'd already arrested me once that week that kept him from sending me back to his cells for what my mother always called “a little time out.”

He eased back in his chair, shaking his head at me. He gestured at the file on his desk. “I wasn't here then, but about the time Alan Lottner disappeared, there was a fire bombing at a nursing home there in East Jordan. Apparently the ATF was called in, and they took a real interest in Lottner for a while.”

“Why?” I asked, shocked.

Strickland shrugged. “Seemed odd, him disappearing and then a month later we've got thirty-two people dead.”

“For God's sake, I was
murdered.
And I wouldn't have the first idea how to set a bomb,”
Alan protested.

“Oh, but Alan wouldn't do something like that. I mean, come on. What does he know about bombs?”

Strickland gestured toward the file. “Says here it was a pretty simple thing, really. Dynamite, blasting cap, a digital kitchen timer, and lots of gasoline to accelerate the flames. Place went up like a matchstick. Whoever did it padlocked the front and rear doors of the place—he wanted those people to fry. Never caught the guy, never came up with a motive, never uncovered a single witness.”

“Well, it wasn't Alan.”

“Oh, I don't think it was. Your reaction is interesting, though. So you knew the victim really well.”

“Ah, no, not all that well,” I said uncomfortably.

Strickland just looked sad. He regarded his watch. “Well, that's about all the horse manure this old man can stand to see a person shovel in a single day without choking on it. I'm going to tell you right now that you've used up your marker with me over that little fiasco in the jail the other day. You do know what I'm saying here, don't you.”

It wasn't a question. “Yes, sir.”

“You ever had a polygraph exam?”

I shook my head. There'd never been any reason; I'd admitted my previous crime.

“You willing to take one now?”

“Maybe you should ask your attorney about that,”
Alan suggested worriedly.

I licked dry lips. “Sure.”

Strickland grunted. “My polygraph examiner is on vacation in South Carolina. He decides to come back to our winter paradise, I'm going to send a car to collect you for another little chat. That be okay by you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You lie to me again, I'm going to place you under arrest for obstruction and anything else I can think of. Clear?”

I nodded.

Once in my truck, I pounded my steering wheel in frustration. “Dammit, Alan! See what you've gotten me into!”

“Me? I think you're forgetting who the victim is, here.”

I started the truck. “And I think you're forgetting that if I'm arrested, you're arrested. If I go to prison, you go to prison,” I said agitatedly.

“Well, whose idea was it to say it came to you in a dream? I never told you to say that.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do?”

“So are you going to tell him about me?”

“About you what, hanging out in my head like some sort of talking brain virus? No, I do that and he'll be locking me up for my own good.”

“So what are you going to say?”

“You know what, Alan? Figuring that out should be your job.”

The idea of evading Strickland's questions while wired up to a lie detector gave me cold sweats. I spent the next several days spastically turning my neck anytime I spotted someone out of the corner of my eye, expecting to see one of Strickland's deputies bearing down on me with a pair of handcuffs. At home I'd jump to the window and peer out whenever a car passed, gulping audibly when it was a patrol car. My new tenant, Jimmy, picked up my nervousness and would peer out at traffic even if I forgot to.

Jake, however, was impervious to my mood. He enjoyed having Jimmy around, and would lie next to Jimmy's chair when the TV was on, giving me a pointed look as if to say, “I like this guy; he doesn't drag me on forced marches in the cold.”

When Jimmy opened the back door to head up the outside stairs to his room for the night, Jake always followed as far as the threshold, but that staircase looked like it wasn't worth the effort. Jake would sigh, glancing at me in disappointment, before collapsing back on his blanket.

“You have to like me best,” I informed him testily. “It's in the Dog Manual.”

Another side effect of digging up Alan's corpse: I was back to being Kalkaska's most notorious citizen. I decided to evade the Black Bear after it became evident that all everyone wanted to talk about was me walking in the woods and seeing a skeleton lying there with a bullet in its head. The inference that Alan had been exposed to the elements made him angry, as if it implied he was somehow lazy. I was just glad the story about the dream hadn't gotten out.

Milt called me at home and asked if maybe we should go writ of replevin on Einstein Croft—sue him, in other words, to get the pickup back. I begged him to give me a few more days. A writ of replevin would mean the sheriff would pick up Einstein's ride, and I'd get paid nothing unless I served the summons for fifty dollars. “Any movement on Jimmy's paper?” Milt asked softly.

Jimmy looked up from the pizza we'd put on the coffee table, sensing we were talking about him.

“You know he lost his job at the hotel, Milt. He hasn't got any money.”

“I need to see something pretty quick, Ruddy. That motorcycle has bad piston rings; it's not worth even a grand. Why did he buy the thing—what was he, drunk?”

“No, he was just being Jimmy. I'll get right on it, Milt. Got anything for me?”

“Nope, been pretty quiet. Just Croft.”

“Okay, okay.” I hung up and Jimmy gave me an anxious look. “You go down to the dealership, ask Claude if the shop is hiring like I told you?”

He nodded. “And the gas station. Nothing.”

I knew it was the truth. It was the second week of May. The snowmobilers had quit coming, the summer trade was more than a month off—everyone was just hanging on, waiting for the change of season. The saying up here is that we go from mud to mosquitoes with only a week in between.

“I'm going to head over to the Black Bear in a little bit, help out Becky,” he told me.

“She can't afford to pay you anything,” I snapped.

Jimmy looked hurt. “Yeah, I know that. Just to help out, I meant.”

“Sorry, Jimmy,” I muttered.

“We need to go talk to that bank president's wife, find out why she's sending the checks,”
Alan advised, which irritated me because I'd just been thinking the same thing.

*   *   *

The next morning I was on the Blanchards' doorstep at nine
A.M.
, lifting the brass knocker and letting it clank several times. Jake, who'd joined me for the ride, solemnly watched me from the side window of my pickup. I waved at him and his floppy ears twitched. I loved when they did that. A woman answered, regarding me curiously.

“Mrs. Blanchard?”

She nodded. Mrs. Blanchard looked to be in her late twenties, a pretty woman with light-brown hair. Her cheekbones were high and her legs were thin. I felt like a big dumb repo man standing on her front porch. I glanced over and Jake, bored, had already stopped watching in favor of a nap.

I told her my name and the fact that I worked for Milton Kramer, letting the details of how I made my living flow out one at a time to see what she reacted to, which turned out to be absolutely nothing. She remained cool, leaning on the door a little as if ready to slam it on me.

“She's pretty impressed with you,”
Alan remarked dryly.

“Bad checks, things like that,” I was saying. Still nothing.

“Tell her you've got a voice in your head,”
Alan snickered. When I was finished here I was going to find a river and drown myself just to punish him.

“Mr. Kramer cashed some checks for a guy named Jimmy Growe.”

There! Just for a moment, something passed through her eyes, the faintest hint of darkness. Then a forced blandness took over, her eyebrows arching up questioningly.

“It seems the checks were taken from the bank when you were working there. I just came by to talk to you about that.”

“Why? What makes you think that I know anything about it?”

“She looks like she's enjoying herself,”
Alan observed. Her grip had relaxed slightly on the door, and though we were both still standing she seemed in no hurry to be rid of me.

“Well, you were issuing starter checks at the bank, weren't you, Mrs. Blanchard? You had access to the packets.” I was honor bound not to tell her that Maureen at the bank had recognized her handwriting.

“So?”

“Ma'am, may I ask you what your maiden name was?”

A faint flush spread across her cheeks. “Adams,” she answered faintly. “Why?”

“Most people choose variations of their own names when they assume a pseudonym,”
Alan informed me sardonically.
“Hence Adams becomes Wilenose.”