The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man (3 page)

The truck was sold used, so I didn't have the original invoice in the file. No invoice, no key numbers to access to cut myself a set of keys to his truck. Normally with used cars I just tow them away, but that wasn't an option with the way his driveway turned and how he liked to park it. But this truck was built with one of the old-style, steering wheel-column ignitions. What I could do was slim jim the lock on his door and use a dent puller on the key collar, disabling the security lock on his steering wheel and ripping out the starter contacts before Einstein could recite the theory of relativity. Once I started the truck, though, I'd have to rock back and forth a few times before I got a good enough angle to back the thing down the driveway. He'd obviously gone through the same rocking process to park it there. If he really did have a gun in his house, I'd be a pretty easy target.

I'd have to come back later.

Midnight. I did my best work at midnight.

 

 

2

Money for Nothing

 

The drizzle became more ambitious on the one-hour drive back to Kalkaska, making a ticking sound that meant it was changing from rain to sleet. I thought for a while about Einstein Croft's truck, then about beautiful curly-and-brown-haired Katie, her phone number safe in my pocket, and then finally about the nightmare again.

By the time I dropped Milt's tow truck off at the lot, the ice was coming out of the sky like bird shot, stinging my face as I hustled down to the Black Bear Bar. I pushed the door open and wiped the wet off my coat.

The bar was just starting to gather its Friday night together, some guys from the insurance agency turning their liquid lunch into an early evening and a couple of construction workers messing around at the pool table. I could tell from the pristine set of the booths that we hadn't sold any food all day.

My sister Becky and I disagree about the kitchen she tries to run out of what had been nothing more than a place for booze back when my parents owned it, but in the end the business belonged to her and she tacked up a
BAR AND GRILLE
sign over the door a few months ago, as if the extra
e
was going to convince anyone to actually eat there.

Becky was hunched over her ledger book, chewing on the end of her pencil. “Becky, hey,” I called, sliding around the bar and pulling down a glass of beer. The spigot sputtered and spat foam. “Great,” I muttered.

“Be sure to clean the hose this time,” Becky reminded me absently.

“This time,” I shot back. More than two years had passed since I'd neglected to clean the rubber hoses that ran the beer from the keg to the tap, with the result that we served a bunch of college students a few brews with some moldy-looking crap floating on the surface. Apparently I was never to be forgiven.

Grunting loudly, I wrestled a new keg out of the back, then pointedly set about running soap and water down the hoses. “You won't believe this dream I had.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, so fascinated she couldn't bring herself to look at me.

“The night of the big storm, knocked out the power?”

“That was some storm. Windy,” she answered absently.

“It was incredibly real. I've never had a dream like this. I was driving in the woods and these two guys hit me with a shovel.”

She glanced up. “Who?”

Becky is two years younger than I, but I can't help but think of her as my older sister. While I was raising hell with my football buddies in high school she was always serious, like right now with her glasses smudged and her brown hair lifeless and stringy after working the bar all afternoon. It was as if she had a tapeworm or something that was always draining the fun out of her, turning her dour and sad.

It started with her teeth. Some sort of medication my mother took when she was pregnant caused Becky's baby teeth to come in a dark gray, almost black. I'll never forget waiting for those teeth to fall out, and the slump in my parents' shoulders when the adult teeth finally sprouted and they were as dingy as the first set. She was the girl with the gray smile. Becky spent her whole childhood trying not to grin, and it seemed to make her mouth small, somehow, pulling her face down into a point. Bleaching at the dentist's office eventually became affordable and effective enough that she now had a real smile, but she doesn't deploy it very often.

“I don't know who. Two guys. They hit me with a shovel, then they shot me.”

“Shot you,” she echoed listlessly.

I found myself somehow hurt she didn't care more. Wasn't she listening? I was
shot
. “Yes, shot! And then I died in the dream. That's never happened to me. I mean, I could just feel myself die. Last thing I remember was lying there looking at this big old tree, and then I just slipped away.”

“And came here.” She gestured around the Black Bear Bar and
Grille.
“Heaven.”

“It's bad luck to die in a dream,” I persisted. “It supposedly means you're going to die in real life.”

“Supposedly, you
are
going to die in real life.”

“What's eating you, anyway?”

She tapped her glasses with her eraser, regarding me with her sad eyes. “We're pretty far behind on our food bill. When I called in the order this morning they wanted to know when we'll be sending them some money.”

“Oh, that again.”

“Yes, that again.”

“Okay. I'll talk to Milt tomorrow, see if he has something for me.” I shrugged.

“We need a thousand dollars by the end of the month.” I figured I knew why the accusatory tone: Against her wishes I'd extended some credit to a few people who'd been oddly absent from the bar since the night of my generosity. “If we don't have it, we'll be cut off again, have to pay cash for everything. We could go out of business.”

“Okay, I'll talk to Milt,” I reiterated. “Man, that was a weird dream.”

“Ruddy, you're not listening to me. A thousand dollars or we could lose the bar.”

I weighed the chances of pulling in four repos in a week. It made stealing Albert Einstein's truck a higher priority. “I'll think of something, okay?”

I turned away from the distress in her eyes. What could I say? This time of year was always bad for the Black Bear, all of the cash reserves sapped by the winter's lack of business. Becky bent her head back down, tapping her pencil. I wanted to comfort her, but Becky doesn't really do
comfort
. The Black Bear had been in existence our whole lives; I really couldn't imagine it closing, despite her dire pronouncement.

I went back to cleaning up, thinking there was something else about the nightmare I needed to tell Becky. Something important, but now I couldn't remember.

Slow night. An hour later the insurance salesmen were gone, dropping a pile of crumpled bills on the center of the table that covered the tab but left virtually nothing extra to acknowledge that Becky had been running back and forth to the bar on their behalf for four hours. I slipped the money into the till without telling her. The construction workers had added a third person to their party, which I supposed made it a crowd, but they made one pitcher of Coors last for two hours, as if having clean hoses made it taste funny. To please Becky I tried suggesting they might like some nachos and they acted as if I were joking.

I couldn't blame them; our nachos tasted like roofing material.

Claude and Wilma Wolfinger made a boisterous appearance at around eight o'clock, looking as if they had already invested a considerable amount at one of Becky's competitors. They were both sixty years old and it seemed like they had been married for at least that long.

Claude waved at me expansively. “Ruddy, come here a minute,” he greeted.

Claude was a thin man with white hair growing from his wiry, spotted arms. His cheekbones were nearly always red from the harsh weather and the strong drink he used to ward off the cold. His shirt proudly stated that he was a mechanic at a used car dealership, and his hands were never quite clean. When I was a little boy he and Wilma would sit in the Black Bear and regale me with stories of the world travels they were about to undertake. Twenty years later and he was still here in Kalkaska, overhauling truck engines.

Wilma worked for the county, patiently telling people they were in the wrong line or that they had filled out the wrong form. She was an inch taller than Claude's five foot eight and outweighed him by fifty pounds. She wore violently bright colors and huge sparkly earrings that resembled miniature chandeliers. Some of Wilma's ancestors were here when the white man came and apparently liked the new arrivals enough to marry them—all that remained of her Native American heritage was her black hair and dark eyes, but it was enough to give her a bit of an exotic look, particularly when she was angry at Claude, which frequently happened at the Black Bear. They always paid for whatever dishes they threw at each other.

“Ruddy, Ruddy, come sit down,” Claude urged, clamping a hand on my wrist. Wilma was smiling at me joyfully, positively beaming. That they were this happy together was so unnatural it made me instantly suspicious.

“Ruddy, I've got a plan that is going to make us all rich.”

“I haven't got any investment capital, Claude.”

“No! Listen.” He winked at Wilma and she nodded encouragingly. “You can say good-bye to your finances with this one, Ruddy.”

“That's exactly what I'm afraid of.”

“What?” Claude asked, puzzled.

“He means your finance
problems,
Ruddy,” Wilma corrected. “This is going to fix everything.”

Claude was looking over my shoulder, his face drawing tight. “This deal's just for us,” he said hurriedly, “so don't say anything to Jimmy about it. Act natural!”

I turned. Jimmy Growe was making his way across the floor to my table, his face scrunched in concern. “Hey, Claude. Hi, Wilma. Ruddy,” he greeted us.

“Hi, Jimmy,” Wilma responded softy, while Claude and I acted natural. Wilma was reacting to Jimmy because she couldn't help herself; he has a clean, innocent face that seems to make women want to mother and love him from the moment they see him. He was what I think they call “black Irish”: green eyes, smooth skin, jet-black hair—he looked like a movie star and had even been in a TV commercial once, though his career as an actor was somewhat hampered by his inability to act.

“Ruddy, you got a minute?”

Claude's hand grabbed my wrist again in a firm message I ignored. “Sure, Jimmy, everything okay?”

He eyed Claude and Wilma. “Uh, I need to talk to you. It's kinda important.”

I struggled to my feet, Claude clinging to me like a wrestler. “Okay, sure, let's go over by the bear.” I gave Claude a look and he reluctantly released me.

“See you in a minute, then, Ruddy,” he told me, with so much emphasis I half expected him to pull out a stopwatch.

Jimmy and I wandered across the bar to the bear. When I was nine years old my father and my uncle shot one of the last black bears seen in Kalkaska County, a fact that gave him no end of pride back then and which now occasionally came up as a barbed reference by the environmentally minded editors of the local paper. The carcass was taken to a taxidermist, who stuffed it full of, well, stuffing, and posed the animal in a position of fierce anger, its teeth bared and its arms lifted for a totally unbearlike attack. My dad nicknamed the bear Bob. Not too many people wanted to sit under it and get drunk, so Jimmy and I were alone. We pulled our chairs up to a small table and sat, Jimmy hunched over in a position of such distress that I was sure he'd gotten a girl pregnant. I crossed my arms and waited for him to find his way to the right words.

“Where the hell am I?”
the bear asked.

I whipped my head around. I'd heard it in my right ear as clear as if the bear had leaned over and spoken, but there was no one there. “What?”

Jimmy frowned. “Huh?”

“I…” I pointed to the bear. “Did you hear that? It sounded like the bear talked.”

Jimmy was clearly baffled. “The bear?”

I cranked my head around all the way, surveying the whole bar. We were completely alone, ignored except for the frantic looks from Claude. Yet the voice had been right there, closer to me than even the bear, really. “It said, ‘Where the hell am I?' Did you hear it?”

Jimmy gazed at the bear with a perplexed expression.

“Okay, never mind.” It didn't make sense so it must not have happened. “Tell me what's up.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.” Jimmy hunched over again, poking at a cigarette burn in the wooden surface of the table.

“Jimmy…” I prompted after a minute.

“It's like this. You know Milton Kramer, right?”

This was going to take awhile. I sighed. “Yes, I know my boss. Are you behind on some payments, Jimmy?”

“Oh no, nothing like that, Ruddy. It's these checks.”

“Checks? From the hotel?” Jimmy might look like a fashion model but he lacked a certain focus and thus far had managed only to secure full-time employment as a low-level maintenance man at the local hotel.

“Well no, huh-uh. These are checks I got in the mail.”

“In the mail?”

The door opened and two young women came inside, blinking at the bear in a way that let me know they'd never been here before. Then they fastened their gaze on Jimmy. I nodded at them encouragingly, but apparently I was invisible.

Jimmy glanced at me with hooded eyes. “Uh-huh, yeah. In the mail. For a thousand dollars.”

“Who sent you a check for a thousand dollars?”

Jimmy shrugged. “I dunno.”

“You don't know.”

“Yeah.”

“So someone sent you a check for a thousand dollars and you don't know who.”

“Yeah. Five of them.”

“Five of them? Five thousand dollars?” I stared incredulously.