Repo Madness (10 page)

“Then what's your point?”

“My point is that everything you're babbling about is in the book. Which I just read. Pretty coincidental, don't you think? And there isn't some huge crime family up here, Alan; everybody's too cold for that.”

He was silent. “Alan?”

“I don't
babble
,”
he sniffed.

“Well, hey, the good news is that I still have a job and just doubled my money.” I said it a bit aggressively, waiting for Alan to advise me it wasn't enough to make me a serious prospect for his daughter, but he was silent. I heard the boop of a siren and looked in my rearview mirror. A sheriff's department car was following me, its lights flashing. Sighing, I checked the speedometer and pulled over. They had me going five over the limit.

The man who got out of the passenger side was the man who'd replaced Barry Strickland—Grant Porterfield, the new sheriff. He was a little beady-eyed guy, short and fat where Barry was lean and solid.

The deputy driving was Dwight Timms, whose family had owned a bait shop for many years and was known for smelling like their products. Dwight didn't like me much—he and Katie had been all but engaged when I met her, and he was unhappy she picked a repo man over a heavily jowled, jarhead, sallow-skinned, dull-eyed moron with a mean streak and a badge to back it up.

I guess I didn't like Dwight much either.

“Sheriff,” I greeted evenly, ignoring his deputy.

“Why don't you step out of the vehicle so's we can talk?” Porterfield suggested. Timms walked up on the other side of my pickup, covering me like I was a public menace.

I agreeably opened my door and stepped out, crunching snow under my stylish rubber boots. I rubbed my hands together but kept them out in the open. Cops like to be able to see your hands.

“How fast were you going?”
Alan asked.

“Heard about your accident the other day,” Porterfield noted. Timms was peering in through my windows, looking for smuggled AK-47s.

“Black ice.” I shrugged.

“I heard you were chasing Tigg Bloom at the time. Repo man.”

“Chasing? No, not true. I was behind him, sure, but I was just driving down the hill and lost it on the ice.”

“That's not what Tigg says.”

“How is good old Tigg?”

“His leg's broke, but he'll live. He's thinking of filing a criminal complaint against you.”

“So his statement is that he saw me, thought I was somehow going to tow away his truck with him driving it in front of me, decided to drive off at high speed, went flying down a steep hill coated with ice, lost control, nearly wiped out a school bus full of kids, crashed into the woods, and I'm the criminal?”

Porterfield gave me a look I supposed he thought was hard and scary, but I'd been glared at by Barry Strickland, who was a professional at it. “Well, either way, that's your last one,” he said, leaning over to spit in the snow.

Timms came over to stand next to his boss, giving me a smirk. His hand was resting on the butt of his weapon. The guy was really starting to piss me off.

“Last one what?”
Alan wondered.

“I'm not sure I understand, sir,” I replied.

“No more repos in my jurisdiction. You want to pick up a car, you file a writ of replevin with the court, get it signed by a judge, and I'll send my deputies out to pick it up. We'll call you when it is in impound.”

I stared at the two lawmen. They were both wearing identical challenging grins, loving telling me that I would not be able to make a living anymore.

What Timms wanted more than anything, I knew, was for me to lose my temper and take a swing at him. They'd pull their handguns, get cuffs on me, and book me for being disorderly, and my probation would be revoked. I'd wind up doing a couple years of jail time, just for the satisfaction of breaking his nose.

Might be worth it.

“Understood,” I finally replied woodenly.

“They can't actually do that,”
Alan intoned in an I-was-a-Realtor-so-I'm-an-expert-in-the-law voice.
“If it is legal, they can't stop you from making a living.”

“May I go, Sheriff?” I asked.

He spat in the snow again. He seemed disappointed somehow. “Drive carefully, Mr. McCann. Watch out for black ice.”

I slid into my pickup and watched in my rearview mirror as the two lawmen settled in, said something to each other that made them both laugh, and then pulled a U-turn and sped off.

“Well, that's just great,” I said.

“I don't know what to do next. I guess get a lawyer and sue the sheriff's department,”
Alan speculated.

“I don't have the money to sue anybody.”

“But you just had the sheriff tell you that you can't do repossessions anymore. What are you going to do?”

“Me?” I started my pickup and put it in gear. “I'm going to go repo a car.”

 

8

A Job Up Your Alley

I sat in my pickup and regarded Zoppi's Jeep Grand Cherokee—a pretty blue machine with sprays of frozen Michigan mud splashed out from all four wheel wells. The parking lot of the furniture-refinishing place was small and rutted and contained only a Dumpster, some snow-covered lawn chairs, and a decades-old Honda motorcycle on lifeless tires leaning against the back wall of the shop. I'd driven past the front of the place and looked in through the display windows, and it appeared the same person who had designed the parking lot had also decorated the showroom—furniture was haphazardly arrayed on the cement floor, some of it as dirty as the motorcycle.

Alan, of course, was in full priss.
“I am telling you, you don't want to mess with these people, Ruddy.”

“I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.” I had no keys and no tow truck. How was I going to get my hands on the Jeep?

The sun was pretty close to setting. I figured Zoppi would be leaving his place of business soon, probably to go put a horse head in somebody's bed, if Alan was to be believed.

I parked well down the road, behind an abandoned cherry stand—in the summer you can stop at any one of a hundred family-owned stands lining the highways and buy a lug of sweet cherries fresh off the tree. In the winter there is nothing except maybe free ice. I grabbed a pair of pliers out of my toolbox, then hiked back to the parking lot and tried the door to the Jeep. Unlocked, but no keys under the rug or behind the visor.

“Someone could come out any second!”
Alan hissed.

I popped the hood and went to look at the engine, cringing in anticipation of a car alarm, but there was none. I pulled the pair of pliers out of my pocket and disconnected the positive wire off the battery, letting it droop. I shut the hood, slapping the grease off my hands and onto my pants.

“So now you have smears of oil all over your clothes,”
Alan stated disgustedly.

“Makes me almost as bad as the mafia, doesn't it?”

The furniture shop was in a cluster of faded retail buildings huddled together on this stretch of road, as if people had started to develop a town and then lost their nerve. To sit indoors and keep my eye on the Cherokee, I had a choice between pet grooming or a tiny café. I picked the café and settled down with a cup of coffee at the front window, logging into their free Wi-Fi.

Becky had started offering free Wi-Fi at the Black Bear, too. People start giving away everything for free, how is a bill collector supposed to make a living?

Alan made distressed peeping noises as I surfed the Web on my smartphone.
“I hate this. I just start to read something, and you change it,”
he complained.

I ignored him and was soon frowning at Wikipedia. “‘A human body cools twenty-five times faster in cold water than in air,'” I read aloud.

“So? What are we doing?”

I glanced around the café. There were no customers, and the woman behind the counter had gone into the back room. “I'm thinking about what Amy Jo said. Lisa Marie wasn't in the car when it sank. What if that means she got thrown out? Maybe the back window was open. We hit the water going, what, fifty? That could propel a person pretty far. Maybe Lisa swam to the opposite shore that night. I was pretty out of it. And those stoners didn't know to look for anyone else. If she got tossed twenty yards or so, woke up when she hit the water, and headed for the opposite side, it could explain how she survived.”

“Twenty yards?”
Alan repeated skeptically.

“The point is, Alan,” I responded agitatedly, “maybe what Amy Jo meant was that Lisa Marie started off in the backseat, but she wasn't in the car
when it sank
. The water that night was forty-eight degrees, which means by this chart I'm looking at, she could have gone more than thirty minutes without drowning. You could swim that channel in a third of that.”

The woman came out from the kitchen. “You need something, hon?” she asked. She'd obviously heard me talking.

“No, I was just…” I gestured with my phone. She nodded in understanding and went back through the swinging doors. Cell phones have made it possible for all sorts of lunatics to operate in society.

“So then what?”
Alan pressed.

I was frozen, though, staring at the screen. This habitual position reminded me that I hadn't texted with Katie in hours. I thumbed the message app and double-checked. Nothing from her.

“Is that what I think it is? A conversation with my daughter?”
Alan asked excitedly.

“Yeah, I was just looking to see if she had sent me a text message. She usually checks in regularly.” Maybe not when we were on a break, though. I scrolled back through the past to show him what I meant.

“Well, that's revealing,”
he said dryly.

“What is?”

“I'm looking at what she is saying. ‘How are you feeling?' she asks. ‘I miss you. What time will you be home?' she says. ‘Thinking of you today. Can't wait for the weekend.'”

“Yeah?” I had a feeling I was about to receive the benefit of another lecture from my fiancée's father.

“Then look at you. ‘Fine,' you say. ‘Seven thirty,' you say. ‘I have to work the bar Saturday.' See a pattern?”

“You mean the pattern where she asks a question and I answer it?” I snapped, irritated because I understood exactly what he was getting at.

“Don't you think she deserves more than just information?”

“It's the information age,” I retorted. “That's what texting is for.”

He was silent.

“Fine.” I sighed. I thought about it for a moment, and then typed this:
It really meant a lot to me that you came to see me in the hospital. I was glad to see you. I don't understand why you need a break. I think it is crazy that you're moving out.

“Maybe just end it at
hospital
,”
Alan suggested.

“But it
is
crazy that we're living apart. What the hell does a break mean when it is in the middle of a relationship? That's like saying, ‘My legs are tired. I think I'll break one.'”

“Just erase everything after ‘glad to see you,'”
he insisted.

I did what he said and sent it. “Okay.”

“Okay. So tell me about Lisa Marie,”
he suggested.

“Right. So she gets thrown out of the car. If she spent much time in the water, she would have collapsed. She needed help. When I got to the hospital, I was unconscious, and I guess they warmed me up gradually.”

“So it's late at night, and she's gotten to the opposite shore. Many people there?”

“In November? No, it's mostly summer places, but there could have been a few locals. She could have made her way to a house. Or,” I speculated with growing enthusiasm, “what if a car came along and picked her up?”

“Why would a car come if the ferry had shut down operations?”

“Dammit, Alan, this isn't helping!

“Ruddy. You're forgetting that she died. She was found in the water. Five days later.”

“I am not forgetting that,” I snapped. “What I am saying is that if she was thrown from the car and made it to shore, someone would have helped her or they would have found her body right there. And whoever helped her…”

“Whoever helped her changed their mind and dumped her back in the lake to drown,”
Alan concluded.

“Shut up, Alan.”

“Ruddy…”

“Just shut up!” I glanced over, and the waitress was standing behind the counter, regarding me with round eyes. My phone was on the table, nowhere near my ear. I smiled weakly, left a tip, and went outside, my hands in my pockets. Alan wisely didn't say anything.

Zoppi, when he emerged though the back door, looked more like a bellhop than a criminal warlord. He was thin and pale, with jet-black hair that was more perfectly combed than a toupee. “Looks like he forgot his machine gun,” I told Alan as I strolled over, acting nonchalant. Zoppi got into his car, reacting angrily when he turned the key and nothing happened.

“So now what?”
Alan wanted to know.

Zoppi opened his door, and I was right there. “Hey! Car won't start?” I called cheerfully.

He was surprised but not suspicious to see me. “Yeah.”

“Why don't I take a look? Pop the hood,” I offered.

Shrugging and not at all grateful, Zoppi slid back into the car and tugged on the lever. The hood bucked up an inch, and I raised it. “Try it now,” I called after pretending to do something to the engine.

Zoppi swore. “Nothing!” he shouted. “Goddammit!”

“Hey, okay, let's switch places,” I suggested.