Repo Madness (18 page)

I still harbored a lot of affection for Milt, still missed him, but I didn't like the way he had treated me. If he ever decided to join the dead-guys-in-my-head club, we'd have a few words about that.

The last assignment Milt had given me before he died was a guy named Mark Stevens, whose file had now worked its way to the top of the stack. I had repossessed a lot of his family members over the years and didn't expect them to tell me much of anything on how to find their cousin, but his best buddy in life was a guy named Kenny MacDonell, so I figured if I found Kenny, I would be able to locate Mark.

I dropped Jake off at Kermit's office before I headed out of town and tried to ignore how eager my dog was to leave the repo truck. “You know you belong to me,” I reminded him. He gave my hand an affectionate, reassuring lick. I think we both knew I was being condescended to by a basset hound. He curled up in his chair and sighed in contentment. Kermit was on the phone, so I didn't stick around.

It took me most of the day, asking around, to track down Kenny's mom, who lived by herself in a house trailer outside of Bellaire. Her driveway was plowed out and her walk shoveled, which Alan noted.
“Kenny probably lives here,”
he concluded shrewdly.

“Or maybe his mother drives a snowplow. You think of that, detective?” I knocked on the front door, little pieces of ice dropping from my mitten with the impact. The sky had completely bled out of blue and was a milky white, and the temperature was scraping the teens. While I waited, I had a fantasy that Kenny's mother would invite me in and give me a cup of coffee. I could taste the coffee, feel it warming my hands and my insides.

A woman opened the door as far as a chain would allow, her blue eye regarding me balefully through the crack. Even with that little of her face showing, I knew she was the woman who had gifted Kenny MacDonell to the world—same orange freckles and pale complexion, hair a dark red. I had met Kenny and his buddy Mark when the two of them barged in with shotguns and tried to hold up the Black Bear a few years back. I probably wouldn't mention that to his mom. “Mrs. MacDonell?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“I'm a friend of Kenny's.”

“He ain't here.”

I hugged myself a little to indicate how much warmer our conversation would be at her table, with her coffee. “Do you know what time he'll be back?”

“Who says he lives here?” she responded with hostility.

“She's not going to tell you anything,”
Alan predicted.

“Oh!” I gave her a surprised look, one of the chief psychological weapons we repo men deploy to extract information. “He moved? When was that?”

“I never said he lived here. I ain't seen Kenny in a long, long time.” She made to shut the door.

“Oh my God! That's terrible!”

She hesitated, frowning suspiciously. The door was now open barely an inch.

“You must be worried sick! How long has he been missing?” I implored.

“I didn't say he was—”

“Have you called the police?” I interrupted anxiously. “I know how a mother feels when one of her children vanishes. Can I help you in any way, Mrs. MacDonell?”

“No, I'm sure he's fine.”

“This is terrible weather to be homeless!” I squinted at the soulless sky.

“He's not homeless. He just hasn't been around in a while.”

“He could be in trouble!”

She shut the door, slid off the chain, and opened it up wider, still blocking access with her body. “There's no trouble. He gave me two hunnert dollars a couple days ago.”

I put a hand on my heart. “Oh, thank God. Thank God. So you know where he is, then.”

“No. I don't know where—”

“I was so worried you were telling me something horrible had happened to my friend Kenny,” I continued blithely. “He still doing construction at the East Jordan Iron Works?”

“No, he's remodeling a place on the lake south of Petoskey.”

“That's good. He and Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. One of those big places on the highway?”

“No, a small home off Townline Road.”

Alan groaned, as if he had wanted her to keep it a secret or something. “Well, that is so good to hear. I know he's been down on his luck lately. Hey, if you see him, would you tell him his good friend Ruddy from the Black Bear stopped by?”

“What do you want with him, anyway?”

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I just want to show his friend Mark my new truck.”

*   *   *

“I can't believe that worked,”
Alan muttered.

“The power of repo persuasion.”

“So when are we going to Beaver Island to talk to Nina Otis's sister?”

“We're not. I can't see any reason why that will help us find out what happened to Lisa Marie.”

“But what about the possibility that all of the women we found on the computer were killed by the same man, a serial killer, like in all those books you make me read? We talked about this!”

“No,
you
talked about it. I don't see the connection at all. Three of the women are just gone; they didn't even wash up onshore.”

“People don't just vanish.”

“Alan, I make my living off of people who just vanish. It's what people do.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home. I need to clean up. I have a date.” I smiled at myself in the rearview mirror.

“What? With Katie? When did this happen?”

“You were asleep when I called her. Which is what I want you doing tonight, by the way. I don't need you chatting in my head while I'm trying to have a conversation with my girlfriend.”

“She's my daughter.”

“She's my fiancée,” I retorted, hoping that was still true.

When I arrived home I put on a new shirt and a pair of pants that I'd sent to the cleaners. I shaved and made sure my hair was as under control as I could make it. I didn't have any warm coats beside the one that I wore to repo cars, but I put on a sports jacket underneath it.

“How is it you can get your dirty socks on top of the hamper, but not in the hamper?”
Alan complained.

“It's just one of my many talents.”

“I can promise you Katie doesn't want to be with someone who can't even manage his own socks,”
he huffed.

“She wanted a guy. I'm a guy.”

“You're a slob.”

“Same thing.” I put my socks in the hamper, though.

Kermit dropped off my dog as I was getting ready to leave—Jake took one look at me and rolled his eyes, going to his blanket on the floor, weary from a day of sitting in his chair. “Tough day at the office?” I asked him. I knew that the second I left the house, he would promote himself to the pillow on what I still considered to be Katie's side of the bed, feeling he deserved a little self-pampering after being at work all day.

I debated what to drive to pick up my date. The repo truck was much newer and nicer on the inside than my old pickup. It also had two winches and a giant mechanical arm capable of lifting a car, which she might consider overkill.

Regardless, I decided the nicer interior was the better choice. Katie wore a new red coat I'd never seen before, very striking on her—but it made me uneasy, somehow, that she was buying beautiful clothing while we were on our break. She wore her work grown-up clothes under it, and I caught her eyebrows rising when I shrugged off my coat and she saw the jacket and the new shirt. What that expression meant, though, I had no idea.

I faltered when I saw that her finger was bare of the engagement ring I'd given her. Could she have forgotten it? The stone had come from my mother's small jewelry collection, a lucid, flashing diamond.

I knew that if we were permanently unengaged, she would give the ring back. If she didn't, maybe it meant what she'd been saying. We were on a break. Dating. Having fun.

The Weathervane is a beautiful hotel-restaurant built of gigantic rocks mined from the local hills and waters, including a ten-ton monster shaped like the state of Michigan. The place used to be a grist mill in the 1800s, and hugs the north side of the Pine River—a steel-lined stream, dredged deep, that cuts Charlevoix in two. A drawbridge over the Pine is the only connection between the two halves of town. From our table we could see the bridge and the river, jammed full of broken ice that rolled like the spiked back of a giant dragon. I had no idea why the river didn't freeze solid like all the other self-respecting water in the area.

My last-minute instructions from Jimmy the Wise One were to keep the conversation light and fun. Don't press her. When in doubt, apologize. Even if you're not in doubt, apologize. Apparently, women really like apologies.

Our waiter brought bread and butter. The butter was extremely cold, as tough to cut as the tension at the table. Here we were, engaged, on a break, on a date. What do you even talk about, under such circumstances? I asked Katie if she had ever seen the
Emerald Isle
coming or going to Beaver Island, which was far offshore, only visible on clear days.

“Just once. It barely fits in the canal!”

“The Pine is a river, actually. It was here before the white man showed up and lined it with steel plates. It's the only river in the United States to flow in two directions simultaneously.”

“Right. Correct her,”
Alan groused.
“Lecture her with useless facts
.
Make her feel like an idiot.”

“Sorry. I could be wrong,” I told her. I gratefully held out my glass when the waiter brought the wine. “Sorry. Did you hear about the woman who fell off the
Emerald Isle
that one time a few years ago?”

“Yes! I was friends with a guy who knew her. Nita?”

“Nina Otis.”

“And now we're talking about murder. On a date,”
Alan scolded.

“We don't know that she was murdered,” I said peevishly.

Katie gave me a puzzled look. “What do you mean? You think she was murdered?”

“No, sorry. It was just … I was reading about it somewhere one time, and I wondered why the captain paged her.”

“He did that?”

“Yeah, it was in the paper. At some point, they called for Nina Otis over the ship's loudspeaker.”

“Oh. Well, maybe by then she had fallen overboard.”

“Sure.” I waited for her to get it. Didn't take her long.

“Oh, but that doesn't make sense. How would they know who she was? And if she had fallen, they would have done more than just page her. Like, what was she supposed to do, say,
Oh, I fell off the boat, and the only reason I need to get back on is because I'm being
paged
?
”

We laughed together at that one, a simple, just-like-it-always-was type of laugh that reminded me how easily I could talk to her. I had to resist reaching for her hand. Her blue eyes had a lovely light in them.

I put that light out around the time we finished our salads. “So … how much longer do you think you'll need, to, you know? Think things through. About us.”

“Ruddy,”
Alan moaned.

Katie set her fork down stiffly, her posture straightening and her mouth settling into a line. I wanted to shout at her to wait,
Don't say what you're about to say!

I got a stay of execution. “Couldn't we just enjoy dinner?” she asked softly.

“Yeah, right, sorry, of course. I'm sorry. Sorry.”

By the time we'd finished the whitefish we'd both ordered, I'd managed to make her laugh by relating the story of how Mark Stevens and Kenny MacDonell came to rob the Black Bear with shotguns that were not loaded because they couldn't afford shells.

“And now these guys are your friends?” she asked, grinning.

“Well, yeah. At least until I repo Mark's truck,” I told her.

Her bemused look could have been,
What am I doing out with a big dumb repo man?
Or it could have been,
This man has an open heart and a really nice tow truck.

Now that I had a working radio, I listened to NPR while I drove, which was ten times more pleasant than listening to Alan Lottner. This made me something of a man of the world, and I chatted knowledgably about the euro, the inflation rate, the Federal Reserve, and other things that were apparently all connected together. At least seven times during dinner Alan said,
“Let
her
talk”
and as much as he irritated me, I did just that.

“A buyer this time a year is great, because you know if they're out looking at houses in this weather, they're serious. But if you get a seller who wants top dollar, you're going to work really hard and then get fired before the snow melts for not getting any offers,” she told me.

“And why do you want to be in this business?” I replied.

Her laughter was rueful.
“So much better to be in the business of throwing people off their roofs,”
Alan remarked acerbically. I wanted to throw
him
off the roof.

I drove her home, putting on a new CD playing her favorite singer, Michelle Featherstone. We drove down M-66, and my mood darkened only briefly as we passed the turnoff down to the ferry landing. My eyes found the spot in the frozen lake where I figured my car went in. Despite Amy Jo's information and despite Alan's serial killer fantasies, seeing that place still made me slightly ill.

Katie reached a hand out and touched me, her face wistful and sympathetic. Instantly, I felt better.

I was in love with Katie Lottner. I couldn't really be losing her, could I?

“So things might not be what they seem,” I said after a moment. “I found that woman from the festival. The one who said Lisa Marie Walker was not in the car when it sank? Her name is Amy Jo Stefonick. I spoke to her.”