Repo Madness: A Novel

  “You need an ambulance?”

  I shook my head and sat up. “No. Wow.” I glanced over at Blanchard, who was still straddling the snowmobile, his lifeless body twisted, his mouth open in outrage. “Neither does he,” I observed. The white glare from the SUV’s headlights made Strickland’s shots to the banker’s center mass appear black as oil. One of them went too high—above the eyes—and some of Blanchard’s skull was missing. It looked even worse than the Photoshopped pictures of his wife, made all the more gruesome by the way his corpse still sat in the saddle, as if ready to ride away like a headless horseman. I glanced away, a little sickened.

  Strickland grunted. “I came running the second I saw him pull the pistol. I thought he’d see me, but he was looking at you and nothing else. Not the brightest move, to walk right up to him like that, my friend.”

  “Repo men are known for their lack of intelligence.”

  He grinned, bringing out his cell phone. He dialed. I looked around the cold, bleak landscape, thinking how close I had come to dying. It didn’t seem real.

  “Cutty, shots fired. Suspect is 10-55. Roll your forensics team,” Strickland said. “Armed civilian on the scene.” He looked at me. “No, our C.I. is unhurt.”

  I probed the bruises under the vest. “Ow,” Alan complained.

  * * *

  Even though they had the chip in the hat, the police still wanted to take my statement, so I sat in the panel van and went through it all a couple of times. There wasn’t much for me to tell, since all I’d basically done was walk out on the ice and fall down—Barry Strickland’s conversation would probably take a lot more time.

  It was just past twelve when the cops let me go. Cutty shook my hand, a wry look on her face, probably processing how my screw-up had saved the court system the cost of a trial. “The D.A. wants me to hold you here,” she murmured confidentially.

  “Great.”

  She shrugged, giving me a small smile. “I don’t actually work for him, you know. I’d suggest you get in your tow truck and go home. Put some ice on those bruises; it helps. I got hit in the vest two separate times a few years ago, so I know how much it hurts.”

  I took her advice and slipped behind the wheel, waving jauntily at the state police as I drove over the Holy Island bridge. No one tried to stop me.

  I cruised up the snowy county road to M-66 and paused there, considering. I was exactly equidistant between Katie’s place in East Jordan and the Ferry Bar in Charlevoix. I had two distinct sore spots on my chest, my ears still rang from the near hit to the head, and I was awfully damn exhausted. Katie opening her door for me would be the most welcome sight I could think of.

  On the other hand …

  “Let’s go see what’s happening at the Ferry Bar,” I told Alan.

  “It’s after twelve. They close early in the winter,” Alan objected.

  I turned right, toward Charlevoix. “That’s good. I’m a repo man. I do my best work at midnight.”

  30

  We Have Less Time Than We Thought

  Charlevoix was buttoned up tightly. In the summer the streets flow with people and gaily lit boats bob in Round Lake and the air feels warm and exciting. This time of year, February not yet half over, people withdraw into the safety of their warm homes, abandoning the town. I saw literally not a single person as I cruised up Bridge Street. I parked two blocks away from the Ferry Bar—standard repo procedure. I grabbed Alan’s case file and headed out. My footfalls were muffled by the snow, so the night was utterly silent. When I got to Rogan’s place, it was closed and dark.

  “Would you quit touching the sore spots on your chest?” Alan requested peevishly.

  “They hurt.”

  “I know they hurt! Stop touching them!”

  I remembered Rogan telling me he had a garage. I went around to the back of the bi-level building, finding four ground-level garage doors. I located which one was logically his, but it was locked. All right. I went back up to the front and peered inside. The only lights were the indicators on the appliances, green and red and blue dots in the darkness.

  My elbow knocked out the glass above the doorknob, and I reached through and unlocked the door.

  “Ruddy!” Alan blurted, sounding stressed for some reason.

  “Oops.”

  “That’s breaking and entering.”

  “I know. I’ll go inside; you stay here and watch for the cops.” A little psycho humor, there.

  “What are we really doing here?” Alan responded testily.

  “I don’t know, Alan. We’re looking around, seeing if we can find anything. You’re the one who thinks Rogan might be our man.”

  After ten minutes in the bar, all I could say for sure was that it was a place that served alcohol. If Rogan had made a signed confession, he had neglected to leave it lying out. Sitting right next to his computer screen was the key card to access it, and pretty much without thinking I swiped it, and the system came alive.

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  “This is the same system we’ve got at the Black Bear. Of course I do,” I responded.

  Well, I really didn’t. I had it in my mind to see if Shantytown mayor Phil Struder had a house account, but instead, after a bit of messing around, found myself looking at calendars. “Damn,” I said.

  “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can you check the date Nina Otis vanished?”

  “Sure. Want to tell me why?” Using the printouts from the folder for reference, I tapped the year, found the month, and opened it.

  “This is a shift schedule, right? Let’s see if Rogan was really off the night she disappeared.”

  That wasn’t as easily accomplished as I would have hoped, but after a couple of stabs at it, I got the correct week up. It was summer, so three people worked that night.

  One of them was Wade Rogan.

  “Huh. And he said he wasn’t here that night. Our friend Mr. Rogan seems to have a problematic relationship with the truth,” I noted dryly.

  “Not just that. Wait. Focus for just a second, okay? Focus. Okay. See it?”

  “See what?” I said impatiently.

  “See how he took the next four nights off?”

  “Huh.”

  “Ruddy. What if the guy buying Nina Otis drinks was the bartender?”

  “Which,” I mused, “was something the mayor could hardly have failed to notice.” I thought about it, and then, with Alan’s printouts reminding me of the dates, went back to work on the schedule. Rogan didn’t own the bar the night Lisa Marie Walker vanished, but the next four days after telling the cops he saw a drunk woman headed for the Charlevoix docks, he was off work, letting himself get pretty short-staffed for a drinking establishment in the tourist season. He wasn’t working the night the woman fell off the sailboat virtually in front of his home, nor did he report to work for three days after that. We saw the same thing for the two other missing women from Alan’s list—the nights they vanished, Rogan was here, but then he gave himself a quick little vacation after that.

  “Let’s look around,” I suggested. I went down the hallway to the bathrooms. The hallway itself was closed off by a curtain. The men’s room was first, on the left, and then the ladies’ was at the very end. An ancient wooden phone booth, inoperative and all carved up with initials and obscene comments, was positioned between the men’s and the women’s, so that the end of the hall was hidden from view.

  On the other side of the hall from the ladies’ room was a door with a wide-angle peephole in it. It was locked, but when I hit it with my boot a couple of times, it opened inward. Alan sighed. I turned on the light.

  It was a tiny office—Rogan’s personal work space. A desk, phone, and a chair. Photographs of someplace tropical, maybe the Wolfingers’ beach in Hawaii, on the wall. Shelves with cleaning supplies and cans of salsa, things like that.

  “So, Alan,” I said. “Suppose you’re giving some lady free drinks all afternoon. She’s goi
ng to take the ferry to Beaver Island, but you’re making them strong and she’s gulping them down, getting tipsy. Eventually it’s time for her to leave. You know she’s going to want to use the bathroom after all she’s had to drink. You come back here.” I gestured to the peephole in the door. “And you watch. And here she comes. You open the office door, you step out, you grab her, you close the office door. It could happen in literally seconds.”

  “She would have to be really, really drunk,” Alan objected. “Otherwise she’d fight it, maybe scream.”

  I thought about the cans of starter fluid out in the mayor’s ice shanty. It wasn’t just an explosive chemical; it had long had another use. “Ether,” I speculated. “You have a cloth soaked in ether. By the time she reacts—remember, she’s hammered—she’s sucked in the fumes and her lights go out. Or hell, maybe I’m making this too complicated. Maybe you just say, ‘Come here a minute,’ and she walks right in.”

  Alan pondered it. “Then what?” he asked.

  There was a single door to my left. I thought it might be a closet, but when I opened it, I saw that it led to a dark, steep stairway. I fumbled for a light switch, found it, and flipped it on. A single stark light bulb showed the way down to the inside of a garage. “Huh,” I said.

  “What is that thing down there?” Alan asked.

  At the bottom of the stairs, which pitched so steeply they looked spectacularly treacherous, a small chair incongruously sat on a metal rail. It was, I realized, a stairway elevator.

  “Picture you’ve got a drugged, unconscious woman, and you need to get her to the trunk of your car,” I murmured. “No way you’re going to be able to get her down these steps. So you put in a lift.”

  “He’s been doing this for a while,” Alan said breathlessly.

  “You might have missed a few with your list,” I agreed. Inside, though, I was finally feeling something—rage. This guy ruined my life, and he took Lisa Marie’s. He murdered Nina Otis. He was like a spider, lurking here, waiting for his prey to stumble down the hall.

  I debated going down the stairs, but I didn’t know what else I would be able to learn. From where I stood, it was a completely empty garage. I turned to flip off the light, and my eye caught sight of a peculiarly high shelf to my right, about six inches wide and a foot long, set off to the side of the upper doorframe. It was so high, I couldn’t see what was on it, but when I felt around up there, I touched a soft cloth. I pulled it down, unfolded it, and stared at a hypodermic needle and a small glass vial. I turned the little bottle over and read the label.

  “What’s Flunitrazepam?” Alan asked.

  “Not something they covered in repo school,” I muttered. I went back into the office, and used Rogan’s PC to look up what I had found. “Rohypnol,” I announced.

  “Okay, and what is Rohypnol?” Alan asked peevishly.

  “It’s like a knockout drug.”

  “So…,” Alan replied slowly, thinking it through.

  “So that’s it,” I finished for him. “He waits in his office. The drunk woman comes down the hall. He opens the door, gets her inside, sticks her with a needle, and she’s out for hours.”

  “He did it, Ruddy. He killed Lisa Marie Walker.”

  I put the drug back up on its shelf and turned off the stairway light. “I need to talk to Strickland,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  I could hear it plainly: A vehicle was pulling up behind the building. Briefly, headlights caused a yellow strip of light to flare beneath the garage door.

  “If we tripped an alarm, we’re screwed,” I muttered.

  Just as I was shutting the door at the top of the stairs, the garage door gave a lurch and began grinding upward, raised by an electric motor. It wasn’t the cops.

  Wade Rogan was returning to work.

  * * *

  “Run!” Alan blurted, panicking. I didn’t run, but I didn’t dawdle, bumping into a table as I made my way through the darkened bar. There was no way Rogan was going to miss the destruction to his front door—cold air was flowing in through the shattered glass as I opened it and stepped outside. I thought that, with a little luck, he’d fail to notice the abuse to the office latch, because kicking it open hadn’t really left much damage other than maybe a gouge in the strike plate.

  How much time, though, before he realized he’d had a break-in? And then what would he do?

  “My guess is that the first thing he’ll want to do is make sure his drug stash is still there. Then he’ll probably call the cops,” I speculated. I was running down the street, my footfalls muffled by the fresh snow, my breath steaming out in front of me.

  “Will he? His bar was broken into, and nothing is missing. He knows you’re suspicious of him.”

  “You might be right.” Panting, I slid into my tow truck. “But we’ve got some time. He’s not going to want to leave the door with that hole in it.”

  “Time for what?”

  “We know where he is, which means we know where he isn’t. I want to go check out his house, see if I can find anything there.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  I drove north, right past the Ferry Bar. I stared inside: It was still dark. “He’s in his office,” I said. “Or maybe he’s still in his car, listening to a story on NPR.”

  “Or maybe he took one look and he’s already on the road, ahead of us,” Alan suggested tensely.

  “I don’t think so. We’d see his lights.” Highway 31 has a lot of straight road before the turn to Boyne City.

  “You can’t honestly be thinking of going to his house.”

  “Yeah, I can honestly be thinking of that.”

  “Why? Why not just go to Strickland with what we’ve got?”

  “What we’ve got? I’ve got? Well, what exactly do I have? And how about when I tell Strickland how I got it?”

  “I think if you break into a place and discover evidence, if you’re not a cop, it can still be used at trial.”

  “And I appreciate your expert legal opinion, but even if that’s true, all I have is circumstantial crap. Maybe, though, I can find something in his house. Don’t a lot of these assholes keep trophies? I read that somewhere.”

  “We’re going to have no time at all, Ruddy.”

  I put my foot hard on the accelerator. “Nah, we’re going to have plenty of time. Ten minutes, easy. Maybe an hour, even.”

  “God. What if he catches us?”

  “If he catches me, then I’ll make him lie down and I’ll call the cops.”

  “He could have a gun.”

  “Well, I’ve been shot already tonight. Wasn’t that bad.”

  “You had on a vest.”

  “Just relax, Alan.”

  There wasn’t a soul on the road this late at night, this late in winter. The trees flashed by, coated on their north sides by snow that flared white in my headlights.

  I passed Strickland’s place and thought briefly about going back and seeing if he had gotten home yet and maybe wanted to help me go shoot somebody else. In the end, though, I kept driving.

  * * *

  Rogan’s mailbox had a red reflector on it that brightened as I approached. I turned and headed down the long, narrow driveway—it reminded me of the trip down the middle of Holy Island: just as dark, just as isolated.

  When I got to his house, I decided to flip the truck around and point it back up the driveway so I could take off quickly. “Hey, Ruddy,” Alan asked as I was cranking the wrecker around. “Where’s the folder?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The folder. Our files. Did you leave it sitting out in the open for Rogan to find?”

  “Huh. I guess we’ll have less time than I thought.”

  “We have to leave now!”

  “Ten minutes,” I promised. I checked my watch.

  “What was that? Is someone here?” Alan asked.

  “What? Where?”

  “Next to the garage. See? There’s a car.”

  I backed my
truck up and swung it so the headlights were beaming directly on the vehicle next to the garage. I sucked in a breath.

  It was Katie’s car.

  31

  The Mayor of Shantytown

  I punched my fist through the glass door on the side of the house, unlocked it, and found myself in the mud room, the place designed for people to dump boots and snowshoes and coats in the winter. This one looked like every other mud room I’d ever been in—lined with hooks and benches—except for the incongruous presence of a large, new-looking freezer, hip high and four feet long, shoved up against one wall. The thing was so large, it made the mud room unusable for its intended purpose. I stopped, staring at the gleaming appliance.

  “You don’t think…,” Alan whispered in horror.

  I did not want to look in that freezer. Yet that’s what I did, gritting my teeth and lifting the top. The missing snowmobile canvas was in there, white condensation frozen in fractal patterns across its black surface.

  I moved the canvas.

  A man, perhaps seventy years old, his eyes open, his face white with frost, was folded into the tight space, his mouth frozen open, as if he died screaming.

  I’d found the mayor of Shantytown.

  “He knew Rogan was the person buying Nina Otis drinks,” Alan murmured in shock.

  “And this is how he shut the guy up.” I plunged into the dark house, feeling for light switches. “Katie!” I shouted. “Katie!”

  I listened. Nothing.

  Leaping up the stairs two at a time, I ran from one bedroom to another, tearing open closets, diving to the floor to look under beds. One room was an office, piled high with folders and other papers. I was panting, sick to my stomach. I turned and dashed back to the main floor. Rogan could turn up any minute.

  Bathroom. Master bedroom. Small study.

  Nothing. No sign of her.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” Alan begged. “You have to find her, Ruddy!”

  “I know! Stop. Let’s think. Think.” I stood, trying to get my breathing under control, listening for any sign of her.

  “Wait. Rogan’s shanty.”