D.A. The cut his eyes to Katie. “I’m not sure you’re safe with him alone,” he stated pointedly.
I clenched my fists, unable to believe this guy would stoop so low. Cutty was regarding him with a shocked expression.
“Well, that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Katie spat, her eyes sparking angrily. I stared, surprised: I had never heard her use the f word before in her life.
“Wow,” Alan said.
“Ruddy saved my life. I’m not saying another word to you, you moron,” Katie continued. “Get out of my room.”
Hughes opened his mouth to retort. “Sir!” Cutty barked, stepping in front of him. He blinked, startled. “We need to go. Now,” she declared sternly. Cutty would have made an excellent bar bouncer.
He regarded her blankly, and then disgust curled his lip. “All right. We’ll leave. But this isn’t over.” He glared at me.
“I’ll call you when we’re finished here,” I promised Cutty, completely ignoring D.A. Darrell.
As they left, I closed the door and leaned against it. “So,” I said.
“So. God, Ruddy. Come here.” She held her arms out, and when I crossed the room, she buried her face in my neck. “I was so stupid. It was such a great house, I was thinking of how I would advertise it, how well it would show when the snow melted, and he seemed so nice. He offered me a drink, and even though it was really strong, I sipped it because I thought, you know, sales, get the customer comfortable.”
“You are not stupid. That guy, he’s had practice at this.”
“I hardly drank any of it at all. Then the room started spinning, and I felt so drunk. He was laughing at me.”
“It’s okay.”
She pulled back and looked at me, her eyes moist. “But then I remember you picking me up. I felt so safe in your arms. I knew everything was going to be all right. And then it was cold and then you were hugging me and then I was in the car with Kermit. Because you saved me. You, Ruddy.”
“Well, Jake helped.”
She laughed, shaking her head.
“You did save her, Ruddy. You saved my little girl,” Alan praised.
“What did the cops tell you?”
She shrugged. “Not much. They said they were just starting their investigation, but that that guy probably has done things like this before. Kidnapped women, I mean. They said I was lucky to get away. No,” she corrected herself. “The D.A. said I was lucky to get away. The nice policewoman said you saved my life, and if it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t even know what was going on.”
“I’ll bet you the D.A. was happy with that.”
“Oh, very,” Katie agreed sarcastically.
“So, is there anything you need? Your Nelson DeMille novel? Chocolate? More apologies?”
“No, but there is something you could get from my house. Would you mind?”
“Not at all. What?”
“My engagement ring?”
“Really?”
Katie looked around, and her expression turned sly. “Come here,” she said to me. She lifted the thin blanket covering her legs.
Now it was my turn to look around. “Are you serious? I thought you had a not-tonight-I-have-a-headache headache.”
She laughed. “The bed’s adjustable. How can we resist?”
“I’m just not sure that’s part of the prescribed treatment.” I could sense Alan’s distress with the whole subject.
“Well, maybe this isn’t the place for that,” Katie concurred. “We could make out a little, though.”
“Or a lot, even,” I agreed.
We smiled into each other’s eyes. My heart was responding with an accelerated pulse rate. She held out her arms, and I decided the time had come to push Alan away, but when I looked for him, he was already gone. Apparently, my unconscious had taken care of suppressing my subconscious.
I was a repo man with a voice in his head. I had a dog, a fiancée, a pregnant sister, friends, and legal problems. A life, in other words. I had a life, and this woman was at the center of it. I awkwardly climbed into the hospital bed with my Katie, and she laughed as she encircled me with her arms.
Epilogue
Mick’s first thought was that the guy standing on his front porch was a cop, because he had that look, that air of grim authority. He was big, too: a big unhappy cop, there to do some big unhappy cop thing to Mick. Mick swallowed.
“Mr. Clayton?” the big guy queried.
Mick nodded nervously—there was just something about the guy’s presence that came off as menacing. Mick found himself feeling guilty, though he wasn’t exactly sure what it was he might have done.
“I’m here about your Escalade.”
This made no sense to Mick. “Now what?”
“You have a new Cadillac Escalade? In your garage, maybe?”
“Yeah, but…”
“You haven’t been making your payments. You haven’t made any payments. I need twelve hundred dollars from you, or I’m going to have to take it in.”
“Take it in?” Mick blinked rapidly. “Wait, that’s what this is? You’re, like, a repo man?”
“Yes, I’m exactly, like, a repo man.”
“Okay.” Mick shook his head. “Something’s not right. The payments are supposed to come out of my checking account automatically. I … Oh.”
“Oh?” the big guy repeated.
“Crap! Like, right after I bought the car, my identity was stolen. Some guy took some of my outgoing bills from the mailbox and made checks on his printer for my checking account and cashed them. He got, like, five grand before the fraud people figured it out. So I had to get a new checking account.” Mick slapped his forehead. “So of course the payments haven’t been coming out automatically.”
“Of course.”
“And now I’m behind?”
“More than sixty days,” the big guy affirmed. “So I need to either relieve you of the burden of ownership of the Escalade, or I need to relieve you of the burden of twelve hundred dollars.”
“This is … Look, I’m getting married.”
“Congratulations. Twelve hundred dollars.”
“No, I mean, that’s why everything’s so disorganized in my life right now. Yes, yeah, I have the money. Is a check okay?”
The repo man looked around the entryway, clearly sizing up Mick’s life style. Mick anxiously made the same assessment. His fiancée had recently repainted the entryway, and there was a picture of the two of them in Maui, Mick and Marissa, grinning because he had just proposed to her—if a guy could afford to take a woman to Maui, didn’t that imply he made a nice living and was good for a couple of car payments? Marissa certainly seemed to believe so.
“Sure, I’ll take a check, as long as you can promise it won’t bounce. That would be very unpleasant, if it bounced.”
“No, no, I get that. Don’t worry. Come in. It’s cold out.”
The repo guy didn’t have to duck to come through the doorway, but he completely blotted out the thin sun for a moment as he filled the frame. “When you didn’t respond to their phone calls, I guess the bank saw that as an indication of your attitude toward your payments, and they sent me to help you with your attitude.”
“The phone calls?” Mick asked as he searched for his checkbook in a drawer in the kitchen, which Marissa was still in the process of redecorating. “Oh man, like, a robocall? I got a couple when I first bought the car, trying to sell me an extended warranty, so I just started hanging up on those,” he apologized. He felt a real need to explain himself. As he handed over his check, he hesitated, his eyes widening. “Oh my God!” he blurted.
“Problem?”
“You’re that guy. McCann. Robby?”
“Ruddy. We know each other?” He pulled the check from Mick’s fingers, using the delicacy of a parent separating a toy from a child.
“Yeah. Well, not really. We met once. And I was deposed for your trial. On tape, I mean, but they never called us to testify.”
&n
bsp; The repo man drew himself up, somehow getting bigger, but his voice was soft. “I pleaded guilty,” he said. “So there was no need for your testimony. And you are…”
Mick nodded vigorously. “Yeah.”
“No, I mean, who are you?”
“Oh! Right. Uh, I was parked in a van that night with some friends. My buddy Gary and I were the ones who went out in the rowboat. That was some night.”
“Yes. Yes, it was.” McCann had a reflective look on his face as he nodded. “I am sorry I never thanked you. Between the whack on the head and the water, I guess I wouldn’t have made it if you hadn’t pulled me out of the lake.”
“Sure. That’s okay. Your dad did.”
“My dad? My dad did what?”
“Your dad thanked us. He had us in for a couple of beers at that bar? Is it still there?”
“The Black Bear. Yeah. It’s still there.” McCann was regarding Mick strangely. “He did that?”
“Yeah.”
“That surprises me. He never said anything about it.”
Mick pondered what to say about the girl who died that night and came up with nothing he couldn’t be sure wouldn’t piss this big guy off. Instead he changed the subject. “It’s funny. I’m going to see them. They’re coming to the wedding.”
“I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”
“Right. So Sharon and Gary got married. You have to … It’s hard to explain what an impact that night had on us. I mean, we’re just sitting there, smoking some weed I bought that was the worst damn marijuana in the world.” Mick smiled at the memory. “And then your car comes, and it was as if it crashed into us somehow. Hearing you yell for that girl, watching your car sink, barely getting you into the boat, it really brought home to us how quickly things can change, you know? Life seemed different after that. The three of us were together all the time, talking about it, and Sharon kept asking what are we doing, we’re just wasting our lives, when something could happen and then it would be over, just like that.” Mick snapped his fingers. “She was kind of my date that night, but she and Gary sort of clicked. They decided to get married and move to Grand Rapids, where he started working for Steelcase, and she’s into some kind of computer security. And I looked at that and thought that if Gary Burner—that was his nickname, from, you know.” Mick pinched his thumb and forefinger together and brought the imaginary joint to his lips. “If Gary Burner is going to get sober and get married and get a job, then what am I doing, you know? So I got an engineering degree from Michigan—go Blue—and now I work in the energy sector, decommissioning old oil rigs, mostly right around here.”
“Go Green,” McCann replied. Michigan State.
“So I guess what I’m saying is, you don’t have to think about thanking me, that in some weird way I kind of feel like I ought to thank you. I get that it was tragic, of course. I just … If you hadn’t come along, I might still be parked in that van somewhere, getting high and bitching about my existence instead of going out and doing something.” Mick impulsively stuck his hand out and, after a moment, McCann took it, shaking it gravely.
“I appreciate you telling me all this,” McCann said. “No one ever mentioned it to me before. I’m happy something good came of the accident. You want, bring your friends to the Black Bear when they’re back in town. I’ll buy you all a beer. The place is a lot like you—it was sort of going nowhere, but my sister fixed it up, and now we get successful people, families.…” McCann shrugged in a way that indicated he wasn’t necessarily sure he was describing an improvement. “Hardly ever get a fistfight anymore.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Mick said, knowing that with the wedding, they would all be too busy to take McCann up on his offer.
McCann nodded as if he knew the same thing. “Well, hey, normally there’s a collection fee that gets added to the end of your contract. Two hundred dollars.”
“Oh.”
“My company will waive it though. Consider it a wedding present.”
“Wow. Thanks. That’s great.”
McCann turned to go. “No,” he said over his shoulder. “Thank you.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As a former repo man myself, I have to say that to do the job properly, it helps to be more than a little crazy. Picture creeping up on a house at midnight, jumping into a car, and sitting there cranking a nearly dead battery while lights come on in the house and you see shadowy figures grabbing their shotguns and running for the door. What sane person would do something like that? Yet despite the fact that I repeatedly did stuff like that, I’m not an expert on mental disorders, so in order to produce a realistic-sounding conversation between Ruddy and a psychiatrist, I received invaluable aid from Dr. Ira Handler. Thank you, Doctor, for your guidance.
I’ve had thankfully little exposure to criminal court, so thank you, Rob Whims, for your legal advice and alarmingly creative ideas on how to murder people.
In this era of search engines, you’d think I could research everything just by sitting at my desk, but it turns out some things require more nuance than a question that generates 345,000 “results.” Thank you, Cantor Gary Shapiro, for being my go-to on the subtle ins and outs of Judaism. And thank you, northern Michigan, for supplying me with such rich and interesting people and places—every time I go there for research it’s a delight. And yes, Darlene’s is there in East Jordan, the Landing is right there where Ruddy drove into the drink in Ironton, and the Red Mesa Grille is in Boyne City, as is Café Sante. No amount of Google will relate how good Darlene’s cinnamon rolls are, nor how amazingly peaceful it is to sit at the Landing’s lakeside tables for a fabulous perch meal on a summer evening, nor just how great the Mexican food is at the Red Mesa. Nor will Google help you find the Black Bear Bar and Grille in Kalkaska—I made that place up.
Thank you, Tucker, for being as lazy in reality as Jake is in fiction.
Thanks to Connection House for all of the social networking stuff, including web design, that you’ve done for, what, seven years? You’ve been invaluable. Is that what it’s called, social networking? Whatever it is, thanks so much, with particular thanks to Susan Andrews, Andrew Gupton (they’re related), and Charlie Salem. Charlie, you are unreal. And thank you, Mindy Wells Hoffbauer, for helping the more than 300,000 Facebook fans of A Dog’s Purpose enjoy and celebrate their dogs. It’s an ongoing conversation—if you’re on Facebook and like dogs, books, my books, animal stories, or animal rescue, come to the A Dog’s Purpose page and join us. Okay, maybe if you don’t like dogs, you shouldn’t bother.
Speaking of A Dog’s Purpose, when this novel, Repo Madness, is published, the DreamWorks/Walden Media production of the film of A Dog’s Purpose will either be in theaters or so close to it our contractions will be two minutes apart. This would not be happening were it not for Gavin Polone, who is honest, hardworking, determined, talented, and quite handsome with a mosquito net over his face. Gavin is the producer of A Dog’s Purpose and has championed the book and the movie from day one. He is also involved in two other book-to-movie projects we have going at the moment—I’m honored to be working with him.
Another great producer is Vahan Paretchan of Lifeboat Productions, who is working to see that a series based on Ruddy McCann the repo man will be playing on small screens sometime in the near future. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this, we will have already shot the pilot episode! Currently it’s being called Repo Madness, but that could change—for all I know we’ll call it Ruddy’s Flower Shop.
I’m a producer myself, you know. I produced Muffin Top: A Love Story, which was co-produced, co-written, and directed by Cathryn Michon, who stars in the movie, which is based on her novel The Grrl Genius Guide to Sex (with Other People). In other words, Cathryn may have been slightly more important than I was to the whole thing, but hey, I drove her to the set every day—otherwise, there would be no movie! So maybe I should get all the credit.
Cathryn lowered her standards about five years ago and married me. I get cr
edit for that, too.
Maybe by the time this book is released, our movie Cook Off! will be in theaters. I produced that one as well, and Cathryn’s efforts on that project was just as intense—without her, there would be no Cook Off!, which was based on another one of her books: The Grrl Genius Guide to Life. (I drove her to the set on that one, too.) Oh, I’m actually in that movie, in a brief scene that I will modestly tell you is the best in the whole film, even though it’s only a few seconds long.
Tom Rooker and Elliott Crowe were intimately involved in both of the above projects. And, I’ll cheerfully admit, so were hundreds of others—Tom and Elliott get special attention because they, like Cathryn, are still working on both movies. Turns out, when you make a film, you’re never really done. You just occasionally go into remission.
Cathryn also reads nearly every draft of all of my books, providing substantial notes and helping me craft novels I can be proud of. I used to stand right there and ask her what she thought of each page, but through selective use of negative reinforcement she has corrected my behavior.
If this is the first novel in my “repo” series you’ve read and you’d like to read more, check out The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man, which introduced Ruddy, Alan, and the cabin-fevered folks at the Black Bear to the rest of the world. There is also a sweet little short story entitled “The Midnight Dog of the Repo Man” that is available in e-book format—it tells the story of how Jake and Ruddy came to live together.
And, if you liked A Dog’s Purpose, please consider reading A Dog’s Journey, the direct sequel. It’s got an even higher reader rating than A Dog’s Purpose!
Thanks to Steve Younger and Steve Fisher for representing me in Hollywood. Thank you, Scott Miller, for rescuing my career and deftly repackaging me as a novelist after I’d spent years as a humor writer, though I thought we agreed that everyone’s name should be Steve.
Sheryl Johnston is not only the name of Ruddy’s preferred psychiatrist, but she’s also one of my dearest friends and a former NASCAR driver. Thank you, Sheryl, for getting me places quickly. Very, very quickly.