The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man: A Novel

  “I’ll never see my little girl again. She’s all grown up. She grew up without me. I wasn’t there, Ruddy. I’m her daddy and I wasn’t there for her.”

  I tried to imagine what he was going through. I thought about how I felt when I got the call from Becky telling me Dad was dead, how frustrated I’d felt that I had seen so little of him those three years. Mom was even worse, coming just six months later. “I’m sorry, Alan. Jesus, I’m really sorry.”

  Alan directed me to the cemetery, going quiet as I pulled up to a heavy-gauge chain-link fence. There was not a headstone in sight. “I don’t understand,” he said finally. “This was the graveyard.”

  I got out of the truck, the snowflakes landing on my face and melting. I walked up to the fence and grabbed it—it felt pretty new, coated with some sort of rubberized layer to prevent rust. From here I could gaze right down into the parking lot of the factory where Einstein worked. I scanned the area, looking for his truck.

  “This makes no sense. This was the cemetery, I swear. The funeral home was about fifty feet from where we are standing, and the headstones went all the way down the hill.”

  “Well, it’s not here now, Alan. There’s a factory, instead,” I sighed. Another indication that Alan was a figment of my imagination.

  “What’s happening?” Alan shouted in frustration. “My house, my office, even the town cemetery, they’re all gone, just like the past eight years!”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re thinking that this is just more proof that I never existed,” Alan accused.

  “Well yeah, Alan, I am.”

  The noise he made in response was full of defeat.

  “What do you want to do now, Alan? Got any more ideas?”

  “Let’s just go.”

  I detoured down Main Street in case Katie was standing there with a dead battery. No such luck, though everything else about the day was pretty much the same. I swung the truck into the exact same parking slot and let a pleasant feeling akin to nostalgia wash over me. “I think I’ll have a cup of java,” I remarked. “That okay with you, Mr. Lottner?”

  “Sure,” Alan responded listlessly.

  I indulged myself by sitting at a small table and picturing what it would have been like if Katie had accepted my offer of coffee that day. Again, I was almost impossibly witty, and she laughed and laughed.

  Alan winked out on me, off on one of his catnaps, and I took this as a sign that I should be impossibly witty on the telephone while I had some privacy. The woman who ran the coffee shop told me to help myself to her phone. I was pretty calm as I dialed, fully aware that Katie was most likely still at work. I’m in East Jordan; before I leave, I want to make sure your battery is still …

  I heard five rings, and then a click. “Hello, this is Katie Lottner. I can’t take your phone call right now…”

  What? What? I hung up, my heart pounding.

  Katie Lottner?

  10

  I’m Not Dead

  Could this really be happening? How could she have the same last name as Alan? Was she Kathy, his daughter?

  What was my mind doing to me? Or was it God, trying to teach me some lesson I hadn’t any hope of comprehending?

  I’d met Katie before I heard any voices in my head. Had she mentioned her last name then? I tried to recall. Maybe she told me, and I forgot, but it was trapped there in my subconscious. Mix in a little location—East Jordan, where I met her and where Alan claimed to have lived and died—and the whole story was revealed to be nothing more than a rather mundane creation by an imagination too lazy to go very far for the ingredients of its hallucinations.

  Shaken, I drove down to the little park located where the Jordan River empties into Lake Charlevoix. For most of its length, the Jordan isn’t so much a river as a clear, cold brook. As it approaches the lake, though, it widens, slows, and forms what in other waters might be termed a bayou. The water here looks still, deep, and dark.

  I felt Alan come awake, but I didn’t say anything. The very fact of first name Katie, last name Lottner, was rendering me mute.

  I turned my back on the river and gazed out at the lake. The water was the same shade of gray as the sky. We were both silent, contemplating. A long way out a boat broke from shore and headed north—I could see its wake flashing white in the frigid water, but the wind carried off the noise from the motor before it could reach my ears. “It’s best for me like this, when you are looking long distance and not moving your eyes so much. When you’re focused on something close it makes me nauseated,” Alan finally said.

  “Well, do me a favor and don’t throw up in there.”

  “I remember coming down the Jordan River in a canoe with my daughter. We’d fish for trout. When you get down here to the end where the river flattens out, the current sort of dies, and you have to paddle pretty hard. She’d get tired. We’d pull up right about here. Then we’d sit and fish some more from the shore.”

  “Your daughter, what was her name, again?”

  “Kathy.”

  “Kathy, what is that, a nickname for Katherine or something?”

  “Actually it’s ‘Katrine.’ Marget insisted we name her something Swedish. I called her Kathy, Marget called her Katrine.”

  “Katrine. Katie,” I said. Alan didn’t comment. I sighed. “I’ve done that. Canoed down the Jordan River before,” I told him, returning to the original subject. Which was probably why Alan had the same recollection—we were both drawing from the same memory bank.

  “Yeah?” He pondered this for a few moments. “It was near the Jordan where I was killed.”

  I sat down, careful to keep my eyes on the horizon so he wouldn’t get sick. Time to see what my imagination could come up with. I had a feeling Alan’s murder would exactly match the circumstances from a T. Jefferson Parker novel I’d just finished. “Tell me about that.”

  “I got a phone call from this guy who’d seen an ad for a listing in our office. There was this cabin out in the Jordan Valley, ten acres of land. Man who owned it used to hunt out of it. Then he died and his wife let it fall apart. Kids broke into it, and then somebody got careless and it burned down. When she died it went to her niece, I think it was. She put it up for sale, but she was from California and wouldn’t believe me when I told her how little it was worth. It was a pretty little piece, about five hundred feet of riverfront, lots of hardwood. We went through the motions but nobody was interested at the price she wanted. So then this guy calls me, says he might make an offer, wants to take a look at it. I arrange to meet him and his wife, but driving out, I think I saw something I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two guys. I think it must have been a drug deal, the way they reacted. I drove on past them to up where I had my listing, and a couple of minutes later I heard them coming up from behind. I turned and one of them had a shovel…”

  “A what?” I demanded sharply.

  “A shovel. He had this look on his face I’ll never forget.”

  I stood abruptly. “Can you show me? Show me where this happened?”

  “Sure.”

  Alan directed me back down Highway 66 toward Mancelona. Even with the forest still looking dead from winter and snow puddled in the shadows, the Jordan Valley is a spectacular remnant of glacial action, heavily wooded and hilly. We turned once, then again, bumping down a mucky dirt road that was doing its best to turn back into untracked forest. I dropped my truck into four-wheel drive and powered over some small trees that had been felled during recent storms. My heart was pounding now, and I felt a little sick. We topped a rise and I eased to a stop.

  “What? What is it?” Alan demanded anxiously.

  “Here.” I stared without blinking at a small clearing off to the right. “This is where you saw the two guys, standing next to a truck. One of them you knew from somewhere before, but the one with the shovel was a stranger.”

  “The one I knew had a toupee,” Alan whispered.
>
  “Exactly.” I pressed on the accelerator and shot forward. Without the autumn leaves it really didn’t look much like the same place until the road ended at the remains of a burned cabin strewn across the forest floor. I slid out of the cab and walked up to where the front door had been, kicking at some loose bricks. “You were standing right about here.”

  “How do you know this, Ruddy?”

  “The other one, the stranger, husky with a tan. Green eyes. He walked right up and swung the shovel without even slowing down.” I rubbed my arm.

  “Hit me between the elbow and the wrist. Broke the bone, I think,” Alan murmured.

  I pictured the guy with the shovel, the expression on his face. “Yes.” I turned and looked down the road. “So you ran back this way.”

  “I was running forty miles a week at that point. Once I got twenty yards ahead, I knew they would never catch me. I could hear them panting, even after that short distance. And then the sound faded away.”

  I found myself trotting back down the road, acting it out. “Didn’t even notice their truck when you passed it,” I said as I huffed past the clearing where it had been parked. I slid and almost fell in the snow-covered mud but didn’t stop.

  “I was too busy thinking, trying to figure out why they had done it. Maybe if I had seen the truck it would have occurred to me to get off the road.”

  “Because you didn’t.” I stopped, peering around. “If you’d made it into the woods, they never would have caught up with you.”

  “It was up here farther, I heard the truck.”

  I began moving. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to tell exactly where; the woods look so different this time of year.”

  “Tell me how you know all this, Ruddy.”

  “I had a dream several days ago. Except it felt more like a memory, more like waking up and remembering something that had really happened.”

  “A dream.”

  “Don’t start getting skeptical on me, Alan. Not you, of all people.” I slowed down, panting with the exertion. “Here’s where you heard the truck, right?” I began watching the side of the road. “So right along here somewhere…”

  We saw it together, the place where he’d jumped the ditch and fled into the woods. “There,” we said in unison. Without hesitating, I stepped into the trees.

  “Right along here. I’d just started running, I fell, and then just up here…”

  “Yes. He must have had a rifle. Even then, a pretty good shot, caught you right in the leg.”

  “I don’t know that he was aiming for the leg,” Alan argued, as if it made a difference. “And he might have shot five times; I never heard the rifle.”

  I turned around in a full circle. “I’m looking for a big old tree. An oak,” I stated.

  The tree was there, but was no longer upright. Same large cavity in the huge trunk, but the massive oak had been toppled by nature, lying indignantly on its side.

  It didn’t go down without a fight, though—it clung to an enormous ball of earth with its gnarled roots, exposing a huge crater that had filled with brown meltwater. “Right here.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is where you died.”

  “Yes.”

  I stood there for what must have been five minutes, staring at the tree, thinking of the life ebbing out of me, of wanting to live and knowing I wasn’t going to. Fixing my eyes on the sky and a tree and wishing I could have more time.

  “You okay, Alan?”

  “Yeah. I guess … I guess I’m probably buried right here somewhere. That’s why I wanted to see the cemetery, see if I had a grave. I knew I wouldn’t.”

  I turned and looked, kicking away the thin layer of melting snow. There was no mound, and whatever signs of digging that might have once marred the earth had been erased by eight years of active forest cycle.

  “What do we do now, Ruddy?”

  I jammed my hands in my pockets. The day was ending. The sun, which had been hidden behind a thick skin of gray all day, was fading rapidly away. “So one thing that could be happening is that I’ve been here before, forgot about it, and now, after my dream, I have created a split personality that ‘remembers’ a murder.”

  “Back to the ‘I must be crazy because I have voices in my head’ theory,” Alan observed.

  “Right. Repo Madness.”

  “You don’t believe that, though,” he said evenly.

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t. Because I know I’ve never been here before. I had a dream about it, but I would not have been able to find this place if you hadn’t shown me.”

  “So now what?”

  “So now I have to follow this thing through,” I said grimly. “Because if you are a figment of my imagination, the fact that I believe your story means I really am crazy.”

  We drove back to East Jordan with the light nearly gone from the sky. Some locals were already in the Rainbow Bar, not giving me much notice as I slid up and asked for a beer. I sat there looking friendly for a while, finally breaking into a conversation between two guys about what great times they had three years ago ice fishing. “I’m looking for a guy named Alan Lottner,” I told them.

  They passed a doubtful look between them. I sipped my beer.

  “Guy that ran off few years ago,” someone speculated from another table.

  “I didn’t ‘run off,’” Alan objected.

  There it was: confirmation that an Alan Lottner had really existed in East Jordan. Of course, I could have picked this up somehow, read his name off of a real estate sign, even met him at some point and just forgot.

  Everyone was watching me curiously. I cleared my throat. “He ran off?”

  “Oh, yeah,” one of the ice fishermen said, brightening. “What happened to him? He wasn’t from around here.”

  “Found him dead somewhere. I remember reading about it,” said the guy at the other table. “Funeral notice in the paper.”

  “I still don’t know who you’re talking about,” the other ice fisherman groused.

  “Dressed funny,” the guy at the other table recalled.

  “Dressed funny?” Alan squawked.

  “So … he’s buried here in East Jordan?”

  The man with all the information squinted his weathered eyes, trying to remember. “Yeah, think so.”

  “I tried to find the cemetery, but it’s not where I remember it.”

  The ice fishermen both snorted. “That’s because they moved the darn thing. Just dug everybody up and moved ’em all, so they could build the PlasMerc factory.”

  “New cemetery is up north toward Boyne City way. About four miles.”

  Alan was still upset as we drove north. “Where do they get that from? I didn’t run off.”

  “It was a long time ago, Alan. That’s probably all they can remember.”

  “And do you think they found my body in the woods, is that why I’m buried in the cemetery?”

  “Let’s just take it one step at a time, Alan.”

  “Dressed funny. This from a man in a Detroit Pistons jacket, a John Deere baseball cap, and a T-shirt with a picture of a duck on it.”

  Grinning, I swung my truck into the parking lot of the cemetery, my lights sweeping past a funeral home that looked no more than a few years old. A shadow appeared briefly at the window, probably someone checking to see who had just pulled in. “I see somebody in there; let’s go ask him where we can find Alan Lottner’s grave.”

  Rock salt crunched under my feet as I mounted the cement steps. I pushed open a polished wooden door and stepped cautiously into the entryway of the funeral parlor. Tasteful carpet and dark paneling gave the place a solemn feel. I poked my head around the corner, looking into a large room with shiny wooden pews.

  “Can I help you?” inquired a voice from behind me.

  I turned and started in surprise.

  He was heavier than I remembered, and his scalp was so bald it gleamed. But take a few years off his face and put a toupee on him and I would rec
ognize him anywhere. In my dream he was standing next to a pickup truck in the woods, talking to a green-eyed guy with a shovel, gazing at me with an unreadable expression as I drove past.

  We’d found one of Alan’s killers.

  11

  Where the Bodies Are Buried

  “My name is Nathan Burby,” he told me, holding out what turned out to be a professionally soft, dry, funeral-director hand. I stared at him, astounded.

  He was several inches shorter than I, with a rounded chin and dark, warm eyes. His suit was charcoal gray wool, his facial features bland. His smile was cautious—welcoming, but careful not to come off as too jovial in case I was here to discuss putting Aunt Mildred in the ground. Absurdly, it struck me that he looked like a really nice guy.

  “Oh my God,” Alan breathed, barely recovering from his own shock. “Do you know who this is?”

  “I’m Ruddy McCann,” I finally answered Burby, releasing his hand.

  He gestured as if he had a staff of workers gathered around him. “How can I help you tonight, Mr. McCann?”

  “I was looking for the cemetery,” I replied faintly.

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place, then.” He smiled pleasantly.

  “It’s him! The one with the toupee! That day in the woods! He’s one of the killers,” Alan was babbling shrilly. I closed my eyes once, hard, trying to get him to shut up. Burby was watching me curiously.

  “I meant the other one, wasn’t the cemetery, I mean, didn’t it used to be somewhere else?”

  “That’s right. We moved here about seven years ago.”

  “He must own the place,” Alan speculated, calming down a little.

  “Was that so they could build that new factory I noticed? PlasMerc?”

  Something like discomfort flitted across Burby’s face, but, smoothly practiced in suppressing his own feelings in order to allow his clients to indulge in theirs, he kept whatever it was under tight control. “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “How could you do that, though? I mean, weren’t the bodies buried and everything?”

  “We moved everyone,” he explained simply. “Everyone with a family member interred at the old cemetery was compensated, or at least those we could contact. For those with untraceable roots, we’ve established a trust fund, and we have hopes that eventually they’ll come forward.”