“You have a point here, Alan?”
“Just that maybe your sister should be allowed to make the changes she thinks will bring in more business. This sure isn’t the kind of place I’d want to hang out in.”
“You are welcome to leave any time,” I told him frostily. I decided the soda wasn’t working for me and switched to beer.
Night settled, and Jimmy left to go on a date. No one came in. By nine o’clock Becky and I had the place to ourselves. She busied herself installing a rack over the bar, from which she dangled shiny new wineglasses that hung upside down like bats. I guessed we would no longer be serving wine in old jelly jars. When she was finished, we stared at each other from across the room, each feeling the lack of business eloquently supported our respective positions.
Kermit showed up around closing time. “Kermit, over here!” I shouted at him. Becky, who’d been disapprovingly tracking my repeated trips to the keg machine like a school hall monitor, gave me a hard look.
“Ruddy…” Alan said warningly. What was it with everybody?
Kermit came over and stood a little uneasily in front of me. “Sit,” I invited, kicking a chair out from the table. The action was meant to be smooth but instead the chair fell over. Becky stared at me and I shrugged.
Kermit righted the chair and eased down into it.
“You and me, Kermit.”
He swallowed.
“Tomorrow, we are going to go cook the literal goose of a certain Mr. Albert Einstein.”
Kermit stared at me.
“Einstein Croft,” Alan hissed.
“I meant Einstein Croft. What did I say, Albert Einstein? That’s pretty funny.” I noticed I was the only one laughing, and cleared my throat. “Anyway, come pick me up in the tow truck at seven A.M. in the morning. We’re going to take the thing from his job. That work for you?”
He nodded. “Sure.”
“Okay. Okay, then.” I stood, formally shook his hand, nodded with dignity at my sister, and marched out into the frigid night air.
“Well I hope you’re satisfied with yourself,” Alan lectured as soon as he had me to himself.
“Satisfied, that’s the word I’ve been looking for. I’m feeling perfectly satisfied, yes.”
“You’re drunk. I hate it. I can’t think straight.”
“Oh my God, are you telling me you’re drunk, too?” I hooted. This struck me as so funny I had to sit down on my front steps, laughing until tears flowed out of my eyes. “Well, there goes my idea of making you designated driver.”
“You disgust me.”
“Oh, great! I have a voice in my head and he’s disgusted!” I shouted out into the Kalkaska night.
“I was killed, Ruddy. We know who did it. We know where he works. Yet you’ve done nothing about it.”
“Yeah? And what, exactly, am I supposed to do?”
“We need to figure out why he did it. We need to find out who the man with the shovel is. We need to do something, Ruddy, instead of just sitting around all day reading mystery novels.”
“Maybe I don’t care, did that ever occur to you, Alan? You got killed by two guys in the woods. Well I’m sorry, but that’s not my fault. I never asked for this, for you to come into my head and start talking to me. You’re a total stranger—why should I give a rip about you?”
“You’re an abuser. You abuse your sister and you abuse your own body. You’re a murderer.”
“Yeah? Well you’re drunk,” I sneered. I stumbled into my house. The stack of bills on the table enraged me and I swiped them off onto the floor, kicking at them and mostly just hitting air. “Maybe I like it messy!” I yelled. I picked up a pillow off the couch and threw it across the room, where it landed on a kitchen chair and instantly looked like it belonged there, offering me no satisfaction whatsoever. That was the whole problem.
“I changed my mind!” I bellowed. “I am not satisfied!”
Jake eased off his blanket and padded over to me, concerned. He shoved his wet nose at my hand and gazed up at me loyally, ready to take a walk or do anything else that might make me happy. “You are the best dog in the world,” I assured him. I held his face in my hands and smiled into those sorrowful brown eyes. “The best dog. My best friend.”
I shambled into my bedroom and Jake followed me, a question in his eyes. “No, Jakey. In case I ever manage to get a woman in here I can’t have you in the habit of lying in my bed. Want me to sleep on the floor with you? I will. Would you like that?”
His look indicated my offer wasn’t good enough.
I didn’t remember setting my alarm clock, but it woke me up at six A.M. I felt like I’d been beaten. I eased out of bed and went into the bathroom, looking sadly into the old, red eyes of Ruddy McCann. Life was not supposed to turn out like this.
Jimmy had picked up the scattered bills and placed them back on the table. It looked like he’d polished all the glasses in the cabinets, too. I didn’t deserve a friend like him. I found some thousand-year-old beef taquitos in the freezer and heated them in the micro, eating them quickly, before Alan woke up and gave me a nutrition lecture.
I was experiencing the hangover of a lifetime. My head was oddly clear, but the rest of my body hurt as if I’d spent the day working out in a gym and then being beaten by a karate instructor. My stomach was tender with the same soreness I’d feel after the first day of crunches at football practice.
I sighed despondently. I was only a couple of years older than Deputy Timms, but he looked a lot younger, his chubby cheeks lending his face a childlike exuberance, like maybe a child with really ugly parents. When Katie compared the two of us, she probably thought of me as over-the-hill.
The light was blinking on my message machine. As if she sensed I was thinking of her, it was Katie Lottner, asking me to come to a memorial service in East Jordan on Thursday evening, at Burby’s funeral home. The county had finished its tests on Alan’s body and released it to the family. I listened to the message several times, straining through it to find nuggets of passion or affection, but it sounded like I was just one of several on a list she was working. I was glad Alan wasn’t awake to hear about his funeral; I wanted to think about a way to tell him about it.
Kermit picked me up at exactly seven o’clock, handing me a tall cup of coffee as I climbed in. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy. When he passed over a new folder from his uncle, I decided his behavior was downright acceptable.
The assignment was an easy one—some nut living in the woods “off the land” and selling the bank’s collateral—a Ford Explorer—a part at a time to the junkyard so that he’d have a few bucks to his name. I hauled in what was left of the thing, and because the guy was officially a skip, got five hundred bucks for my efforts. “I guess the bank thinks if you don’t have a mailbox or a phone you’re a skip,” I observed to Kermit.
By the time we were headed up to see Einstein Croft, it was almost noon. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the temperature was flirting with the fifties. We were about to repo Albert Einstein, and I now owed Milt nothing and had a check coming besides. “I’m back to being satisfied,” I told Kermit. He eyed me cautiously.
We swung into the guest parking of Einstein’s job, avoiding the guard who protected the employee lot. “Okay, here’s the thing. I’m going to get the receptionist to let me use their internal phone system. As soon as she does, I want you to distract her, okay? You’re good at that kind of thing—just keep talking to her, don’t let her overhear what I’m doing, all right?”
Kermit seemed nervous. “Wait! What should I say?”
“I don’t know. Explain the difference between swipe and nonswipe.”
We pushed open the glass doors and approached the receptionist in the lobby. She looked like she was barely out of high school—thin and pale, her short hair dyed unnaturally black. Up close I could see the small holes where she inserted her lip and nose rings after work.
I hooked my finger over my shoulder at the tow truck. “I?
??m supposed to phone the guard when I get here, somebody needs a tow. Can you connect me, somehow?”
She seemed unsure about my request, which was good, because it distracted her and kept her from asking me why I didn’t just pull up to the employee entrance and talk to the guard in person. She picked up the phone and stared at the switchboard. After moving her lips and nodding as if she had a dead Realtor of her own to talk to, she brightened.
“Jed? It’s Charlene. Hang on, please.” She smiled at me triumphantly. The second she handed me the telephone, Kermit pounced on her with a focused ferocity.
“Have you thought about handling call overflows from your station?” I heard him ask.
“Hello?” I said, trying to sound like a factory employee, whatever that meant.
“Security.”
“Hi, I need a tow truck, I busted my brake cylinder,” I told him. “Can you call one for me?”
“Call it yourself, this ain’t road service,” he advised gruffly.
“Oh, well, I don’t know how to make an outside call on this phone.”
“Just dial nine, like every other phone system in the universe.”
“Okay, so, when the tow truck pulls up, let it in, okay?”
“It’ll make my friggin’ day,” he responded, hanging up.
So far, so good: a call from inside the factory advising the guard to let in the tow truck. Now we just needed to stall for a few minutes. Kermit showed no sign of winding down, so I pretended to be interested in a bunch of pictures hanging on one wall. They were all businessmen and women, each identified with little golden name tags.
When my eyes drifted across one of the photographs, my jaw dropped.
“Hey, Alan.” I stood and stared.
“It’s him,” Alan breathed.
I reached out and touched the golden nameplate. “Franklin Wexler,” I read out loud.
Unmistakably, the man with the shovel.
18
The Man with the Shovel
I strode over to where Kermit was still holding the receptionist hostage with a constant barrage of words. Her nameplate said CHARLENE.
“Hey, Charlene,” I interrupted. “Can I ask you a question about that guy over there?”
Charlene’s mind surfaced slowly, shaking off Kermit’s conversation like a dog getting out of the water. “Who?”
“Franklin Wexler.”
“Who?” she repeated.
“Come on, Charlene, snap out of it,” Alan urged.
“There’s a picture of a guy over there, and this little gold plaque says ‘FRANKLIN WEXLER’. I take it he works here?”
Charlene frowned as if she had never noticed the pictures on the wall ten feet in front of her. “Those are board members,” she decided.
“Okay, right. I’m interested in Franklin Wexler.”
“They’re board members,” Charlene repeated.
“They’re members of the board,” Kermit interpreted helpfully.
“Right, I get that, but Franklin Wexler. Is he in?”
“Oh, no. They don’t work here.”
“They’re board members,” Kermit said again.
“Okay but what does that mean,” I snapped, losing patience. I knew Alan was going to say “It means they’re members of the board” before he said it.
“They don’t come in or nothin’. That’s just the people on the board,” Charlene elaborated.
“They’re on the board but they don’t come in?” I asked.
“Right,” Kermit answered. I shot him a look.
“That’s fairly common,” Alan lectured me in a Business 101 tone. “They’re on the board and supposedly have oversight of the corporation, but the CEO actually runs the place. Technically, the CEO works for the board, and sometimes the chairman has a lot of power, but usually the board members don’t do much but collect an honorarium.”
“I never seen ’em,” Charlene avowed.
“Well, I need to talk to Franklin Wexler,” I told her.
I saw the doubt in her eyes—a tow truck driver needs to talk to a board member? “Actually, he does,” I amended, hooking a thumb at Kermit. “He’s my boss. It has to do with his nonswipe account. Kermit, tell her the difference between a swipe and a nonswipe account.”
Kermit drew in a breath. “Wait!” Charlene pleaded. “I don’t know anything about them. They aren’t in the company directory. I don’t have any way to get in touch with ’em.”
I mulled this over. “Okay, thanks.”
“Franklin Wexler,” Alan repeated in my ear. “We should be able to track him down; that’s an uncommon name.”
Yes, Alan, I thought, but I don’t have time for that right now, I need to repo an Einstein. I slapped Kermit on the arm. “You did good,” I told him as we walked back out into the sunshine. “Now here’s the plan. I’m going to hunch down in the passenger seat and pull a tarp over myself. You drive around to the side, where the entrance to the employee lot is, and tell the guard you’re the tow truck for the guy who called. He’s expecting you, so he’ll just let you in. You drive far enough into the employee parking lot so he can’t see you, then I’ll hop out and switch places and we’ll go hunting for Einstein’s truck.”
The plan worked like a dream. The guard waved us in without taking his eyes off his television and within a few minutes I was back behind the wheel of the tow truck, slowly cruising the rows of vehicles.
“What if the guard gets suspicious?” Kermit asked nervously.
“Relax, will you?” I muttered. Then I spotted the pickup I was after. “Uh-oh.”
“What? What is it?” Kermit pressed.
“Looks like they’re having a picnic. Guess we’ll have to call it off,” Alan remarked.
Drawn outdoors by the nice weather, a group of burly factory workers sat at a picnic table at the far end of the parking lot, eating lunch together and basking in the sun’s rays. Parked directly in front of them, the back bumper not more than twenty-five feet from the picnic table, was Einstein Croft’s vehicle. Einstein himself sat as if to keep his eye on the prize, facing his truck.
“That’s the truck? Right there, in front of the table? There are all those guys! They’ll see us driving up!” Kermit exclaimed in alarm.
“Right, right. Okay.” I thought about it, then turned my wheel sharply and drove down another row of vehicles, headed away from the picnic table.
“We leaving?” Kermit asked, relieved.
I turned the wheel again, then stopped. We were now all the way at the other end of the lot, the rear end of the tow truck facing the front end of Einstein’s pickup. “Croft’s driver’s side window is open. That means the truck is probably unlocked. Manual transmission—I can yank it into neutral.” I grinned at Kermit, who paled.
“Ruddy,” Alan warned.
“Here’s what we’re going to do, Kermit. You ever notice the sling that hangs at the bottom of the tow cable?”
I nodded out the rear window, and he followed my gesture. Dangling from the high boom was the thick cable, and at the bottom were two heavy rubber skirts joined along the lower edge with a steel rod—the sling. “Okay. In a normal repo situation, you got three parts: the tow hook, the sling, and the safety chains. You put the sling under the front bumper and raise it—the car you’re towing rests on the sling, but isn’t attached to it—that’s why you need the hook, which you affix to the car frame. And then the safety chains are your fail-safe option. That’s a repo term meaning that even if the hook fails, the car won’t fall off the sling because of the safety chains.”
“This isn’t a normal repo situation. The men are right there, twenty feet away!” Alan protested.
“But this is not a normal repo situation,” I told Kermit agreeably. I slid out of the cab and yanked on the side lever, lowering the sling. Kermit watched me through the back window, his mouth gaping. When the sling was all but touching the ground, I came back and got behind the wheel. “I’m going to back her right up to the front of Einstein’s
truck, fast, jamming the sling under it,” I told him. “I’ll jump out and raise the sling just enough to get the hook on the frame. You slide over to the driver’s seat and get ready to go. I’ll open the door and pop the truck into neutral. When I’ve got her hooked just enough to get out of here…” I put the gear shift in reverse, grinning at him. “I jump back in and you floor it. We’ll do a better job of attaching things when we’re half a mile up the road. Simple. Ready?”
“What? No, wait…” Kermit protested faintly. I was already backing up, looking over my shoulder, the transmission whining as I gave it some gas.
“This strikes me as very risky!” Alan announced in alarm.
I was watching the guys at the picnic table. So far, none of them had done anything but observe our approach. I pressed down on the accelerator, ignoring Alan’s gasp.
“Wait!” Kermit shouted.
We slammed into Einstein’s truck with neck-snapping force, his vehicle bouncing on the sling. I jumped out and ran back, grabbing the lever and jamming it forward. With maddening slowness, the sling began to lift. I realized I was holding my breath, so I forced a casual expression onto my face and exhaled, glancing over at the men at the picnic table as I walked to the driver’s side door. Unlocked. I opened it and leaned in and grabbed the gearshift, rattling it loosely. Neutral. Parking brake off.
Events were unfolding with such speed that no one had even moved. Einstein himself had a sandwich halfway to his mouth and was frozen in shock. I nodded at him. Just another five seconds or so and the front of his truck would be up high enough to attach the hook and haul it off. This was going to work!
Suddenly the tow truck lurched, pulling away from me. I stared in disbelief. “No, Kermit!” I yelled. “Not yet!”
With a blast of black exhaust, Kermit took off, Einstein’s truck trailing behind the tow truck. I gazed after him for a moment, then turned and looked back at Einstein. He and his buddies had come to life and were boiling off of that picnic table. They didn’t look like they were in a good mood anymore.
For a moment it was my turn to stand frozen, and then I spun and sprinted after Kermit, who was speeding away. “Kermit! Wait!”