“Kermit’s going to help me out a little this summer.”
“Summer,” I agreed dubiously. I looked down at the wet snow I’d tracked in.
“Yep. Maybe you’d take him around, show him the ropes?”
I nodded carefully. Milton didn’t need two men; was I being asked to train my replacement? Milton was the sort of person who always looked out for his family, even his brother’s sons. I was painfully aware that if I weren’t a repo man I’d be nothing.
I sat in the metal chair facing Milton’s desk. “Got anything for me?”
“Yeah, believe so.” Milton put on a pair of reading glasses and looked over the tops of them at a file. “Ford Credit. A guy somewhere in Traverse City, said he’d make up the two payments he’s behind and then disappeared instead. Ford Mustang.”
“Okay.” I reached for the file.
“Mind if I matriculate a little?” Kermit asked, intersecting my reach with his own.
“If you what?” I asked politely.
“I just would like to see. You know, if I have any ideas.”
“Sure, sure, that’s a good idea,” Milton beamed. “Let’s let him metic-whatever, see if he can find the guy.”
“Okay.” I paused. “Milt, I heard you got some bad paper from Jimmy Growe.”
Milton glanced up sharply. “Who told you about that?”
“Jimmy.”
“Ah.” Milton took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if looking at me over the top of the lenses was tiring him out. “Yeah, that’s right. I guess he spent the money already.”
“He bought a motorcycle with some of it. I told him to sell it.”
“Good, good. I don’t want the damn thing.”
“What’s the deal with the checks, though? Jimmy said he didn’t know where they came from.”
“That’s right. Bank is up in Traverse. They won’t tell me the name on the account, and they’re those starter checks.”
“Why’d you cash them?”
“I know, I should have thought it through better. I knew Jimmy wouldn’t be up to anything, is all. And I figured, why would someone send him the money, if it wasn’t legitimate?”
“Want me to look into it for you?”
Milt shrugged. “I don’t know what good it would do. No law broken, Jimmy never did anything to earn the money. I just should never have cashed them.”
“I’ll be up near Traverse anyway, tracing this Mustang. Something’s not right, Milt. I mean, you know Jimmy. Sending him those checks was a deliberate way to get him into trouble. Maybe I can recover something from that end for you.”
Milt grunted. “Sure, look into it. I took ten points; you can have all of it if you can recover my five grand. Last time he owed me money it took something like eight years for him to pay me back.”
I nodded, understanding. Milt was fine with paying me, but if I couldn’t track down somebody to make good on the debt in Traverse City, I would be collecting from Jimmy.
I exhaled. I hated this next subject. “So, Milt. I’m wondering if I could have an advance on some of the work I’m doing? We’re a little short with our suppliers down at the Bear.”
Milt loans money for a living, so the look he gave me was all business. “How’s it looking with Albert Einstein?” he asked.
“I touched the collateral yesterday.” I told him about the goose named Doris, and both Kermit and Milton howled at the picture of me being run off by poultry, leading me to conclude that neither one of them had been clubbed with goose wings before.
“Ya know, if the goose really attacked you, they should euphemize it,” Kermit advised.
“Euphemize? You mean, call it ‘Christmas Dinner’ or something?” I smiled.
Kermit frowned. “No, I meant put it to sleep.”
I decided it wasn’t worth trying to explain. I was watching Milt pull out his big checkbook and scrawl in it. He handed me more than I was expecting: $750. “There’s advance on Einstein—I know you’ll get him if you’ve seen the truck—plus the fee on Jimmy. I figure with you babysitting him I’ll get paid one way or another.” Milt wagged his finger. “One percent of the balance per month on Jimmy, my interest rate on that.”
I nodded. Twelve percent per year, better than the credit cards. Milt lends money but he’s not the Mafia.
“And hey, would you mind taking Kermit along with you now? You’re headed up to Traverse, right?”
“Only if he brings a dictionary.”
Milton laughed. “He does have a hell of a vocabulary, doesn’t he?”
Kermit and I stood. On his feet, he appeared to be no more than five foot six; next to him I felt like a giant. In high school he would have played center—all of his weight down low like that. In college he would have sat in the stands along with everyone else his size.
I turned at the door. “Hey, catch up with you in a minute, Kermit.” Once he had passed outside I came back into the room. “Milton, can I ask you something?”
He nodded carefully.
I jammed my hands in my pockets and glanced around the room. “Have you ever had voices in your head? Talking to you?”
Milton stared. “You got voices in your head?”
“No, forget it. I mean yes, I do, but it is only one voice. He says his name is Alan.”
“You got a voice in your head named Alan?” Milton’s eyes were looking sort of milky. I wondered if he was calculating how long it would take the cops to arrive if he lunged for the phone.
“Forget it, it’s nothing.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got the madness, son,” he whispered.
“The what?”
“Repo Madness. It happens. The stress of snatching units off the streets, one day, you just crack up. I once saw a guy bigger than you sit right down on the curb and start to cry like a baby. Madness got him bad. He was never able to take another car after that day.” Milt beckoned and I reluctantly leaned forward. “Why do you think I never steal any of my own cars anymore, Ruddy?”
I thought about it. “Because Ruby would kill you?”
He blinked. “Ruby? The hell is Ruby?”
“Your wife?”
“My wife is Trisha.”
“That’s her name! Trisha!”
“Jesus, you got voices in your head and you think I married some bimbo named Ruby?”
“For God’s sake, Milt, it’s just one voice and I have always thought your wife’s name was Ruby. I mean, I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t think of her any other way.” Already, the name Trisha was fading from my brain, replaced by a giant neon sign blinking RUBY, RUBY, RUBY.
Milt eyed me for a minute. “It’s the madness, Ruddy,” he pronounced finally. “I just got the madness. One day everything is fine, and the next, no matter how easy the snatch, I start getting so damned scared I can barely move. Then I’m pulling a voluntary, guy voluntarily hands me the keys, and the same thing happens—my heart starts to pound and my hands shake. That’s when I knew I had to give it up, before I lost it completely.” He looked at me shrewdly. “Before I started hearing voices.”
I remembered the dream, and how my heart had been pounding the “Night of the Attack of Doris the Goose.” Could this really be what was going on? Repo Madness.
I shook it off. “Look, just forget about it, okay? I’m fine. Thanks. No problem. I’ll find this skip and look into Jimmy’s checks, okay?”
Milton nodded sadly. As I backed up, my heel caught the lip of the rug and I tripped a bit, stumbling. He just watched with wise eyes, probably thinking this was another symptom.
“So you’re a repo man? That’s what the whole thing was about last night? I thought you were a cop or something,” Alan complained as I left Milt’s office.
“You don’t like it, go inhabit someone else’s psychosis,” I growled silently, keeping the dialogue in my head where it belonged. I expected a flip response, but instead I got back silence, with a bit of an impatient flavor to it. I stopped in the hallway. “So, no lippy comm
ent? I just called you a psychosis,” I challenged him mentally.
“Well?” he finally demanded. “What are we doing? Why don’t you say something?”
“You mean you can only hear me if I talk?” I asked out loud.
“Well, of course,” Alan replied a bit indignantly. “You think I can read minds?”
There were just too many things wrong with that question to respond to it. “Listen, Alan, we have to discuss something. I think I am handling this pretty well. I mean, I have a voice inside my head, but I’m not overreacting. But this isn’t normal. I’m obviously losing my grip. You have to go away now, Alan.”
“I can’t go away, Ruddy. What do you think, I can just float out and up to the stars or something?”
“I don’t know what I think. I’m not sure it matters what I think. All I know is, I can’t go around talking out loud to this voice in my head because people just don’t do that. Not mentally healthy people.”
“You’re saying I am just some sort of figment of your imagination. I resent the implication,” he said loftily.
“You resent? You? Let me ask you, do you hear a voice in your head? Huh? No, you don’t. You can’t even hear me in my head! So don’t tell me about implications. The implication is, I am going crazy and am going to wind up in a room with soft walls, that’s the implication.”
“Well, obviously there’s no talking to you when you’re in this sort of mood.”
“What I am saying is there’s no talking to me, period.”
I paused, glaring at the wall, because what else was I supposed to look at?
When Alan spoke his voice was suddenly plaintive and smallsounding. “But Ruddy, I need your help. I think I know why I’m not … not in myself anymore. My body, I mean. I think I know what happened.”
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
“I’m dead.”
I blinked. “Dead?” I repeated incredulously.
“Murdered. I think I was murdered, Ruddy.”
I stood frozen, still staring at the wall.
My Repo Madness seemed to be getting worse by the minute.
5
Exactly Fifteen Miles an Hour
On the way to Traverse City Kermit checked his mobile phone every ten minutes, announcing over and over “no signal here,” and “weak signal here” as he frowned at it. “That’s why I leave mine in my kitchen. Signal’s good there,” I responded, but mostly I wasn’t paying attention. I was brooding over what it could possibly mean that the voice inside my head now claimed to be a murder victim. It sounds, well, crazy, but I realized that somehow I had started to buy into it all—I was actually beginning to think of the voice as a separate person, as Alan Lottner, and could see myself eventually growing comfortable with my conversations with him. There was just something so normal about it—another man’s voice, seeming to be coming from my ears and not from within my brain. That’s really what all human interactions are like, right? Kermit at that moment was yammering away about some way he could make money; it was a separate voice, a separate person, and I wasn’t looking at him. And when you talk on the phone, you can’t see that particular person, either. So none of this felt any different than how life usually goes, even if I knew it wasn’t.
But murder? What was next, would he want me to avenge his killer? And who would that turn out to be, the president of the United States or somebody? How long before I complacently went along with this idea, too?
Traverse City is right on Lake Michigan and has fifteen thousand people in the winter and what seems like two million in the summer, as opposed to land-locked Kalkaska, where I think I know just about everybody by their first name. Kalkaska only really has a crowd control problem during deer hunting season, when the boys from the city arm themselves and wander around wearing camouflage pants, drinking beer.
Kermit was happy for me to drop him off at a drugstore to mess around while I checked into Jimmy Growe’s mystery checks. The silence he left behind when he jumped out made me realize just how much talking he’d been doing—I had a voice both in my head and in my truck.
All of the checks to Jimmy Growe had come from one bank. I walked into the lobby, looking around for the Department of Checks from Nowhere That Bounce.
The person who agreed to help me was a large woman, her bone structure as solid as mine, and I could picture her being a campfire girl leader for the three daughters whose framed photographs owned most of the real estate of her desk. She was about my age and wore her auburn hair so that it curled a little off her shoulders. Her dark eyes softened in concern as I spread Jimmy’s six checks—five NSF, one uncashed—across her desk. She told me to call her Maureen.
“Oh my,” Maureen murmured.
I explained my connection to Jimmy and Milton, showing her my business card and Milton’s corporate endorsement of the checks on the back. “What I need to know is who wrote these checks. You can see that the signature is not really legible. It could be Whitmore, or Southmore, or Sophomore. Or Whilnose, or Whilmore.” Those had been my best guesses. None of the names I’d suggested were in the Traverse City phone book, and I doubted anyone on the planet was named Whilnose.
Maureen agreed that the names were hard to read, and even pointed out something I’d missed—the signatures didn’t really appear to be the same from one check to the next. “This one is definitely Wilmore,” she pronounced.
“Wilmore,” I agreed, making a note. She watched me write down the name, frowning.
“Please understand, I am not confirming that as the name on the account,” she warned me, somehow sounding less like Maureen the human and more like Maureen the bank.
“Oh, I understand, it just helps. Most people, when they want to assume a name, pick a variation of their own name.” She looked at me dubiously. “Well, that’s what I read in a mystery novel,” I explained defensively.
“So you think these are all pseudonyms?” she asked.
“I don’t know, really. I thought you could give me the name of the owner of the account. Maybe it will turn out to be this Wilmore.”
She bit her lip. “We’ve never had a case of a returned check where the payee didn’t know the remitter.”
“It certainly is interesting,” I agreed brightly, watching the doubt etch shadows into her expression. She wasn’t going to tell me.
“You see, Mr. McCann, it would be against bank policy to give out a name on an account.”
“But these are bounced checks!”
“I’m sorry, even under these circumstances.”
“But you said it has never happened before. Come on, Maureen, you mean you have a policy for something that never happened before?”
“Great idea, get her pissed off,” Alan admired.
A slight flush crept onto her cheeks, but she maintained her composure. “I’m sorry. But the owner of this account…” She paused, frowning. Her head came forward sharply. “These are all different accounts!” she exclaimed.
“They are?”
“Look!” She pointed to the hieroglyphics across the bottom of each check. “You have six checks drawn on six separate accounts.”
I wanted to encourage her curiosity. “How in the world could that possibly happen, I wonder?”
Our eyes met. “Someone must have opened six separate accounts with our bank, receiving a packet of starter checks each time.”
“And not using them at all,” I agreed, finally doing some noticing myself. “See? These are all check number one hundred. That would be the first in the series, right?”
She nodded. “Right.”
I held my breath, watching her mull it over. Then the part of her brain that stood guard over bank policy slammed the door on this line of thinking. “Well,” she murmured, searching for the words to tell me I still wouldn’t be getting any information out of her.
Glancing around the office in my frustration, I noticed her degrees and certificates. “Hey, you went to Michigan State!” I exclaimed.
She blink
ed at the abrupt change in subject.
“Me too!”
We beamed at each other, and then her expression changed. “You’re Ruddy McCann. The Ruddy McCann?” she gasped.
“That’s me.”
“Oh my!” She half rose in her chair as if to shake my hand again, then sat back down. “I didn’t know you lived here.”
“Right down the road in Kalkaska. Went to high school there and everything.”
“What a small world,” Maureen breathed. “I had no idea.”
We spent a moment looking inward at our college memories. “What happened to you, didn’t you play professional football? I remember everyone saying you were going to win the Heisman Trophy, and then…” Her face turned gray as she remembered what did happen to me. “Oh my.”
I waited. People have various reactions to my past, and I didn’t know what direction Maureen would take.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. I could see that she was; her deep brown eyes were sagging under the weight of tragedy.
“It was a mistake I will regret for a lifetime,” I told her sincerely.
“What was?” Alan demanded.
The silence was awkward but I let it build for a moment, then I leaned forward. “Maureen, Jimmy Growe is a very simple guy. I kind of take care of him, like the big brother he never had. He pushes a broom for a living. When these checks arrived, he felt like he had won the Lotto. Now, you and I would probably wonder what the heck was going on, but Jimmy just ran out and cashed these with my employer. And, Jimmy being Jimmy, the only tangible item left from all that money is a motorcycle. Which, knowing Jimmy, he bought from someone who probably took him to the cleaners, so when he sells it he will be thousands of dollars in debt. If I don’t get to the bottom of this, it is going to take Jimmy years to get out of trouble. He still doesn’t really understand what is going on—he offered to pay me by giving me this last, unendorsed check here.”