Maureen made a noise in sympathy. I could see her mothering her image of Jimmy, so I decided to leave out the part about him being the hottest stud in Kalkaska.
“Couldn’t you please look into this? If it is a joke, it has gone way, way too far. These checks are doing Jimmy a lot of harm.”
Her maternal instincts pushed her over to the dark side of banking. “Yes, all right. I’ll be right back.” She swept the checks off her desk and left the room.
“You were a Heisman Trophy winner?” Alan demanded.
“No,” I told him.
“What was she talking about, then?”
“Alan, is it lonely in there? No one to talk to?”
“You don’t know the half of it. When you’re moving it is all I can do to hang on, like when you were driving and that Kermit was talking about how he was going to make all that money by processing credit card charges. But when you’re sitting still and I feel more in control, I want to scream, because—”
“Alan, shut up.”
He bit off his rant in what I swear sounded like hurt silence.
“You are not in control. I am in control. And when I am conducting a conversation with someone, I want you to be quiet. If you are, then when we’re alone, I’ll talk to you. If you’re not, then I’ll never answer you again, and you’ll never have anything approaching a dialogue with anyone unless you leave me and go into somebody else’s head. Okay?”
He didn’t answer.
“Alan?”
“Oh, am I allowed to speak now?”
Maureen was back in the room, carrying a ledger book. “This is very disturbing.” She sat down heavily and stared at me, wrestling with what she had just learned.
“Maureen?” I prompted.
“Well, we still maintain this log in addition to the computer. Whenever we issue starter checks we write down the name and date, here.” She pointed to the list and I looked at it from an upside-down angle. Customer information flowed across the register in neat rows. I sensed there was a lot more, and waited for her to tell me.
“The thing is, Mr. McCann, none of these packets were ever issued to a customer. See? The account numbers are printed right here. Someone has drawn a line through them.”
“Why would anyone do something like that?”
“Well, sometimes an error is made, and we just void out the account. Under those circumstances, we would mark through the number here and destroy the starter packet.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Well, not a lot, but it does happen. Someone should have noticed this, though. Oh.”
“Oh?”
Her eyes were now unreadable as they met mine. “Oh my.”
“What is it, Maureen?”
Wordlessly, she spun the book around for me to see. I glanced down the list of names, noting that the starter packets with the lines through them were grouped together, all issued in December, all within a day or two of each other.
“The handwriting,” Alan murmured.
“The handwriting,” I repeated stupidly.
“Yes. The word void looks like it could be the same as on the checks,” Maureen agreed helplessly.
I looked at her in amazement. “So the bank has been sending Jimmy these checks?”
“No! Oh no, Mr. McCann. Not the bank. An … employee.”
“Why would they do that?”
Maureen shook her head, her look as blank as Jimmy’s had been.
“I need to talk to the employees,” I declared grimly.
Maureen appeared shocked. “Oh no, we couldn’t allow that.”
“But…”
“No, I’m sorry, that won’t be possible.”
I don’t like it when people tell me something I want to do isn’t possible. When I spoke again, it was slowly and deliberately. “Maureen, you need to understand, Milt isn’t trying to go after the bank. We just need to get to the bottom of this. Can you look into it, figure out what happened, who did this? You know. Just compare the log here to people’s handwriting. We’ll keep this quiet. There is no need for Milt to report this to the authorities.”
Maureen’s eyes searched mine. Alan was silent but I swear I could feel his distaste for my subtle threat. Finally she pressed her lips together, nodding unhappily.
“Good, I’ll call you in a day or two to see if you found anything out for me, okay?”
Maureen nodded again, and I shook hands with her and left the office. I was the first to speak in the parking lot. “What, what is it?” I challenged.
“She was helping you and you made it sound like if she didn’t cooperate you’d haul her down to gestapo headquarters,” Alan sniffed.
“Alan, I’m a repo man. I collect money, and if people don’t have any I take away their cars. How do you think I do that, send a Hallmark card with a puppy on it?”
“It was mean.”
I stopped walking and faced a small snowman some children had built so that anyone watching would assume I was arguing with it and not with a voice in my head like some crazy person. “Yeah, well, what do you do for a living?”
“I sell real estate,” he answered loftily.
“You what? Would you listen to yourself? You do nothing. You live off of the welfare state of Ruddy McCann. You don’t even have a body.”
“Well, I’m sure if circumstances were reversed I would be a little more understanding.”
“I’m sure you would, Alan, because you know what? I’m not understanding any of this!”
“I told you I was dead, murdered, and your lack of concern could not have been more apparent,” he accused. “You’re selfish, mean to people, and you don’t floss.”
“I … what?”
“Your dietary habits are inexcusable. Your house is a wreck, and you never exercise.”
“What are you talking about?” I sputtered. “I don’t have to exercise, I’m an athlete, I get it from sports! And I do too floss, sometimes, and how is it your business anyway, and shut up! I mean it, stop talking now, Alan. Not another word.”
I kicked ice chunks out of my way as I strode down the sidewalk to the pharmacy. I had a split personality and we didn’t like each other. I peered up at the overcast sky, thinking I was the butt of some cosmic joke. It was not the first time in my life I’d entertained that particular notion.
I entered the drugstore and started hunting for Kermit. He was reading a Playboy magazine, hunched down by the display so the pharmacist wouldn’t notice him. “You’re not supposed to read them if you’re not going to buy them,” I called out loudly. He fumbled the magazine back into the rack and followed me outside. Soon we were in the truck, headed out to try to find the Ford Credit account.
“This guy we’re looking for bought himself a brand-new Ford Mustang and stopped paying for it a couple of months ago,” I told Kermit, mostly to prevent him from talking. “A lot of the vehicles I drag in are sports cars. Hardly the most practical vehicles for around here—we’re buried in ice half the year. Young guys fall in love with an image of themselves roaring around in their hot cars and sign papers for payments that are hopelessly out of their reach.”
“I used to own a Trans-Am,” Kermit piped in irrelevantly.
“That’s nice, Kermit. Anyway, by the time they find out what the insurance is going to cost on their new toys, they start to get a little buyer’s remorse. But they can’t sell the things—the most expensive option on a new car is the depreciation, meaning they’d have to come up with thousands of dollars to undo their mistakes. Most guys wind up turning them back in. The ones who refuse to drop them off at the dealership find themselves dealing with me. Unless they’re like this guy—he went to ground. His car hasn’t been seen around all winter, and he doesn’t seem to have a home, he just sort of drifts from friend to friend’s place. No permanent address.”
“First thing we should do is run a background check,” Kermit speculated.
“Yeah?” I glanced over at him. He looked completely serious. “W
hat does that mean?”
“You know, on the computer.”
“You know how to do something like that?”
“Um, no, not especially.”
“Okay. So I thought the first thing we’d do is check out his place of business.”
For employment, the customer had listed “logger” on his application. There’s no such thing anymore in northern Michigan; what he did for a living was run a chain saw, cutting down second-growth forest for small-time firewood operations. One of the regulars at the Black Bear did the same kind of thing and told me where our Mustang customer had been working this past winter.
Kermit had the file open in his lap as we bounced down the rutted two-track deep into the woods, my tires biting at the mud in four-wheel drive. “What are these?” he asked, holding up a set of what were clearly car keys.
“When you buy a new car, the dealer retains the key numbers, so you can cut a new set if you lose them. Or if the repo guy needs some,” I explained.
We came to a halt in a clearing with jumbled stacks of hardwood. It was Saturday, so the place was abandoned. Two hydraulic splitters, a couple of mauls, and an old flatbed truck with dual rear wheels all appeared to be rusting at about the same rate. “No signal,” Kermit pronounced, holding his phone up for me to see. I ignored him.
“Hello?” I called out as a formality. There clearly wasn’t anyone around.
“Hello! Yo! Anyone here? Hello!” Kermit shouted. “Hey!”
“That’s enough, Kermit.”
“Hello there, hello! Anybody?”
“Kermit!” He looked at me, startled. “It’s okay, I don’t think anyone’s here.”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you look around, see if you can spot the car anywhere. A lot of these guys think I’ll never look for it out here in the forest.”
He agreed, the black mud sucking at his boots as he wandered off down one of the trails. His thighs were so big he had a natural waddle to his gait, which the tricky footing only accentuated. I couldn’t recall ever meeting someone who carried all his weight in his legs and butt like that. Unconsciously I pinched a fold of flab over my hips, then patted my stomach. When I realized what I was doing I sighed and shook my head. So what? I always gained a little weight in the winter. It was perfectly normal. Sometimes I even lost some of it in the summer.
I looked around. Everything in the clearing was a boggy mess. The earth was deeply rutted where their truck had backed up to the six-foot-high piles of split firewood. To the left, trunks of fallen trees lay ready for the saw to cut them up, and sawdust was nearly a foot thick in some places.
“Well, hell. I half expected to find the car here,” I muttered. Alan didn’t reply, apparently deciding to punish me with silence. I wondered how I could induce him to keep it up.
I strolled around, looking hopefully behind the woodpiles. In the shadows the ground was still buried in deep snow, and I tried to imagine what it was like to stand here all day and cut up logs while the Michigan winter poured wet blizzards on my head. What a life the poor guy led.
“Well, that’s that,” I announced in disgust. Kermit had come wandering back twice like a lost dog, and was running out of trails to explore. I could hear him blundering around about thirty yards away.
“Wait,” Alan blurted.
“Oh, are we speaking now?”
“Look at the ground. Not there. No…” He grunted in frustration. “Please, look at the woodpile. To the left. Farther. Now down. Look at the ground. There! Look at the tracks.”
Along the forest floor where Alan was directing my eyes, muddy ruts went right into the woodpile, as if someone had driven under the logs. I glanced at the other places and noted they all looked the same: When the loggers unloaded their truck, some of the logs obliterated some of the tire tracks. I didn’t see anything special about the area in which Alan was interested.
“Walk over there,” Alan urged. I obliged, curious. “Do you see?” he demanded.
“See what?”
“The grooves from the tires. Look at them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not only is there a double set like everywhere else, there’s also a more narrow, single set. Like someone pulled a Ford Mustang up to the woodpile.”
“Right.” I thought about it. “Or maybe the woodpile wasn’t here when the Mustang made these tracks.”
“Yes, exactly!” Alan agreed excitedly.
With effort, I climbed up the precarious stack of wood until I was on top. I kicked aside a few logs. “If there’s a sports car under here, it is dented all to hell,” I commented. I started tossing logs off the top of the pile. Just a few layers down I hit heavy chipboard, three-quarters of an inch thick. “I’ll be damned. Hey, Kermit!”
An hour later we had exposed a large wooden box, fortified within by two-by-fours and which, once I’d broken out the crowbar, proved to be home to a cherry-red Ford Mustang. I used the winch on the back of the truck, unspooling the thick black cable, attaching the hook to the Mustang, and pulling the car slowly out into the open. Milt’s truck was old but the winch was state-of-the-art, well oiled and repo-silent.
“Whoa, nice car, can I drive it?” Kermit wanted to know.
Something about the lustful look in Kermit’s eyes made me think that would be a bad idea. “Better let me,” I advised. “I’ll let you do the next one.”
My keys worked but the battery was lifeless. I peered up at the darkening sky. “Tell you what, Kermit, I’d like to get the hell out of here. Instead of jumping it, why don’t you just push me down the road. Once we get going I’ll pop the clutch and we’ll start it that way.”
Kermit shrugged. “Whatever.”
“The road’s pretty slippery, so I imagine you’ll need to get me moving about ten, fifteen miles an hour or so for the tires to get enough bite to start it. Okay?”
He sullenly shrugged again, apparently hurt that I didn’t trust him with the car. I slid in behind the wheel, put in the clutch, and moved the shifter into first gear.
The car rocked. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Kermit hunched over the trunk, gritting his teeth. “What an idiot,” Alan muttered.
“Kermit.” I stood up out of the car. “I meant push it with the truck. The truck, Kermit.”
“Oh.” He stood up, scratching his head.
“Did you really think you’d get going fifteen miles an hour pushing it yourself?”
He shrugged.
“Okay, try the truck. And Kermit, no faster than fifteen miles an hour, all right?” I slid behind the wheel again. “Guy would probably try to hit eighty if I didn’t say anything,” I remarked.
“So how did a Heisman Trophy finalist wind up a repo man in northern Michigan?” Alan wanted to know. “What was she talking about back at the bank?”
“Later, Alan,” I responded, knowing I would never tell him. It wasn’t something I talked about. I frowned as I watched Kermit in the cab of the truck. He had turned it around so that the big rubber front bumper was facing the rear of the Mustang I was sitting in, but now, for some reason, he was backing up. Where did he think he was going?
Kermit turned on the headlights. He was a good fifty feet away. Suddenly the truck lurched forward.
“What is he doing?” I sputtered, watching the tow truck bear down on me.
“I imagine he is approaching the rear of this vehicle at a speed of exactly fifteen miles an hour,” Alan observed calmly.
There wasn’t time to say anything else before the crash.
6
The Slander Clause
It was dark and starting to snow with real hostility when I hit the door of the Black Bear, pushing it open like I was hoping it would smack into someone on the other side. I pulled a beer off of the tap and stood behind the bar and drank it while the regulars sat in their chairs and gaped at me with expressions verging on fear.
“Bad day?” Becky asked innocently, moving close to wipe down the keg machine with a rag.
>
“Don’t ask. I’ve got your thousand dollars, though.”
Her eyes flared with life briefly, then went dark again. “Okay.”
“I’ve got seven-fifty now, and I’ll give the rest of it to you tomorrow, after Milt pays me for today’s repo.”
“Okay.”
“Come on, Becky! Isn’t that what you wanted?” I bit off the impulse to shout at her.
“Sure.” She passed a hand over her brow, leaving a smudge on her glasses. “Sorry. Thanks, Ruddy.”
She tried out a pursed smile, but it was so rickety and weak I had to look away. When I turned back, she’d given up on it. “Listen, a couple more months and the summer crowds will be here. Things always go better in the summer. We just have to hang on,” I encouraged.
“I’m not sure we can make it until summer, Ruddy,” she said in a voice so quiet I wasn’t sure I heard correctly.
Janelle Lewis sat down at the bar, and I turned to serve her, glad for an interruption. “Hey, Janelle.”
“Hello, Ruddy.” She was, as always, carefully made up, though the flip in her professionally dyed blond hair looked like it had spent a little too long out in the wet weather.
Janelle’s husband divorced her hard when she turned forty, applying every insult to the injury by marrying a woman who was herself forty. Janelle had brown eyes and freckles and had lost so much weight after her husband left she could probably still wear her Kalkaska High School “Blue Blazers” cheerleader outfit, but she’d abandoned her innocent look in favor of tight jeans and loads of fake jewelry that made her look sharp-edged somehow.
Janelle’s bar tab tracked bourbon to the exclusion of everything else. She was lonely, and the way her eyes often lingered on me told me that she saw me as a possible cure for the emptiness in her life. The thirteen-year age difference between us didn’t seem as relevant as the wide gap between herself and her happiness, and I’d never been tempted. I poured some bourbon in a glass and waved the soda nozzle at her—sometimes she wanted it, most of the time, like tonight, she shook her head and took her first gulp like it was medicine, her eyes tightly closed.
“I heard about the fight here the other night. I’m sorry I missed it,” Janelle observed.