The Midnight Dog of the Repo Man Read online

  “Is that what you do? Repo man?” Kenny asked curiously.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “This bar thing is just so I can meet glamourous people.”

  “Whoa. That’s awesome.”

  “I have to pinch myself every day.”

  “Ever had a gun pointed at you?” he pressed.

  I gave him a look and he blanched, glancing at his own shotgun. “Oh yeah. Sorry.”

  “I know where the truck is, I’ll bet,” Mark offered.

  “Hey! She wants your phone number!” Stasia called out with a hoot. Cora hushed her and Stasia collapsed in giggles.

  “Which one they talking about?” Kenny wanted to know.

  “Not you,” Mark said.

  “Mark. Focus. You know where the truck is?” I demanded.

  Mark regarded my intensity. “My grandfather’s place, got a pole barn. Pretty much where the whole family stores stuff.”

  I reached out and took his hand in mine, like we were shaking on a deal. “Mark. I’m getting a bonus for this repo. Tell me where the truck is and I’ll split it with you—a thousand for me, a thousand for you. Ten times what you guys were going to make for being Bonnie and Clyde tonight.”

  “So you got any dance music on the jukebox?” Kenny wanted to know. He saluted Cora with his beer glass and she raised her pinot grigio in response.

  “I don’t know if I can do that. He’s my cousin,” Mark whined. “We’ve been close since we were kids. Could you make it fifteen hundred?”

  “How about a thousand dollars, another round of beers when we get back, and I won’t report your robbery attempt to the sheriff,” I counteroffered.

  “A thousand dollars,” Mark mused.

  “Let’s go over and sit with the girls,” Kenny suggested.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go repossess a truck.”

  *****

  MARK AND KENNY SAT in the front seat of the tow truck on the trip to the Stevens family pole barn, chattering excitedly because they were going on a repo and then back to the Black Bear to hook up with Stasia and Cora, who I guess had decided to join the gang. Mark was the sort of direction giver who said things like, “I think you should have turned back there,” which was sorely testing my patience.

  I don’t really do “patience.”

  “What you should have done was told me to turn back there,” I corrected irritably as I made my second U-turn of the evening.

  “Sorry. It’s dark,” Mark apologized, as if I couldn’t see that my truck’s headlights were barely capable of cutting through the thick, black night. The road surface was a glowing strip of white dirt lined on either shoulder by dark trees like soldiers standing silent sentry. The Stevens property was apparently at the far end of a bottomless void.

  “Did you know there’s kind of a rust hole in your floorboard, here?” Kenny asked me, jabbing at it with the toe of his boot.

  My boss had purchased the vehicle from a tow company in Detroit, where the salt eats out car bodies like zombies going after cheerleaders. (I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies lately.) When the thing runs, the rusty body sort of shakes, as if it is breathing. “Yeah, lets the exhaust in better like that,” I informed Kenny.

  “Maybe we should go with you every repo,” Mark speculated. “You know, we could help out. Be your backup. Like, someone tries something, and then bam! Kenny and I step out with our shotguns, like, ‘go ahead, make my day. You’re terminated.’”

  “Oh? You guys bring your weapons?” I asked innocently.

  Kenny and Mark exchanged stricken looks. “Kenny, what the hell!” Mark accused.

  “Well, you don’t have yours, either,” Kenny responded defensively.

  “What do you guys do when you’re not terrorizing Kalkaska?” I asked idly.

  “Carpenters. Cabinetry. Woodwork. Pick up rocks,” Kenny responded.

  “Pick up rocks?” I repeated.

  “That happened one time,” Mark snapped, as if insulted.

  “We just finished repairing a dock in Ironton,” Kenny continued. He and Mark exchanged dark looks and I picked up on it.

  “What happened with that job?”

  “We didn’t get paid, is what,” Mark confided bitterly. “Thirty-five hundred bucks, and the guy stiffed us because he said we did sloppy work.”

  “That dock is perfect,” Kenny interjected. “You could deliver a baby on it. You could eat off it.”

  “Probably not in that order, though,” I observed.

  “Montgomery comes down and says, like, ‘The boards are unevenly spaced.’ I showed him with a ruler, and he just said, ‘I’m not payin’. We worked two weeks on that thing.”

  “Wait, Gabriel Montgomery?” I interjected.

  “Yeah. Piece of work that guy is,” Mark muttered.

  “You guys are sort of the coincidence twins, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Yes, we are,” Kenny agreed.

  Mark nodded, then frowned. “Wait, what?”

  “Since you two are my backup gunslingers, I’m going to let you in on a little inside information. Open the glove box, there.”

  Kenny agreeably punched the button and the door to the box dropped open. “See what’s in there?” I asked him.

  “Uh, burger wrappers. Candy wrappers.”

  “Not that.”

  “Yahh!” Kenny screamed.

  I nearly drove into the ditch, wrestling the sagging truck back from the brink with a frantic twist of the wheel. “What?” I shouted.

  “There’s a rubber snake in there!” Kenny yelled while Mark disgustedly shoved him away.

  “Get off of my lap,” Mark snapped.

  “Okay, so it’s a snake,” I retorted. “You almost got us killed, yelling like that.”

  “Why do you have a rubber snake?” Kenny demanded.

  “What? Why does anyone have a rubber snake?” I snapped, a little peeved.

  Mark and Kenny regarded each other, unsure. “Good point,” Mark conceded.

  I reached past them and snagged the folder out from under what were really just a couple of paper wrappers, in my opinion. It wasn’t as if I had a ton of them in there. Who doesn’t shove a burger wrapper in the glove box every once in a while? “See? Check out this folder.”

  “ ‘Gabriel Montgomery,’” Mark read off the file.

  “That’s the coincidence I’m talking about. Montgomery’s nearly four payments past due on his Cadillac CTS, and the bank has had it with his excuses. As soon as he gets back up north from wherever he’s been wintering, I’m going to head out and take it from him.”

  “That’s so sweet.” Mark grinned.

  “Sort of strange that you guys are involved with two repos in a row. Maybe you are cut out for this job,” I suggested.

  “Beats picking up rocks,” Kenny agreed.

  “Would you let that go? Jesus,” Mark seethed.

  “I’d love to see his expression when you steal his car. Like, ‘Wait a minute, he’s towing my car!’” Kenny said.

  “Sure beats what happened with him this morning. Hasta la vista, baby, we’ve got your Cadillac. Who’s rich now?” Mark sang in agreement.

  “Wait, this morning?” I interjected.

  “Drag it down and dump it, drive right off his dock, right over the perfectly spaced boards and into the water. Then dynamite the whole deal. Boom! Say good-bye to your Cadillac, butt face,” Kenny enthused, holding his hand up for a high five with his partner.

  “I don’t get the dynamite,” Mark objected.

  “Mark. Focus. You guys saw Montgomery this morning?” I pressed.

  “Yeah, that’s how we started this perfect day. Knocked on his door and he opens it and just laughs at us when we handed him a duplicate invoice,” Mark answered.

  “That invoice was made by my sister on a computer,” Kenny complained.

  “Then he points a gun at us. A gun! What kind of person …” Mark trailed off as he made an unfortunate connection.

  “So he’s back in town,”
I mused.

  “Yeah, but just for a day, he said. He’s leaving tomorrow for Europe or someplace,” Kenny said.

  “Or Montana, maybe,” Mark speculated.

  “The part of Montana that looks like Europe,” I translated.

  “Exactly,” Kenny affirmed.

  “Well, okay then. First thing in the morning, I’ll go relieve Mr. Montgomery of his obligation to put gasoline in his Cadillac,” I declared.

  “Wait, free gas? I don’t get it,” Kenny replied.

  “Where did you get the car keys?” Mark wanted to know, pulling them out of the folder and waving them at me. I explained that the dealer retained key numbers on every new car sold, just in case the owner lost them or the repo man needed them. “They don’t have a clicker on them, but they’ll work just fine.”

  “That is so cool,” Mark admired.

  “Why didn’t you guys get something up front for the dock job? Everyone knows Montgomery is a deadbeat,” I inquired. “He doesn’t pay his gardener, the trash pickup, anybody. Half the town has taken him to small-claims court.”

  “The guy’s rich,” Kenny protested. “He drives a Cadillac.”

  “Not after tomorrow, he doesn’t,” I said.

  “I don’t get it. He’s got a yacht, this amazing place right on the lake, his dad left him like a hundred billion dollars—why doesn’t he pay his bills?” Mark pondered.

  “A hundred billion sounds high,” I noted skeptically.

  “I think you should have turned back there,” Mark observed.

  The Kalkaska nightscape is dotted with places where the oil companies have punched holes in the sandy soil to get at the petroleum and are burning off excess natural gas in waste flames, which must make the environmentalists just giddy. When we got to the pole barn it was illuminated with the flickering light from one of these eternal torches and the whole effect was damn spooky.

  “I’ll wait in the tow truck,” Kenny volunteered. He reached in and pulled out the rubber snake as if it were a weapon.

  Mark found the key for the padlock hidden under a rock that was the first place any burglar would look and opened up the huge sliding doors. Inside was an absolute mountain of the kind of crap you see decorating the walls in chain restaurants with names like Sure Happy It’s Thursday! and Pirate Gomez O’Malley’s! Watering cans and license plates and snow skies and lunch boxes and hockey sticks and there, in the center of all of it, a gigantic Ford truck with a snowplow and massive rear tires. The thing was dented up and down the length of its body—Mark’s cousin apparently used trees to guide himself into parking spots.

  I glanced at my watch. It was just midnight.

  I always did my best work at midnight.

  *****

  I DROVE THE FORD and my two cohorts followed in my tow truck. Kenny kept playing with the flashing blue lights on top, the two of them back there laughing like idiots. A thousand dollars has an intoxicating effect on some people.

  By the time we got back to the bar, Stasia and Cora had apparently decided that the whole robbery wasn’t such a cute meet after all and had left. My two helpers looked pretty dejected, so I gave them each another beer before I bounced them out the door.

  “We’ll come back, of course,” Kenny promised.

  “Knock yourselves out,” I agreed.

  The next morning I woke up feeling pretty good about things—the thousand bucks from the plow truck repo would help Becky keep the Black Bear open until the summer crowds showed up, which would be happening any time now, the leaves had burst out of their hiding places right before Memorial Day, and the sun was shining, and the air was so clean it hurt.

  So: a rewarding night and a perfect June day and I was off to repo another car—enough to make a guy like me damn near euphoric. Furthermore, this Montgomery was not some poor slob who had been ground up and spat out by the economy—no, Gabriel Montgomery was an infamously pompous jerk who cheated everyone the way he had cheated Kenny and Mark. Montgomery lived like the hundred billionaire he was, in a stunning summer home perched on the south arm of Lake Charlevoix, right where the Ironton Ferry transports cars back and forth across the narrows. The land there was so coveted that if I put all my cash assets together I might be able to buy a single frontage foot of it. Montgomery had three boats tied up to the enormous permanent dock that KENNY AND MARK HAD just repaired, because obviously no one can get by with just one boat.

  I was in such a good mood as I drove down to the ferry that I was completely unprepared for what hit me when I got there.

  The ferry was on the east side of the lake, six hundred feet away, so I had several minutes before it came back to get me. I saw my friend Toni Marteney, the captain, directing people onto the ferry, wearing a cap that she stole from the skipper on Gilligan’s Island. I got out of my truck, parked and locked it, and then, though the sun was still shining, felt a dark, chill cloud settle over me.

  This was where everything went south for me—right here, in Ironton, population practically zero. One minute you’re the big Kalkaska football star, local hero, fame and fortune lined up to shake your hand and welcome you into the club, and the next your head is down as you listen to the judge sentence you to prison. Now I was finally free from behind the razor wire, which was a substantial improvement, but I was broke, hadn’t had a date in forever, was going absolutely nowhere. All because of what happened right here.

  I watched a family eating lunch on the docks just to the north of where I was standing, at a great little place called The Landings. It’s a restaurant housed in what was, when I was a little kid, a bait shop hugging the shore. Now it’s a place for people on watercraft to tie up and dine on food that is better than what the Black Bear serves by an order of, oh, a thousand. Just shows what happens when you have a kitchen instead of just a microwave and a chef instead of just a sister. The family was enjoying the sun and the meal and the day, oblivious to the fallen hero watching them. They had normal, happy lives. I had what felt like no life at all.

  “Ruddy!”

  I looked up. Toni had made it over and loaded two cars and was waving at me.

  “You coming?” she wanted to know.

  “Yeah,” I said. I trudged over and got on the ferry.

  “You leaving your truck?”

  I nodded. “Going to pick up a Cadillac.”

  She grinned at me. “Ah. Anybody I know and dislike?”

  “I couldn’t tell you Gabriel Montgomery’s name; that would be a violation of the Repo Code,” I responded. My heart wasn’t in the banter, however. I moodily looked into the clear, emerald water as the ferry chugged across to the Boyne City side. Right here.

  Usually a good repo will perk me right up, but the sour mood left an aftertaste I couldn’t shake, even after I walked down Montgomery’s long driveway, the day’s heat radiating up through my shoes, and saw the guy loading his car. My car, I corrected mentally, patting the keys in my pocket. This would be easy. I slid over behind a tree to watch.

  Montgomery had jet-black hair combed carefully back, pressed pants, and a blue polo shirt that he probably got playing polo. He had an air about him, the kind of person who feels the world owes him extra consideration at every turn because his daddy invented something or sold something or accomplished something to fill up the Montgomery family bank account.

  He was, indeed, headed on a trip, it looked like—he was shoving a couple of matching hard-sided suitcases into the backseat. They were bright red and looked as expensive as everything else he wasn’t paying for. Probably wasn’t going to drive all the way to Europe, but it was clear he’d be gone for a while. It if hadn’t been for Mark and Kenny, I would have missed him.

  Good. When you steal someone’s car, you have to return his personal property. The suitcases would make that easier.

  Montgomery didn’t see me observing him. The Cadillac was in the circular driveway in front of a house that probably had six bedrooms more than mine. From where I stood I could see down the gentle, grassy
slope to the big wooden dock—more like a pier, really, with giant gray timbers pounded into the lake bed supporting a latticework of perfectly spaced boards. Montgomery had a fifty-five-foot cigarette boat next to a forty-foot sailboat and a sixteen-foot ski boat. Maybe the bank would be sending me out to pick up the boats, too.

  Montgomery went back into his house and I walked down to his car, got in, started the engine, and then sat waiting for a moment. When he stepped out of his house lugging a duffel bag, he stopped dead, his blue eyes bulging at the sight of me, his mouth opening comically. “Hey!” he shouted.

  Normally this was the best part, but I was still in a dark mood. With no joy at all I gunned it, cranking the wheel and spitting gravel. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw Montgomery chasing after me on foot, and even that didn’t make me happy.

  I drove down to where Toni was just raising the gate on the ferry, but when I honked she looked up and, smiling, dropped the ramp so I could trundle on. I parked and got out. “Nice ride,” she observed, running her hands on the smooth black finish.

  “Yeah. I just got it,” I replied. I went to the railing and looked a hundred yards down the lake, waiting to see if Montgomery would make an appearance on his perfectly spaced dock.

  He did not disappoint. Carrying the duffel bag he’d been bringing out of the house, he ran out on his pier and stared at me escorting his car across the channel.

  I waved.

  Montgomery dropped the duffel bag and unzipped it, fishing around inside with hurried purpose. I watched with interest. Binoculars, maybe? Clearly he was going for something other than spare socks.

  When he stood up from the bag, I gulped. What he held in his hands was what most people call an assault rifle—big and black and ugly. He pointed it at the ferry.

  “Toni!” I shouted. I didn’t know what the range was on the thing, but I figured we were probably within it. I grabbed Toni and dragged her behind the ferry’s cabin—a tollbooth-like enclosure that had thin metal walls that might or might not stop a bullet.

  “What? What’s happening, Ruddy?” Toni asked anxiously.

  “He’s got a rifle.”

  “Who?”