Repo Madness (38 page)

“Open the glove box and hand me my weapon, would you please, Ruddy?” he responded calmly.

“Oh God,”
Alan blurted in alarm.

The Glock in the glove box had a trigger lock jammed into it. Strickland pulled out a key as I handed it to him. “Turn on your headlights,” I suggested suddenly.

“What?”

“Your lights. I'll walk down, leave my door open, you crawl out the door after me. He won't be able to see you with the headlights in his eyes. I'll meet him on the ice.”

Strickland nodded and flipped on his beams. Instantly, the world changed, flaring white in front of us, the surrounding landscape seeming to plunge more deeply into darkness. Strickland hid below the dashboard, and I popped open my door and stepped out and walked down to the ice, waving my hand.

The snowmobiler was wearing a helmet and goggles, so I really couldn't tell if it was our man. He slowed down as he came closer, stopping about twenty yards away, so that I had to trudge that far out to meet him. He turned off his machine.

“Mr. Blanchard?” I called.

He sat there, just staring at me. I figured Strickland was stuck in the trees back on the island—if he attempted to follow me out here, Blanchard would spot him as soon as the sheriff was on the open ice.

Twenty yards was sort of a long shot for a pistol. I'd have to handle this myself. “That you, Mr. Blanchard?” I called.

He reached up and removed his helmet and goggles. I crunched snow under my boots as I cautiously approached. It was Blanchard, his face unreadable as his eyes bored into me.

“You bring my money?” I stopped two yards away.

He didn't say anything.

“Hey. I've been freezing my ass out here; you're late. Not the best way to treat your partner.”

“Partner,” he repeated.

“How do we know he doesn't have a gun?”
Alan hissed at me.

“You said, remember? That we were going to do a lot of things together. But it starts with my money.” I pursed my lips, watching his eyes.
Come on, Blanchard, pull out the cash so we can get to
bingo
and end this thing.

He looked down at his lap. “All right.”

I moved to the side of the snowmobile, holding out my hand, and that's when Blanchard raised his pistol.

“Not good,” I had time to say, before he pulled the trigger.

Two shots went into my vest, staggering me, and then the third one went right into my face.

*   *   *

I fell like a tree, landing on my back on the hard ice. I registered more shots, coming from my left, close and loud. That was Strickland, returning fire. I stared at the sky, my ears ringing, pain throbbing in my chest, face stinging as if from a slap, and waited to feel the life ebb out of me.

“We're hit, we're hit,”
Alan babbled.

“Shut up, Alan,” I muttered.

“Ruddy?” Strickland's face hovered over mine, the shadows from the headlights carving black canyons under his eyes. “You hurt?”

“He got me in the head.”

Strickland's eyes widened in alarm. He reached out with a gloved hand and seized my jaw, moving my head back and forth. Ice crystals on the leather glove stung my cheeks. “I don't think so. Probably just missed—the shock wave can feel like a hit if it comes close enough. You were only a few feet away.”

“Oh. Right,” I agreed, feeling foolish. “I know he got me in the vest.” I patted my chest, wincing.

“You need an ambulance?”

I shook my head and sat up. “No. Wow.” I glanced over at Blanchard, who was still straddling the snowmobile, his lifeless body twisted, his mouth open in outrage. “Neither does he,” I observed. The white glare from the SUV's headlights made Strickland's shots to the banker's center mass appear black as oil. One of them went too high—above the eyes—and some of Blanchard's skull was missing. It looked even worse than the Photoshopped pictures of his wife, made all the more gruesome by the way his corpse still sat in the saddle, as if ready to ride away like a headless horseman. I glanced away, a little sickened.

Strickland grunted. “I came running the second I saw him pull the pistol. I thought he'd see me, but he was looking at you and nothing else. Not the brightest move, to walk right up to him like that, my friend.”

“Repo men are known for their lack of intelligence.”

He grinned, bringing out his cell phone. He dialed. I looked around the cold, bleak landscape, thinking how close I had come to dying. It didn't seem real.

“Cutty, shots fired. Suspect is 10-55. Roll your forensics team,” Strickland said. “Armed civilian on the scene.” He looked at me. “No, our C.I. is unhurt.”

I probed the bruises under the vest.
“Ow,”
Alan complained.

*   *   *

Even though they had the chip in the hat, the police still wanted to take my statement, so I sat in the panel van and went through it all a couple of times. There wasn't much for me to tell, since all I'd basically done was walk out on the ice and fall down—Barry Strickland's conversation would probably take a lot more time.

It was just past twelve when the cops let me go. Cutty shook my hand, a wry look on her face, probably processing how my screw-up had saved the court system the cost of a trial. “The D.A. wants me to hold you here,” she murmured confidentially.

“Great.”

She shrugged, giving me a small smile. “I don't actually work for him, you know. I'd suggest you get in your tow truck and go home. Put some ice on those bruises; it helps. I got hit in the vest two separate times a few years ago, so I know how much it hurts.”

I took her advice and slipped behind the wheel, waving jauntily at the state police as I drove over the Holy Island bridge. No one tried to stop me.

I cruised up the snowy county road to M-66 and paused there, considering. I was exactly equidistant between Katie's place in East Jordan and the Ferry Bar in Charlevoix. I had two distinct sore spots on my chest, my ears still rang from the near hit to the head, and I was awfully damn exhausted. Katie opening her door for me would be the most welcome sight I could think of.

On the other hand …

“Let's go see what's happening at the Ferry Bar,” I told Alan.

“It's after twelve. They close early in the winter,”
Alan objected.

I turned right, toward Charlevoix. “That's good. I'm a repo man. I do my best work at midnight.”

 

30

We Have Less Time Than We Thought

Charlevoix was buttoned up tightly. In the summer the streets flow with people and gaily lit boats bob in Round Lake and the air feels warm and exciting. This time of year, February not yet half over, people withdraw into the safety of their warm homes, abandoning the town. I saw literally not a single person as I cruised up Bridge Street. I parked two blocks away from the Ferry Bar—standard repo procedure. I grabbed Alan's case file and headed out. My footfalls were muffled by the snow, so the night was utterly silent. When I got to Rogan's place, it was closed and dark.

“Would you quit touching the sore spots on your chest?”
Alan requested peevishly.

“They hurt.”

“I know they hurt! Stop touching them!”

I remembered Rogan telling me he had a garage. I went around to the back of the bi-level building, finding four ground-level garage doors. I located which one was logically his, but it was locked. All right. I went back up to the front and peered inside. The only lights were the indicators on the appliances, green and red and blue dots in the darkness.

My elbow knocked out the glass above the doorknob, and I reached through and unlocked the door.

“Ruddy!”
Alan blurted, sounding stressed for some reason.

“Oops.”

“That's breaking and entering.”

“I know. I'll go inside; you stay here and watch for the cops.” A little psycho humor, there.

“What are we really doing here?”
Alan responded testily.

“I don't know, Alan. We're looking around, seeing if we can find anything. You're the one who thinks Rogan might be our man.”

After ten minutes in the bar, all I could say for sure was that it was a place that served alcohol. If Rogan had made a signed confession, he had neglected to leave it lying out. Sitting right next to his computer screen was the key card to access it, and pretty much without thinking I swiped it, and the system came alive.

“You know what you're doing?”

“This is the same system we've got at the Black Bear. Of course I do,” I responded.

Well, I really didn't. I had it in my mind to see if Shantytown mayor Phil Struder had a house account, but instead, after a bit of messing around, found myself looking at calendars. “Damn,” I said.

“Wait.”

“What is it?”

“Can you check the date Nina Otis vanished?”

“Sure. Want to tell me why?” Using the printouts from the folder for reference, I tapped the year, found the month, and opened it.

“This is a shift schedule, right? Let's see if Rogan was really off the night she disappeared.”

That wasn't as easily accomplished as I would have hoped, but after a couple of stabs at it, I got the correct week up. It was summer, so three people worked that night.

One of them was Wade Rogan.

“Huh. And he said he wasn't here that night. Our friend Mr. Rogan seems to have a problematic relationship with the truth,” I noted dryly.

“Not just that. Wait. Focus for just a second, okay? Focus. Okay. See it?”

“See what?” I said impatiently.

“See how he took the next four nights off?”

“Huh.”

“Ruddy. What if the guy buying Nina Otis drinks was the
bartender
?”

“Which,” I mused, “was something the mayor could hardly have failed to notice.” I thought about it, and then, with Alan's printouts reminding me of the dates, went back to work on the schedule. Rogan didn't own the bar the night Lisa Marie Walker vanished, but the next four days after telling the cops he saw a drunk woman headed for the Charlevoix docks, he was off work, letting himself get pretty short-staffed for a drinking establishment in the tourist season. He wasn't working the night the woman fell off the sailboat virtually in front of his home, nor did he report to work for three days after that. We saw the same thing for the two other missing women from Alan's list—the nights they vanished, Rogan was here, but then he gave himself a quick little vacation after that.

“Let's look around,” I suggested. I went down the hallway to the bathrooms. The hallway itself was closed off by a curtain. The men's room was first, on the left, and then the ladies' was at the very end. An ancient wooden phone booth, inoperative and all carved up with initials and obscene comments, was positioned between the men's and the women's, so that the end of the hall was hidden from view.

On the other side of the hall from the ladies' room was a door with a wide-angle peephole in it. It was locked, but when I hit it with my boot a couple of times, it opened inward. Alan sighed. I turned on the light.

It was a tiny office—Rogan's personal work space. A desk, phone, and a chair. Photographs of someplace tropical, maybe the Wolfingers' beach in Hawaii, on the wall. Shelves with cleaning supplies and cans of salsa, things like that.

“So, Alan,” I said. “Suppose you're giving some lady free drinks all afternoon. She's going to take the ferry to Beaver Island, but you're making them strong and she's gulping them down, getting tipsy. Eventually it's time for her to leave. You know she's going to want to use the bathroom after all she's had to drink. You come back here.” I gestured to the peephole in the door. “And you watch. And here she comes. You open the office door, you step out, you grab her, you close the office door. It could happen in literally seconds.”

“She would have to be really, really drunk,”
Alan objected.
“Otherwise she'd fight it, maybe scream.”

I thought about the cans of starter fluid out in the mayor's ice shanty. It wasn't just an explosive chemical; it had long had another use. “Ether,” I speculated. “You have a cloth soaked in ether. By the time she reacts—remember, she's hammered—she's sucked in the fumes and her lights go out. Or hell, maybe I'm making this too complicated. Maybe you just say, ‘Come here a minute,' and she walks right in.”

Alan pondered it.
“Then what?”
he asked.

There was a single door to my left. I thought it might be a closet, but when I opened it, I saw that it led to a dark, steep stairway. I fumbled for a light switch, found it, and flipped it on. A single stark light bulb showed the way down to the inside of a garage. “Huh,” I said.

“What is that thing down there?”
Alan asked.

At the bottom of the stairs, which pitched so steeply they looked spectacularly treacherous, a small chair incongruously sat on a metal rail. It was, I realized, a stairway elevator.

“Picture you've got a drugged, unconscious woman, and you need to get her to the trunk of your car,” I murmured. “No way you're going to be able to get her down these steps. So you put in a lift.”

“He's been doing this for a while,”
Alan said breathlessly.

“You might have missed a few with your list,” I agreed. Inside, though, I was finally feeling something—rage. This guy ruined my life, and he
took
Lisa Marie's. He murdered Nina Otis. He was like a spider, lurking here, waiting for his prey to stumble down the hall.

I debated going down the stairs, but I didn't know what else I would be able to learn. From where I stood, it was a completely empty garage. I turned to flip off the light, and my eye caught sight of a peculiarly high shelf to my right, about six inches wide and a foot long, set off to the side of the upper doorframe. It was so high, I couldn't see what was on it, but when I felt around up there, I touched a soft cloth. I pulled it down, unfolded it, and stared at a hypodermic needle and a small glass vial. I turned the little bottle over and read the label.