“I can’t tell you. Repo Code,” I replied. I raised myself up, risking a peek around the corner. Montgomery was no longer scoping the ferry.
He was getting into his ski boat.
“Uh, Toni? Can this thing move any faster?” I asked.
Toni shook her head. She was still crouched behind the cabin as if we were taking heavy fire. “This is pretty much flat-out as she goes, Ruddy,” she confessed mournfully. We were making our way at what felt like five miles an hour.
We were close enough I could actually hear Montgomery fire up his twin outboard engines. “I’m pretty sure Montgomery’s boat can hit forty knots,” I mused as I watched him back out of his berth. I triangulated his approach with our dead-slow crawl and figured he had us beat by a long shot.
“Wait, this is a no-wake zone! He can only go six miles an hour!” Toni blurted, relieved.
“I somehow think that doesn’t matter to our friend,” I answered. As if to prove my point, Montgomery cranked it up and came thundering toward us, carving a deep, white trough of foam in the placid waters.
Toni and I decided we would be more comfortable in the cabin and dove inside, crouching down. There really wasn’t room for both of us in there. I smelled coffee and mildew and, frankly, Toni, who was sweating profusely. “Are we safe in here?” she asked worriedly.
“Sure, if he doesn’t shoot,” I replied. Toni did not appear assuaged.
Montgomery cut the throttle—he was close, his engines growling like twin bears just on the other side of the thin metal walls. I heard the slap of his wake against the sides of the ferry and pictured him matching our speed, sighting down the barrel of his weapon, thinking how best to take his shot.
“I sort of have to stop the ferry soon or we’ll crash it,” Toni apologized.
“The hell with this,” I decided. I stood up, left the cabin, and walked out to the railing, staring at Montgomery, who had set down his gun to steer his boat. I could see the thing, though, sitting on a white seat right next to him. He was less than twenty feet away—if it weren’t for his motors, we could have conversed in normal tones.
“I’ll meet you on the other side!” I shouted to him. “Dock your boat at The Landings!”
His glare was dark and implacable, but after a long moment he did as I asked, his engines howling as he rocketed ahead of us and went to the docks. The family eating lunch watched him without much interest as he hastily tied up, but when he climbed up on the sturdy dock and padded on bare feet over to greet the ferry he had his rifle swinging free in his right hand.
The father made a decision and moments later his family had abandoned their lunches and darted into the restaurant.
“You want me to go with you?” Toni asked, clearly hoping I’d decline the brave offer.
I shook my head. “You got some customers,” I said, gesturing to the vehicles that had shown up over on the Boyne City side. “Better get going.”
“Want me to call the cops?”
“No, they’d just mess up the repo,” I replied. Police officers take a dim view of self-help repossessions, believing it makes for a far better outcome if the bank hires a lawyer and waits for a court date and then gets a judge to sign a Writ of Replevin and then hires the local sheriff to go out and pick up the car. The police also prefer it when the law is called in to settle a bar fight. I guess the shorthand for it is that police officers take a dim view of me.
I slid into the cockpit of the Caddy and drove slowly over the ramp and onto the land, waving my thanks at Toni, who appeared to be hyperventilating. Her job is to sail back and forth across the same six hundred feet, day in and day out, so I guessed this had all been a little more excitement than she was accustomed to.
Montgomery was waiting there for me, his weapon cradled in his arms. I could have floored it and blasted past him, but instead I docilely pulled into the parking lot and stopped next to my tow truck. When I got out, I noticed that Montgomery had painted toenails—black-painted toenails, like he was a member of Black Sabbath instead of just some rich deadbeat.
He was staring at me with hot, beady eyes. “You’re not taking my car anywhere,” he told me. It sounded like a line he had practiced all the way over here.
“Afternoon, Mr. Montgomery,” I greeted civilly. “I need you to clear your personal property out of the vehicle. This is a legal repossession.”
“It’s a legal nothing,” he snapped back.
I considered this for a moment. “That doesn’t actually make any sense.”
“Yeah? Well, does this make sense?” He pointed the rifle at me, curling his finger around the trigger. I looked at the blank, cold eye of the thing, just five feet away from my face.
“You going to get your stuff out of the car or do you want me to dump it out here?” I asked. “Your choice.”
“Are you stupid?” he demanded, scowling.
“Depends on who you ask.”
“I’m taking my car back and no one’s stopping me.”
“Not exactly. I’m stopping you. Here, take your stuff.” I opened the back door, pulled out one of the gleaming red suitcases, and set it on the pavement. The thing was heavy—there had to be a thousand polo shirts in there.
“Hey!” Montgomery shouted, his face flushed scarlet.
“So you’re really going to shoot me. With people watching out the window at you, probably already called 911,” I said skeptically.
Montgomery didn’t flinch, didn’t turn around to check on the people who were, indeed, standing inside the restaurant staring out the windows, and that’s when I felt a dip in my self-confidence. His face was so full of fury he seemed incapable of rational thought. You see that sometimes, in my line of work. It’s just a car, not worth going crazy over, but I guess for some guys it is as if you’ve stormed the village and are making off with all the women. Normally, I just stand there looking unimpressed and eventually the heat breaks.
I stood there, looking unimpressed.
Montgomery brought the rifle up, squinting down it as if sighting on a deer.
He was going to do it.
And that’s when I realized just how low I’d gotten. Gabriel Montgomery was about to pull the trigger and put an end to me and I didn’t give a damn. Nothing flashed before my eyes; no regrets surged through me; I didn’t even reflect on the irony that the full circle had come to this place, right here, where I’d committed the crime that sent me to prison, where I’d lost everything. I just stood and waited for it. Hell, I wanted it.
They say you never hear the round that hits you. But in this case, I did. Montgomery squeezed the trigger and I heard a satiny, sibilant sound, followed by a blast of wet that in the first instant I thought might be blood but immediately realized was a stream of water.
It was a squirt gun. It took me several seconds to process this completely unexpected development. I was not dead. “Cut it out!” I barked. I wiped my eyes, glanced down at my sodden clothes, and then glared at Montgomery, who seemed a little taken aback that he had actually shot water at me. When I strode over and yanked the plastic weapon out of his hands he flinched and sort of shrank down.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded. “You can’t run around squirting people.”
He worked his mouth. He seemed to be unhappy that I was so much larger than he was. “I …,” he started to say, his bluster diminished now that I had the gun. For a moment we both thought I was going to return fire, and then I threw the toy into the grass.
“Give me your keys,” I ordered sternly, my hand out, palm flat.
He contemplated refusing me and I gave him a look and he recontemplated, digging into his pocket and meekly handing them over. Now he could climb into the Cadillac to clean his crap out of it without any chance of starting the engine and roaring off. “Okay, now get your stuff. Anything you want to keep, take it. I’ll help you carry your suitcases to the boat.”
“You’re going to be hearing from my lawyer,” Montgomery warned
darkly, some of his bravado returning in what I considered to be an inappropriate response to the situation.
“Yeah? Start off by telling him you threatened me with what you implied was a deadly weapon and see what kind of check he thinks you should write me. In fact, you got your checkbook on you?”
Montgomery snorted in disbelief. “You don’t really expect me to give you a check.”
“Get it out.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“You want, I’ll pat you down and find it. I don’t pat gently.”
He thought about it. “Okay, this is for sure a crime,” he said, pulling his checkbook out of his back pocket. It was a nice leather job with a Montblanc pen shining in the seam. “You’re threatening me with violence for money, that’s robbery.”
“No, that’s extortion, and it’s not what we’re doing. You owe thirty-five hundred dollars to Kenny and Mark. Make the check out to Mark Stevens.”
“Those guys?” Montgomery said incredulously. “You have to be kidding.”
I just looked at him.
“The dock isn’t even level,” he spat.
“Thirty-five hundred dollars,” I repeated.
Montgomery angrily scrawled in his checkbook, then agitatedly ripped the check out. When he handed it to me I reached a little farther and wrapped his hand in mine. “This check bounces and I’m going to come collect on it myself.” I squeezed his hand a little, feeling the bones uneasily rearranging themselves under my grip. “Plus penalties and interest. You won’t like my penalties. We clear?”
Montgomery gazed down the lake at something, his lips twisted sourly. I squeezed harder and his eyes snapped back to mine.
“We clear?”
“Yeah, okay, fine,” he said, snatching his hand away.
I walked over to the car, holding the little remote in my hand. “You got anything in the trunk?” I inquired.
I punched the button and something hurtled out of the trunk and tackled me. I was so startled I staggered back and fell down hard on my butt. It was a wriggling, licking, whining dog, black and brown and white, with enormous ears and a tongue as wet as a squirt gun. The poor guy was almost frantically happy to see me, dancing around in my lap and kissing my face. “Okay, okay!” I said, pushing him away and sputtering.
“Jake!” Montgomery shouted crossly. “Get down!”
Jake cringed a little at the sharp call, his eyelids fluttering. I stood, brushing the grit off my pants. “So this whole time there’s been a dog in your trunk?” I demanded. Then something else occurred to me. “Wait, where were you going, just now? With the suitcases.”
Montgomery was back to looking down the lake. “Detroit,” he finally replied. “At least until you showed up.”
Detroit was something like four and a half hours away. “You were going to keep a dog in the trunk all the way to Detroit?” I demanded.
Montgomery shrugged. “No law against it.”
I looked down at Jake, who seemed to be intensely following the conversation. “So you put your bags in the backseat and your dog in the trunk,” I translated incredulously.
“Damn dog drools on the leather,” Montgomery explained.
I took a deep breath and then let it out. This was not, I decided, my fight. “Get your stuff,” I said.
Two minutes later Montgomery had a handful of things from his glove box (no wrappers or rubber snakes, though) and I was carrying his two suitcases out onto the wooden dock to his boat. The water level was lower than usual, so Montgomery had to take a ladder down to his ski boat. I saw a woman’s bikini top lying on one of the white seats and a few empty beer bottles poking up out of the cup holders dimpling the sideboards. I handed him one of the suitcases and he stumbled a little under the weight.
“Careful!” he snapped at me.
I raised the other one over my head and threw it down. It landed on the boat deck with a crash. Montgomery’s eyes flashed hot.
“You want me to get your toy gun?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Maybe next time it won’t be a toy,” he suggested softly.
“Maybe next time when I take it from you I’ll give you an anal probe with it,” I responded.
Montgomery dropped his eyes from mine. “Jake!” he called.
Jake went to the edge of the dock and looked down into the boat, whining in a small, distressed voice. His legs were too short to leap safely—it was nearly a six-foot drop.
“Jake!” Montgomery yelled crossly.
“You’re going to have to come get him,” I said.
“Jake! Dammit, get in the boat!”
“Hey!” I said loudly. “You’re not listening to me. He can’t make it. You’re going to have to come up here and get him.”
With a noise of disgust, Montgomery scaled the ladder. At his approach, Jake backed away from the edge of the dock.
And then I felt the little dog pressing up against my legs. It was a subtle thing, but he was behind me, leaning into my calves, and when I glanced down he gazed up at me with eyes that seemed to communicate all sorts of things I couldn’t read.
“Jake!” Montgomery snarled. He stomped over and reached for Jake’s collar and the dog cringed away. When Montgomery snagged the collar and yanked, dragging the little dog with him back to the ladder, Jake made that small distressed sound again and something in me broke.
“Montgomery,” I said.
My tone of voice halted him. He looked at me warily.
“I hear you’re a pretty good swimmer.”
His gaze turned puzzled. “Swimmer?” he repeated.
I stepped up to him and he straightened, alarmed, letting loose of his dog. I grabbed him by his polo shirt and swung him away from his boat to the other side of the dock, where the water was clear and motionless until I threw him in it.
Montgomery yelled something as he flew through the air, but I didn’t catch it. When he surfaced, coughing, he was articulating a little better.
“What the hell!”
“Oops,” I told him.
“This water is freezing!”
“Well, it is June,” I replied reasonably. “It’ll warm up a lot in a couple of weeks.”
“You threw me in!”
“Is that your interpretation?”
He began struggling toward shore, his sodden clothes weighing him down. He was back to being difficult to understand, though I thought I caught the words “police” and “lawyer” as he thrashed.
I looked at Jake, who was sitting down and regarding me with what I thought were sad, pleading eyes. I opened my mouth to tell him he couldn’t live with me—I’d have to take him to the pound, maybe, or some rescue organization. But the words couldn’t come out, not in the face of those sorrowful brown eyes.
I was Ruddy McCann, repo man. I was broke, lived alone, and didn’t have any hobbies beyond breaking up bar fights. It was hardly the kind of situation to bring a dog into.
But what kind of existence did the dog have now? Jake was watching me, his fate in my hands. I realized then that my black mood had vanished—tossing Montgomery into the drink seemed to have put everything back into balance. Maybe having a Jake in my life would make things a little better for me, a little easier. And maybe if he did that for me, I could return the favor, give him a better life, too.
Montgomery was finally in water shallow enough to allow him to stand. He wasn’t looking at me as he waded ashore, water streaming onto the grass. His expensive clothes hung in wet wads and his hair was plastered to his head. It was a good look for him.
I reached in my pocket for the keys to the Cadillac.
“Let’s go, Jake,” I said to the dog, who brightened at his name. We walked back to the parking lot and my new companion had a jaunty skip in his step—my drenching Montgomery had lifted Jake’s mood, too. But he pulled up short as we approached the Cadillac, its trunk still yawning open.
“No, it’s okay, boy,” I said. I slammed the trunk, but he still seemed unmollified,
sitting down and regarding me with a glum expression. I opened the driver’s side door. “Come on, Jake. You ride up here with me.”
Jake’s look was full of wonder. I stood waiting. He glanced between me and the interior of the car, then seemed to reach a decision. He trotted over and joyously leaped inside.
I slid in. “Move over, little guy,” I told him. He obligingly settled into the passenger seat, sitting so that he could look out the windshield and help me drive.
“You’re a front-seat dog now, Jake. Drool all you want,” I advised. I patted the check in my pocket before starting the car and heading toward home with my new dog.
READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF
The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man
W. Bruce Cameron
Available in hardcover and e-book in Fall 2014 from Tom Doherty Associates
A FORGE BOOK
Copyright © 2014 by W. Bruce Cameron
chapter
ONE
COMPUTERS and insurance companies call me Ruddick McCann—to everyone else I’m just Ruddy. I work for a collateral recovery agency run by a guy named Milton Kramer. When people can’t make their car payments, I help them get back on their feet.
I’m a Repo Man. Get it? “Back on their feet.” That was repo humor, there.
I’ve been relieving people of the burdens of automobile ownership for more than six years and I still don’t understand why it is necessary. If you can’t afford to make your car payments, why not just drive it back to the dealership and hand over the keys, instead of making Ruddy McCann come after you?
Today I was looking for a twenty-five-year-old man named, of all things, Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein Croft was his full name, though I suspected everyone called him Einstein— how could you resist? He worked on the assembly line at a place called PlasMerc manufacturing—something told me he wasn’t exactly living up to his parents’ expectations as far as his intelligence.
The PlasMerc factory had only been open a few years and I’d never been there before. I was surprised, when I located the place, that the employee parking lot was fenced and paved, with a guard in a booth, no less. Most companies in Northern Michigan were more considerate, leaving their workers’ cars out in the open where the Repo Man could easily get to them. I pulled up in Milt’s tow truck and nodded at the guard, hoping he’d figure I was from AAA and punch the button for the gate to swing open. Instead, he gave me a stony stare, so I sighed and rolled down my window.