Staying Fit
Illustration by Steve Vance
15
No, I Did Not Mean to Do That
Katie spotted me and came right across the floor without hesitation. She held out her hand like we were going to have a business meeting, and I took it with a little disappointment, though I don’t know what else I’d been expecting. I reflexively checked to see if Alan was awake, which he was, and so what? I’d done nothing wrong, I reminded myself.
“The sheriff told me where you worked. I wanted to ... I was going to get you a card. You know, for ...” She gestured toward my face.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. It was all a misunderstanding.”
She poked her finger into her hair and twirled it like a fork full of spaghetti. A reddish highlight flashed in her brown hair as she did so, and I found myself staring at it, enthralled. “She used to do that same thing with her hair when she was little,” Alan murmured, jerking me out of my reverie. “It means she’s worried about something.”
“Well ... I’m sorry,” she said.
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We looked at each other. I couldn’t stop grinning at her, even though I felt foolish. “So,” I said finally. “What sort of card do you get for something like that?”
Her mouth curved into a soft smile. “I figured they’d have something suitable.”
“Sorry I spit, I’ll try to quit?”
“Oh please,” Alan protested, but Katie laughed.
I steered her over to a table and sat down. Becky appeared, her eyebrows raised in unwelcome curiosity. My sister could read me so well. I introduced the two women. So what if I was interested in Katie? No big deal—but I could feel my face flushing, for some reason.
Jimmy came over and I found myself tensing, feeling like I suffered mightily in comparison to my supermodel buddy, but Katie was friendly and nothing more. After Becky brought us both our drinks, Jimmy went back to the bar and I had Katie all to myself, like a date.
With her father there.
“So, you’re the bouncer here?”
“More like the business manager,” I promoted myself. “My sister owns it, and I run it.” I glanced over at the bar to make sure Becky couldn’t hear me.
“I’m not going to sit here and listen to you mislead my daughter,” Alan warned, as if he could sit anywhere else.
I told her how the Black Bear came to get its name, then cleared my throat. “Actually, I don’t spend much time here. My profession is collateral recovery.” Katie thought about that.
“Come on, Ruddy,” Alan prodded.
“I’m a repo man,” I elaborated. There, happy now?
“You’re kidding me! Have you ever been shot?”
“Not anywhere vital.” Her eyes widened. “No, just joking. I’ve had a gun pointed at me a few times, but not with intent to use it.” I thought about Einstein Croft.
“Well, maybe once.”
“I could never do that.” She shook her head, undoubtedly picturing something far more glamorous than the gritty reality of climbing under a car to attach a tow hook to some deadbeat’s bumper.
I told her about how I got into the business—Milt hired me because he figured a large ex-football player could intimidate people into giving up their vehicles. I left out the part about being beaten up by a twenty-pound goose.
“So the theme of this conversation is, all about me, by Ruddy McCann,” Alan noted sardonically.
“But what about you?” I asked smoothly.
“Well, what about me?” she replied lightly.
I took a deep breath and broached the subject I’d been dreading. “Well, Deputy Timms, are the two of you ...”
Against my fervent wishes, she nodded her head. Her finger started twirling her hair. “We’re supposed to get married.”
“What?” Alan shouted.
“Ah. Well, congratulations, then, that’s just great.”
Her eyes regarded me with an unreadable expression. “Thanks. It isn’t official, though. I mean, he hasn’t proposed formally; we’ve just talked about it.”
“Oh.”
“Ask her about Marget,” Alan directed.
I decided that next time I had Alan alone we were going to have a serious talk about when it was appropriate for him to speak. I asked Katie about her family, and she told me her mother had remarried and still lived in the East Jordan area. “I’m living with her, actually,” Katie informed me with an embarrassed blush. “But in a trailer, out back. Like, a travel trailer with a kitchen and all? Just until, you know, Dwight and I figure things out.”
“I hope that doesn’t happen for a while,” I said sincerely. I thought maybe I was pushing too hard, but she just gave me a frank and appraising look.
“Did we ever meet before?” she finally asked softly.
“Well, yeah. I saved you from certain doom in downtown East Jordan by using my superpowers to start your car, don’t you remember?”
“No, I mean ...” She shook her head and her hair shimmered and that’s all it took to change everything—the sight of her hair, her curls lightly bouncing on her shoulders. It was like my heart had climbed a wall and then fallen over onto the other side. I barely knew her, but I was in love with Katie Lottner.
“It’s just that I have this sense from you, like we were friends before, somehow. It’s a feeling.”
“Well, did you ever hang out with the Kalkaska High School football team?” I asked.
“No!” she replied, laughing in surprise.
“Top ranks of government? Upper strata of society? Internationally recognized cultural events?”
Alan tsk-tsked in my ear.
“No. Well wait, would the East Jordan fireworks be considered a cultural event?” she asked.
“Was there a truck pull afterward?”
“Sorry.”
“Then no.”
“She thinks she knows you because she senses me, here inside you,” Alan chided.
I decided that wasn’t right, because I didn’t want it to be. “Maybe in a former life,” I suggested, “we were together as repo men.”
She laughed again. “Do you believe in that, though? In reincarnation, of former lives becoming mixed up in current ones?” she asked me.
“Oh, I do now,” I admitted.
“Me too. I believe it, too,” she said. We stared into each other’s eyes as if sharing a secret.
After an hour or so she told me she had to go and I offered to drive her home. “Well, thanks, but that would mean leaving my car here,” she pointed out.
“Not necessarily. Come on, I’ll show you.”
I drove Katie Lottner home in the tow truck, dragging her Ford behind us. She kept laughing at the arrangement. “This is the first time I’ve ever done this.”
To show off, I demonstrated how hitting the repo switch dropped all the lights both in and out of the truck, so that we were humming up M66 in eerie darkness for a moment. I flipped the switch back on before Alan had a chance to start panicking.
“This is it,” Katie said as I slowed for a long curve, my headlights playing across a nice little place on the steep banks of Lake Patricia. The travel trailer was clearly visible in the backyard, the lights on inside.
When I unhooked her car in her driveway we stood there in the chill air a little awkwardly. I thought about taking her into my arms and kissing her senseless, but instead just stood there grinning when she said, “Well ... ,” and briefly touched her lips to my cheek.
I watched her enter the main house and noticed a woman standing at the window. Corn silk hair, not at all like Katie’s, but the same pretty features. She watched me impassively as I slid behind the wheel and threw the truck into reverse.
Marget.
Alan served up one of his frosty silences most of the way back, and I stayed quiet myself, enjoying it.
“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” he finally demanded.
“Nope.”
“Do you know how hard it was for me to sit there quietly during all that?”
“No, and neither do you. You talked the whole time.”
“She’s my daughter!”
“She’s a grown woman,” I reminded him. “Besides, didn’t you hear her? She’s engaged to marry about three hundred pounds of deputy sheriff.”
He groaned. “No, that’s not what she said. She said they were talking about it. Nothing’s been decided yet.”
I decided not to tell Alan how much pleasure it gave me to agree with him.
Something like a warm breeze hit my face while I was out walking Jake, as if spring was taking a test run. He lifted his nose to it and seemed to drink it in, and for once didn’t drag me back to the house the moment he’d finished lifting his leg. “That’s right, Jakey,” I told him. “Summer will come again, I promise.”
Jake wagged as if he understood me. I pictured him running through the summer grasses, something he still did, if for much shorter bursts. “Such a good boy,” I told him. He wagged again. I stooped down and looked him in the eyes. “Hey,” I said softly. “I want you to live a long, long time, okay? I need you. You’re my dog.”
“I don’t get it. Why can’t you treat people the way you treat your dog?” Alan asked.
I sighed. “Alan, can you just give it a rest sometimes? I get it, I’m not perfect.”
Alan didn’t answer.
I plugged in my cell phone to charge it and went through the process of adding some minutes to my account. Who knew, maybe Katie and I would be talking to each other.
The next morning I awoke in an irrepressibly good mood, and then things got even better. Milt had a hot tip for me: A skip was back in the area.
“A skip is a guy the bank can’t find,” I told Kermit, who was along for the ride at his uncle’s request. I felt like whistling—my fee doubled on skips. I’d make five hundred dollars if I located this guy’s vehicle, which would erase two-thirds of my debt to Milt.
The customer’s driveway was a long, muddy rut pointing up a hill to a shoddy-looking cabin at the top. Parked right next to the cabin, front end facing us, was the truck we were looking for, a green Toyota. Across the road from the mouth of the driveway a steep bank dropped down to a stream, the water dark and deep from runoff. I didn’t like that: It meant I’d have to slow way down to make the turn out of that driveway to stay in control, and when I’m stealing a vehicle I like to put my foot into it until I’m out of rifle range.
I looked at my hands and they were not trembling. My heart wasn’t beating any faster than normal, and my stomach felt fine. Repo Madness, my ass.
“Slide over,” I instructed Kermit. “Drive my truck. Follow me.”
I grabbed the keys out of the folder and started climbing the muddy driveway, my eyes on the cabin. I was still forty feet from the truck when I saw the customer sitting at his table drinking coffee. His eyes widened.
“He sees us!” Alan yelled.
“No, he sees me. I think you’re still safe,” I corrected. I nodded at the guy, raising my hand in greeting. “Okay, fine, just coming to see you,” I muttered, smiling hugely, with an “I’m-not-here-to-steal-your-truck” expression on my face. He jumped to his feet.
Great.
I sprinted for the Toyota, which was locked despite the fact that there was no one around for three square miles. “Hurry! Hurry!” Alan was shouting unhelpfully. The key went in as the customer’s cabin door banged open. I jumped inside, locked the doors, and fired up the engine. He started shouting at me but I had it in drive and tromped on the accelerator.
“What’d he say?” I asked, grinning in triumph.
“I think he said ‘no brakes’!” Alan replied.
Frowning, I put my foot on the brake pedal and it went to the floor without resistance. I started pumping it, watching in alarm as the road rushed toward me.
“Look out!” Alan yelled.
The driveway dipped where it met the road and the impact was like crashing into a wall. The truck bounced hard, my teeth clicking together, and then I was across the road in a flash. The windshield cracked as a thin tree tried to stop me. The front end of the truck dove toward the river and then I had a face full of air bag.
“I hate those things,” I muttered. My nose felt like it had been hit by a basketball.
“Ruddy, we’re sinking, we’re sinking!” Alan shouted, his voice shrill. We were, indeed, sinking. The front bumper was pointing down at a severe angle and water was rushing in around my feet. I looked out the window and saw that the stream was up to the side mirrors. I searched my mind for a sense of déjà vu, but felt nothing. This wasn’t anything like the last time I’d been in a vehicle in the water.
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