Envy the Night

“You mean they might come back.”

“Like I said, I don’t know anything about them, or Vaughn, but I know some things about Devin. One of those things is that the people surrounding him will be professionals. Professionals don’t like to leave loose ends. You were face-to-face with that guy yesterday. So was I. We both saw him attack you and saw his buddy attack that cop, and our testimony could put them in jail for a long time. You and I have just become loose ends. If these guys really are involved with Devin Matteson or anyone close to him, then that’s a very serious concern.”

14

__________

Steve Gomes had wanted to take his boat out that morning, but Jerry passed on the offer and headed for the library. Though not much of a reader, he was a regular patron. The Tomahawk library had a handful of computers with Internet access, and Jerry had recently discovered the online auction sites.

Jerry’s dad had owned a liquor store, an occupational choice less than pleasing to Jerry’s mother, a woman who went to church on Sundays and Wednesdays. Rare was the week that passed without a bout of criticism of Rob Dolson’s work, that selling of sin. There was one element of the liquor business, and one element only, that pleased her: the presence of mirrors. Alice Dolson loved mirrors, and her husband received plenty of them, shipped in from Stroh’s and Anheuser-Busch and the rest. Though she loathed the products they advertised, Alice couldn’t help but like the mirrors. Her favorites were the Scotch mirrors. Much more elegant than those silly beer mirrors, she’d insist. If you ignore the brand name, they’re really quite beautiful.

So Rob Dolson hung on to the mirrors, and when he died, Alice kept them. She’d passed a few years later, leaving Jerry a fifty-year-old collection of bar mirrors. They decorated his home and filled his garage now. He’d hoped to build the collection, but classic mirrors were hard to find—or so he’d thought until he discovered eBay. If he felt a bit fruity shopping for antiques on the Internet in the library (and he did), it was easy enough to dismiss that with the recollection that the mirrors were, of course, advertising alcohol. Nothing embarrassing about that.

He’d found a nice Genesee mirror with paintings of men engaged in various outdoor pursuits, the slogan reading The great outdoors in a glass, when his phone rang. Steve Gomes had talked him into canceling the landline in favor of a cell a year earlier, telling him that the cell had free long distance and none of those bastard telemarketers calling. What Steve had failed to anticipate was that Jerry made few long distance calls, and didn’t mind talking to a telemarketer in the evening, providing it was a woman with a nice voice and he’d already consumed a brew or two. He had the cell now, though, and when the damn thing rang he saw that it was Bud Stafford’s home number. Nora’s home number, now.

Jerry turned the ringer off and matched the glare from the front-desk librarian with one of his own. Who couldn’t appreciate the Benny Hill theme song, anyhow? When he’d learned that was one of the ringer options, he’d been as good as sold.

Two minutes later, the phone rang again.

“It’s a Saturday,” Jerry growled. Nora had no right to bother him on a Saturday.

This time the librarian lobbed a heavy sigh with her glare, and Jerry stood up and took the phone outside onto the sidewalk. Nora deserved a lecture for this one.

“You never heard of a day off?” he said when he answered.

“Just rumors,” Nora said.

“That ain’t funny. I’m down here at the library and you got my phone ringing and bothering—”

“You’re at the library?”

“Ain’t the point, Nora. Don’t matter where I am. Point is, it’s Saturday, and that’s a day off.”

“How’d you like another day off, Jerry?”

“What do you mean?”

“You come in today, for just a few hours, and I’ll let you take Monday off. You’d be trading eight hours of work for about two or three, and you’re already in town. Tell me what the downside of that is.”

No downside that he could perceive, other than caving in to her request. He was silent, thinking it over.

“Time-and-a-half, Jerry. That’s what I’ll pay you if you come in today.”

“What the hell do you need me there for? We don’t have anything all that urgent.”

“We do now. I want that Lexus put back together, and I want it put back together fast.”

“Nora, that car is not a one-day fix. Hell, we’re gonna need parts that’ll take a day or two just to get—”

“You’re not fixing it. You’re just putting it back into one piece so I can get it out of my shop.”

“Guy wants to take it somewhere else?” This was not good. Jerry had a thousand bucks riding on that car.

“The police want to take it elsewhere.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to get into it on the phone, Jerry, but I need that car back together, and I need it to happen today.”

Shit. If the cops were already onto this car, he might have lost his chance at the grand already. Of course, that AJ character had offered him half of that if he could get the little tracking device, and Jerry had turned him down because he didn’t have access to the shop over the weekend. Well, he did now.

“All right, Nora. I can come down there. Time-and-a-half and Monday off, I’ll come down there.”

“The very soul of generosity.”

“No problem,” he told her, and then he disconnected the phone.

This was working out to be a fine weekend. He had little on his plate for the rest of the day, and now he was going to make time-and-a-half plus the five hundred AJ had promised him in return for that tracking device. That Genesee mirror had just become much more affordable.

He went into the library, purchased the mirror, and logged off the Internet. Giving the librarian a mocking wink and salute, he walked back into the sunlit day and reached into his pocket and extracted the bar napkin he’d put there when he left the house that morning. AJ was probably going to appreciate this phone call just as much as Jerry had ended up appreciating Nora’s.

He answered on the second ring, and Jerry told him the situation while he walked away from the library and down the hill toward the river. The Wisconsin rolled right behind the library, wide and languid at this spot, a water skier working up by the bridge.

“Deal still stands—you get the tracking box, I get the five hundred?”

“You want to take me up on that deal.” AJ’s voice was different today. Kind of uneasy, wary.

“I will take you up on it. If you ain’t interested anymore, though, shit, it’s no skin off my back.”

“I thought you couldn’t get in the shop on weekends.”

“I just told you, she’s paying me time-and-a-half to come in.”

“And she didn’t tell you why that was?”

“I assume the boy you’re so interested in is coming back for the car.” Jerry didn’t want to repeat Nora’s reference to the cops; it seemed like something that could kill this deal before he made a dime.

“That seems unlikely.”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m just saying if you want your gadget back, now’s the time to get it.”

“You’re asking me to come back to that body shop?”

“Man, I ain’t asking you nothing. I’m telling you I can get my hands on the thing. That’s all.”

AJ went quiet for so long Jerry thought he’d hung up.

“You there?”

“Yes. All right. You get that tracking device, and return to the bar where we talked yesterday. Go there at seven o’clock.”

“And you’ll bring the money.”