“If there has been, then the car’s owner will need to come in and explain that to me. I’m certainly not allowed to release personal effects from a vehicle, sir.”
“How about we give him a call, together? You can ask . . .”
Dave O’Connor had left no phone number—or any other form of contact information—but even if he had, Nora wouldn’t have called. O’Connor had been weird enough, but this guy was almost threatening.
“No,” she said. “If the car’s owner—whose name is not Vaughn—calls me and explains this, then we’ll see how we can proceed. Until then, I’m afraid not.”
The guy’s eyes darkened and he seemed ready to object when the office door opened and Jerry ambled in, a socket wrench in one hand. He gave Nora and the guy a casual glance and then knelt in front of the little refrigerator she kept in the office, pulled out a can of Dr Pepper, and cracked it open before walking back into the shop. The visitor watched him go.
“It sounds to me like you might have the wrong body shop,” Nora said.
For a long moment he didn’t answer, just stared at the door Jerry had walked through as if it were something that called for real study. Then he nodded.
“Of course. That must be it. Apologies.”
He gave her a mock bow, lifting his hand to his forehead, then opened the front door and walked back into the parking lot. She stood up and went to the window in time to see him climb in the passenger side of a black sedan. That was why he’d left the engine running—he wasn’t alone, wasn’t driving. She got a clear look at the car as it pulled out to the street, a black Dodge Charger, one of the newer models. She’d made the mistake of complimenting the look, only to have Jerry ridicule her. Nora, it’s a four-door. That ain’t a Charger, it’s a joke.
She couldn’t read the license plate, but the colors told her it was from out of state. Wait, those colors were familiar. A smear of orange in the middle of a white plate with some green mixed in. She’d just seen that on the Lexus. Florida.
It wasn’t five yet, but she turned the lock on the front door as she stood there gazing out the window. The odd feeling that had convinced her to get Dave O’Connor out of her shop and back on the road without any of the normal procedures had just returned, only this guy with the belt buckle made it swell to the edge of fear. He’d called him Vaughn. She had no proof that the Lexus driver’s name was actually Dave O’Connor. All that cash, the hurry he was in, the gun Frank had seen, none of it suggested anything good. Add a fake name to the mix, though, and she was beginning to feel stupid. She’d gone for the money despite all the obvious objections, let the guy dictate the situation. It wasn’t easy to imagine her father handling this in the same way.
Nora walked out of the office and back into the shop, watched Jerry working on the Lexus. The car was empty. Dave O’Connor had cleared all his things out when he left, including that handgun in the glove compartment. So he hadn’t called someone to come pick anything up.
“Jerry,” she said, “can you give me a minute?”
She wanted to talk to him, explain the situation and ask if he’d found anything in the car, more cash or guns or, well, anything. But when he turned around he had that irritated sneer on his face, ready to argue or mock her or do anything but listen.
“Well?” he said. “You got another problem needs me to fix it?”
“No, Jerry. It’s just . . . I was thinking . . .”
“Hope you didn’t hurt yourself.” That passed for humor to him, real wit.
“I was thinking you can go home early,” she said. “That’s all. It’s Friday, and we got some nice work in today, and you’ve done a good job this afternoon. So go on and get out of here. Enjoy the weekend.”
She walked away as the first flush of gratitude mixed with shame crept onto his cheeks.
6
__________
Getting out a little early on a Friday was no reason to disrupt your normal postwork routine, so Jerry drove directly to Kleindorfer’s Tap Room, had himself a bar stool and a Budweiser before the clock hit five. Carl, the bartender, took one look at him coming through the door and asked if the Stafford girl had finally fired him. Jerry didn’t bother to dignify that with a verbal response, electing instead to go with a simple but clear gesture.
It was early enough that the room was almost empty, a couple of out-of-towners drinking Leinenkugel in a booth, nobody at the bar except Jerry, nothing on the TV except poker. Give it a few minutes, they’d switch over to that show where the black guy and the white guy argued about sports, neither of them knowing a damn thing to start with. Jerry and Carl tended to have better ideas than those two.
Jerry sipped his beer and watched the muted poker game and simmered over Carl’s comment. It had been a joke between friends, no offense meant, but it riled him anyhow. Not so much at Carl for saying at it, more at his own life for the circumstances that produced the line. Jokes about working for Nora were constant. Could hardly get through a day without hearing one. She’d been there almost a year now. Showed up from Madison dressed to the nines, walked into the body shop wearing jewelry and perfume and with her long fingernails polished and told Jerry she was the new boss. Wouldn’t just own the shop, she intended to run the shop.
The afternoon Bud Stafford had his stroke, it had been Jerry who found him slumped under a Honda, his shirt smeared with primer from the fall onto the hood. Jerry knew it was bad; his hands shook while he dialed for the ambulance. At the time, though, he’d seen two possible outcomes—Bud would die, or he wouldn’t. The end result, this half-death, was a twist Jerry hadn’t considered. Nora’d called a few days after the stroke to ask him to keep the shop going while Bud was in the hospital. A week after that, she was in town and in charge. Jerry had tolerated it, because he figured Bud would come back. That’s what she kept telling him, insisting to him. Bud was going to be fixed up, and then he’d be back and she’d be gone, back down to Madison, finish up graduate school in art history, of all things.
He still couldn’t get his mind around that. Bud had been cutting that girl checks for years, putting her through school. Reasonable thing to do, providing the kid would accomplish something, walk out of there with a piece of paper telling the world she was useful, an engineer or an architect or a doctor, but Bud could never say what the hell she was going to do. Most practical man Jerry’d ever seen walk the earth would just shake his head and smile and say, “She’s a damn smart girl. I’ll let her learn, and when she’s done with that, she’ll do something big. Guarantee it, my man. She’ll do something big.”
Well, she wasn’t doing shit that Jerry could see except bitching a blue streak about things she didn’t understand and losing them business. End of every month, Nora would tell him that they’d kept the bill collectors at bay again, like it was something to be proud of. Didn’t realize those bills were paid only through a sort of pie-in-the-sky expectation that Bud would be back eventually. It kept a meager supply of work coming in. And, Jerry had to admit, kept him in the shop. So who was he to criticize the customers who did the same thing?
Ten, maybe fifteen minutes had passed while Jerry brooded—enough for a completed Budweiser and the order of a fresh one—when the door opened and closed behind him. Regulars finally showing up, he thought, until the new arrival sat down beside him. Long, lean guy with a shaved head and a tattoo on the back of his left hand, a weird symbol that meant nothing to Jerry. Had a camouflage jacket on over jeans and a T-shirt. Seventy degrees today, and both this guy and the one who’d come into the shop office to talk with Nora were wearing jackets.