THE GARAGE DIDN’T open until eight a.m., the sign said, so he drove back two blocks to a café and then drove another block and parked, and killed the engine, and sat with the keys in his fist.
“What?” he said. She hadn’t said a thing.
He half expected to see Ed Moran’s cruiser on the street, or parked before the café, and when he went inside and sat at the counter he half expected to see Moran himself walk in with his deputies, and he half hoped he would. Save everyone a lot of trouble, probably.
But no sheriff walked in, no deputies, and at eight a.m. he let the waitress refill his mug. She was forty or so and on the big side and she had a bright patch of pink on her neck he took to be a birthmark. Her tag said rhonda.
“You sure you don’t want some real breakfast, hon?” she said, regarding with an unhappy look the untouched half of his buttered toast. The other half he’d swallowed just so he could take his heart pills and not vomit them right back up.
“Thank you, but I gotta watch my figure,” he said, and there was a half beat of nothing before she cocked her head back and laughed.
“Hon, you call that a figure?”
When she’d gone away again he sat drinking his coffee until he’d emptied the mug—no sheriff, no deputies—and then he left a few bills on the counter and walked out a free man, a free citizen of his own country, and he walked to his car and got behind the wheel and drove back past the café and pulled into the lot of the mechanic’s garage and parked off to the side, out of the way of the closed bay door.
An electronic chime sounded when he entered, and there was no one at the desk and he waited to see if someone would respond to the chime. Stink of grease and tire rubber and sweat, decades of it in the crammed little office and no one coming, so he stepped into the garage through the open door and stood watching the only man in there heft a tire from off its bolts and bounce it away on the blackened floor. Finally Sutter said Hey and the man looked up from his work and said Hey yourself. Stood and came over, working a red rag in his hands. He was a squat and strong-looking man with enlarged gray eyes behind thick lenses. Midforties. His face was not marked, scratched, in any way.
“Can I help you?” the man said.
Sutter looked for a name on the blue mechanic’s shirt but saw none. “Maybe so,” he said. “Are you the owner?”
“I am, and my old man before me and his old man before that.” He stuffed the rag in his back pocket and set his hands to his hips.
“Any chance you’ve got a young man name of Bud works for you?”
“Bud,” said the man, merely repeating the name. He took Sutter in anew. Sutter wearing his regular canvas jacket, now. His jeans, his khaki shirt. “You mind if I ask who’s asking—not to be rude or nothin.”
“Not at all. Tom Sutter,” he said and put out his hand.
“Pete Yoder.”
“Glad to meet you, Pete. I’m just asking because this guy Bud gave me a jump up in Decorah awhile back, said if I was ever down this way I should stop by the shop and say hey.”
“Which shop did he say?”
“Said best shop in town.”
“Well, you found it. But I only got one man working for me and his name ain’t Bud.”
“Well, shoot,” said Sutter. “What’s his name?”
“I just told you. Pete Yoder.”
Sutter smiled. “That’s how I liked it myself, back in the day. My name on the door, my name on the work. Well,” he said, turning to go.
“What kind of work was that? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Sutter turned back. “I was a sheriff for fifteen years.”
“That so. Whereabouts?”
“Up north. Just over the state line.”
“That so.” Yoder adjusted his smudged lenses. “Then you probably know Sheriff Moran.”
“He used to be a deputy of mine,” said Sutter.
Yoder nodded and studied his own fingers, front and back. He pulled the rag from his pocket and began working it in his hands again. “Well, Sheriff. I reckon this brake job ain’t gonna do itself.”
“Sorry to keep you from it.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help you. There’s two other garages in town, but I’m guessing you already know that.”
Yoder walked him back into the office, and there he paused, and Sutter paused too.
“How do you like that rig there, Sheriff?” He was looking at a grid of black bars over the office window. Raw steel frame bolted to cinderblock. Welds of dull pewter, unpainted. New-looking.
“I’d say you had you a break-in,” Sutter said.
“You’d say right. Twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hand tools, according to the insurance, walking right out that door. But you can’t buy those kind of tools no more. Those were my granddad’s tools.” He looked away. Then he looked back and said, “Not sayin nothin against your old deputy, Sheriff. But ever time I think of some son of a bitch walking around in here, taking his sweet time, and then walking right out that door with my tools…” He looked like he might spit, but spit where, on his own floor? “I know it’s just tools,” he said. “But I think I could kill a son of a bitch if I got the chance.”
19
BY THE TIME he pulled into the parking lot of the garage the cab of the van was no warmer than when he pulled out of his drive—or if it was warmer it was his own body heat that had warmed it—and Gordon left the engine running so there’d be no doubt, so no one could sit there running the engine for an hour before they could tell him what he already knew, which was that his goddam heater was shot.
He felt a little better for the day off, for the night’s rest without fever dreams, but still his eyes ached in the winter light and his body felt like he’d fallen down a flight of stairs.
Just a few other cars and trucks in the lot and none he recognized other than Wabash’s Ford pickup and the black Crown Vic he kept as a loaner. Anyway the garage opened for business at seven thirty so she would have already come and gone by now and would not return again until five o’clock to pick the boy up again, just as she’d done when the boy worked for him. That other lifetime. And he would go to another garage if he could find one within twenty miles that did not take twice as long and charge twice as much and do half as good a job and was somehow also run by Dave Wabash, a man he’d known since high school and who sent customers his way just as he sent them Wabash’s way.
He stepped into the office and stood there a full minute, waiting, tasting more than smelling, thanks to his jammed-up sinuses, the gasoline and tire rubber, before finally he pushed through the glass door, stained with many black handprints, into the garage and made his way toward the only sound, which was the ratcheting of a socket wrench—steady, rhythmic, like the call of a great bug. He tracked the sound to the far bay, where a man stood under a gray sedan, or did not stand exactly, as the lift only went so high, and there was no pit and a man had to stoop under the chassis or else scoot around in a chair on casters—Wabash too cheap to buy new lifts, which was fine by Gordon if it kept his prices down.
All he could see of this man was his dark-blue mechanic’s pants and his leather workboots, and Gordon said, “That you under there, Dave?” and there was a final turn of the wrench before the boots shifted and took a step and a face appeared. Not Wabash’s face or the face of any other mechanic he knew, but the face of the boy he’d not seen in ten years, and seeing it appear now from beneath the car did something to Gordon’s legs so that he had to take a step to get his balance. His heart rolling like a boat. Time rolling back.