Envy the Night (3 page)

He slid the gun back into the case and closed it and opened the door—after a glance in the sideview mirror to make sure he wasn’t going to step out in front of a truck, survive the accident only to get squashed when he was on foot—and then got out of the car. He walked around to the front and saw that he wouldn’t be driving anywhere. The right front tire was blown out and the wheel bent inward, crunched down beneath the mangled front quarter panel. If he’d handled it right, turned into the skid instead of away, he might’ve been able to keep the Jeep straight enough to avoid the trees. Then he’d be left with a dent and a drivable car, instead of this mess.

He’d lost track of the Lexus at the moment of impact, and now he was surprised to see how far behind him the car was, a good hundred feet at least. The driver had made the shoulder as well, but the car was facing the wrong direction and angled against the trees that lined the road.

Looking up at the car made his previous suspicion come on again, and again he thought of the gun, had to shake his head and move away from the Jeep before the urge to go for it got any stronger.

“It’s not him,” he said. “It’s not him.”

At that moment the driver’s door on the Lexus opened and Frank’s breath caught and held for a second until the driver stepped out onto the road.

It was not Devin Matteson. Not by a long shot. Even from this far away he could tell exactly how ludicrous the idea had been, could tell that he’d just caused a dangerous accident over an utterly absurd moment of paranoia.

He walked toward the Lexus as the driver began to survey the damage to his vehicle. Frank’s first thought, watching him—
the dude’s on speed
.

The guy, tall and thin with a shock of gray hair that stuck out in every direction, was dancing around the Lexus. Literally dancing. He’d skip for a few steps, twirl, lift both hands to his face and then prance back around the other side. He was talking to himself, too, a chattering whisper that Frank couldn’t make out, and he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that there’d been another car involved in the collision.

“Hey.” Frank got no response and walked closer. “Hey! You okay?”

The guy stopped moving then and stared at Frank in total confusion. Then he looked up at the Jeep and nodded once, figuring it out. Up close, Frank saw that he wasn’t too old, maybe forty, the gray hair premature. He had a long nose that hooked at the end and small, nervous eyes set above purple rings that suggested it had been a while since he’d had a full night’s sleep. His hands were still moving, too, fingers rippling the air as if he were playing a piano.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay. Yes, everything’s fine. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll just call Triple-A. You can go on now.”

Frank raised his eyebrows. “Just call Triple-A? I hit
you,
man. You’re going to want to hang around and get this worked out for insurance.”

The guy was shaking his head. “No, no, I hit my brakes, just slammed on my brakes, not your fault at all.”

Not his fault at all? What the hell was he talking about? Frank had been tailgating so bad he’d slammed into him as soon as the guy slowed. It was clearly Frank’s fault. The guy must be nervous, that’s all. Shaken up. Collision like that, at nearly highway speeds, who wouldn’t be?

“What I’m saying is, we need to call the police,” Frank said. “Get an accident report made, so we can make this square with the insurance company, right?”

The gray-haired guy winced and rubbed his forehead as if a pain had developed there. He probably had a bad driving record. Maybe a few accidents, and driving a car like that Lexus, his insurance rate already had to be high. He was worried about the money. Didn’t understand that Frank was liable for all the damage.

“Tell you what,” the guy said. “It’d be a big help to me—a
big
help—if we didn’t get an accident report made.”

So he’d been right—bad driving record. Unless it was something more serious. Hell, maybe the guy
was
on drugs. Frank frowned, studying him closer, looking for the signs. He just seemed amped-up, that was all. Buzzing. His eyes
were clear, and he was cogent enough in conversation. A Starbucks addict, maybe.

“I’ll pay for your damage,” the gray-haired man continued. “I know what you’re thinking—as soon as I can, I’ll take off and stiff you on the bill. But I promise that won’t happen. We can take care of it right now. Find a repair shop, and I’ll take care of the bill beforehand.”

“I hit
you,
” Frank said again.

“Don’t worry about that. It was my fault, my responsibility, and I don’t want an accident report made, okay?”

Frank shook his head and walked a few steps away, looking at the Lexus. It was even more beat to shit than his Jeep. The front end was crumpled, there was a gash, maybe three feet long, across the passenger side of the car from the contact with the trees, and steam was leaking out of the hood.

“Please,” the man said, and there was a desperate quality to his voice that made Frank look back with surprise. Whatever trouble this guy had with his driver’s license—if he even had one—was serious. Frank stood there on the shoulder as two cars buzzed past them, nobody stopping, and looked at this weird guy with the nervous hands and panicked eyes. Why not give him a break? It was Frank’s fault, so it was only fair to let this guy handle it in whatever way he wanted.

“All right,” he said, and the look on the gray-haired man’s face, the way it broke with relief, was enough to convince him he’d made the right call.

“Thank you. Oh, man,
thank
you. I’ll call a tow truck. The car’s got a navigation system, you can find anything with it, we can pick any repair shop you want, I’ll show you the choices . . .”

__________

J
erry was staring at Nora’s ass again, in that way he had where his eyes seemed to bug right out of his head, nothing subtle about it, but she wondered if she was allowed to care today—she’d done the same thing that morning as she got dressed, looking her butt over in the mirror like some sort of sorority girl instead of a woman with wrench calluses on her palms. You did something like that, could you get upset when a guy allowed himself a stare? Maybe she’d earned the leer. Karma.

The glance in the mirror was important, though, a morning reminder that Nora was still very much a woman. This before putting on the jeans and the heavy work shirt, tucking her hair into a baseball cap so it wouldn’t hang free and invite a painful accident. She’d learned that lesson one afternoon when she’d used the creeper to check up on Jerry’s work and rolled right over her own hair. Stafford Collision and Custom was open by seven thirty, and from then until six or six thirty when she shut the doors and turned the locks, Nora would interact with few females. It was a man’s business, always had been, but she liked the touch she brought to it and thought the customers did, too. Granted, they were her father’s customers and probably kept returning more out of loyalty—and pity—for Bud Stafford than for his daughter, but the shop still did good work. On those rare afternoons when a particularly difficult job was done and the car driven out of the shop, Nora might even let herself believe
they did a better job now. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, of course, but she did have an eye for detail that her father couldn’t touch. Too bad an eye for detail wasn’t enough to keep the bills paid.

The phone rang out in the office, and Nora straightened up and looked back at Jerry, who promptly flushed and averted his eyes. Even when you
didn’t
catch Jerry, he thought you had. Jerry would’ve made a piss-poor criminal.

“I’d like you to take another pass over that front quarter panel,” Nora said.

“Huh?”

“Nice orange-peel finish in the paint, Jerry. I know you can see that, and
you
know how I feel about it. Doesn’t matter if it disappears in the shadows, you can see it in the sun, and that’s when people care about their cars looking the best. They go home and the first sunny Saturday morning they wash the car and wax it and see that orange peel. And then you know what happens? They don’t come back.”

She walked away from him, got into the office just in time to grab the phone before it rang over to voice mail. She was always forgetting to take the cordless handset out into the shop with her, and she knew they’d lost business because of it. When a body shop doesn’t answer, people just call the next one in the phone book; they don’t wait and try again. She’d been one ring away from losing this call.

“Stafford Collision and Custom, this is Nora Stafford.”

She sat on the edge of the desk and took notes on one of the old pads that still had Bud Stafford’s name across the top. The caller wanted a tow truck for two cars that had wrecked up on County Y. Her last tow driver, who’d also been a prep man and part-time painter, had picked up a drunk driving charge three months back and to keep him would have required bearing an insurance rate spike that she simply couldn’t handle. In reality it was a welcome break—the shop’s financial situation was going to dictate firing somebody anyhow, and the drunk driving charge gave her an excuse. She’d let him go and couldn’t afford to hire a replacement. But two cars—including a Lexus—that was business she couldn’t turn down, either. Jerry could drive the tow truck, but he wasn’t covered by the insurance policy, and she needed him to finish repainting that Mazda this morning. She’d have to handle this one herself.

She got the details of the wreck’s position and promised to be out within twenty minutes, then went back into the shop and told Jerry where she was going. He just grunted in response, not looking at her.

“What’s the problem, Jerry?”

“Problem?” He dropped the rag that was in his hands. “Problem should be pretty obvious. You got me wasting all my time
re
painting work I shouldn’t have had to
paint
in the first place.”

She waved a hand at him, tired already, the argument by now just like the dying water heater in her house—too familiar, too annoying, too expensive to fix.

Jerry was a body man, a fine body man, none better in town. Didn’t have the eyes for a top-quality paint job, but that wasn’t the problem so much as the way he felt disrespected when asked to paint. If she could afford to bring someone else on board, she would, but that explanation hadn’t appeased him.

“Jerry, this is not a big deal. If you’d done it right the first time, I wouldn’t have asked you to repaint it. Instead, you half-assed the job and then tried to make up for it with the buffer, like usual.”

“Damn it, Nora, last time I painted cars it was with—”

“Single-stage lacquer, spray it on, buff it pretty, don’t have to mess with no damn clear coat . . .”

Nora mocked his voice perfectly, capturing the drawl so dead-on that Jerry pulled back in anger and grabbed his rag again, tightened his fist around it. He was a small man, only a few inches taller than she was, but strong in the wiry way that comes from years of physical labor. What was left of his hair was thin and brown and damp with sweat.

“All right,” he said. “So I’ve told you before, if you remember all that. Think you’re clever saying it back to me, I ’spose. But if you was clever you’d understand, instead of using it to make fun of me. Your daddy understood. I’m not a combination man. I do body work. Been doing it since back when you was playing with dolls and putting on training bras and learning to paint your nails.”

Same old shit. He’d start bitching about his workload, then begin with his what-a-pretty-little-girl-you-are routine, slighting her gender either directly or with what he thought passed as slick humor.

“Tell you something, Jerry? When I was learning to paint my nails, I was also learning how to paint a
car.
Now it’s time that you do.”

She turned and walked away from him, heard the
bitch
muttered under his breath and kept on going, out of the shop and into the tow truck. Sat behind the wheel and let the engine warm and lifted her hands to her face and thought,
I would’ve cried about this. A year ago, maybe even six months ago, I would’ve cried
.

Not any more, though. No way. But was that entirely a good thing?

She wasn’t going to think about it. Pointless exercise. What she needed to think about was the cars waiting for her up on County Y. That was more than a pleasant surprise—it was salvation. She’d spent the morning trying to determine which bills she could be late on. It was down to that now, down to creating a rotating schedule of missed payments because otherwise she simply could not keep the doors open. Now here was a phone call offering enough work to keep those wolves distracted, if not completely at bay. And to think, she’d been one ring away from missing it altogether.

It felt longer than twenty minutes. The gray-haired guy kept up a constant stream of chatter, the words sounding more nervous each time there was a pause, as if he were scared of silence. When a car passed by, though, he’d stammer the way you do when you lose your train of thought, stare intently at the vehicle until it was out of sight. A couple of times, people slowed and put their windows down, ready to offer help, and the gray-haired guy just waved them off and shouted that everything was fine, go on, have a nice day.

It
was
a hell of a nice day, though. If the Lexus driver would shut up for a few minutes, Frank wouldn’t have minded it at all, standing out here. It had been a long time since he’d lived in the city, so it wasn’t as if he’d arrived in the woods fresh from garbage-riddled streets that stunk of exhaust fumes. Even so, this place felt different. For one thing, there wasn’t a building in sight. Turn right, turn left, see trees and blue sky, nothing else. A pair of hawks rode the air currents high above, staying on the south side of the road. Must be a clearing back there, something offering prime hunting ground for the birds. Frank could’ve watched them for a long time, if this jazzed-up dude would let him. Instead, he was busy fending off meaningless questions and observations.

He was relieved when he saw the tow truck at the eastern end of the road, and a minute later it had pulled up beside them. The driver opened the door, and Frank felt his eyes narrow, saw matching surprise on the gray-haired man’s face. The driver was a woman, and a good-looking one, that much evident even with her face shadowed by a baseball cap. She hopped down onto the road—the truck was too high for her to just step out; she couldn’t go an inch more than five-three and might go an inch less—and walked around to face them.