Singleton had felt something blossoming within him, as he looked across the table at the woman. After all this time, a woman really cared for him? Somebody who would hang out with him, and cook and make babies? How did that happen?
He'd reached across the table, and had taken her hand; tears rolled down his face, and she said something like, "It's okay."
Later, feeling a little unmanly about the whole thing, about the tears, he'd started to apologize for himself and she'd laughed and squeezed him and said, "Loren, you did just perfect. Just perfect."
Somehow, he thought, he had.
SINGLETON HAD WORKED until seven that morning and had come home to find Katina in his bed. He'd crawled in with her, though he hadn't been too tired. Now, at ten o'clock, he was sleepy; he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.
Deon and Jane,he thought. Hanged.
Fear tickled through his chest. He tried to shut it out, flopped this way and that, wrestling with his pillow. Maybe somebody was coming for him, he thought.
A hangman.
Katina didn't know anything about that.
RUTH AND KATINA Lewis stepped inside the body shop's overheated office, took off their mittens, and Ruth pulled the door shut behind her. Gene Calb was working behind his desk. He was a balding, heavyset man in his mid-forties, with a weathered face and thick, scarred mechanic's hands. A pair of reading glasses perched on his thick nose. He looked over the glasses and said, "Guys. You musta heard."
"A little while ago, in town," Ruth said. "Jane and Deon, but people said they were hanged?" Ruth stuffed her mittens in her coat pocket, and unzipped the parka. Ruth Lewis felt like her sister, but didn't look like her. She was a slender woman, where Katina was round, and she had flinty green eyes behind steel-colored, wire-rimmed glasses, while Katina's eyes were softer, paler. Ruth's hair was close-cropped, an ascetic's 'do; Katina wore her hair full. Ruth's cheeks were rosy from the cold, like her sister's, but unlike Katina, she wore no lipstick or jewelry-a pretty woman determined to do nothing with her looks.
Ruth was the older sister and the boss, Katina the subordinate.
Calb said, "Hung in a grove off the ditch road. That Letty kid found them this morning." He looked at the clock. It was just 11:45. It seemed like the morning had stretched on forever, since he'd heard the news at ten.
"So what are we doing?" Katina asked. She always reminded Calb of a clucking hen, a busy, mildly overweight woman, but with a sensuous underlip. She was supposedly a member of some Catholic religious group, but apparently one that didn't have anything against sex: Katina had been sleeping with Loren Singleton, and Singleton was looking as happy as he ever did, if a little peaked. "Do we do anything? "
"I'm closing down," Calb said. "For the time being. Until we find out what's going on."
"That's not acceptable," Ruth said.
"I… " A car went by on the highway, and Ruth and Katina and Calb all turned their heads that way-you always looked at a car on the highway in Broderick. A Highway Patrol car with extra passengers.
"Ray Zahn," Ruth said.
"Loren told me that a couple of big shots flew in from St. Paul, and Zahn's driving them around," Katina said.
Calb shook his head. "I'll tell you what, guys; they're gonna hook Deon up with me, and I don't know what I'm going to tell them."
"Tell them as much of the truth as you can," Ruth suggested. "That you hired Deon to drive for you, on the recommendation of an old army buddy in Kansas City, that you rehab trucks from all over the Midwest, and that he picks them up."
"That's not exactly… "
"He does that," Ruth interrupted. "You could give references."
"Yeah. He's done that," Calb said. "What about you guys?"
"We can't stop," Ruth said. Her chin was set, tough, square. "We need to keep working."
"I'm sorry, but we gotta stop, until we find out what's going on," Calb objected. "This may be coming out of Kansas City. If that's what it is, maybe we can give some stuff to the cops, and they can settle it, but before then… "
"Ray, we can't," Ruth said urgently. "We haven't made enough runs lately. The Ontario net just came back up, since Jeanette died."
"I can't help that," Calb said. "I talked to Sister Mary Ann yesterday, when she came in-she seemed pretty happy."
"She did fine, but the mix wasn't that good. We can't stop," Ruth said.
"Hey-I'm shipping a load of junkers out right now. George is on his way in with his truck and we're getting them the fuck outa… excuse the language. I'm sorry." He was genuinely worried that they might be offended. Ruth had once been a nun.
"I don't care about the language," Ruth said. She switched a smile on, and then off. "All I care about is that we keep working-and we won't stop. If we have to pile up the junkers on your doorstep, that's what we'll do."
"Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch," Calb said, forgetting himself again.
THE DEAL WAS complicated, but profitable for everyone.
A man named Shawn Davis from Kansas City, Missouri, working with old drug-dealing friends in St. Louis, Des Moines, and Omaha, would spot and steal late-model Toyota Land Cruisers, 4Runners, and Tacoma pickups. No Nissans, no Fords, no Chevys. Nothing but Toyotas. That kept parts and paint supply simple.
The stolen vehicles would be driven, individually, from Davis's place in Kansas City to Calb's body shop, in Broderick. Calb had been in the Army with Davis, and they'd done some chickenshit black market stuff in Turkey, selling U.S. government meat. They trusted each other, to a point. The stolen cars were driven north by Deon Cash, who was Davis's cousin, or Joe Kelly, a friend of Cash's.
As Cash or Kelly was driving north, one of a group of religious women-as a group they were called the "nuns" by the Custer County people, and some of them were-would pick up a late-model, but high-mileage, last-legs Toyota in Canada, usually from a dealer auction. The nun would nurse the wreck across the border into Minnesota, and deliver it to the body shop.
In the shop, the stolen car would be repainted to match the beater. Some of the parts and trim-the dashboard graphics indicating kilometers per hour, instead of miles-the ID numbers, and papers of the high-mileage Toyota would be transferred to the low-mileage machine.
A nun would then drive the truck back across the border, where it would be resold. The remnants of the beater would be shipped to a junkyard, where it would be crushed into a cube and sent to a smelter.
The money was great: a battered, busted-up two- or three-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, often owned by the kind of long-distance salesman who'd put fifty thousand rough miles a year on his car, would be purchased at a used-car auction for a few thousand dollars Canadian. Three weeks later, it would turn up on a working ranch in Saskatchewan or Alberta, in near-new condition, with all the right papers. The buyer would pay the equivalent of $20,000 for a $50,000 machine.
After all the work was done, and the employees paid, and the investment in the vanishing truck was accounted for, Calb and Shawn Davis would split $5,000 on each Toyota sale, give or take. Two trucks a week added up to a quarter-million tax-free dollars a year, each. Hiding the cash was almost as much trouble as making it, but they found ways.
THERE WERE A few flies in the ointment.
The nuns made everybody nervous. They weren't paid anything, which meant that Davis and Calb didn't have a good hold on them. The women were using the trucks and the body shop's expertise to smuggle drugs south across the border. Although they had no economic hold on the women, Calb believed that they were safe. The women were, he thought, the next thing to fanatics. Nice fanatics, like Ruth Lewis, but they would go to prison before they talked about the deal.
Another fly was Deon Cash, and his old lady, Jane Warr. Cash wasn't quite right. Shawn Davis had given him a job reluctantly, paid him $432 per delivery, because he was a cousin, and because he had shown in jail that he could keep his mouth shut. But Cash was a bad man; and worse, he was stupid.