Free The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man by W. Bruce Cameron Page A

here.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œWhy don’t you look around, see if you can spot the car anywhere. A lot of these guys think I’ll never look for it out here in the forest.”
    He agreed, the black mud sucking at his boots as he wandered off down one of the trails. His thighs were so big he had a natural waddle to his gait, which the tricky footing only accentuated. I couldn’t recall ever meeting someone who carried all his weight in his legs and butt like that. Unconsciously I pinched a fold of flab over my hips, then patted my stomach. When I realized what I was doing I sighed and shook my head. So what? I always gained a little weight in the winter. It was perfectly normal. Sometimes I even lost some of it in the summer.
    I looked around. Everything in the clearing was a boggy mess. The earth was deeply rutted where their truck had backed up to the six-foot-high piles of split firewood. To the left, trunks of fallen trees lay ready for the saw to cut them up, and sawdust was nearly a foot thick in some places.
    â€œWell, hell. I half expected to find the car here,” I muttered. Alan didn’t reply, apparently deciding to punish me with silence. I wondered how I could induce him to keep it up.
    I strolled around, looking hopefully behind the woodpiles. In the shadows the ground was still buried in deep snow, and I tried to imagine what it was like to stand here all day and cut up logs while the Michigan winter poured wet blizzards on my head. What a life the poor guy led.
    â€œWell, that’s that,” I announced in disgust. Kermit had come wandering back twice like a lost dog, and was running out of trails to explore. I could hear him blundering around about thirty yards away.
    â€œWait,” Alan blurted.
    â€œOh, are we speaking now?”
    â€œLook at the ground. Not there. No…” He grunted in frustration. “Please, look at the woodpile. To the left. Farther. Now down. Look at the ground. There! Look at the tracks.”
    Along the forest floor where Alan was directing my eyes, muddy ruts went right into the woodpile, as if someone had driven under the logs. I glanced at the other places and noted they all looked the same: When the loggers unloaded their truck, some of the logs obliterated some of the tire tracks. I didn’t see anything special about the area in which Alan was interested.
    â€œWalk over there,” Alan urged. I obliged, curious. “Do you see?” he demanded.
    â€œSee what?”
    â€œThe grooves from the tires. Look at them.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œNot only is there a double set like everywhere else, there’s also a more narrow, single set. Like someone pulled a Ford Mustang up to the woodpile.”
    â€œRight.” I thought about it. “Or maybe the woodpile wasn’t here when the Mustang made these tracks.”
    â€œYes, exactly!” Alan agreed excitedly.
    With effort, I climbed up the precarious stack of wood until I was on top. I kicked aside a few logs. “If there’s a sports car under here, it is dented all to hell,” I commented. I started tossing logs off the top of the pile. Just a few layers down I hit heavy chipboard, three-quarters of an inch thick. “I’ll be damned. Hey, Kermit!”
    An hour later we had exposed a large wooden box, fortified within by two-by-fours and which, once I’d broken out the crowbar, proved to be home to a cherry-red Ford Mustang. I used the winch on the back of the truck, unspooling the thick black cable, attaching the hook to the Mustang, and pulling the car slowly out into the open. Milt’s truck was old but the winch was state-of-the-art, well oiled and repo-silent.
    â€œWhoa, nice car, can I drive it?” Kermit wanted to know.
    Something about the lustful look in Kermit’s eyes made me think that would be a bad idea. “Better let me,” I advised. “I’ll let you do the next one.”
    My keys worked but