Envy the Night Read Online Free PDF

in discussion with herself. “Two thousand dollars is a sizable down payment. The bill for this work will run well over that, but it’s certainly enough to get us started.”
    They were on the highway now, southbound toward Tomahawk, the tow truck’s engine throaty, straining to get its load up to speed. Nora’s thigh was warm against Frank’s. He looked at her hands on the steering wheel, saw no wedding ring. So it wasn’t her husband’s body shop. This was just what she did, drive a tow truck in a town like Tomahawk? A young girl, intelligent, with perfect teeth and eyebrows?
    “You guys have someone to come get you?” Nora asked.
    “Nope,” Frank said, and Dave O’Connor shook his head.
    “I’ve got to get something figured out,” O’Connor said. “Like I told you, I’m in a bit of a hurry. Got a meeting that won’t wait all day for me.”
    “A meeting at the Willow?” Frank asked.
    “No. I, uh, I’ve got to get to . . . Rhinelander. Little bit of a drive left to make, so, you know, got to figure something out.”
    Rhinelander. He’d been westbound on County Y, headed for Rhinelander? That was an interesting route, considering County Y took you out to the Willow,across the dam, and then looped back down to the old highway and into Tomahawk. O’Connor had been driving the exact opposite direction from Rhinelander, and not toward any highway where he could correct his course.
    “Any chance you’d have a car you could rent me?” O’Connor asked Nora.
    She shot a sideways glance at him. “I don’t rent cars. I fix them.”
    “You don’t have anything around the shop? It’d be one day.
One
day, and I’ll give a couple hundred cash for it. I’ve got to make this meeting.”
    Nora let a few cars pass before she answered.
    “Only drivable vehicle I could give you—unless you want to drive the tow truck—is a beat-up old Mitsubishi that probably can’t do more than fifty without blowing up.”
    “That’s fine. I’ll take it.”
    “And if it
does
blow up on you, I’m certainly not going to take responsibility. I’m doing this as a favor.”
    “It’s not a favor. I’ll pay you—”
    “You won’t pay me anything. Sounds like you need something to get you to Rhinelander, and the Mitsu will do it. Slowly.”
    “I appreciate that,” O’Connor said. “It’ll be a huge help. Save me the time of renting a car, and I don’t have time to waste.”
    Something else it would save, Frank thought, staring out at the lumber truck ahead of them, was the
process
of renting a car. You couldn’t do that with cash—and Mr. Dave O’Connor seemed damn concerned with sticking to cash.

4
    __________
    T ook Nora ten minutes to get Dave O’Connor in and out of the body shop. He had the cash out before she was even in the door, put it in her hand and waved away her offer of a receipt, said he knew she was trustworthy and he was in a hurry, now, could you show me that Mistubishi you were talking about?
    So she took him out back and showed him the car, a rusted blue box of a thing they used for errands, running back and forth to the auto parts store. Had four-wheel drive, but that was about it. Windshield wipers were shot—how many times had she asked Jerry to replace them?—and two of the windows hadn’t moved in the better part of a decade. Dave O’Connor looked at it as if it were the next year’s model of his fancy Lexus. Took the keys and tried to press more cash in her hand.
    While declining the money for the third time, she realized she was hustling him out of the shop almost as much as he was hustling her, and she knew why. There was something
off
about this guy, and, yeah, it started with the cash-only thing and the I’m-in-a-big-hurry thing but went beyond those, too. A meeting in Rhinelander? What the hell was he doing on County Y, then? License plate from Florida, no less. And the mannerisms, the tension . . . she pushed it out of her head. He’d given her more than enough