The Man Stalking Me Said Stop Working Alone, and the Kind Vet Was the One Who Let My Tire Down novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: I'd Move

A deputy reads the plate and goes pale, Andy fills his thermos and jokes about her two sugars, Margit says the Harbormaster's name, and the black sedan is back at 2:40.

The deputy came at ten to six, as the dark behind the garage went from black to blue.

He was young, in a county parka with snow on the hood.

He stood in the break room holding a clipboard and not looking at it.

I told him all of it, from the camera to the tire to the cup.

He wrote the first line.

Then I read him the plate, and his pen stopped.

"Say that again, ma'am," he said.

I said it again.

He looked at the paper, and then at me, and some of the color left his face.

"You're sure that's the plate?"

"I have a photo," I said, and held up my phone.

He studied the screen for a long moment and lowered his voice, though nobody else was in the room.

"I'll file it," he said.

"But I'm going to tell you something off the record."

"Go on," I said.

"Ma'am, I'd move."

I stared at him.

"That's what the county gives me?" I said.

"For a man who knows what's in my coffee cup?"

"That's all I can give you."

He would not meet my eyes.

He went out, and I watched his cruiser pull away with its lights off.

I stood in the break room with my hands flat on the counter.

Four nights in eleven, and the plate belonged to a name that frightened a deputy.

The back door banged.

Andy Lindqvist came in stamping snow off his boots.

He was a big sandy-haired man in a salt-stained clinic jacket, with a steel thermos in one fist.

"Morning, Two Sugars," he said.

He had called me that since my second week.

He was a large-animal vet from a clinic out in Proctor.

On winter nights he drove through the garage to fill his thermos at our coffee urn and talk about heifers.

He was the first person in Duluth who had made me laugh.

I had not meant to like him, and I did.

"You look like you saw a ghost," he said.

"A deputy," I said.

He raised his eyebrows and unscrewed the thermos.

"What did you do, run a plow through the sheriff's mailbox?"

"There's a man who's been standing in the lot," I said.

Andy stopped with the thermos in the air.

For a moment he did not move.

Then he set it down on the counter, very slowly.

"Standing how?"

"Just standing.

"He left me a coffee, black with two sugars."

Andy gave a short laugh and shook his head.

"I'd bet he got that off the whiteboard in here," he said.

"You write your order on it every Monday."

I had never thought of that.

I looked at the whiteboard by the urn, where the whole shift wrote its orders.

My own name sat in blue marker with a 2 beside it.

The fear in me loosened a little.

It tightened again, because the man had also known about Hermantown.

"He knew where I go on Saturdays," I said.

"I never told anyone that."

"Maybe you did," Andy said.

"Maybe you mentioned it to me."

I thought about it.

I might have.

I had told him more in eleven weeks than I'd told anyone in Duluth.

He filled his thermos and screwed the cap down.

"Want me to sit with you till six?"

"I'm fine."

"Then I'll park where I can see the door," he said.

He winked and went out.

Through the window I watched him climb into his salt-crusted Ford with the stock tank in the bed.

He backed it around until it faced the back door.

He sat there with the engine running and the heater on.

It made me feel better, and I hated how much.

I drove home at six-fifteen with the left rear tire thumping.

Superior Street was empty and gray.

My apartment sat over a closed bookstore with a hand-lettered sign in the window that said BACK SOON.

It had said that for two years.

Margit Salo was out on the sidewalk in her cardigan and boots, chipping ice off the step with a spade.

She was fifty-nine and round, with silver hair, reading glasses pushed up into it, and a pencil behind her ear.

She had the habit of knowing everything.

"You look dreadful," she said.

"Thank you," I said.

"Come up after your sleep and I'll feed you."

"Margit, do you know a man who drives a black sedan and scares deputies?"

She stopped chipping.

She leaned on the spade, and her kind face went careful.

"Why?" she said.

"The plate came back to something, and the deputy went white."

"Which plate?"

I told her the letters.

She said nothing for a long moment.

"That's the Harbormaster," she said at last, very quietly.

"Matt Ravnik."

"Who is that?"

"Nobody on the water says his name out loud," Margit said.

"He holds the ore docks, the grain elevator and the tugs."

She looked up the street toward the bay, as though he might be standing there.

"He paid the roof on this building years ago, and he has never once come in.

"Never a word.

"Just the check."

"Why would he pay your roof?"

"I've never asked," said Margit.

"I'm not a fool."

I went upstairs and slept four hours with my boots on.

That night I came in at ten with a thermos of my own and a plan.

At 2:40 in the morning the camera showed me the black sedan at the edge of the lot, lights off, snow on its roof.

He was standing beside it in the dark coat.

I took the pepper spray from the drawer.

I put on my parka, unlocked the back door and walked out to him.

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