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

think. I’m not sure it matters what I think. All I know is, I can’t go around talking out loud to this voice in my head because people just don’t do that. Not mentally healthy people.”
    â€œYou’re saying I am just some sort of figment of your imagination. I resent the implication,” he said loftily.
    â€œYou resent? You? Let me ask you, do you hear a voice in your head? Huh? No, you don’t. You can’t even hear me in my head! So don’t tell me about implications. The implication is, I am going crazy and am going to wind up in a room with soft walls, that’s the implication.”
    â€œWell, obviously there’s no talking to you when you’re in this sort of mood.”
    â€œWhat I am saying is there’s no talking to me, period.”
    I paused, glaring at the wall, because what else was I supposed to look at?
    When Alan spoke his voice was suddenly plaintive and smallsounding. “But Ruddy, I need your help. I think I know why I’m not … not in myself anymore. My body, I mean. I think I know what happened.”
    â€œOkay, let’s hear it.”
    â€œI’m dead.”
    I blinked. “Dead?” I repeated incredulously.
    â€œMurdered. I think I was murdered, Ruddy.”
    I stood frozen, still staring at the wall.
    My Repo Madness seemed to be getting worse by the minute.

 
    Â 
    5
    Exactly Fifteen Miles an Hour
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    On the way to Traverse City Kermit checked his mobile phone every ten minutes, announcing over and over “no signal here,” and “weak signal here” as he frowned at it. “That’s why I leave mine in my kitchen. Signal’s good there,” I responded, but mostly I wasn’t paying attention. I was brooding over what it could possibly mean that the voice inside my head now claimed to be a murder victim. It sounds, well, crazy, but I realized that somehow I had started to buy into it all—I was actually beginning to think of the voice as a separate person, as Alan Lottner, and could see myself eventually growing comfortable with my conversations with him. There was just something so normal about it—another man’s voice, seeming to be coming from my ears and not from within my brain. That’s really what all human interactions are like, right? Kermit at that moment was yammering away about some way he could make money; it was a separate voice, a separate person, and I wasn’t looking at him. And when you talk on the phone, you can’t see that particular person, either. So none of this felt any different than how life usually goes, even if I knew it wasn’t.
    But murder? What was next, would he want me to avenge his killer? And who would that turn out to be, the president of the United States or somebody? How long before I complacently went along with this idea, too?
    Traverse City is right on Lake Michigan and has fifteen thousand people in the winter and what seems like two million in the summer, as opposed to land-locked Kalkaska, where I think I know just about everybody by their first name. Kalkaska only really has a crowd control problem during deer hunting season, when the boys from the city arm themselves and wander around wearing camouflage pants, drinking beer.
    Kermit was happy for me to drop him off at a drugstore to mess around while I checked into Jimmy Growe’s mystery checks. The silence he left behind when he jumped out made me realize just how much talking he’d been doing—I had a voice both in my head and in my truck.
    All of the checks to Jimmy Growe had come from one bank. I walked into the lobby, looking around for the Department of Checks from Nowhere That Bounce.
    The person who agreed to help me was a large woman, her bone structure as solid as mine, and I could picture her being a campfire girl leader for the three daughters whose framed photographs owned most of the real estate of her desk. She was about my age and wore