32 Cadillacs (12 page)

Give the little toad something to think about.

For the rest of the night he sat in his car across the street from the garage entrance, dozing, listening to Live 105, The
Rock of the Nineties, feeling blue about Beverly. She couldn’t
seriously
have dumped him tonight, just like that, could she? In public and everything, just because her car…

Rising sun woke him. People were leaving for work; no trick at all to get inside for another walk-through before admitting
he wasn’t going to get the Mercedes. In two hours it would be assigned to someone else.

But as he drove away, he brightened: anybody who was going to get that car away from Pietro and his poopsie was going to have
to be a better carhawk than Larry Ballard.

And Ballard had just enough ego to feel there weren’t too many of them fellers around.

*   *   *

A few hours earlier, while Ballard dreamed of hypersteroid Freddies going out twelfth-story windows in leather underwear without
benefit of parachutes, Bart Heslip drove south through San Francisco on the post-midnight-deserted James Lick Freeway. His
white teeth gleamed in anticipation as he took the Silver Avenue off-ramp into the outer Mission.

Just after lunch he’d gotten a new lead on Sarah Walinski from the skip-tracers. Until she’d waved her magic axe at the other
guy’s head, Sarah had been a shift-worker at Bonnard Die-Cutting on Tennessee across from the site of the old Bethlehem Shipyards.
Heslip had timed his arrival at Bonnard to chat in the noontime cafeteria with people who’d worked Sarah’s shift. A Polish
woman as old as water had beckoned him to her table.

“Hey, you. Ya want get hold Sarah Walinski? Hey, talk Mel Larson. A driver.” She held up a hand with forefinger and index
finger crossed. “Sarah and Mel like that…” She began moving her fingers in a shocking graphic rhythm and burst into raucous
laughter. “Hey, that’s Sarah on top.”

After making sure Larson was out on his truck, Heslip used an insurance scam to learn from a bright-eyed personnel woman that
Larson lived off Silver Ave, near the green postage stamp of Portola Playground. Tall skinny three-story wooden row-house
that needed paint, ROOMS FOR RENT on the front door and a street-level one-car garage beneath. He checked through the dusty
window. Empty. But fresh oil on the floor and junk shoved back against the walls showed a car was being parked in there.

The landlady had more chins than Chinatown, hawsers for ankles, and got more religion than a jackleg preacher when Heslip
asked her about Sarah sleeping over.

“Oh my goodness, no! I keep a respectable house here…”

The Chicano who ran the little
madre y padre
down the street sang a different song.
Sí
, Sarah live in the white house needs paint.
Sí
, she lock up her car in that garage at night.
Y caramba
, she buy her liquor by the gallon.

Heslip did not turn in the new address at the office when he went back to DKA. He wouldn’t do that until he’d gotten his final
shot at Sarah himself: no tomorrow for him on this case. He tossed an old yellow Plymouth with only half a transmission on
his towbar and, out at Larson’s place, dumped it in front of the still-empty garage. He stuck a note hand-scrawled on cheap
paper under the wiper arm;
im sorry wont run pleez dont call cops.

Late tonight, when Sarah came back from whatever bar she was getting sloshed in, she would find the old Plymouth in front
of her garage and, he hoped, being drunk and careless, would park the Charger in the street. From whence, Heslip thought as
he drove through the night, he now would pluck it like an apple.

The Charger wasn’t there. Nor on any adjacent street. He ended up down the block with a good view of the house, waiting for
the bars to close. And sort of hoping that when she came, Larson would be with her, drunk and belligerent: he had begun to
feel like hitting someone male, his own size or larger, several times very rapidly in the face.

Not to be. At sunup, as Larry Ballard drove morosely away from the Montana on the far side of town, Heslip was still sitting
there, chilled and stiff and also empty-handed. No Sarah. No Charger. And at ten o’clock he would have to go back to the office
and hand her file over to someone else.

Wait a sec! At 9:45 the landlady, shopping bag in hand, laboriously made her way down the front steps on her swollen ankles.
She waddled obliquely across the street to his car, panting from such exertion. Heslip rolled down his window.

“Young man,” she said, “I wish I’d told you the truth about that woman yesterday. She
has
been living with Mr. Larson, and she’s a fat lazy slob who all she does is lay around and drink hard liquor and never change
the sheets. And all they’d ever do after he got home from work was drink and fight up there in his room until all hours.”

Noting the change of tenses, Heslip said, “Swell.”

“Last night, along about ten o’clock, they had a terrible row an’ she threw him down the stairs. Broke three of his ribs an’
give him a concussion. Amb’lance come an’ everything. Din’t even go to the hospital with him—just packed up an’ left. I seen
you sittin’ out here all last night and still here this morning, an’ I just thought it was my Christ’an duty to tell you she
was gone.”

After
she was gone.
After
he’d sat there all night.

“Even if you are a nigger.”

Bart Heslip drove off cursing her, and himself for not slipping her a twenty yesterday, and for not being here last night
at the right time, and Sarah, and the guy she’d thrown down the stairs, and most especially Dan Kearny for… well, just on
general principles.

*   *   *

Kearny had sneaked into work early that Friday morning to upend the big metal barrels full of paper trash over a square of
canvas laid out on the concrete floor—for once he was glad they were having so much trouble with their cleaning service. He
was in before anybody else—especially Giselle—to look for Warren’s app and Trin’s business card. They should still be here,
since the trash had been piling up for a couple weeks. No reason for Giselle to know he needed them after all, was there?

Forty minutes later he was still there, pawing away, when her voice made him leap and whirl as if stung by an asp hidden in
the ejected paperwork. Giselle was holding up the elusive employment application and the wayward business card.

“Looking for these?”

He sighed and grunted his way to his feet and dusted off the knees of his trousers. “How’d you know I’d need ’em? When I tossed
those, the Gypsies hadn’t even hit the bank yet…”

“Woman’s intuition.”

“Yeah, sure.” He eyed the offending papers as if they were cold-virus cultures. “A lying thieving conniving Mexican—”

“But a hell of an investigator.”

“If you can control him. I seem to remember that nobody cheered louder than you when I fired him the first time.”

Giselle shrugged. “Things change. Now we need him.”

“And this other guy, Warren! Donald Duck on helium—”

“He doesn’t have to talk, Dan’l. Not if he can grab cars. Maybe he’s the greatest carhawk the world has ever seen.”

“Yeah,” said Kearny bitterly, “sure.”

*   *   *

Something that sounded female and Latina and 15 max answered Trin Morales’s phone at 11:00
A.M
. Morales took the receiver out of the girl’s hand to yell something short and Anglo-Saxon into it. The phone replied in Kearny’s
voice.

“Put your pants on and get your butt down here. Now.”

*   *   *

Four hours later Ken Warren, also summoned by phone, wanted to give a great big YELL. Except nobody would have understood
him, anyway. He wanted to yell because Kearny was showing him stuff right out of Auto Mechanics 101. And talking to him as
if he had a mind defect instead of a speech defect.

“You put one alligator clip on the positive post of the battery, and the second one on the distributor…”

All right
, Ken thought,
I know how to hotwire a car
.

Kearny showed him anyway. And then said, “These days we try to get key codes from the dealer and cut keys for the door locks.
But if you don’t have a key, this funny-looking thing here like a Buck Rogers raygun is a…”

I know how to use a lockgun to open door locks
.

Kearny showed him anyway, and then said, “If you don’t have a lockgun with you, this piece of thin strap steel can…”

I know how to go down alongside the window with a slim-jim and flip open door locks
.

Kearny showed him anyway, and then said, “These days we use a lockpunch under the dash to….”

I know how to punch an ignition lock and substitute my own. I know how to hotwire under the dash. I know how to…

Kearny showed him all of it anyway. And then said, “Follow the instructions on the assignment sheet. If it’s REPO ON SIGHT,
just grab the car. But if it says to make contact first—”

“NgYe gho ntawk ta ghu man.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Kearny looked suddenly deflated, as if he had forgotten the extent of Warren’s speech defect. “ ‘Gho
ntawk ta ghu man.’ That’s very important—talking to the man if the case instructions tell you to. Most of our trouble with
clients comes from field men who don’t talk to the man.”

He thrust the sheaf of field assignment sheets almost blindly back into Warren’s hand, started to walk away slump-shouldered,
then stopped and turned back. He sighed.

“One more thing. Two of those files are pretty salty. That guy Uvaldi—that’s the Mercedes convertible—has a fag boyfriend
who’s six-six and two-forty and leaps tall buildings in a single bound. He—”

“Ngye
ndon
’ gho ntawk ta ghu man.”

Kearny looked surprised, as if a guy like Warren wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. “Uhhh… that’s right, Ken, you
don’t
go talk to the man. You avoid the man like the plague. The other one you gotta watch out for is—”

“Ghu whooman.”

Kearny thought, This guy talks funny but he sure ain’t slow. All he’s had time to do is riffle through those files
once
, but he knows which cases I’m talking about. Could it be he might actually work out as a repoman?

Feeling almost hopeful, he said, “She busted Heslip’s head with a can of coffee and Heslip is pretty nifty on his feet—won
thirty-nine out of forty fights professionally before he—”

Warren went into a sudden fighter’s crouch, bobbing and weaving, and threw a damned fast left hook/right uppercut combination
at the chin of an imaginary opponent.

“Ngye ngsaw hym gnfigh ngleven nears ago.”

“Ngsaw hym gnfigh.” Kearny nodded as if pleased about something, and went back inside chuckling to himself. “Catchy.”

That’s when Ken Warren started to like Dan Kearny. Dan Kearny might talk to him like he was an idiot, but Dan Kearny laughed
at him like he was a man. And left him on his own with a fistful of REPO ON SIGHT orders and a whole weekend to prove he
was
the greatest carhawk the world had ever known.

W
hen they had opened the turnstiles at Universal Studios Tours down in L.A. that same Friday morning, Ephrem Poteet had paid
and queued up for the first of the long open-sided buses to the tour’s backlot delights. It was just a week since the Great
Cal-Cit Bank Massacre and already he had heard about it.

Poteet was late 30s and still handsome, sloe-eyed, well-built though starting to go paunchy. But by subtle alterations in
his appearance, clothing, posture, and gait, he still could pass for any age between 25 and 50.

Today he was mid-40s, with a red bandana around his neck and a grey gunfighter’s mustache and powdered hair to glint silver
below a white wide-brimmed ten-gallon cowboy hat like Tom Mix wore in the Saturday morning serials long before his birth.
He walked a little pigeon-toed in his cowboy boots, a bit bowlegged from aridin’ that old cayuse on the lone pray-ree.

He was also sober—a small triumph not entirely his own, because his latest thirty-day stretch in the county slam had ended
just last week. When he drank he got nasty, when he got nasty he beat his wife, when he beat his wife he got into bar scuffles,
when he got into bar scuffles he got arrested and booked for Drunk & Disorderly. He no longer had the wife, but he was still
getting drunk, nasty, in scuffles, and arrested for D&D.

Poteet came to work at Universal Studios early most days during the peak April-September tourist season. Only after Labor
Day, when the crowds had thinned and he would stand out as a regular despite his disguises, would it be too risky to continue.

Risky because Universal had no idea he worked there.

His first mark was an overweight red-faced woman with two noisy kids and a gaping purse. The bus stopped and everyone started
crowding off for the earthquake special-effects show. While standing politely aside and speaking to her with a West Texas
drawl, Poteet lifted his cowboy hat with one hand and her wallet with the other.

“First time y’all here, ma’am?”

“Yes. We’re from Indiana. The kids are so excited…”

“Wal, don’t let ’em get scairt—it’s all jus’ funnin’.”

He sat behind her on the bleachers and, when the lights went down, slipped two $20s from the wallet. When the audience applauded
the completion of the tour guide’s opening spiel, he dropped the wallet back into the purse.

If the mark had only a bill or two, he took nothing at all. If the wallet was missed before he could return it, he merely
dropped it on the floor. When it was found with money still inside, they were happy: at an amusement park with the kids, who
knew how much actual cash they had left?

By early afternoon he’d made nearly $200, a very good day’s score, when, from the queue for the next bus, he saw the door
of one of the maintenance sheds was ajar. Awfully early in the season, but too good to pass up even though Universal would
know a dip had been working the crowd that day. He would skip work for a week, let the pickpocket heat die down; the big score
should make the interruption of steady income worth it.