Роберт Стивенсон: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 3, March 1990

Standley could tell I was unhappy. He had been slinking around nervously all morning. I had just decided to go tell him I wanted to roll again when the phone rang. I saw him slip out the side door as I picked up the receiver.

“Hey, welcome back, cholito. How’s the leg?” It was Alicia from the dealership down the street.

“Aw, shoot, Miss Scarlett, ’tweren’t nuthin’. Just a scratch.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. It’s still attached to the rest of me.” I took a sip of my coffee. “Want to see my scar?”

“Not if it’s where I think it is.”

“Too bad. It’s the chance of a lifetime. So, what’s up?”

Alicia sighed on the other end of the phone. “I’ve got some heat for you. A Corliss GT — loaded.”

“Yeah?” I said.

I could hear her shuffling papers. “Guy did a Playhouse 90 on us.”

“Sounds like somebody’s under the bus.”

“Yeah — me, if we don’t get the car back. It’s my heat.”

“Okay, I’m on it. Personally.”

“Thanks. By the way, seeing as how you’re disabled, I sent the lot guy over with the keys. Is he there yet?”

I looked out the plate glass windows. The street was deserted, except for a couple of palm trees swaying in the breezes and a tall black man walking purposefully toward the door, eyeballing the scenery like he was new in town. “Does he look like Dobbin, only a few shades darker?”

“Yeah. His name’s Bowie.”

“He’s on his way. What’s the scoop on the Corliss?”

“The usual Sunday night credit bandit, I guess.” I never understood why, but car dealerships are open Sunday evenings, after TRW closes, and they actually sell cars without a credit check if the buyer looks okay. I can’t complain — it gives us extra business.

“Somebody got by you? Pobrecita.”

“Yeah. He looked okay, and he was dressed nice. He said he had his own business, and his car got stolen last week. He gave me a check for a grand, but Marcy at the bank says he’s down to spare change.”

“Did you talk to him about bringing the car back?”

“Yeah, yesterday. He said his secretary screwed up the accounts, and he was going to fix it. I called again this morning. His business phone’s been disconnected and his home phone doesn’t answer.”

“Give me the listings.”

She read off a business address and phone number in Del Mar, and a home one in Peñasquitos. I entered them in my computer.

“The business number checks out, but the residential’s listed as a C. Hendricks in University City.”

“That little liar.”

“It’s probably his girlfriend. Only women living alone list themselves under their initial.”

“I’ll remember that.”

While we had been talking, Bowie had arrived and stood towering over me. He was about six feet, fighter’s build, dark-skinned. He was wearing a pair of faded, grease-stained jeans over heavy work boots. It looked as if he’d been doing some kind of heavy construction lately.

“So, you want me to pull the car?”

“Yeah. Even if he does make good on the check, I can’t get him financed.”

“Okay.”

“Gotta go now, crip. Bowie still there?”

“Yeah.”

“He sounds like he needs some extra cash, so keep him in mind if you’re short-handed, okay?”

“Your wish is my command.”

I hung up and turned to face Bowie, grimacing as I caught my leg on the corner of the desk. I rose a little bit and stuck out my hand. “Jose Camacho, better known as Joe Cho. You Bowie?”

“Yeah. Bowie Randall. Don’t get up, man,” he said. “I heard you took a bullet. I just brought you some keys.”

His voice was soft and deep, with some kind of accent I couldn’t place.

“Thanks. Alicia told me you were looking for some action. You done repo before?”

“Nah. You need a whole lot of experience?”

It was just a question, nothing behind it, so I shrugged and let it pass.

“Can you get bonded?”

“Yeah. No problem.”

“I’ll see what we can do when Standley needs some help.”

“Thanks.”

All the teams were out rolling, which meant there wasn’t anybody to relieve me at lunchtime. I ordered a pizza that arrived almost cold, ate half, and wrapped the rest to take home for dinner.

I worked the phones pretty hard until Standley came back, which wasn’t until almost three, but I didn’t get any leads on the Corliss bandit. His name was John Schroeder, which didn’t ring any bells with me. We got some guys we visit two or three times a year. Standley tried to slime his way past me into his office, but I blocked him.

“You ever heard of giving a guy a lunch break?” I snarled at him.

“I thought Mick...”

“You thought nothing. If this is the way you’re gonna treat me, I’m going back out on the street.”

Standley looked around nervously, but the office was empty.

“Fine. You do that,” he said weakly.

“Starting tomorrow,” I said.

“Sure, Joe. Whatever you want. I’ll get someone else to work the desk.”

I smiled as I walked back to my desk, and hoped Standley couldn’t see my reflection in the plate glass window.

The usual routine when we’re rolling is I pick up Dobbin at the bus stop around the corner from his ma’s house at seven — he doesn’t have a car — and we meet the Creeper at this doughnut shop down by Balboa Park. I don’t know where he lives; sometimes I think maybe he hangs out in the park at night.

We eat and grab some coffee to take with us, then we prowl around the airport parking lots for a while, and head into the shop about eight thirty to see if there’s any new heat.

Standley doesn’t like the three of us together so much — he thinks if we had three cars out we could pull more — but we’ve been proving him wrong for so long he hardly mentions it any more, except when business is slow.

The way we work when we’re on the road is I handle the car phone and the wheels, Dobbin hotwires when we have to and acts as a general menace to society, and the Creeper keeps the heat sheet. He doesn’t really need to look at it much — he’s got a photographic memory for license plate numbers, which always makes me think he must have done time.

We had a couple of new cars on our sheet, so we did the usual home and office check to see if the people were stupid enough to leave the car lying around. These two weren’t. It looked like I was going to have to call them and ask them nicely to bring the cars back. Sometimes, when you do that, they get nervous about where they stashed it and move it, and all you gotta do is follow them.

Mostly that doesn’t work. And once you let them know you’re after them, they really go underground. Not to mention that sometimes they get pissed off at you for stealing their wheels back and take it out on you, which is why Dobbin has a couple of fake teeth and I have a bullet hole that might have been a sex change operation if the guy had had better aim.

I explained to Dobbin and the Creeper about Alicia’s Corliss bandit, and we took 805 up to University City to see if Schroeder had hidden the car at his girlfriend’s house. The address was a nice bunch of condos nestled in the side of a hill just below the shopping center. We did a couple of rounds in the parking lot, watching kids stumble out and head in little packs for school, dragging lunch boxes behind them, but the car wasn’t there.

I decided to call and see if I could flush somebody out of the roost. We pulled into a vacant parking space right outside the Hendricks unit, where I could see into the downstairs windows. I dialed the number, deciding at the last minute to do my L. A. Law act.

“Is this Miss Hendricks?” I asked.