Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“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.

When 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 cay use 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?”