Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“Madame Aquarra knows of whom you speak,” she admitted in a suddenly mellifluous voice. “And of course Madame Aquarra knows the way in which she released your power so that you found financial success. So...”

Ballard just stood there beaming at her, his hands in his pockets. He had her. Goddammit, he had her! Or her greed did.

“So give me your gift for her and I will get it to her.”

Ballard slowly moved his head from side to side, still without speaking, still with that silly grin on his face. The sudden anger he had hoped for suffused her features: yes! She hated her daughter-in-law hard enough to sell her out to a gadjo .

“How much for her?” Madame Aquarra demanded bluntly.

He brought his hand out of his pocket clutching two $50 bills. Madame Aquarra stared at them, then met his bland eyes with her angry ones. A shiver ran through him. She was a powerful presence despite her venality.

“Madame Miseria. San Francisco.”

He gave her a single fifty. Silently. She spoke again, as if he were physically dragging the words out of her.

“North Beach.”

Madame Miseria. Now he remembered her sign in... Romolo Place, that was it. He got around the City a lot, he knew most of the streets well. So Madame Miseria was Yana. Hot damn!

He gave Madame Aquarra the other fifty. Who immediately exclaimed: “Go! Find her! Destroy her! Rip her eyes out!”

Then Madame Aquarra slammed the door in his face.

Ballard went down to his car both elated and uneasy. He had found her — unless the old lady had conned him. No. She had stopped believing his story of a reward, she thought the gadjo wanted to bust Yana for something. Her hatred had fused with her greed and she had dropped dime on her daughter-in-law.

So it looked as if Yana had gotten away from her — and one way or another must have taken her bride price with her.

Ballard’s unease came from the fact that he’d parked where Madame Aquarra could get his license number if she were so inclined. He didn’t believe in Gypsy curses, but he did believe in the efficiency of their information network.

He drove off thinking, Maybe I ought to get word back to her that something really terrible has come down on Yana. That would make her happy and perhaps forget all about Larry Ballard.

Which would make Larry Ballard sleep better that night.

Sleep that entire weekend had been in short supply for Ken Warren. Somehow he had gotten it fixed in his head that those three days were some sort of test for him. Show Dan Kearny that he was a real carhawk, and the DKA job would be his.

There is a surprising number of things a guy with his sort of handicap can do to keep the bills paid, and Warren had done most of them, from civilian contract worker in Vietnam twenty years before (nobody with his kind of speech impediment could get into the military, he’d tried hard enough), to migrant laborer, to stevedoring on the docks, to pushing a big-rig, to, of all things, bartending.

But repoman was what he liked best, he was really good at it if they didn’t try to make him talk to people. He got to use his smarts when he was a repoman. He got to figure out what the other guy had done and was going to do next. There was excitement and challenge and now and then intense danger. The perfect job.

Not that he’d faced any danger this weekend.

The woman with the can of coffee had taken off.

The guy with the big boyfriend hadn’t come back.

But lots of other people had been home. Pedestrians now, every one of them. The guy in Fairfax in Marin County, up on the hill with the dirt road, who’d wanted to argue about his truck until Warren had picked him up under the arms like a baby and set him on a shelf in his garage as if he were a can of paint.

“Gnaw gnhew nthtay nere nhtil Ahm ghawn.”

The guy didn’t look like he understood the words, but he stayed there on the shelf as Warren drove away in his pickup.

The man and his wife down in Burlingame on the Peninsula with the twin his-and-hers Buick Reattas and the vicious watchdog. Warren had stolen the first Buick at 3:00 A.M., the second at 3:30, the first from the driveway, the second from the carport, without even waking up their Rottweiler in the backyard. In fact, he’d tied a big red bow he’d found in the back of one of the repos to the gate of the dog’s pen as a little joke.

There had been one hairy moment in San Francisco’s Castro District when a crowd of hostile gays had been watching him break into a Ford Aerostar van. But some guy had helped chill them out, and then, when Ken was about to drive away, had handed him the keys! The registered owner. He’d just stood there watching Ken take it, ashamed to admit being behind in his payments.

Then that other guy down South of Market, who had jumped on the hood of his own Plymouth Laser and spread his topcoat wide in front of the windshield in an attempt to keep Warren from driving it away. The Laser hit a phone pole, but still ran, so it came off better than the guy on the hood: he’d ended up in SF General with breaks and contusions and a bad case of gutter mouth from French-kissing a sewer grate.

No, the problems Ken Warren had faced hadn’t been the subjects whose cars he was taking. The first was that along about 5:00 A.M. Monday he had run out of gas — him, not his car — and had fallen asleep on stakeout at 25th Ave and El Camino del Mar in Seacliff. The lady with the Beemer 535i never showed, and he woke bleary-eyed and fog-frosted at 6:30. He washed and shaved in the men’s room at the Seacliff Motel up behind Sutro Heights, even had toast and coffee in their dining room before driving unwillingly back toward the DKA office.

Unwillingly, because that’s where his other problem was waiting. He hadn’t had a key to the DKA garage, so he’d street-parked the cars he’d repossessed around the block the office was on. Worse than that, when he’d run out of parking places he’d left the final repo right-angled across the sidewalk with its front bumper nudging DKa’s heavy garage door.

He bet Dan Kearny was going to be really steamed about that.

When Dan Kearny got to the office at 7:33 Monday morning, he was really steamed. Some idiot had nosed a car across the sidewalk to block the DKA storage garage door. And wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a single parking place in either direction where he could leave his car until he could move this one.

After double-parking in the street with the blinkers on, he went through the office deactivating the alarms, then out the back to unlock the heavy wooden sliding door and flick the switch on the little motor that rumbled it aside. Grumbling to himself, he got the car started and was backing it out into the street when Giselle double-parked behind it, boxing him in.

“What’s that doing here?” she demanded.

“My very thought. I’m going to leave it in the street for the cops to tag and tow—”

“You can’t. Until we turned in our files last week, I was carrying the paper on that one.”

“I’ll be damned!” said Kearny/ “It must have been in that fistful of cases I gave Ken Warren on Friday. He must have grabbed it over the weekend and parked it here because he didn’t have a garage key. Not too shabby for a new man.”

“There’s another one of mine across the street.”

“Got two? Hey, terrif!” He paused, suddenly uneasy. “Ah, listen, Giselle, I fired the cleaning service on Friday.”

“You what? Why didn’t you wait until I found somebody else who we can count on to—”

That’s when O’B drove up and half got out of his car.

O’B had spent most of Saturday at the airfield up in Sonoma, trying to get a line on the Gyppos who had “sold” the ancient biplane to Doc Swigart — no luck — most of yesterday in the Old Clam House under the freeway near the Army Street off-ramp, and most of last night in an ail-night steam-room on Market Street soaking clam juice out of his system.