Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

One foot on the blacktop, he craned cautiously over the roof of his car as if he were still hung over despite his fresh-scrubbed, russet look from the steam. He shamelessly gargled his r’s for his best Blarney-stone brogue — a gone-slightly-to-seed Irish potato with bloodshot eyes.

“Faith an’ bejesus, an’ ’tis the wee leprechauns who’ve been busy this blessed weekend.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” demanded Kearny, though he was starting to get an idea that he already knew.

“Makin’ all the shoemaker’s shoon in the night an’ slippin’ away at first light.”

“How many of ’em are yours?”

O’B came around his car to slap a lean freckled hand on the hood of a green Cutlass Supreme right in front of the office.

“This.” He turned and pointed down the block. “That one. And that pickup over there from Marin. Two more around the corner...” He grinned at Kearny. “Maybe now you appreciate just how much work I turn out in the course of a day’s—”

Kearny had just begun pointing out that someone else had repossessed all those cars assigned to O’B, not the Irishman himself, when Larry Ballard drove up.

Ballard already had been around the block and through little one-block Norfolk Alley behind, and there was not one damned parking place to be found. Usually, early on a Monday morning, there’d be a dozen free.

And now this, people standing around in the middle of the street waving their arms. What was going on? A convention?

Or maybe it was trouble. Yeah, there were Kearny, Giselle, O’B... some guy’s car blocking the garage... He squealed to a stop behind O’b’s car and piled out, feeling behind the seat for his tire iron, only then belatedly realizing that nobody was there except the DKA crew. He went up to them.

“What happened?”

Kearny swept his arm around in an all-encompassing gesture. “How many of ’em were assigned to you, Larry?”

For the first time Ballard began checking license plates.

“Ill... be... damned...” He shook his head. “I see those his-and-hers Buicks from down the Peninsula, I bet I hit that address a dozen times without getting a sniff of those cars, just a big damn dog who tried to bite off my—”

“Don’t say it!” exclaimed Giselle in alarm.

“—foot,” finished Ballard, then said in equal alarm to O’B, “Nobody grabbed our Mercedes from Pietro, did they? I—”

“I didn’t see it.” O’B turned to Kearny, “How many guys did you have out in the field over the weekend, Reverend?”

Before Kearny could respond, Bart Heslip drove up.

He bounced out of his car like answering the opening bell.

“Who got run over?”

“Last week’s cases,” said Ballard.

“I don’t get it.”

“Somebody did. Repeatedly.” Then it was Ballard’s turn to wave his arm around like Balboa on a peak in Darién. “How many do you recognize, Bart?”

Surprise widened Heslip’s eyes.

“That Laser with the front end bashed in was one of mine.”

“I hope we didn’t do the bashing,” said Kearny quickly.

“I couldn’t say. I never laid eyes on the car while I was carrying the assignment. I’d started to think the guy was made out of smoke...” He interrupted himself in sudden panic. “Nobody got Sarah, did they? If I spent my weekend chasing Gyppos without a sniff and somebody knocked off that Charger—”

“I didn’t see it on the street,” said Ballard. “Unless it’s inside—”

“The guys I had out over the weekend didn’t have keys to the garage,” said Kearny.

Heslip’s eyes had lit on another of the parked cars. “Hey, there’s that Aerostar van, the one that—”

“Out in the Castro,” nodded Giselle, who had assigned the case to him in the first place.

“I only had it for a week,” said Heslip defensively. “With all the other cases I was working—”

“The guy who got it only had it for a week end ,” Kearny interrupted in his most offensive manner.

Heslip was indeed offended. “What guy?”

“I only had two men out, and one of them is a green pea who just started Friday. So probably Morales—”

Just then Morales drove up in one of the Gyppo Caddies !

Instead of being grateful, Kearny, that chingada , was on him like a junkyard dog.

“What are you doing with that Cadillac?”

“Driving it,” smirked Morales as he got out. He’d driven it the whole weekend, Jesus, what a boat! Power everything. “Bringing it in to make out my report and—”

Ballard had been looking through the windshield to check the I.D. number against their Gypsy Cadillac master list.

“Yeah, it’s one of ours,” he said in a crestfallen voice. “But what’s this bastard doing working for us again, anyway?”

“ Chinga tu madre, maricón! You wanna go ’round right—”

Heslip got between them but Ballard was ready to go — last time Morales had knocked him down, this time that wouldn’t be so easy for him. Ballard was older, wiser, fitter, with a few years of karate under his belt.

Not that karate, come to think of it, had made much difference to Fearsome Freddi of the leather underwear.

Ignoring the ruckus, Kearny said, “We needed a couple of extra men to pick up the slack on the files you turned in so you guys could work the Gypsy stuff.”

“Only a couple of extra men?” Giselle was looking around with a dazed expression. Apparently all the parking places were filled with repos. “Two guys? All this?”

But Kearny had remembered all over again that Morales wasn’t supposed to even know about the Gypsy cases, let alone be working any of them.

“You snooped those Gypsy files!” he stormed. “That’s what you were doing when I saw you in the front upstairs office on Friday afternoon! Dammit, Morales, I want—”

“Hey, I got one, didn’t I?” Morales jerked a thumb at Ballard. “That’s more than hotshot here did over the weekend.” He stepped closer to Kearny, an insinuating look on his face. “Listen, I bet you’re offerin’ everybody a bonus on each Gyppo car they turn, right? Now it seems to me that if I was workin’ Gyppo cases along with the rest of the guys...”

“No bonuses, and I can’t trust you anyway,” said Kearny flatly. “Not on something like this. You were hired to pick up the slack—”

“I’d still like to know who repo’d all these cars, since it obviously wasn’t any of us,” said O’Bannon.

That’s when Ken Warren drove up.

He knew it, he just knew it. The car he’d left in front of the garage door now was backed halfway into the street, and Kearny was waving his arms at some Mexican dude in the middle of a bunch of people like maybe there’d been an accident.

He didn’t remember a Spanish surname on any of the cases he’d worked, but he’d been knockin’ ’em off pretty fast, he couldda forgotten a name. He’d never gotten a crack at so many easy repos in his life. These DKA guys must really talk to the man, like Kearny had said, instead of just grabbing cars.

Ken Warren really liked just grabbing cars.

He double-parked his company car like everyone else had, and sort of tiptoed down toward the group. Hey, they were all operatives, he bet. In fact, he bet he could figure out who was who just from reading the reports on the cases he’d been handed.

He couldn’t place the Mex guy, but the Mick with red hair and freckles and boozer’s face, that had to be O’Bannon, the one signed himself O’B.

The black guy he’d seen fight, that was Bart Heslip. Not very marked up for an ex-pro middleweight.

Kearny had said the tall good-looking blond lady was Giselle Marc, office manager. She also worked the field — he couldn’t blame her there, that’s where the action was.