Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

And the lean handsome muscular guy, must do a lot of surfing or SCUBA-diving to have his hair bleached almost white like that, he had to be Ballard.

Inevitably, Kearny saw him. Came over working his face and waving his arms just as he’d been doing at the Mexican guy a couple of minutes ago.

“Warren, what the hell were you doing over the weekend?”

Giselle breathed, just loud enough for Kearny, “What do you think he was doing? Proving he is the greatest carhawk the world has ever known.”

The rest of them had turned to stare at Warren as if he were from another planet — and he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, trying to figure out what Kearny wanted him to answer. Then inspiration struck.

“Hey, Mr. Kearny, Ah gnthalk ta gha man!”

Kearny astounded him by busting out laughing. And then clapping him on the shoulder and demanding, “You talk to all the men?” He seemed to be getting the hang of the way Ken spoke.

“Well, no, juth nthoz who—”

“How many cars did you grab since Friday afternoon?”

He didn’t have to consult his case files to answer that one. He’d counted them up during breakfast. “Nthevnteen.”

“Seventeen?”

“Yeah.”

“Police reports?”

“Yeah.”

“Condition reports?”

He’d completed those over breakfast and he’d rather show than tell, so he held out the sheaf of completed forms. Kearny looked at them, then nodded and turned to the rest of them still standing around staring as if they were at Fleishacker Zoo.

“Ken Warren,” said Kearny with a flourish, then added with masterful understatement, “he’ll be covering for you while you work the Gypsy accounts.”

“For all of us?” asked Ballard.

“Him and Morales, yeah.” Kearny gestured at the repo-crowded street. “You got a problem with that, Larry?”

“Hell no, no problem, I just wondered how one guy...”

Ballard ran down. The guy had repo’d seventeen cars in three days! That was a decent score for a decent field man in a decent month. For the first time in his professional life he felt something akin to awe for another man’s work besides Kearny’s; the Great White Father, of course, was always the best. He stepped forward and stuck out his hand to Warren.

“I’m Larry Ballard.”

“GnYm kGen Gwarren.”

Then they were all crowding around and shaking his hand and clapping him on the shoulder, like football players mobbing the guy who took the opening kickoff and ran it back for a touchdown. Warren suddenly understood why they had been staring at him. Not because they’d heard he talked funny. Hell no. Because they were impressed .

For the first time in his life, the very first time, Ken Warren felt he was part of a group that didn’t give a damn how he talked. However he did it, he spoke their language.

Kearny said, “Okay, Warren’s got reports to write and cars to get back to the dealers. Giselle and Trin each have a Gypsy Cadillac to do the same with. The rest of us, the Gyppos aren’t going to waste any time spreading the word that someone dropped a rock on a couple of their boats over the weekend.”

“Hell, Dave,” said O’B, “they were both gotten on drivebys. Maybe the Gyppos’ll figure the law of averages just caught up with them. Only so many new Caddies on the street—”

“You really believe that?” demanded Kearny in disbelief.

“Nah.”

“We knew somebody would be looking,” Marino offered tentatively. They were in the kitchen of Yana’s ofica , and although he would never admit it, she was pretty impressive on her own turf.

“Track is always good place to look for Gypsies,” agreed Ristik eagerly. But he came out sounding defensive just as Marino had, even though Yana was his kid sister, so he added, “Just some repomen getting lucky.”

“That’s some kind of lucky.” Yana shook her head. “No. Somebody very good and very clever is after us.”

“Repomen are not clever,” said Marino disdainfully.

“These are.”

“Or maybe your husband is up to his old tricks of selling our cars to the gadje, and maybe you are helping him...”

His voice ran down: he had gone too far and knew it. For a moment, her face looked like scraped bone; he felt a stab of superstitious dread. Then she relaxed and shrugged.

“If Ephrem can make money betraying the rom to the gadje, he will — but he gets no information from me. I don’t know where he is and I don’t want to know. Whether somebody is on to us or not, we have to tell the kumpanias two cars are lost. And I want to know for sure about the repo agency.”

“Not too hard to find that out,” Marino said.

At the same time, Ristik said: “Why tell the kumpanias yet? Most of our people are already gone from here—”

“Then find out,” she told Marino, then told Ristik, “because if a repo agency knows about us, they’ll try to follow us all over the country from here. Also, I can’t leave yet—”

“Theodore Winston White the Third,” smirked Marino.

She shot him a venomous glance.

“If you spent more time on your St. Mark Hotel scam and less on having your clansmen follow us around, hoping to take that fifty-eight pink convertible away from us, maybe you—”

“What do you know about the St. Mark?” demanded Marino in a furious voice. She laughed aloud, and whirled toward him so her full skirt flared out around her beautiful legs.

“What do I know? What I know.”

“If you interfere with that—”

“Stay away from Teddy White.”

There was a long pause. Finally, Marino nodded and stood up from the kitchen table, where he and Ristik had been sitting.

“Agreed.”

She softened slightly. “I only need a few more days...”

“Also.”

They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then both of them burst out laughing at the same time.

“Want to be lady-in-waiting to my King after Zlachi dies?”

“Want to be court jester to my Queen?”

But clattering down the stairs a few minutes later, with no need to keep up a front, Marino was unsmiling.

Was there a detective agency good enough to tag them as the ones who had hit the bank for the Caddies? Couldn’t be. No agency was that good. Yet as Yana had said, two cars in one weekend out of the fourteen still in the Bay Area were too many.

And meanwhile, time was tight and his people were having no luck at all in finding the pink 1958 Eldorado convertible. If she turned out to be right about the repo outfit, he’d use it to smoke out the ragtop. Not that he thought she was right.

As he started down the Romolo steps, a tall blond man with a hawk nose and cold blue eyes passed him coming up. Their eyes locked for a moment, like those of adversary eagles; then the man was gone. On a sudden impulse, Marino turned to look back up the street after him. Yes. Turning in at Madame Miseria’s ofica just as Marino somehow had expected.

Theodore Winston White III? No. The man who fell for candle readings, and money that bled after a special-dye-soaked bill had been substituted for his, and probably a poisoned egg, and maybe even a cemetery dig, had never viewed the world through such bleakly realistic blue eyes. More likely, a cop.

Maybe she was in trouble. Good! He hoped she was.

Yana was saying, “We have to find out who repo’d those Cadillacs, and we don’t have the contacts in the cop shop that Rudolph does. If someone in our kumpania could pose as—”

Ristik stopped her with a characteristic Gypsy shrug, the sort that involves eyebrows, hands, wrists, forearms, shoulders, and a tilt of the head to one side.