Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Athlete whirled, nimble and quick, reaching into the cab for his baseball bat — but the big mean-looking mother with short-chopped brown hair slammed the door on his wrist. He started screaming, high and thin like a grammar-school girl finding a snake in her bed.

The attacker picked up the bowie knife. Cowboy Hat ran, so fast his ten-gallon Stetson flew off and landed in the gutter. He was bald under it, somehow vulnerable without it.

The big mean-looking dude stood on the hat, ripped it in half with the knife, but let the man go. Maybelle was glad. She couldn’t take no more people gettin’ hurt, not even bad people.

Totally ignoring the fallen warriors, the man smashed in the windows of the pickup with the baseball bat, slashed all four tires with the bowie knife — in this part of town, no windows would go up, no police patrols would come.

Finally, he reached in and twitched out the keys to drop them and the knife down the nearest sewer grating. Then he came back to Maybelle and looked her up and down, thoroughly and unhurriedly, taking in her tight red sequins and too much lipstick and breast half-exposed by the torn dress.

Only then did he yell at her.

“Gnew awtta nbe hathamed!”

Ken Warren took off his tan corduroy jacket and draped it around her shoulders. Maybelle couldn’t quit crying. She was ashamed, and terrified, and knew God had let him see her like this as punishment for what she was doing to keep her big fancy prideful Continental.

Warren drove the company car in on Post toward the Tenderloin with Maybelle sobbing beside him on the front seat as if her heart would break. He looked glumly over at her.

“Nthtop nhat!” he finally ordered.

Maybelle seemed to have no difficulty in understanding him. She reduced the crying to sniveling, then stopped altogether.

“Where you be takin’ me?” she asked in a small voice.

His apartment, that’s where, he told her. He’d just moved in last week, had this new good job so he was out all hours, anyway, looking for people, cars, how’d she think he’d found her? She could sleep there until she got something better.

“Lord, Lord, child, how’m I gonna get somethin’ better?” she asked him, the tears coming again. “Ah cain’t...”

She fell silent. She’d raised her son Jedediah without a man to home, raised him, as he’d always said with laughing eyes, with the Bible in one hand and the hairbrush in the other. Then God had forsaken her, and killed him. Killed her son. Her Jeddie gone, and her still here. Lord, Lord, it wasn’t fair.

“Takin people’s cars,” she said finally. “Whut sorta job is that to—”

“Mbesth tl’ve never ntad,” said Warren.

At his apartment over a liquor store he made her some soup, made up the couch for himself while she drank it, then got her into his bed when she started falling asleep spoon in hand.

Maybelle’s last thought before going down, down into sleep between those clean, cool sheets, was that she knew, deep inside her secret heart, that Kenny’d been sent by God because Jesus was giving her one more chance to repent.

Then she was snoring, out cold, not even any REM going on behind her eyelids. Ken Warren shut the bedroom door quietly, tiptoed out of the apartment, and drove back out to the Fillmore to repossess her Lincoln Continental for the bank.

No more of that streetwalking shit for Jedediah’s mother, even though his buddy was eighteen, no, nineteen long years dead in the jungles of Vietnam.

The aging rock musician bore the stylized stigmata of his tribe: a Gibson slung down his back on a worn leather strap; a bright felt-covered baseball-style cap loaded with glittery beads bill-backward on his shoulder-length hair; leather vest with more beads, big brass belt buckle of crossed miniature wheel lock pistols, faded jeans with the knees out, black scuffed combat boots. Obligatory shades.

“You see that there big ape?” he demanded of a little girl at the King Kong exhibit. “My daddy caught him for me.”

The little girl’s eyes got very big. She had blond hair and a gap in front where two teeth should have been. She lisped in wonder, “For you ?”

He pulled the guitar around and strummed a simple chord progression and sang in a flat Bob Dylan sort of voice:

The mother, who thought he was part of the entertainment, laughed at his shouted last line as he lost his balance and steadied himself against her and lifted her wallet. The long drought was over. The Rock Musician, one of Poteet’s most potent personae, was scoring like the Golden State Warriors.

But when he was about to put the wallet back into her purse, some old grey-haired geek with a big jaw wanted to take their picture in front of the ape.

“Hey, sure, that’s great, man,” he mumbled, thinking, Get outta my face, geek, or I’ll knee-drop you for sure.

But, ever alert, he used the photo opportunity to slip the wallet back into the woman’s handbag — minus a couple of twenties, of course. The grey-haired guy ended up sitting next to him on the bus, real talkative and a real bug with that camera, click, click, click, all the damned time.

“My grandchildren are coming out from back east next week.” The old geek’s smile lit up a rather hard and heavy face. “So many things to do while they’re here, my wife sent me out on a little recon mission so we don’t miss anything.”

“Recon... that like a scoutin’ trip, Dad?”

“Very like,” agreed the grey-haired man solemnly.

He took so many pictures of everything and everybody that pretty soon Poteet sort of forgot he was there.

Click, click, click!

Up in the Bay Area, Eli Nicholas hauled the backseat out of the brand-new Fleetwood limo. Unlike Poteet, Nicholas absolutely would have known what a recon was, and actually did play the guitar professionally: on the weekends he strummed wild Gypsy tunes for a group of gadje amateur flamenco dancers in a neighborhood bar on El Cerrito’s San Pablo Avenue. He was a slight swarthy man with a lined joyful face and strong fingers callused by three decades on the strings.

During Vietnam those hands had learned another trade, one that led him to now have both back doors of the Fleetwood limo open and the backseat out on the concrete. Midday of a midweek workday, most of the parking slots under his Richmond apartment building were empty. The deserted area, backed by a high wooden fence, was well-hidden from the street. The afternoon was balmy, so both men, in work pants and shirt sleeves, were sweating lightly from pulling out the seat.

“Why under the backseat?” asked Rudolph Marino.

“It’s under where he would sit,” said Nicholas patiently.

Fact was, Marino was shook-up, nervous, a state of mind so foreign to him it was like a fever in his brain making it not work right. His biggest score, sure — but he only wanted to con some people, he didn’t want to blow them up.

From a cardboard box with a construction company’s logo on it, Nicholas was taking a foot-square sheet of whitish putty-like substance a quarter inch thick and backed with adhesive strips.

Marino asked almost shrilly, “What’s that?”

“Sheet C-4.” Nicholas said it casually as he was peeling away the protective layer from the adhesive.

“C-4? Plastique?”

“Yeah. Plastique. Ninety percent RDX, the most powerful chemical-composition explosive known, ten percent inert binders so it can be pressed into sheets like this here.”