Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“... and he’s been running this elaborate scam on—”

She broke off abruptly when Kearny appeared.

“No,” he snarled.

“No to what?” She stood slightly taller than he, and so slid off the desk to look down at him as she always did when they were about to go at it.

“Maybelle Pernod. No way she’s going to—”

“Hnyeth thnee ith! Hnit wasth hmy indea!”

Kearny was frozen in openmouthed astonishment. Warren, having had his say, began doggedly hitting the keys again.

“Ken repossessed her Continental as ordered,” said Giselle, talking fast. “She’s living at a friend’s apartment until she gets enough for first and last and security deposit on her own.”

“Yeah, well, she ain’t gonna get it from us.”

Warren ripped the report from the typewriter and stood up. He jerked his windbreaker off the back of the chair and started to shove his arm into the sleeve all in the same motion.

“Hnen Agh nquitt!” he exclaimed.

CLOSE AND BILL on WALINSKI, SARAH.

CLOSE AND BILL on UVALDI, PIETRO.

The guy was an absolute killer. Kearny got in Warren’s way as the big man tried to storm out of the room.

“You can’t quit,” said Kearny reasonably. “I need you to go down to L.A. with Trin Morales and ferry up a couple of Gyppo Cadillacs. Besides, your registration hasn’t come back from Sacramento — and your raise hasn’t come through yet.”

Storm clouds still churned in Warren’s eyes. “Hngmaybelle?”

“A steal at forty a night, Dan,” said Giselle quickly.

“Hear that?” said Kearny. “A steal at forty a night.”

Warren looked suddenly flustered; he ducked his head and mumbled something and gathered up his folders and patted Giselle on the shoulder and was gone.

“What’d he say?” asked Kearny.

“He has to drive Maybelle home.”

“ He’s the friend whose apartment she—”

“Yep. He knew her son in Vietnam. I didn’t know that when I assigned the reopen REPO ON SIGHT to him. He went out on it and rescued her from some rednecks and then repo’d her car.”

“How the hell do you find out all this stuff? The guy doesn’t say two words to me, and when he does I can’t...”

“Maybe ’cause I listen?” she said. Kearny shrugged, half shook out two cigarettes, extended the pack to her. She took one, adding, “And how’d you know I’d started smoking again?”

He gestured at the ashtray of butts. “Warren doesn’t.”

They lit up. Giselle said casually, “Maybelle does a hell of a job, doesn’t she? A steal at forty a—”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.”

Ballard and Yana both came at the same time, crying out together wordlessly in their mutual release. After a long minute of dying spasms and thrusts, they fell apart and lay on their backs, sweating, panting, staring up through the semi-darkness at the plush hangings over Yana’s bed. Incongruously holding hands.

Almost unwillingly, Yana rolled toward him and put her head on his shoulder and gave him a few leads on some Marino clan Cadillacs. And then asked him for that favor she had in part brought him back here a second time to get.

At such a moment, what man in his right mind would say no?

If it isn’t raining in Seattle, it’s overcast. In fact, a publisher who wanted an aerial panorama for a book jacket once had to wait eight months just to get a clear day for the picture.

Take today: overcast, moist, but not raining; none was forecast until after the weekend. Which suited Big John Charleston right down to the waterlogged ground. Scraped out of the piney woods by his bulldozers here southeast of Seattle on Maple Hill Road, Big John had a subdivision he’d figured for a sure thing. Urban refugees fleeing California for the good life in God’s country, what did they care about a few trees got axed to give them space? How could he miss?

But despite a hell of a lot of money paid under the table to various officials, the permits and zoning and environmental impact studies had taken so long that the goddam recession had its claws in when he’d been ready to roll. So Big John had fifty lots all platted out, sewer and utilities in, roads dozed and graded for blacktopping — but no buyers. Not even Californians.

He needed loan extensions from the banks, but to show the project was viable he had to pre-sell lots, which meant paved streets. And now the goddam envirofreaks were double-dipping for a second share, and there was an injunction against him getting any more work done until some other goddam study had been made. Well, screw that. He’d do it anyway — except that all the local contractors, knowing he was broke, wouldn’t work on the cuff.

“We got assets.” Little Johnny was Big John’s son by his first wife, and, sadly, a mere sliver, not a chip, off the old block. “We got this model house done and three others framed, and the lake and the park and the golf course staked out—”

“We got dirt fucking streets is what we got.” Big John was the size of the late John Wayne, whom he would have resembled if Wayne had worn Jay Leno’s outsized jaw. “It starts raining and the streets turn to mud and we turn to mud.”

“Joe Adams Road Paving, Inc., is really big down in Los Angeles, Pa. Really big. He’s got prospectuses and photographs of jobs he’s done, ten times the size of ours. His specialty is getting in and getting the job done before the environmentalists can get a restraining order. He says even after they got one, like with us, it’s awful tough to tear up paved streets once they’ve been laid. He’s just moving into the Northwest, that’s why he’s willing to give us such a good deal.”

“But he wants the whole sixty thousand cash money up front,” said Big John, “and we got thirty thousand eight hundred sixty-one dollars and twenty-two cents in the corporate account.”

“Maybe offer him half down, Pa, give him the rest after we get the bank loans renegotiated. Meanwhile, all the streets in the subdivision will be blacktopped and ready for buyers—”

“Shut up. Lemme think.”

Big John heaved himself to his feet with a grunt, went to stand in the open doorway of the sales office in the model house. Overhead was the huge illuminated billboard Little Johnny had insisted would catch the eye of motorists passing on Highway 169:

He rubbed Jay Leno’s massive jaw. Southern California road contractor. Designer jeans and dark glasses, prolly driving some shitty little foreign bug a real man couldn’t hardly get his butt into. But here Big John was, with an unfinished subdivision would belong to the bank if he didn’t get those streets paved. So his kid’s $30,000 down wasn’t such a bad idea.

“We’ll see,” he said at last. He had no other options.

A filthy mud-spattered pale blue Cadillac Seville STS, the new one winning all those auto mag best-car-of-the-year awards, swung in from the highway. California plates, on the door the silhouette of a big black bird with the tips of its spread wings going off into ribbons of blacktop road. Below that:

A very fat man got out of the Seville. He wore a stained blue workshirt with the arms cut off above the biceps and khaki work pants riding low under a balloon belly. The bottom two buttons on the shirt had strained open, showing a tepee of hairy skin with a navel deep enough to hide a golf ball. His neck was thick and his arms enormous and sweat stood on a face too shrewd for one so fat. He stuck out his hand.