Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

So she’d just held it, waiting for dark; Yana, after all, was a creature of the night. Now it was nearly midnight . If he didn’t move soon... Then her binoculars caught Teddy coming down the front steps, heavy plastic garbage bag over his shoulder.

She tried to figure out how to drive with her legs crossed as she tailed him down Tiburon Boulevard to the 101 freeway overpass to Mill Valley, the lights of Sausalito winking from her left across broad placid Richardson Bay.

They ended up on the Shoreline Highway in Tarn Valley, where Teddy stopped his little red Alfa beside the closed old-fashioned fruit stand on the dirt verge of the Tennessee Valley Road intersection. Eleven forty-five. Obviously, a rendezvous set for midnight. And an old cemetery was nestled on a tree-shaded hillside above Tennessee Valley Road. Odds-on, a cemetery dig.

She kept going, found some bushes where at long last she could ease her bladder, returned to the fruit stand for a tremendous shock. The pink 1958 Eldorado ragtop was just pulling up beside Teddy’s Alfa! One of the most beautiful women she had ever seen got out. Black-haired and exotic... Yana! Had to be!

Oh, that bastard Larry! Somehow he had gotten the pink Cadillac away from Rudolph and had given it back to Yana.

Giselle wasn’t going to let him get away with it. At a 7-Eleven she bought a box of heavy green plastic garbage bags and three newspapers, returned to Tennessee Valley Road seeking an easy way up the hill to her left. She stopped where the high cutbank dipped for a dry wash, half-choked with brush and ginestra, overhung with a live oak.

Giselle got out her flashlight and stuffed a garbage bag with ripped newspaper. At least she had running shoes in the car. She looked both ways; then, wishing for slacks instead of a dress, hiked her skirt up around her waist and started climbing, using her flashlight only to keep from running into a tree or getting stuck in the eye by a branch.

Ten minutes later, scratched and breathless, she hit a wide packed-earth path that slanted up the hillside to her left. Five more minutes on that, and she emerged at a hairpin turn of a narrow blacktop road. Beside the road was an abandoned wheelbarrow with a rake, a hoe, and a shovel in it.

The brown sign with the green tree painted on it read:

Yana swung the huge car left into the steeply slanted blacktop drive. The top was down and Teddy felt chilled of body and mind. In the backseat was a shovel and $75,000 of his stepfather’s — no, he meant his — money.

“I wish Ramon was here,” he said in a shaky voice.

Yana stopped just short of huge black iron double gates, flanked by grey massive concrete cubes twenty feet square.

“He would not come.” Her stunning eyes burned into his. “He does not approve of this. If you wish to withdraw now...”

“No, I... The curse...” His hands were like ice while his forehead was clammy with sweat. “But the cemetery’s closed, the gate’s locked...”

Yana made a strange quick graceful gesture at it with both hands and intoned loudly, “Nashti jas vorta po drom o bango.” Just the Gypsy proverb “You cannot walk straight when the road is crooked,” but it was the prearranged signal and was why the Eldorado’s top was down.

Before Teddy’s astounded eyes, the long-hasped padlock struck through the joint of both gates clattered to the ground as the right-hand gate slowly swung wide. Yana put the Eldorado through the opening. The narrow blacktop road continued by a long grey massive concrete mortuary building set into the hill like a bunker; a few scraggly patches of ivy grew on it.

Yana sent the big car questing up by it into darkness.

Ramon trotted out to close the gate in case a security patrol came by. He previously had picked the lock and set it back, open, to fall off when Yana signaled him to pull the thin strong black wire he had attached to the right-hand gate.

When he heard Yana’s car returning, he would reopen it.

It was just after midnight at the Giggling Marlin, and Morales had miscalculated. He’d drunk three of the Martin’s goldfish-bowl-size margaritas, and his lips were numb. His head was swirling. Now he was shoveling in refritos y arroz y pollo — but it was much too late. He was blasted.

So was just about everyone else in the place. The Giggling Marlin was a huge box crowded with dozens of tables, all jammed with babbling patrons, mostly yachtspeople. Mexicans, Norteamericanos, other gringos — Australian, Scandinavian, German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish... A dozen languages, a hundred accents fenced in midair.

Against the left wall was a heavy pulley and tackle such as sports fishermen use to haul up by the tail and display the big game fish they have caught. On the wall beside it in bright cartoony colors was painted an eight-foot marlin up on his tail, with sunglasses and a deep-sea fishing rod. He was laughing.

Morales turned to look over the room yet again, and there they were. Four gringos and two swarthy men who looked Mexican but who had to be his Gyppos, because one of them was pocketing a set of Cadillac keys. All of them were drunk and boisterous.

Morales staggered to his feet and out the door — Madre de Dios, how he was drunk! A serious miscalculation. A group of Mexicans was laughing and exchanging remarks in highly accented English with the gringos . One wore a leather vest and no shirt; a three-foot-long iguana was perched on his shoulder, its long whippy lizard tail curled down against his naked chest. The iguana’s eyes mirrored with lidless lizard contempt Morales’s own vast contempt for mankind.

“He is your friend?” he asked the Mexican in Spanish.

“My dinner,” said the Mexican, and they all laughed.

Morales said, “I wish to see the rich North American’s Cadillac.”

“The new Cadillac? With the word ‘Brougham’ on the trunk lid? With the wire wheels and the leather seats and the tinted glass and the cornering lights and—”

“The very one,” said Morales gravely.

“I have not seen it.”

They all laughed again. Morales found a crumpled $20 bill, said with great assurance, “But you can discover it.”

The Brougham was found, but it had the d’Elegance option package, which included a theft-deterrent system. Morales had no key for it. Caramba , he wished he wasn’t so drunk; he couldn’t remember where he’d left his own car, with his repo kit in it.

Even with the kit, and sober, getting away with the Caddy wouldn’t be easy. Cabo was at the very southernmost tip of Baja, where the Gulf of California met the open Pacific. There was only one paved road north to La Paz, capital of baja del sud .

He had to find a way to get a head start on them.

Morales returned to his half-eaten frijoles and latest margarita, caught the arm of a passing waiter to talk earnestly about the Gyppo without the car keys. Greenbacks changed hands. The waiter departed. Soon a threesome of waiters appeared. One carried a tray with a huge brimming margarita on it. The second carried a big black frying pan and a heavy metal ladle. The third carried a funnel.

Suddenly the lights dimmed, flickered. The waiter with the funnel grabbed the Gypsy under the chin and tipped his head back to shove the funnel into his mouth. The one with the frying pan beat it lustily with his ladle. The one with the margarita poured it into the funnel.

As the Gypsy gagged and choked and thrashed and blinked his watering astounded eyes, everyone in the room clapped, whistled, and cheered his macho performance. He got more drunk and out of it by the second, intoxicated not only by tequila but by the crowd’s flattery of his all-important machismo .