Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“Good enough,” panted one. “They’ll be coming soon.”

The three men in black jumpsuits donned black ski masks, picked up their weapons, and separated to their assigned posts.

The twenty-two-vehicle Lovelli caravan rolled east through the plains along a two-lane highway. The rising sun dazzled their eyes while showing that the early May buffalo grass, nevermore to be cropped by its namesakes, was still green and lush. In a month it would be sere and silver. A low hill rose from the prairie ahead; the road cut straight through it, flanked on both sides by rock faces of shale deposited by the shallow inland seas that had once covered the region. The Lovellis drove toward it.

The black-clad figure prone on the rounded apex of the hill took his binoculars down from his eyes. He said into his walkie-talkie, “Here they come, guys! ETA three minutes.”

As it reached the far side of the narrow cut through the hill, some three city blocks in length, the lead car of the caravan squealed to a stop: crosswise on the highway in front of it was a car-trailer used to haul new cars to dealers. It completely blocked the road. As the caravan skidded to a stop, a second big car-trailer came bouncing out of a sandy-floored wash to block the highway just behind the last Gypsy vehicle.

Trapped.

Yojo Lovelli, the clan patriarch at 55, got stiffly out of the lead car — a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville from Cal-Cit Bank, as it chanced — tested his knees, and looked around. There was a moment of relative silence except for the grumbling of the engines and the soughing of the prairie wind.

Then there was the unmistakable harsh metallic sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into a chamber. A man in a black jumpsuit and wearing a black ski mask over his head came around the front of the car-trailer with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.

Yojo, not yet intimidated, began, “Hey, whatta hell you—”

To be drowned out by a bullhorned voice from above them. “NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS! YOU ARE SURROUNDED!”

Another shotgun shell was jacked into another chamber; a second man, dressed and armed like the first, appeared above them on the lip of the embankment with the bullhorn. Behind them, yet a third shotgun was worked to bring a shell into its chamber.

“REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES!” ordered the bullhorn. There was a scrambling back of unarmed Gypsies who had started to get out of their cars and pickups. “EXCEPT FOR THE NEW CADILLACS...”

Yojo was poised on a knife-edge of resistance: he didn’t want to lose his Coupe de Ville. He didn’t want to lose face with his clan. But he didn’t want to lose any of his people to these madmen, either. His moment passed.

“Goddammit!” he said as he stepped away from his Caddy.

Within twenty minutes, the seven Cal-Cit cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road, empty of people and possessions, engines whispering. The man on the hilltop stayed there, watching for any approaching highway patrol vehicle. None showed. Where they had real luck was that no other travelers appeared on the road from either direction; of course it was early and the Gypsies themselves had chosen this route for its relative lack of use.

The driver of the truck blocking their passage east climbed up into his cab and ran the truck forward so one lane of the highway was open. The man on the top of the hill just couldn’t resist his bullhorn one last time.

“EASTWARD... HO! ”

The caravan moved. Yojo’s wife, Vera, cursed the car thieves through her open window in passing.

“May your testicles wither! May your members be soft! May your wives cuckold you! May your children be born dead!”

As the last car began to move, the other truck pulled around on the shoulder behind it. The driver jumped out to pull down the truck’s clanking metal ramp and fix it in place.

Because occasional cars were passing in each direction now, the three men quickly stripped off their jumpsuits and ski masks to become Bart Heslip (front truck), Larry Ballard (hilltop), and Ken Warren (rear truck). They tossed their attack clothing and sawed-off shotguns into the sage along the shoulder of the road. Within fifteen minutes, all the cars were loaded, along with Bart’s and Ken’s two other Cadillacs they had kept hidden in the arroyo.

“Think the Gyps’ll flag down the highway patrol?” asked Ballard a little nervously.

Ken Warren shook his head. “Gno.”

“Guess not, at that. ‘Hey, Officer — somebody stole our stolen cars!’ ”

“And the closest town is two hours away,” said Bart Heslip. He was feeling mighty good about this coup he had engineered. A lot could have gone wrong, from the highway patrol showing up to a Gyppo buck trying to jump one of their shotguns. None had. He added, “Ken and I’ll be on the interstate inside of one hour.”

Larry shook hands with them before they started off, yelling after them, “GO GETTEM, BEARS!” That had been Kathy Onoda’s invariable order as she sent them out into the field, and since her death it had become a DKA rallying cry.

When the rented truck-trailer rigs had disappeared to the west and no traffic was in sight, Ballard dumped the discarded jumpsuits, ski masks, and shotguns into the predawn hole they had dug. In the unlikely event the Gyppos did blow the whistle, no incriminating evidence would be found on them.

As he filled in the hole, artistically replanting over it an uprooted clump of rabbitbrush, the only observer was a ferruginous hawk kweee-e-eing down at him as it passed in its rocking, side-to-side flight half a hundred feet above his head.

Finally, he recovered his rental car from beneath a pile of brush in the dry gulch, and turned its nose east toward the Mississippi, and Stupidville — and, hopefully, Yana.

The recovery count in the Great Gypsy Hunt had just risen from fourteen to twenty-one.

In those same predawn hours that the DKA boys dug the grave for the contraband black jumpsuits and artistically sawed-off shotguns Bart had bought in Chicago, Lulu Zlachi was practicing some artistry of her own on Staley in his room at Stupidville General Hospital. The rom would be descending on the place at first light, and the King had to be ready to receive them.

“Hey, that stuff feels good,” exclaimed Staley.

“It is good,” she said complacently. “A mix of St. Ives Swiss Formula Firming Mask and Johnson’s Baby Oil. Mineral clay — make you look good and beautiful.”

“Make me look good and dead,” grinned Staley.

Lulu smoothed more of the mixture onto his hands and face. “Good and almost dead,” she amended.

“Close enough so they’ll believe I’m gonna go any minute?”

“But not so close you can’t have a miraculous recovery.”

Yes, it was a thin artistic line indeed that Lulu walked. Or rather, smeared.

At 9:00 A.M. a terrifically hung-over O’B, with only hazy recollection of the previous night’s events, was brought over from the four-cell town jail to the county courthouse and arraigned before Judge Konrad Spitz on charges of lewd and lascivious conduct and possession of pornographic materials.

Thank God, there was Dan Kearny himself, wearing a suit and a tie and a sour expression. What did he have to be so sore about? O’B was the one with the headache, wasn’t he? And sundry itches that suggested the jail needed a good fumigating.

Judge Spitz was a white-haired man with muttonchop whiskers and wire-frame glasses. He peered over them first at O’B and then at the two complaining officers.

“All right, what do we have here?” he asked.

Lloyd and Frank testified as to what had happened the night before. The whole courtroom was laughing — mostly drunks up from the tank, and their lawyers — when they had finished.