Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

“Now go, my children, to bring glory upon this tribe!”

The three of them were at last alone in Rudolph’s kitchen. By candlelight, Lulu looked old and worn.

“Best way to go to Rome to bring this glory on our tribe is find Yana and get back for the kumpania the money she stole from Ephrem’s body,” she said.

“Or for ourselves.” Rudolph made a deprecatory gesture. “We shall not forget Yana.”

“We don’t know the gadjo world well enough to find her in it,” Lulu said.

“Since we can’t find her ourselves,” said Staley, “we have to get someone to look for her who does know the gadjo world.”

“Who?” demanded Rudolph with surprise in his voice.

“The repossessors with whom we dealt in the matter of the thirty-two Cadillacs. Daniel Kearny Associates.”

Rudolph started to chuckle; it grew into open-throated laughter as he savored the irony. Lulu, lost in her fears of retribution should they break the marime curse laid on Yana, hadn’t yet caught on. She finished the last of the memorial mixture of wheatberry, cinnamon, honey, and sultanas before objecting.

“How we gonna get them to do our looking for us? Last time around they was hunting us down like dogs.”

“This time around we’re gonna hire ’em,” chortled Staley.

The spring fog came over the crest to flow down the eastern slopes of the Coast Range, and it was a dark and stormy night.

Well, not stormy, but man was it dark. And foggy. Bart Heslip pulled into a closed Standard station on Woodside Road to study his battered Thomas Guide Atlas for San Mateo County. Keep on Woodside right through town, maybe a mile, and Bear Gulch Road went off to the right.

Beyond town it was inky, no streetlights: horse country, big-tree country, sprawling-estate country. Most of the roads and lanes and drives leading off Woodside didn’t seem to have any street signs on them, at least not street signs that Bart Heslip was able to see.

Out near Sears Lake, Woodside Road just... ended. He got turned around and went back, his wipers on intermittent, driving five miles an hour with his flashlight angled out the open window so he could eye every track and driveway and road coming in from, now, his left. Cold wet early-hours air brought grass and horse smells and beaded his face and sent a shiver through him.

Finally. A brush-obscured sign: BEAR GULCH ROAD.

He backed up, turned in. Narrow blacktop, twisting and turning up the slanting side of a tree-covered hill. Dark, dripping foliage, drifting fog. A quarter of a mile in, the road widened to a flat area the size of a basketball court, with a black steel gate set in concrete and flanked by chain link fences. By the gate was a board with a number pad beside an intercom phone. No good without the correct combination.

Bart sighed, backed into the rear right corner of the lot, and settled down in the forlorn hope of somebody coming in or going out of Bear Gulch Road at one in the morning.

The 1995 Panoz kit car, sleek and low and gleaming ($39,995 on Giselle’s hotsheet), made a hard right past a redheaded guy asleep in his car on Toyon and into the carport to park over the oil stain O’B had noted earlier. The car was one of the greatest tools in Tim Bland’s seduction kit, but not the only one. Tim was in his early thirties with dark good looks and crisp shiny black hair and bright very direct blue eyes that sold many used cars to female customers; many found him handsome and slightly dangerous and went to bed with him. One would tonight.

Bypassing his apartment, he walked down the blacktop in the drifting mist, his shoes scraping subdued echoes from the tarmac. He had sold the woman’s husband a Honda, one thing had led to another, so now he had something juicy and frustrated and available waiting right on his doorstep.

He’d called ahead, so he went by the unlocked door and into the living room already rock hard. The night taxi driver’s blond wife was waiting for him, leaning forward over the back of the davenport wearing only black lace crotchless panties and a lascivious expression. He entered her from behind, spent almost immediately. They went into the bedroom and Bland sat down on the side of the bed to unlace his shoes. He had plenty of time to finish her off before her old man’s shift ended at 6:00 A.M.

She knelt on the bed behind him.

“You’ll get a kick, Mr. Wonderful said some redheaded guy woke him up in the middle of the day with a lot of questions.”

“Yeah?” Bland spoke with scant interest. He had long since decided that you only had to seem to listen to women.

“Questions about you.”

Bland was suddenly all attention. “About me?”

“What kind of car you drive, where you were, like that. Jake ran him off.” She reached around him with eager fingers. “Hurry up, honey, you got my motor running...”

Bland was indeed hurrying. He was already off the bed, pulling up his pants. He had no doubt at all that the redheaded man asleep in his car up on Toyon was after the Panoz.

“Listen, Vix, I gotta go. Be out of town for a few days.”

“Whadda ya mean, outta town?” Anger was clouding her face. “You got your rocks off, what about my rocks?”

Bland knotted his shoelaces. “Save ’em till I get back.”

“Save ’em?” she shrieked. “Why you rotten...”

Her curses followed him out of the house. There were a thousand Vixens in this world, only a few Panoz cars. Twenty minutes later he was swinging the sleek shiny auto up out of Toyon Court past poor slumbering O’B, who obviously had overpoured during his late lunch with Zack Zanopheros.

Bart Heslip, out of his car to shadow-box beside the front fender, had just knocked out Oscar de la Hoya with a really nifty combination when approaching lights and swelling engine noise swung the Bear Gulch Road gate silently inward. Immediately after a Lexus exited, Bart drove through as the gate swung shut.

The blacktop hairpinned back upon itself half a dozen times in the first mile of steep, heavily wooded hillside. A big mule deer buck, eight nascent points of velvet-covered scimitar antler adorning his head, poised on the edge of challenge in Bart’s headlights for two breathless heartbeats. Then he threw his black nose into the air and bounded off down the slope.

Around another hairpin, so tight and steep there was a mirror set at its apex to let drivers see approaching vehicles, a pair of fat-butt raccoons scuttled across in front of him. Their masked bandit faces wore sneers and their beer bellies rolled from side to side as they scrambled up the slope with their thieves’ honor intact.

Bart parked a dozen yards beyond the luminous numbers 7 and 2 tacked to a tree on the right-hand side of Bear Gulch. He killed engine and lights, sat listening to the night sounds and the creak of the cooling engine. Then, leaving Giselle’s hot-sheet on the front seat, he locked up his DKA Taurus and started back toward the driveway, disappearing down the hillside carrying only his repo tools and a flash.

A petite orange tiger-stripe cat was sitting in rapt attention beside a decorative koi pond in front of the rambling redwood-and-stone house. Obviously the Pussy Galore purloined by Romeo Ferretti from his former partner Chuckie up in San Francisco. Big slow drifting submarine shapes below the dark surface held the cat enthralled. The good life, cat-style.

Yeah! Bart’s careful flashlight showed the Ferrari parked in plain view, its nose against a stone-and-concrete retaining wall at the end of a widened-out parking apron. The top was up; moisture had collected on the sleek coachwork.

No visible lights in the house, but their bedroom might be over the two-car garage facing the driveway. Bart boldly tried the driver’s side door. Unlocked. Didn’t even have to use his picks on the old-fashioned wind-wing such cars sported. When he opened the door, the light under the dash showed him a stubby between-seats gear shift. He reached in, popped it into neutral. Hand brake already set. He swung the door almost shut without slamming, so the interior light would go out. Piece of cake.