The End of Marking Time (2 page)

It was one A.M. by then, prime time for a drop-off. Some people might be sleeping at this time of night, but I knew my old friend had been waiting for someone like me to call and he’d be ready to go in minutes.

Later, I turned the corner onto a quiet street with a balance of apartment buildings with protected parking lots and single family houses that jostled for on-street parking. No one lived here long enough to get protective about the neighborhood. There were enough boyfriends visiting so that an extra vehicle hanging around for a few days or even a week went unnoticed. Crusher made sure no one in the know boosted rides from this street, and since cars weren’t disappearing, the cops never had a clue how many cars traded hands here or how long we’d been doing it.

When I parked halfway down, Double came up alongside in a BMW 530i. He waddled out big as ever. He got the name Double back in school because like most of us he got free meals, but he always took double lunch. He was eight years ahead of me, one of those guys we looked up to as heroes. Back then he was the biggest kid for seven blocks, so he was recruited by every gang around. When he made his choice, the balance of power in the neighborhood shifted. He was big enough to avoid the gangs altogether. He told me so a year before my mother chased me out. He was twenty-two and had been busted four times for selling drugs. I could tell he regretted what he’d done, but by then he was trapped. He’d dropped out of school in ninth grade. He was committed to the gang and even if he could get out, who would hire a guy with an arrest record three pages long? Even now, six years later, he was still working for the guy who convinced him to join his gang all those years ago. They’d moved out of drugs and into cars, but I had little doubt Double was going to spend serious time in prison. Crusher had a good system, but so many cars disappearing couldn’t go unpunished forever.

After my talk with Double, I started acting like I was Swiss. I knew who was jumped in to which gang, who the leaders were, and what they were after. I couldn’t bring them together and work out a treaty or anything, but I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to stay neutral and make enough friends inside to get myself out of trouble if I offended someone. Trust me, these guys got offended real easy. I only worked in the suburbs, far from their turf and that’s how I stayed in one piece. Double was the best mentor I ever had. What he told me kept me safe for a long time, but he couldn’t protect me from what was about to happen.

I flashed the keys as Double finished his walk around the Mercedes.

“Couldn’t make the payments?” he joked.

He bounced back into the street and nodded toward the kid getting out of the BMW. I tossed him the keys and took his seat as Double squeezed behind the wheel against the desperate pleas from the shock absorbers.

Double fanned four hundreds in my direction.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You know the rate.”

“Not for this car. It’s worth eighty grand.”

“That’s not up to me. You know that.”

“Let’s go see the man.”

Double gave me a second to reconsider. When I shut my door, he took off with the kid in the Mercedes right behind us. Most guys were afraid of Crusher, but I knew he got his nickname crushing beer cans and not gang members. The name was even more apt now. He bought totaled cars from insurance companies and swapped the VIN to an identical stolen car, then he crushed the evidence and sold it for scrap. Ironic, the insurance guys saw him as a good business partner because he paid top dollar for the cars he wanted, while he made a fortune off their losses.

Crusher told me you’ve got to be patient to get rich. A lot of what I do is modeled after him. He takes cars off the street and hides them in an underground garage for two years. That gives him time to dig out the anti-theft devices and gives the hot cars time to drop to the bottom of the insurance company lists. Even the victims have stopped looking for their cars by the time Crusher sells them. It took me a long time, but I learned to do the same with a safe deposit box and stolen jewelry. The cops only worry so long about stuff taken in a house break then they give up. I’m careful not to take anything too unique or possibly sentimental, and by the time I bring my stuff into the pawnshops it has long cooled. The way things were going for me, I could have taken a year off and it wouldn’t have crimped my style a bit.

Double parked out front and I followed him through the dark office and downstairs. The basement was one huge room glowing with neon light from every corner. I walked around the couch and stood halfway between Crusher and the car chase playing on a sixty-inch plasma. He loved car chase movies, watched them over and over. He ignored me, intent on the action. I couldn’t help but smile. He had this narrow little beard under his chin that hung straight down like an extra finger. One day I imagined that it continued up, joining the short mustache and matching eyebrows, like a dragonfly had landed on his face. Since then I couldn’t look at him without connecting his eyebrows, his nose, and that goofy beard into an insect. To top it off, he framed his face with narrow blond braids. The guys around him were too frightened to tell him he looked ridiculous. I could probably get away with it, but I wasn’t into taking unnecessary risks. I kept my smile to myself.

When he finally looked up, he smacked my hand. “What’s up, hero?” He flashed a look at Double and said, “You’re not getting greedy on me?”

“I brought you a Mercedes SL six hundred.”

He leaned forward on the couch. “And four hundred doesn’t quite cover it?” His eyes lit up knowing how much he was going to make. “If you had the balls, you could sell it for ten grand. It’s worth a hundred.”

Ten grand would save me a lot of night work, but I didn’t want to look too interested. I didn’t even want to think about a hundred grand on one score. Infringing on Crusher’s business wasn’t a good idea, even for me.

“You don’t want to do that, do you?” he asked softly. Then he raised his voice with a decisiveness that required a response. “What’s it look like, Double?”

“Mint. He brought the keys.”

“Sweet. You know those keys cost me four hundred bucks?”

“Glad I got ‘em then.”

Crusher fanned a handful of hundreds and I took them without counting. Later I’d find he’d doubled the regular deal. I would have been happy with six hundred. With fourteen hundred in my pocket and the credit cards, I was due for some downtime.

“Wanna beer?” Crusher asked. “You earned it.”

“No thanks. I’ve got one more stop.”

Double perked up and jingled his keys. I gave him a thumbs-up, thanked Crusher, and headed for the BMW. I told Double I was headed for the hospital and he knew just where I meant.

“Nice ride you boosted tonight,” he said.

“You’re not doing so bad,” I said, meaning the Beemer.

He quieted down and focused on driving. I knew the Beemer belonged to Crusher, but I never knew it bothered Double until then. He lived with Crusher underneath the junkyard and had everything he really needed.

A mile later he said, “You think Cortez has it right?”

Cortez was the first Latino in the South Side Slashers. He worked nights in the hospital. He bought my plastic and resold it for extra cash. “Buying plastic? You ain’t into that?”

“No. I mean working for the man.”

I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. Double wasn’t a bad guy, wasn’t born to be a killer or anything, but he made his living by making two or three ten-minute drives a day. That and he ran errands for Crusher. I’d thought about nine-to-fiving a few times so I could buy a house and file taxes like a regular guy, but what could I do? Who would pay me enough to live on? If I couldn’t do it, Double had no chance.

“Why you want to do that?” I asked.

“Didn’t say I did.”

“Why you asking?”

“Just thinkin’.”

“Don’t you have everything you need living with Crusher? Why would you want to screw that up?”

He didn’t answer, but just hearing my own question I knew. “Who is she?”

He turned and drove for a few blocks before he said, “What about you? You ever think about going straight and settling down?”

He was twenty-eight. Girls were starting to ask him about settling down and having kids. Big as he was, it must have been hard finding girls. If they knew he’d probably never have a legitimate job it’d be even harder. He couldn’t have them sleeping in the basement at the junkyard.

I wondered if he’d been saving money like I had. My safe deposit box held enough cash for a down payment on a house, but I couldn’t tell a loan officer that I made sixty grand a year robbing houses. I could save enough to buy a house in cash, but the cops would be all over me then. I’d made my decision when I was fifteen. I’d spent the last five years becoming a world class housebreaker and that’s what I’ll always be.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I said.

Double was going to have to work out his woman problems on his own.

Double dropped me a block from the hospital. I wished him luck and called Cortez from the sidewalk. He gave me the usual about being busy and that he’d meet me at the regular place when he got his break. I didn’t care. My timing was good. The bars had closed an hour earlier and only a few stragglers wandered the streets. I adopted a far-away look and a casual walk on my way to the diner. Anyone who looked too awake at two-thirty A.M. was up to something. I wanted to look like I’d had a few, but not so many a cop would hassle me while I still had the plastic and the list of account numbers and passwords in my pocket. Once I dumped this stuff on Cortez, there was nothing to link me to the fat guy’s house.

The place was hopping when I walked in. The late night crowd was hungry for greasy burgers and breakfast food to sober up for the drive home. There were a few seats at the counter. The only open table, a booth right next to the door, was a little more private, but not much. I sat down and watched a guy sitting with three women in the next booth. He desperately needed a wing man to create a diversion. The blonde he was talking to was smoking hot and sloppy drunk. She kept bobbing forward and cupping his face in her hands. He kissed her a few times, but the friends kept reaching across the table and breaking them up.

The waitress interrupted. I ordered scrambled eggs, OJ, and French toast and went back to the scene in the next booth. Why did gorgeous women always have friends who couldn’t get a date on a bet? It had to be a safety thing. One of the women laughed like a mule. When the other turned, she might as well have been one. Wow. No sober guy would throw himself into the mix, not even for all the cash in my pocket. Nothing could keep those two girls from putting an early end to that guy’s night.

Cortez walked in. I shifted my eyes to him, but I was still thinking about the poor guy paying for four breakfasts in the next booth. We’d both had an exciting time and we were both going home lonely. Unfortunately for him, he was emptying his pockets while I was stuffing mine.

“Not bad,” Cortez said with a nod to the booth behind him. “Want some of that?”

“Don’t think I can deal with the complications.”

He tugged his uniform and said, “Too much for you?”

I meant the rabid guard chicks, but I didn’t like the challenge in his eyes. Like I couldn’t hold a real job. I was good at what I did. The best. I was invisible moving in and out of houses. Why couldn’t I do some weenie job in a white uniform?

“What’s so hard about what you do?” I asked.

“Nothing. Most of it’s just showing up and getting bossed around. I wheel sick people from place to place, deliver supplies once in a while. It’s cake. Especially at night.”

“And you think I can’t do that?”

“You’ll let someone tell you what to do day after day for eight bucks an hour?” My face must have gone slack. “That’s what I thought.”

“Why do you do it?”

He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a picture. I knew he had a kid, but never thought much about it. In the picture, the kid was on the floor surrounded by stuffed animals. She looked too small to ask many questions.

“What am I supposed to tell her?” Cortez asked.

“You think you’re some hero because you wheel toilet paper around the hospital?”

“To her, yes. She thinks I help sick people.”

Women, families, they screwed everything up. Would Double end up doing the same thing in a few years? Serving the man so he could go legit and pay the way for his family? Would it happen to me some day? No chance. No kids for me. This wasn’t some stage I would grow out of. I wouldn’t go straight for some skirt. Cortez and Double weren’t either. They were pretending, covering so the girls could hold their heads high. But they couldn’t make it working for the man. Never would. That’s why they had to meet me after midnight.

“What you got for me?” The question brought me back.

I took the cards from my pocket and slid them across the table.

Cortez took them one by one until he got to the bank card. “This is no good without the PIN.”

I pulled the sheet from my pocket. “Got a pen?”

He forgot about the cards and focused on the paper in my hands. I slid it to him and watched. His eyes got big when he saw the account numbers. This was going to be a great payday.