32 Cadillacs (17 page)

But repoman was what he liked best, he was really good at it if they didn’t try to make him talk to people. He got to use
his smarts when he was a repoman. He got to figure out what the other guy had done and was going to do next. There was excitement
and challenge and now and then intense danger. The perfect job.

Not that he’d faced any danger this weekend.

The woman with the can of coffee had taken off.

The guy with the big boyfriend hadn’t come back.

But lots of other people had been home. Pedestrians now, every one of them. The guy in Fairfax in Marin County, up on the
hill with the dirt road, who’d wanted to argue about his truck until Warren had picked him up under the arms like a baby and
set him on a shelf in his garage as if he were a can of paint.

“Gnaw gnhew nthtay nere nhtil Ahm ghawn.”

The guy didn’t look like he understood the words, but he stayed there on the shelf as Warren drove away in his pickup.

The man and his wife down in Burlingame on the Peninsula with the twin his-and-hers Buick Reattas and the vicious watchdog.
Warren had stolen the first Buick at 3:00
A.M.
, the second at 3:30, the first from the driveway, the second from the carport, without even waking up their Rottweiler in
the backyard. In fact, he’d tied a big red bow he’d found in the back of one of the repos to the gate of the dog’s pen as
a little joke.

There had been one hairy moment in San Francisco’s Castro District when a crowd of hostile gays had been watching him break
into a Ford Aerostar van. But some guy had helped chill them out, and then, when Ken was about to drive away, had handed him
the keys! The registered owner. He’d just stood there watching Ken take it, ashamed to admit being behind in his payments.

Then that other guy down South of Market, who had jumped on the hood of his own Plymouth Laser and spread his topcoat wide
in front of the windshield in an attempt to keep Warren from driving it away. The Laser hit a phone pole, but still ran, so
it came off better than the guy on the hood: he’d ended up in SF General with breaks and contusions and a bad case of gutter
mouth from French-kissing a sewer grate.

No, the problems Ken Warren had faced hadn’t been the subjects whose cars he was taking. The first was that along about 5:00
A.M.
Monday he had run out of gas—him, not his car—and had fallen asleep on stakeout at 25th Ave and El Camino del Mar in Seacliff,
The lady with the Beemer 535i never showed, and he woke bleary-eyed and fog-frosted at 6:30. He washed and shaved in the men’s
room at the Seacliff Motel up behind Sutro Heights, even had toast and coffee in their dining room before driving unwillingly
back toward the DKA office.

Unwillingly, because that’s where his other problem was waiting. He hadn’t had a key to the DKA garage, so he’d street-parked
the cars he’d repossessed around the block the office was on. Worse than that, when he’d run out of parking places he’d left
the final repo right-angled across the sidewalk with its front bumper nudging DKA’s heavy garage door.

He bet Dan Kearny was going to be really steamed about that.

W
hen Dan Kearny got to the office at 7:33 Monday morning, he was really steamed. Some idiot had nosed a car across the sidewalk
to block the DKA storage garage door. And wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a single parking place in either direction where
he could leave
his
car until he could move this one.

After double-parking in the street with the blinkers on, he went through the office deactivating the alarms, then out the
back to unlock the heavy wooden sliding door and flick the switch on the little motor that rumbled it aside. Grumbling to
himself, he got the car started and was backing it out into the street when Giselle double-parked behind it, boxing him in.

“What’s that doing here?” she demanded.

“My very thought. I’m going to leave it in the street for the cops to tag and tow—”

“You can’t. Until we turned in our files last week, I was carrying the paper on that one.”

“I’ll be damned!” said Kearny. “It must have been in that fistful of cases I gave Ken Warren on Friday. He must have grabbed
it over the weekend and parked it here because he didn’t have a garage key. Not too shabby for a new man.”

“There’s another one of mine across the street.”

“Got two? Hey, terrif!” He paused, suddenly uneasy. “Ah, listen, Giselle, I fired the cleaning service on Friday.”

“You
what?
Why didn’t you wait until I found somebody else who we can count on to—”

That’s when O’B drove up and half got out of his car.

*   *   *

O’B had spent most of Saturday at the airfield up in Sonoma, trying to get a line on the Gyppos who had “sold” the ancient
biplane to Doc Swigart—no luck—most of yesterday in the Old Clam House under the freeway near the Army Street off-ramp, and
most of last night in an all-night steamroom on Market Street soaking clam juice out of his system.

One foot on the blacktop, he craned cautiously over the roof of his car as if he were still hung over despite his fresh-scrubbed,
russet look from the steam. He shamelessly gargled his r’s for his best Blarney-stone brogue—a gone-slightly-to-seed Irish
potato with bloodshot eyes.

“Faith an’ bejesus, an’ ’tis the wee leprechauns who’ve been busy this blessed weekend.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” demanded Kearny, though he was starting to get an idea that he already knew.

“Makin’ all the shoemaker’s shoon in the night an’ slippin’ away at first light.”

“How many of ’em are yours?”

O’B came around his car to slap a lean freckled hand on the hood of a green Cutlass Supreme right in front of the office.

“This.” He turned and pointed down the block. “That one. And that pickup over there from Marin. Two more around the corner
…” He grinned at Kearny. “Maybe now you appreciate just how much work I turn out in the course of a day’s—”

Kearny had just begun pointing out that someone else had repossessed all those cars assigned to O’B, not the Irishman himself,
when Larry Ballard drove up.

*   *   *

Ballard already had been around the block and through little one-block Norfolk Alley behind, and there was not one damned
parking place to be found. Usually, early on a Monday morning, there’d be a dozen free.

And now this, people standing around in the middle of the street waving their arms. What was going on? A convention?

Or maybe it was trouble. Yeah, there were Kearny, Giselle, O’B… some guy’s car blocking the garage… He squealed to a stop
behind O’B’s car and piled out, feeling behind the seat for his tire iron, only then belatedly realizing that nobody was there
except the DKA crew. He went up to them.

“What happened?”

Kearny swept his arm around in an all-encompassing gesture. “How many of ’em were assigned to you, Larry?”

For the first time Ballard began checking license plates.

“I’ll… be… damned…” He shook his head. “I see those his-and-hers Buicks from down the Peninsula, I bet I hit that address
a dozen times without getting a
sniff
of those cars, just a big damn dog who tried to bite off my—”

“Don’t say it! “ exclaimed Giselle in alarm.

“—foot,” finished Ballard, then said in equal alarm to O’B, “Nobody grabbed our Mercedes from Pietro, did they? I—”

“I didn’t see it.” O’B turned to Kearny, “How many guys
did
you have out in the field over the weekend, Reverend?”

Before Kearny could respond, Bart Heslip drove up.

*   *   *

He bounced out of his car like answering the opening bell.

“Who got run over?”

“Last week’s cases,” said Ballard.

“I don’t get it.”

“Somebody did. Repeatedly.” Then it was Ballard’s turn to wave his arm around like Balboa on a peak in Darién. “How many do
you recognize, Bart?”

Surprise widened Heslip’s eyes.

“That Laser with the front end bashed in was one of mine.”

“I hope we didn’t do the bashing,” said Kearny quickly.

“I couldn’t say. I never laid eyes on the car while I was carrying the assignment. I’d started to think the guy was made out
of smoke…” He interrupted himself in sudden panic. “Nobody got Sarah, did they? If I spent my weekend chasing Gyppos without
a sniff and somebody knocked off that Charger—”

“I didn’t see it on the street,” said Ballard. “Unless it’s inside—”

“The guys I had out over the weekend didn’t have keys to the garage,” said Kearny.

Heslip’s eyes had lit on another of the parked cars. “Hey, there’s that Aerostar van, the one that—”

“Out in the Castro,” nodded Giselle, who had assigned the case to him in the first place.

“I only had it for a week,” said Heslip defensively. “With all the other cases I was working—”

“The guy who got it only had it for a
weekend
,” Kearny interrupted in his most offensive manner.

Heslip was indeed offended. “What guy?”

“I only had two men out, and one of them is a green pea who just started Friday. So probably Morales—”

Just then Morales drove up
in one of the Gyppo Caddies!

*   *   *

Instead of being grateful, Kearny, that
chingada
, was on him like a junkyard dog.

“What are you doing with that Cadillac?”

“Driving it,” smirked Morales as he got out. He’d driven it the whole weekend, Jesus, what a boat! Power everything. “Bringing
it in to make out my report and—”

Ballard had been looking through the windshield to cheek the I.D. number against their Gypsy Cadillac master list.

“Yeah, it’s one of ours,” he said in a crestfallen voice. “But what’s this bastard doing working for us again, anyway?”

“
Chinga tu madre, maricón!
You wanna go ’round right—”

Heslip got between them but Ballard was ready to go—last time Morales had knocked him down, this time that wouldn’t be so
easy for him. Ballard was older, wiser, fitter, with a few years of karate under his belt.

Not that karate, come to think of it, had made much difference to Fearsome Freddi of the leather underwear.

Ignoring the ruckus, Kearny said, “We needed a couple of extra men to pick up the slack on the files you turned in so you
guys could work the Gypsy stuff.”

“Only a
couple
of extra men?” Giselle was looking around with a dazed expression. Apparently
all
the parking places were filled with repos. “Two guys? All this?”

But Kearny had remembered all over again that Morales wasn’t supposed to even
know
about the Gypsy cases, let alone be working any of them.

“You snooped those Gypsy files!” he stormed. “That’s what you were doing when I saw you in the front upstairs office on Friday
afternoon! Dammit, Morales, I want—”

“Hey, I got one, didn’t I?” Morales jerked a thumb at Ballard. “That’s more than hotshot here did over the weekend.” He stepped
closer to Kearny, an insinuating look on his face. “Listen, I bet you’re offerin’ everybody a bonus on each Gyppo car they
turn, right? Now it seems to me that if I was workin’ Gyppo cases along with the rest of the guys…”

“No bonuses, and I can’t trust you anyway,” said Kearny flatly. “Not on something like this. You were hired to pick up the
slack—”

“I’d still like to know who repo’d all these cars, since it obviously wasn’t any of us,” said O’Bannon.

That’s when Ken Warren drove up.

*   *   *

He knew it, he just knew it. The car he’d left in front of the garage door now was backed halfway into the street, and Kearny
was waving his arms at some Mexican dude in the middle of a bunch of people like maybe there’d been an accident.

He didn’t remember a Spanish surname on any of the cases he’d worked, but he’d been knockin’ ’em off pretty fast, he couldda
forgotten a name. He’d never gotten a crack at so many easy repos in his life. These DKA guys must really
talk
to the man, like Kearny had said, instead of just grabbing cars.

Ken Warren really liked just grabbing cars.

He double-parked his company car like everyone else had, and sort of tiptoed down toward the group. Hey, they were all operatives,
he bet. In fact, he bet he could figure out who was who just from reading the reports on the cases he’d been handed.

He couldn’t place the Mex guy, but the Mick with red hair and freckles and boozer’s face, that had to be O’Bannon, the one
signed himself O’B.

The black guy he’d seen fight, that was Bart Heslip. Not very marked up for an ex-pro middleweight.

Kearny had said the tall good-looking blond lady was Giselle Marc, office manager. She also worked the field—he couldn’t blame
her there, that’s where the action was.

And the lean handsome muscular guy, must do a lot of surfing or SCUBA-diving to have his hair bleached almost white like that,
he had to be Ballard.

Inevitably, Kearny saw him. Came over working his face and waving his arms just as he’d been doing at the Mexican guy a couple
of minutes ago.

“Warren, what the hell were you
doing
over the weekend?”

Giselle breathed, just loud enough for Kearny, “What do you think he was doing? Proving he is the greatest carhawk the world
has ever known.”

The rest of them had turned to stare at Warren as if he were from another planet—and he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet.
He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, trying to figure out what Kearny wanted him to answer. Then inspiration struck.

“
Hey, Mr. Kearny, Ah gnthalk ta gha man!
”

Kearny astounded him by busting out laughing. And then clapping him on the shoulder and demanding, “You talk to
all
the men?” He seemed to be getting the hang of the way Ken spoke.

“Well, no, juth nthoz who—”

“How many cars did you grab since Friday afternoon?”

He didn’t have to consult his case files to answer that one. He’d counted them up during breakfast. “Nthevnteen.”