Holy Rollers (2 page)

“Scam?” asked Chase. “What do you mean? We’re just trying to help.”

The man wiped the back of his hand across his damp brow, knocking his glasses askew. His shirt was now completely soaked through. “I’ve seen this sort of thing on TV. You two convince me I’ve got a leak, then steer me to a garage where you rip me off for repairs.”

Grant shook his head and smiled his most sincere smile, which could almost be passable at times like these when it was good to look sincere. “Listen, buddy, we don’t have a garage. We’re just two Good Samaritans who saw a fellow driver leaking
gallons
of transmission fluid all over the Turnpike, is all. If you don’t want our help…” He stood, followed by Chase, and they took a few steps toward the Taurus.

“No good deed goes unpunished, eh?” Chase said ruefully to Grant, just loud enough to be heard by the Lexus driver.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Grant.

Behind them, a voice called, “Guys, I’m sorry.”

“Happy travels,” Chase replied, not looking back.

“Hope you don’t seize up,” added Grant.

“No, really. I’m sorry. Please!”

Chase finally turned to face him; Grant followed a few seconds later.

The man, relieved they hadn’t abandoned him, forced a smile. “It’s just that I’m not always as trusting as I should be.”

Grant lowered his gaze to the puddle of transmission fluid on the asphalt, letting the man see exactly how hurt his feelings were. “It’s good to be cautious…I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Chase agreed, tugging absently at the brim of his cap. “There’s a lot of bad eggs out there. But you don’t want to lose faith in humanity.”

The man shook his head and wiped his brow again, and his glasses slid a half inch down his nose. “No, no. Of course not.”

“Okay, then.” Grant raised his head, squared his shoulders, and nodded toward the bay doors at the other side of the Ozzie Nelson Service Center fuel tanks. “In that case, why don’t you pop over to the garage and see if maybe they got time to take a look at your car so you can get back on the road.” His eyes traveled back to the large puddle near the tailpipe. “It looks bad, but I figure it’ll probably be a quick fix.”

The man blinked away sweat from his eyes and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Yeah, I should have them take a look.”

“Also,” said Chase, “it’ll get you out of the sun for a while. Brutal out here today.”

“Brutal,” Grant agreed.

The man opened the Lexus door, a ping announcing the keys were still in the ignition. “Thanks a lot, guys.”

“Not a problem,” said Chase, with a short wave, until he saw the man attempt to force his rotund body back behind the steering wheel. “Wait! You can’t
drive
over there!”

“I can’t?”

“You can’t! You want to ruin your engine?”

“But it’s just a few hundred feet…”

Chase looked at him sternly. “A few hundred feet that could
destroy your car
.”

“Yeah,” said Grant, with a somber shake of his head. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Maybe you’re right.” The man lumbered back to his feet, his pudgy right hand dragging a blue blazer from the passenger seat. The pinging stopped as he removed the keys from the ignition and dropped them in the blazer pocket before slamming the door closed. “Thanks again, guys.”

As he struggled into his blazer, Chase leaned close, resting one hand on his shoulder while the other gently patted him reassuringly. “One last word of advice:
We’re
not ripping you off, so don’t let them”—he indicated the garage—“rip you off either.”

“You see
that
all the time on TV, too,” said Grant.

“I won’t,” said the man. He turned and walked toward the garage, offering them a slight wave in parting. As he did, Grant and Chase returned to the Taurus, opening the doors but not quite getting in.

“No one trusts anyone these days,” said Chase with a sad shake of his head.

“It’s a shame,” said Grant. “Makes life tougher, that’s for sure. It’d be very good for business if people started trusting other people again.”

They watched until the man was almost to the garage and his large frame seemed almost normal-sized.

“Now?” asked Chase.

“Not quite.” Grant waited until the man opened the door to the service station office. “Now.”

Chase, having lifted the other driver’s keys from his pocket while delivering his one last word of advice about not putting too much trust in the garage, was quickly behind the wheel of the Lexus. Twenty seconds later both cars were on the ramp heading back to the New Jersey Turnpike, leaving nothing behind but an empty bottle of transmission fluid where they had been parked.

As he drove north toward New York City, closely following Grant, Chase first removed the EZ-Pass box from the windshield of the Lexus, then finally took the cap off his head and tossed it on the floor before running his fingers through his hair, bringing the styling back to life.

It’s too damn hot for a cap on a day like this
, he thought, and he cranked up the AC.

$ $ $

They had been in Philadelphia on a day trip—for them, helping some associates clean out a foreign money exchange office in a different city counted as a day trip—when Grant figured he should check in with Charlie Chops, proprietor of an occasionally legitimate garage in the Hunt’s Point neighborhood of the Bronx, to see if he might have use for the car they’d stolen for transportation. Chops hadn’t needed
that
car, but tipped them off that he needed a late-’90s Lexus, which led them to the dark green number Chase was now taking off the New Jersey Turnpike, figuring that’d be the first place the state troopers would be looking for it.

He followed surface roads through Jersey City and up the west side of the Hudson River to the Lincoln Tunnel, where he paid the toll in cash. He hated dipping into his own pocket for toll money, but using the EZ-Pass would have left an easy trail to follow.

Somewhere along the way he’d lost Grant, but that was fine. It was more than fine, really; it was ideal. Better they split up and take two different routes—he knew Grant was partial to the George Washington Bridge, while Chase had always been a tunnel fan—than parade a caravan of stolen cars the entire distance between the Ozzie Nelson Service Area and Hunt’s Point.

Grant is a bridge fan, and I like the tunnels.
Chase LaMarca laughed at that thought. Ten words that just seemed to sum up their long relationship.

They were opposites in personality, appearance, and almost every other trait except sexual orientation and criminal proclivity. Grant was abrupt and ill-tempered; Chase was sunny and charming. Grant didn’t particularly care how he looked; Chase was a slave to the mirror. Grant was old school, right down to his preference for license plates; Chase was the only one of them who could boot up a computer.

No one who didn’t know them would figure them for a couple. Yet they had made it work—and work
well—
for almost seventeen years, and neither of them was going anywhere.

It helped that they had some shared interests. Couples who didn’t share interests generally didn’t last for almost seventeen years. That their particular shared interests included auto theft, burglary, picking pockets, and even a little blackmail every now and then was beside the point.

Chase didn’t see Grant again for another half hour, when he finally pulled the Lexus to the curb outside Charlie Chops’s garage and saw him already standing out front, arguing with an older, dark-skinned man who was none other than Chops himself. Apparently the bridge had been the faster route today. Point to Grant.

Chase got out of the car, not bothering to lock it for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that it’d probably be disassembled by the end of the day. As he closed the door he heard Grant say, “C’mon, Chops, this is bullshit.”

“Sorry, Lambert,” said Chops. “But I only need one Lexus, and Farraday got here first.”

Chase looked across the parking lot littered with cars and pieces thereof, spotted the considerable bulk of Paul Farraday scowling on the periphery, and figured out the situation pretty quickly.

“So what do I do with this?” Grant asked, gesturing toward the dark green Lexus.

Chops nodded a silent hello to Chase before returning his attention to Chase’s partner. “Take it back where you stole it, I guess.”

“How ’bout,” said Grant, “I come back tonight after you’ve closed and park it at your curb. I know this is New York, so the cops wouldn’t usually notice for a while, but maybe they get a call. So they come to investigate, and when they do, this Lexus…it’ll be sitting right in front of this chop shop. Kind of awkward, right?” He waited until Chops offered the tiniest frown on his weathered, seen-it-all face. “Now, are we gonna negotiate?”

Chops rubbed his eyes and thought for a moment. “Eight hundred.”

“Make it a grand, and figure it’s a bargain ’cause you’ll already have late-nineties Lexus parts on hand the next time someone needs late-nineties Lexus parts in a hurry.”

The older man rubbed his eyes again before looking into Grant’s own watery eyes. “Okay, a thousand. Just to get you out of here, Lambert.”

“Whatever it takes.”

But Charlie Chops wasn’t done. As he started peeling grimy fifties out of the wad he always kept in his front pocket—because this aspect of his business was conducted exclusively on a cash basis—he said, “You know, Lambert, it’s hard enough running a small business these days without dealing with unreasonable suppliers.”

Grant ran a hand through his bristling, rapidly graying hair. “C’mon, Chops, I ain’t unreasonable. I just want what’s mine.”

“One of these days, you and people like you are gonna put me out of business. And
then
where will you be? Oh, you can probably find another chop shop, but no one who’ll treat you like I do, Lambert.”

“And that will be a sad day in my life,” Grant said, taking the bills when Charlie Chops finally offered them up. “A very sad day.”

Chops looked at the blue Lexus delivered to him by Paul Farraday, then at the dark green Lexus deposited at the curb by Chase, and finally at the late-model Ford Taurus Grant had arrived in.

“This hot, too?” Chops asked, indicating the Taurus.

“What do
you
think?”

“It a local car?”

“Nah. We had to go to Philly for a job, so we grabbed a car in Manhattan last night. But we dumped it in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.”

“So this is from…Bala whatever?”

“No, we left the Bala Cynwyd car in Philly.” Chops began to speak, but Grant stopped him. “The Philly car, we left in New Hope…”

“New Hope?”

Grant shrugged. “Heard a lot about it. Always wanted to see it.”

Chops shook his head. “So this is the New Hope car?”

“No, this is the car we got from the Ikea parking lot in Elizabeth.”

Chops chuckled. “You sure get around, Grant Lambert.”

“I try,” said Grant, not smiling as he shoved the cash deep into his front pocket without counting it. He trusted no one except Chase—and sometimes he didn’t even trust Chase one hundred percent—but knew that Chops would be square with him. “You want the Taurus?”

Chops laughed. “I wouldn’t have minded adding those parts to my inventory, but…” His head took in the parking lot. “Got no room now. Gotta get both these Lexuses into the bays before they start attracting the wrong kind of attention.”

Grant took another look at the Taurus. “I’ve been driving it since Ikea, and I really don’t want to press my luck.”

Chops put a hand on his shoulder. “When you leave the parking lot, make a left and drive four blocks. Leave it outside that high school with the key in the ignition and I can guarantee you’ll never see that Taurus again.” He leaned a bit closer to make sure the conversation was just between the two of them. “Best watch your boyfriend, though. That hairstyle, well, he’s lookin’ sorta…” He wobbled his wrist. “You know
I
don’t care, Lambert, but I can’t say the same for everyone in this neighborhood.”

“He can take care of himself.” Grant made a half turn until he could see Chase. “Ready to hit the road?”

Chase was, and was about to say so when Farraday was suddenly standing between them. Chops backed away, disappearing into his garage.

“You guys got a minute?”

“Ordinarily,” said Grant, “I’d say ‘maybe.’ But I figure you just cost me a thou or so by beating me to Chops with your Lexus, so now I’m not so sure.”

“What, now you don’t believe in the free enterprise system?”

Grant shook his head. “I got you lecturing me on free enterprise, and Chops lecturing me on the problems of being a small businessman. Did I miss something and accidentally enroll in an economics course?” When Farraday didn’t answer—which he knew he wouldn’t—Grant crossed his arms and impatiently said, “Okay, you’ve got one minute. Make it good.”

Farraday straightened his frame. “I got a cousin who got himself into some trouble.”

“That’s what cousins do. Get in trouble. Cousins and brothers-in-law.”