“Don’t smoke that shit in here. I can’t stand the smell!”
Mahoney lit up anyway. “When was the last time you could smell?”
“I can sure as hell smell shit.” Dolores picked up Mahoney’s satchel, still muffling the threats coming through the handset. She inhaled deeply. “See? Shit. Must be Mahoney’s Saturday night.”
Mahoney exhaled. He looked at the window to the office, surrounded by cheap wooden panelling. The shutters were down. “I’m guessing Fearless Leader is in there?”
Dolores grabbed a dusty lowball glass from her work station and rolled the chair to the window with one push. She placed the glass carefully on the window and listened. “Shouldn’t be long now.” Mahoney didn’t need the glass to hear, since he wasn’t half-deaf like Dolores. He could hear the passionless grunts on the other side of the window from the front counter. Dolores rolled back to her desk. She took a satisfying drag from her cigarette before re-engaging with the customer, who was finally starting to deliver his closing arguments. Dolores composed herself before delivering her stock answer. “Sir, the compound is not open for pickups until Monday at 10 a.m. Have a nice day.” She slammed the handset back into its cradle, turning towards Mahoney as she did. “You might as well go in. He’s gotta be done by now.”
Mahoney swung open the half-door next to the counter. As it slammed shut, he stopped. “I thought the office opened at nine.”
“It does,” said Dolores, as she lit up another cigarette. “I finish reading the Sun by ten.”
Mahoney opened the door to Larry Ballendine’s office, mentally preparing himself for the scene he knew was coming. The haze was as smoky as the front of the Hook Me Up office, tinged with the aroma of cheap cigars and recent sex. The woodgrain panelling was covered with yellowed pullouts of Winnipeg Sun girls. Ballendine was standing with his back to Mahoney, his trousers around his ankles. He was in the process of towelling off his genitals, a show that Mahoney never wanted to see. “Gimme a minute,” said Ballendine. “Just gotta do some detailing.”
Mahoney sat in the chair in front of the desk. He looked to his right at the bottle-dyed fire-engine-redhead hastily tying up a faded polyester kimono. She exited the scene without pleasantries, opening the bank of lockers on the wall with a knowing hand.
Ballendine grabbed a spray bottle of Drakkar Noir from the window ledge. He gave his nether regions six mists, then added two more to his posterior before hoisting up his trousers. He turned to Mahoney as he tightened up his belt on his size 44 waist. “How’s the three-six running?” Ballendine still had half of a cigar in his mouth as he spoke. “Give you any trouble?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” said Mahoney, as he rubbed his aching right wrist. “She hasn’t let me down yet.”
Ballendine settled into his well-worn Naugahyde office chair, a dark green model that had been fitted with duct-tape repairs, as needed, since the late ’70s. He folded the wash towel to a possible clean spot, dabbing at his sweaty forehead. There was plenty of forehead to dab: Ballendine had started balding in his late twenties, which was roughly 20 years ago. He hadn’t had a heart attack yet, as far as Mahoney knew. His desk was littered with the things that would get him there: three bottles of Pic-a-Pop Cola, spray cheese in a can, and a half-eaten double chili cheeseburger from Fat Boy Hamburgers on Henderson. He chuckled as he leaned back to put his feet on the desk. “She? She’s not a she.” He pointed at the bank of lockers where the hooker had made her exit. “That’s a she. A hundred-bucks-a-throw-kinda she.”
Mahoney glanced at the lockers. “Yeah, whatever floats your boat, Luscious.”
Ballendine winced. “Don’t call me that.”
“What? Luscious?”
“Yeah, who fucking started that shit anyway?”
“I thought it was Wallbanger.”
“Yeah, well, it stops now. And put out that Colt, that shit stinks.”
“Whatever you say Lusc . . . I mean Larry.”
Ballendine ignored the slip. “What did you get last night?”
Mahoney looked skyward to jog his memory as he butted out the Colt in Ballendine’s overflowing ashtray. “Let’s see. Four drunk tows, six lockouts, three boosts, the City yank out of the Red, and a D-bag with a Porsche.”
“Not bad,” said Ballendine. “Be a lot better if you dealt like Wallbanger.”
“That’s not my style, Larry. We’ve been over this.”
“Yeah, yeah, No-Baloney Mahoney. Squeaky clean, never pissed anybody off. Except for the service manager over at Terry Fucking Balkan.”
Mahoney didn’t care for that dig. “Fuck you, Larry. I didn’t steal those tools from the shop. They went out the back door like that Corvette did. The whole place was dirty as fuck.”
Ballendine remembered the story. “Yeah, some guy took that Vette for a test drive and never came back. Probably be fishing it out of the river when the water goes down enough. In the meantime, you can’t get a legit wrench gig in this town. Best you can hope for is changing spark plugs for the rest of the Elmwood grandmothers. What they pay you with? Pie?”
“I do all right.”
“Bullshit,” said Ballendine. “You work here nights six days a week for ten bucks an hour. You want to get your own shop on that? Yeah, I know about that. Good luck getting a bond or credit with a jobber with a thieving rap, even if it’s trumped up. Indie shop. What a fucking waste of time. The only thing you can afford is a caved-in ex-Gulf in the ghetto that’s on fire. You’d be better off putting on a wig and sucking dicks. Maybe Wallbanger can set you up.”
“Are we done here?”
“Yeah, we’re done here. Speaking of wrenching, when are you gonna fix three-six?”
“When you give me two bills for parts.”
“Two bills? What are you tuning it up with, baby seal pelts?” Ballendine threw five twenties at Mahoney. “Here’s a hundred. Plugs, cap, rotor, and wires. The rest you can get from Merv’s.”
“Oh, goody,” said Mahoney, as he scooped up the cash. “I guess I’ll just find a slightly less fucked-up carburetor.”
“Why don’t you take the one off that hot-rod Camaro of yours? You’re never gonna drive that thing again.”
Mahoney looked straight at Ballendine, hard. “It’s not for sale. And I’m fixing it.”
Ballendine couldn’t contain his laughter. “Fixing it? What, you got a steel mill in your garage?”
“Whatever,” said Mahoney. He was about to open the door when Jerry Waller opened it for him. He was wearing a black T-shirt that was at least two sizes too small, showing off his drug-fed muscular physique. Waller hoisted his white Vuarnet sunglasses on top of his permed black locks. The hairdo looked ridiculous, though no one in his right mind would point it out. One of the side effects of Waller’s steroid use was a hair-trigger temper. He smirked at Mahoney as he passed, throwing a much fatter satchel at Ballendine. “Cleaned up last night, boss-man. Must be all the grad boys who went stag.”
Ballendine unzipped the satchel. He looked at the wad of bills, easily in the realm of three thousand dollars. “That’s a lotta horny blue balls,” he said. “Probably the shortest work the girls have had this month.”
“Eight seconds to love,” said Waller. “I love grad season.” He turned to Mahoney. “How about thirty-six? Not too many dead-battery calls in June, eh Steve-Oh?”
“More than you’d think,” said Mahoney. He faked a yawn, turning to Ballendine. “I’ll pick up the parts. Thirty-Six will be ready for the Monday night shift.”
Ballendine waved him off. “Sounds good. And Steve-Oh?”
Mahoney turned to hear him. “What?”
“I’ll give you fifty bucks for the carb off your schlock rod.”
Mahoney rolled his eyes. He could hear Waller and Ballendine laughing as he closed the office door.
Chapter Five
June 9, 1985
9:35 a.m.
Mahoney eased behind the wheel of his powder blue Plymouth Gran Fury. The mid-’70s model looked like a retired police unit. It had started life as a supervisor’s car for the Winnipeg transit department. The shape of the City of Winnipeg crest was still evident on the front doors where the stickers had been removed. Everyone at the auction thought it was a police car, putting in low bids. Mahoney made it his for six hundred. Not bad for a beater that wasn’t too beat. He prodded the gas three times for ignition. Two was never enough. Four would flood it for sure.
Mahoney fished the five twenties out of his pocket. The one good thing about Luscious Larry Ballendine was that he never asked for a receipt for any of the parts that were needed to keep the Hook Me Up fleet mobile. In his previous life as a Chevrolet technician, Mahoney knew how to spot the best of the used parts on a wreck. He checked his watch: 9:38 a.m. Merv’s Auto Parts would be opening in 22 minutes.
Merv’s was a favourite hunting ground among the motoring poor and the outright cheap. It was one of the few businesses that opened on a Sunday in Winnipeg, located east of Highway 59 on Springfield Road. During the week, the operation would stay open till dusk. On Sundays, the “We’re Closing” buzzer would sound at 10 to four in the afternoon. The business model was best described as self-serve auto parts, with an Enter at Your Own Risk sign as the only safety warning. Mahoney knew the drill. A customer would enter the cashier shack and open his tool box. The cashier would nod, then re-inspect the tool box to make sure that no free parts were leaving the premises. Mahoney had been a regular long enough that no one checked his tool box. They knew he paid for far more than he stole.
A thief. That’s what they tried to call him, back when he worked at Terry Balkan Chevrolet Oldsmobile on Main Street, across from the CN Rail station, in the summer of ’81. The cops searched his garage, unable to find the set of impact sockets that the service manager had accused him of stealing. They fired him anyway, making a point of letting every General Motors dealer in town know about his sticky fingers. The actual reason for dismissal was something more biblical. Mahoney had been having an ongoing affair with the service manager’s wife, which had started with an impressive standing cloakroom fuck in the Marlborough Hotel, at the staff Christmas party in ’79.
The next few years were thin for work. The private garages knew he came with baggage. Most tried to take advantage of it, paying less for his skill-set than most shops would pay for apprentices. He had been driving Unit 36 for about a year and a half. Ballendine had been correct about Mahoney’s back-lane business. The work was simple fare, usually light tune-ups and maintenance in the customer’s driveway or garage, carrying most of his tools in the ample trunk of the Plymouth. It was a good cash business, with plenty of referrals from grateful grandmothers and stingy pensioners. Mahoney would draw up simple ads with a Sharpie and place them on the bulletin boards of the neighbourhood supermarkets. He would write his phone number vertically along the bottom of the ad about 15 times and use scissors to turn the phone numbers into detachable business cards.
Mahoney lucked out at Merv’s. A recent train derailment had pummelled a baker’s dozen of new General Motors products. A Chevy Suburban with a 454 cubic-inch big-block V8 engine gave up its spark plugs, along with their wires, and the complete distributor. This would be a major upgrade for Unit 36, since the new electronic unit had done away with the mechanical breaker points system. Someone had already made off with the Chevy’s carburetor. Mahoney hoped that a can of carb cleaner would do the trick on Unit 36. He stowed the spark plugs in the tool box as the freebie. Sixty dollars in cash bought the rest.
The night was starting to catch up with Mahoney. He stopped at the Mac’s store at Springfield and Rothesay for breakfast: a Pepsi and a Schneiders Hot Rod meat stick. The Sunday drive home was light. He had missed the morning church traffic, most of which was parked in front of the various denominations on Watt Street. The smell hit him like it always did, usually a block before Mission Street. It was the kind of smell that would make most men check their shorts. The stench was as much a part of the St. Boniface neighbourhood as the bilingual stop signs. Loveday Mushroom Farms had been around since 1932, and business was still booming, along with a compost scent that no scratch-and-sniff sticker could do justice. If you ate a mushroom in Winnipeg, chances are it was a Loveday. No one in their right mind would want to live next door.
McTavish Street always seemed to be in the proverbial downwind draft of the mushroom farm. The houses were located on the east side, with the west side devoted to the rail siding for the Central Grain elevator. If the smell didn’t get you, the rumble of slow-moving trains would. With all these things going for it, McTavish Street was one of the better bargains in the city for single-family dwellings, without having a ghetto postal code. Mahoney had purchased his one-bedroom bungalow in 1980 for just over 15 grand. That price included the oversized double garage.
Mahoney pulled the Plymouth up to the garage door. He held the meat stick in his mouth as he fumbled for the keys to the industrial padlocks on the sliding barrel bolts. He opened the door to the darkened garage, hitting the four wall-mounted switches with a knowing hand. The fluorescent tubes flickered at first, then started to build with illumination. Mahoney looked at the prize they had revealed: an Ermine White 1967 Chevrolet Camaro SS 350 coupe. His Hot Rod. Mahoney had purchased it off the Terry Balkan lot in the spring of ’79, a fresh trade-in from a weekend sale. The story went that the 60-something owner had found the Camaro’s non-assisted drum brakes to be hard to actuate with his age-related foot issues. On paper, the dealership showed a trade-in value of $1,350 for the Camaro, on a new Monza 2+2 hatchback. Mahoney picked up his prize for just $725.
The Camaro was half-covered with an old paint tarp. Mahoney pulled the cover off the car, revealing the reason why. The entire roof was caved in, thanks to a lazy summer Sunday at Kildonan Park in ’83. Mahoney had been parked across from the green space on Peguis Drive, the unofficial stretch for cool cars to park. He was checking out a yellow ’71 Ford Mustang Mach 1 parked in front of him when the branch from a hundred-year-old elm broke free from its trunk, landing on the Camaro’s roof. The thin pillars and sail panels did little to soften the blow. Neither did the picture of the car that appeared on the front page of the Winnipeg Sun, thanks to a freelancer shooting summer-themed background shots at the park. The headline didn’t help: CAMAR-OW!!! The insurance payout was painfully low. The Autopac coverage was cheap for the Camaro, though there were no extension policies in place for a car that wasn’t old enough to be considered an antique. The only plus was the ability to buy back his crushed Camaro for a minimal subtraction on the insurance payout. The adjuster looked at Mahoney strangely when he opted not to cancel his plates. “Maybe I’ll turn it into a convertible,” he said, as he exited the office with the cheque for $1,300. He had at least that much in the Camaro’s engine rebuild, and he’d be damned if he let some vulture pick the carcass clean for cheap at the salvage auction.
The car still ran, and Mahoney made sure by starting it once a month, though the collapsed roof made it tricky to reach in for the key. The pummelled roof skin had stopped three inches short of crunching the blue bucket seats. Mahoney knew the blue interior was going to look a little off with a purple paint job, if he could even get the Red River suicide car at the salvage auction. Manitoba Public Insurance auctioned off the cars deemed as total losses every Wednesday. It was a popular sale for the backyard mechanics, usually in search of lightly damaged cars that needed a fender, or maybe a door or two, to look whole again for an easy curbside flip. It was anyone’s guess as to when the Camaro would hit the auction list. Mahoney figured it would take at least a couple of weeks. He also knew that someone else could want it more than him. The tales of cars missed haunted his garage, as well as the garages of his friends, the way that fishing stories haunted the docks of a Manitoba lake.
Mahoney walked to the
front of the car. He let his right hand fall knowingly to the hood release. He raised the hood to reveal the Hot Rod’s heart, an energized chrome-laden re-interpretation of the original 350 cubic-inch V8. Mahoney figured the rebuilt powerplant was putting out close to 400 horsepower by now. At least, that’s what it felt like when the car finally found traction. He had added as many of the pieces that he could find that had started life on the big-block Camaros, like stiffer springs, front disc brakes, a beefier rear axle, and a Turbo 400 transmission in place of the original Powerglide. All of it would fit in any ’67 Camaro with minimal fuss, even a water-logged one.
Mahoney took a chomp of his meat stick as he checked his watch: 11:07 a.m. Sunday night was his day off, which meant he could grab a few winks, then start dismantling the Hot Rod in the late afternoon. A hard wake-up for 4 p.m., some cold pizza, and he’d be ready to start. All he had to do now was call the crew.
Chapter Six
Mahoney didn’t hear the clock radio buzzer, the one he had set for 4 p.m. He did hear the hammering on the screen door. He checked the time: 3:37 p.m. That could only mean Rick Scheer. He was always early.
“It’s open, Rickles,” Mahoney said groggily, as he rolled off the couch and knocked the Gondola Pizza box and the leftover crusts to the floor. The screen door creaked open. Rick Scheer gave a knowing kick to the bottom of the swollen door, the easiest way to pop it open. Scheer was in his early 30s, about five-foot-six, bald as a cue ball, and maybe 140 pounds soaking wet. He was a handy mechanic to have in tight places. Mahoney had met Scheer during his Terry Balkan days. The dealership had gone into receivership by 1982, the year Scheer jumped ship to Garden Gate Pontiac on McPhillips Street.
“Phew,” said Scheer, fanning his hand at his nose. “Smells like a ten-dollar hooker convention in here. Seven dollars after taxes!” Scheer was living up to his Don Rickles nickname the best he could. He wouldn’t be showcasing in Vegas anytime soon.
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