“That was productive,” Buster commented, lighting yet another Camel. He exhaled, looking wistful. “Should’ve said you had five grand to play with, though. Those two shitheads didn’t deserve it half as much as I do.”
“You weren’t kidding about them not liking you.”
“Great men are always polarizing, Nikki,” he sighed. “It’s the curse of greatness, all through history. JFK, MLK, me… We can’t be universally loved.”
“I’m glad you’re keeping such good company.”
Buster tossed his empty road soda on the floor behind him and cracked a second Miller tallboy that he pulled from under his seat. “You should spend more time with me. See how much fun we have?”
Salinas was an hour south. As we left South San Jose behind, the landscape rose and seemed to stretch, relax, rolling brown hills replacing the endless asphalt of Silicon Valley. The Mamas & the Papas came on the radio and I fell quiet, listening, thinking of my parents as I always did. One of their favorite bands. I wondered what my parents would be like today. If they would have changed, or moved, or grown apart. I hoped not. I liked to imagine them still in Bolinas, in the same little blue house where I had been raised, evening strolls along the beach, teasing each other while doing dishes. Still being alive.
I was curious about something. “I thought new cars were impossible to steal—especially the nice ones?”
Buster drummed the beat on the steering wheel with a big hand. “No such thing as impossible to steal. If it has wheels we can steal it. Hell—if they ever make flying cars we’ll steal them, too. A nice model like the G-Class is actually easier for us to find because not as many people have the skill set to jack ’em. You have to be an expert and there aren’t that many experts. If you were looking for a 1990 Honda there’d be two million idiots running around with a screwdriver who could’ve done it.”
“What do people even do with stolen cars these days?” It was an area I knew little about. “Hasn’t technology made it impossible to move them?”
“Far from it.” He smiled and adjusted his visor to block the sun as the road twisted. “You got the chop shops, same as always. Cut stuff into parts, resell pretty much anywhere you want. Shipping international is bigger than ever, too. Tons of countries charge import taxes and tariffs that would make loan sharks drool. Who wants to pay that? Easy enough to fill a couple of shipping containers and sail them out of Oakland or Long Beach—off they go to Asia or South America or wherever. People line up to buy everything we send. And retagging has gotten huge.”
“Retagging? License plates, you mean?”
He shook his head. “VINs. The cops call it VIN cloning. Swap out the VIN on the hot car with one belonging to a legal registered vehicle, have someone resell it online. By the time they find out, it’s someone else’s problem.” He took a gulp of beer and wiped his mouth. “You got a stolen car, you can make money off it. Trust me.”
As we approached Gilroy the landscape became agricultural, hills steeper, cattle grazing, freeway narrowing to two lanes. My parents had brought us down once for the Gilroy Garlic Festival and I could still remember the pungent taste of my garlic ice cream cone.
“Don’t worry,” said Buster. “I’m not a nosy man. I won’t ask. Let’s just enjoy this little road trip together and appreciate each other’s company.”
I leaned back, stretching my legs comfortably against the dash. “Ask what?”
“Well, I suppose if I was nosy, which I’m not, I might wonder who drives this Mercedes you’re looking for, and why the frugal, sensible Nikki Griffin is throwing five grand at a couple of chop shop dummies who talk better and more honest when they’re hanging upside down being tickled.”
“Guess we got lucky,” I said.
“Lucky?”
“That you’re not the nosy type.”
“Right.”
We drove a few more miles.
“Fine,” I said.
Buster scratched his jaw and looked over. “Fine?”
“Fine, as in what do you want to know? Keeping in mind that I can’t use anything but hypotheticals and would hope that even hypothetically you would not ever say a word about any of this. To anyone.”
Buster was, after all, putting himself in a fair bit of danger to do me a sizable favor. More than sizable. I owed him a bit of an explanation.
“Hypothetically,” Buster said, “I should be able to handle that.”
“Okay. Then let’s say I’m tracking down a con man. And let’s say I was hired to do this by the adult son of a very prominent San Francisco family, because he thought his elderly mother was being blackmailed by said con man. Furthermore, let’s say that this guy was recently kidnapped by a couple of Central Coast gangsters who plan to throw him into Monterey Bay tonight if they don’t get what they want.”
“They want money?”
“How’d you know?”
Buster grinned. “Everyone does.”
I acknowledged this point with a nod.
“What about the blackmail?” Buster asked. “The son was wrong about that?”
“Not entirely.” Talking through everything aloud, to someone else, was helping. “I just think the son heard part of a conversation and, since he hated this guy anyway, assumed the worst—wanted to assume the worst. But I don’t think the mother—who, by the way, makes flint look soft—was being blackmailed by the guy I’m after. I think she was asking for his help. With something else. Because she wanted me out of the picture, until I told her the con man had been kidnapped, and now”—as I spoke I was realizing—“it’s not just that she has a soft spot for the fellow and doesn’t want him hurt. She needs someone down there as her proxy, and until the guy is free…”
“That someone is you,” Buster finished.
“Exactly.”
He thought this over. “So who’s actually blackmailing the family? The fine upstanding Central Coast gents?”
“Right.” Mr. Z looking me over, eyes appraising. You’re still pretty… Come find us if you ever need a job. “At first I just thought they were a particularly nasty bunch of pimps, but there’s more going on with them.”
“They’re the ones with the G-wagon. Who you’re trying to find.”
“Right.”
We drove another mile or two.
“You gotta watch it with some of these guys,” Buster observed. “Everyone thinks all the dangerous people live in the big cities, but the groups who control trucking routes through the state, they got all kinds of things going on. Drugs, girls, gambling, protection, hits for hire, you name it. Stolen cars are the nice part of their business. I’ve bumped into them here and there. I keep my distance when I can.”
“You telling me to be careful? That’s a first.” My voice was half-teasing.
Buster’s was not. “Crazy as that sounds, what I’m hearing, yeah. I am. Hypothetically, of course.”
“Duly noted.”
He asked the obvious question. “How the hell did the rattlesnakes you’re looking for get involved with some blue-blooded, ball-and-gown SF types? Where in all hell is that connection?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “But I’m starting to think I really have to find out.”
* * *
After Gilroy, the 101 started to ease west, as if searching for the ocean with biological instinct. We drove on another ten miles in silence, gentle hills swelling up from the ground, white cloud puffs drifting through blue sky. The land untightened. Steinbeck country, here. It felt good to be free of the clogged, urgent arteries of the Bay Area. Good to have air and space and land. Salinas Valley wasn’t far from Monterey, maybe twenty miles inland, but it seemed a different universe from the ocean-side boutiques and hillside mansions I had been around the day before. Now we were in a vast, agricultural flatland, thousands of acres of artichokes and lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries, a staggering wealth of produce that reached every corner of the nation.
Buster drove us east, away from downtown Salinas,
turning the Corvette onto a dirt road. Infinite rows of crops spread in all directions, planted with the geometric precision of a chessboard. The Corvette wasn’t built for dirt, but Buster didn’t seem to care a bit. We jounced along, throwing up a brown dust cloud behind us. I could see groups of migrant pickers scattered among the vast fields and wondered what they were picking. The laborers were tiny against the landscape. It seemed impossible that humans could harvest so much produce by hand.
“We’re going the right way?” I asked.
“Shortcuts,” Buster said.
In another minute he turned off the dirt onto a paved, curving two-lane road that eventually widened and straightened. Urban life returned quickly. Traffic lights and suicide lanes, low-rent buildings, cheap motels and dingy gas stations and liquor stores. Nothing looked expensive. Nothing looked new. None of the big Holiday Inns or shiny, twenty-pump Chevron stations that cropped up around the freeway exits. We were far enough from the 101 that the people running these secondary franchises had to be happy with whatever spill-off traffic they could get. Crumbs. We passed a roadside produce stand selling fruit and vegetables out of cardboard boxes. The dusty guy working the stand watched the Corvette pass, expressionless, stolid under his straw hat.
I watched the road go by.
Thinking about cars, and the people who took them.
28
The wholesale car lot covered what must have been several full acres of asphalt. Endless rows of newly washed cars were lined up with the same precision as the crop fields we had driven through. There was a series of low, flat buildings, like squashed hangars, on the far side of the lot. Buster pointed the Corvette toward the buildings. Heat waves shimmered off the blacktop. Rows of cars slid by in dizzying numbers.
“The guys who work these things are geniuses,” he commented.
“How so?”
“At putting cheap lipstick on old pigs.” He gestured at the rows of gleaming vehicles. “Half of these are probably two hundred miles away from falling apart, but they look like they’re ready for the Daytona. Take any piece of junk in the whole damn world, hammer out the dents, paint the dings, give it a buff and polish, sand down the curb rash, throw some nice new oil into a crap engine, kill the Check Engine light if it blinks, whatever they gotta do. Just get them looking good enough to sell.”
“How many of these do you think were stolen?”
Buster laughed. “How many stars in the night sky?”
I was curious. “Who buys at these places?”
He parked near the first of the buildings and finished the last of his beer. This one he tossed out the window. The empty can landed with a small clank on the hot pavement. “You need a wholesale dealer’s license. Which isn’t hard to get. Then they go out and resell ’em for whatever they can, anywhere they can. A volume business. Barely any profit margin. Just keep the stuff pumping in and going out. Volume. That’s all that matters.”
We parked and got out. Cars were everywhere. Sure enough, they looked beautiful, windshields spotless, paint gleaming, tires a crisp, clean black. I wondered what they were like on the inside. Maybe fine. Maybe rotting away. Like people, not safe to trust appearances.
Workers darted here and there. Everyone seemed in a rush. Contrary to the motionless rows of cars and still, sedate landscape, there was a shifty, hustler energy in the air. I thought of flies buzzing around spoiled fruit. Buster stopped a short guy in a yellow Hawaiian shirt who was bustling around with a clipboard.
“We’re looking for Leo.”
“Good luck with that. I’m busy.”
The guy was already walking away.
He stopped as he realized Buster was now holding his clipboard.
“Think you dropped this,” said Buster.
“Hey, give that back!”
Hawaiian Shirt flushed and reached. Buster raised the clipboard slightly higher.
Buster was six foot five. The man in front of him must have been five foot six. He would have needed a stepladder to get his clipboard. Realizing that he looked foolish trying, he gave up. “Leo’s back that way.” He nodded toward the buildings. “Give that back, okay? C’mon, I need it. I got work to do.”
“Show us where Leo is.” It wasn’t a question.
We followed Hawaiian Shirt as he trotted into the middle hangar. I found myself walking quickly to stay apace. He took short steps but a lot of them. Low margin, high volume. Like the used car business. Inside, the hangar floor was poured concrete. High ceilings lined with fluorescent lights. The front space was set up as a commercial car wash. Sweepers, brushes, a motorized track built into the floor. A line of cars waited their turn. At the other end, a handful of men vacuumed and dried and rubbed stray marks off tires and hoods. A substantial operation. Our new friend ignored the commotion as he led us past the car wash into a warren of offices and drywall partitions and narrow corridors. The concrete here was painted white, like the walls and ceiling. Everything had a temporary, on-the-fly feel, a military base in the middle of a desert. As though tomorrow they could all be somewhere else.
Our conscripted guide opened a door and called out to a man who was barking into a cell phone. “Leo. Someone looking for you.”
Hawaiian Shirt snatched his clipboard back, gave Buster a dirty look, and hastened away.
The man on his cell phone said something, hung up, and turned to us.
Leo, from what I understood, auctioned off stolen cars, and he looked like a man who did exactly that. His slicked-back hair was the color of unwashed fox fur. Small, shrewd eyes looked like a pair of adding machines set into flesh and blood, and he was smiling with all the whimsy of an alligator. His three-quarter-length leather jacket was the color of an old penny and he sported a diamond pinky ring that could have been bigger, but could have been smaller, too.
He looked us over, taking in my chest and Buster’s size. “Help ya?”
“Mikey and Eddie in San Jose sent us down,” Buster said. “About the G-Class.”
“Oh, yeah, Buster, right?” Leo stuck out a hand that vanished into Buster’s paw. Then he looked at me. “Hey, sweetheart, how ya doin’?” He wasn’t looking into my eyes and didn’t even try to shake my hand. That was okay. I’d seen cleaner hands. I didn’t bother with an answer.
“Lady Luck is smiling down upon you,” Leo said. “I think we can find what you’re here for, and we might even be able to do it before the next moon landing. Follow me, ladies and gents, follow me, right this way.” He didn’t bother to look back to see if we were.
We followed Leo farther back into the disorienting maze of hallways. He took a right, then a left, then another left until we reached a door that led into a room set up as an office. There was a cheap couch at one end and a cheap desk at the other. The desk held a boxy old PC that looked like it should have great-grandchildren by now. A closed door led to what must have been a bathroom or closet.
Leo walked over to a side table that held a bottle of Four Roses Bourbon and poured into two glasses. If he was worried about not having an ice machine, I wasn’t seeing it. The glasses looked like they could have used a spin through the car wash out front. He handed one to Buster and took one for himself, then grinned at me, showing gold-capped teeth. “Sorry, doll, I forgot the margarita mix.” He chuckled as though he’d said something funny.
I didn’t say anything. Buster looked like he was about to say something, but I caught his eye. We were here to get something. No need to let pride get in the way. If Leo got us a lead on the G-Class, he could make all the margarita jokes in the world, and worse.
The door opened. A younger guy walked in. His jeans were smeared with paint and his hands were smudged with grease.
“Devin’s gonna help us track the bitch down,” Leo explained. His eyes found me again. “No offense, sweetheart. My mom used to wash my mouth out with soap but I guess it didn’t stick.”
“Maybe she didn’t use enough soap,” I suggested.
Leo’s face froze in a grin. “Mayb
e not.”
The door opened again and a giant walked in. Like a sitcom, where someone new jumps in every minute. Except no one here had said anything funny. The car auction business seemed to be a constant blur of people coming and going. I took an evaluative look at the newest addition. He had a big, dull face and big hands that were also smudged with grease. Suddenly, Buster was only the second-biggest guy in the room. The new man must have weighed three hundred pounds and he had at least an inch of height on Buster. Big, but soft in the middle. He looked like he’d played linebacker for a good college team and then spent the next five years hitting dollar wing nights. The little room was feeling smaller and smaller.
“Big Brad’s gonna help, too,” Leo said. “He’s a whiz at this stuff. Speaking of which, I gotta take a leak.” He stepped into what turned out to be the bathroom. I glimpsed a slice of toilet seat and sink before the door shut.
Buster looked up at Big Brad. “So, you’re a whiz at this stuff?”
Big Brad looked down at Buster. “That’s what the man said.”
I heard water and pipes running and then Leo was back. As he closed the bathroom door behind him I saw the same slice of seat and sink. He checked his wristwatch, a square gold face and alligator strap. “I’ll be right back. I got a guy callin’ me back about this any second. I’m gonna try to get you a name and maybe an address, too, if we get lucky.” He gestured at the couch. “Make yourselves comfortable. Hell, take your shoes off, as long as your socks are clean. Be back in five, ladies and gents. Don’t have too much fun without me.” He winked at me. “Especially you, sweetheart. I wouldn’t want to miss any kinda fun you’re having.”
He stepped out and closed the door.
“He keeps up that shit and I’m gonna wash his mouth with soap, whether you want me to or not,” Buster grumbled. He helped himself to another drink. Between the beers at lunch, the road sodas, and the bourbon he must have had at least five or six through the afternoon. He seemed about as tipsy as if he’d been drinking chamomile tea. This time he poured a bourbon for me, too. A liberal pour, which seemed to be the only kind Buster knew.
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