by James Tarr
“Oh!” he nearly shouted. “Yeah. My fault. Uhh…” he stared at the window, through which he couldn’t really see anything, then abruptly turned and nearly ran back into the house. Marsh nearly bit his lip to stop from laughing. Jesus, was that funny. The look in that kid’s eyes……he’d nearly shit himself.
He glanced down the street at his target’s vehicle, then back at the house into which the teen had escaped. “Shit,” he muttered. He couldn’t stay parked there, there was no telling who or what was going to come out of the house next. The target probably hadn’t seen anything, but he hadn’t stayed alive this long by taking unnecessary chances.
Marsh casually slid back into the front seat, Springfield still in hand. There was no movement at the house, and he didn’t think there would be, but the quickest draw was one where your gun was already in your hand. He looked around, double-checked, then set the Springfield down on the passenger seat. Only after he’d pulled away from the curb did he reholster the pistol.
Dave rubbed his face, grunted, and checked his watch. Okay, that was eight hours, and nothing. He shut Rush Limbaugh off in mid-sentence and called John while keeping an eye on the claimant’s house. Five foot four, two hundred and fifty pounds, and surprise, surprise, she had back problems. And knee problems. But apparently no problem getting to snacks.
“Yeah?” The answer was a short and harsh bark.
“Wow, you okay?”
He heard his boss sigh. “Yeah, sorry, just been on the phone for the last half hour with my wife, sorry, ex-wife, talking about divorce shit. Next time I think about getting married I’m just going to find a woman who hates me and buy her a house. Whaddaya got going on?”
“Nothing. Her car is here, and she came out onto the porch to get the mail about three hours ago, but that’s been it. I’m at the eight hour mark now.”
“You get video?”
“About half a second, the box is on the house right next to the front door, she was heading back in before the camera switched on.” Dave had a good view of the front porch of the house, but once you factored in reaction time, how long it took to turn on the camera, and however long it took to actually start recording once you hit the Record button….
“Yeah, go ahead and kill it. I’ll call the adjuster and see if I can talk her into another day on this one.”
“Maybe if she’s got any upcoming medical or legal appointments? That would get her out of the house, and then maybe she’ll run some errands either before or after.” He heard John sigh again, and realized that he probably wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. John had been a P.I. for years, and a fed before that.
“We’ll see. What are you doing next for me?” Dave could hear papers rustling over the phone.
“Half a day Thursday morning on Victor. That’s all I’ve got right now.”
“All right. I’ll call you when something else comes in.”
Dave hung up, checked his watch again, and glanced at the black leather…well, black fake leather folder on the seat next to him. He had a couple of subpoenas to serve, and it was early enough…... The Cherokee started up with only a slight hesitation even after running the radio for six hours (courtesy of the new battery he’d installed last winter), and headed out.
He didn’t do a lot of process serving, but there were two law firms who had his number when they needed papers served. His first stop was a law firm in Southfield he’d never heard of, tucked in on the third floor of a black office building on Northwestern Highway. The receptionist was a blonde who was a little too skinny for his taste.
“Can I help you?” she asked him. Just from her tone and expression he could tell she thought she was a lot hotter than she was.
“Yeah, I’ve got a Notice of Hearing,” Dave told her, holding it up with a half-apologetic smile. He found it was always more successful to go in with a smile than an attitude.
The blonde eyed the paperwork in his hand with a slight look of distaste. “Well, I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to take delivery of any legal documents, and none of the partners are currently in the office at this time. Perhaps if you could come back tomorrow…”
So that’s how she wanted to play it? Dave just gave her an even bigger smile. “Well, whether you’re authorized or not, I’m serving it on you,” he looked down at her nameplate on the desk, “Rhianna, unless there’s someone else here you’d prefer to see receive the service. Subpoena’s addressed to the firm, so any employee will do.”
She frowned at him, waited two beats, then picked up her phone. “Mr. Sebastian? I have a process server out here with a subpoena for the firm. Should I….?” Dave couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, but from the twitch of her lips he knew what the verdict was. “Yes sir, sorry to bother you.”
“I can take it,” she told him, not so feisty as before, and as she looked up at him Dave took a picture of her with his phone.
“Just so I have a record of who I served,” he told her, leaving the Notice on the counter for her to grab. He checked his watch again as he headed down the stairs to his car. Evening and weekends were the best time to serve people at home, and it was still a little early, but he decided to try anyway since he was already out. It would be nearly five o’clock before he got to the trailer park where his target lived.
Fifteen minutes out his phone rang and he checked the caller ID before answering. “What’s up?”
“You still out doing secret spy shit?” Aaron asked him. From the background noise it sounded like his partner was driving home from work.
“Serving papers,” Dave told him. “To a trailer park, actually. Maybe one of your relatives.”
“We’re not all related. Listen, I’m taking the fastback up to MIS this weekend. Why don’t you bring your ‘Stang, we can do a little racing?”
“That thing’s a classic, you’re going to beat it up racing.”
“What’s the use of having a fast car if you’re not going to drive it fast? Why do you think I never go to the Woodward Dream Cruise.? Six hundred horse and I’m going to sit in traffic, all day, doing two miles an hour, just so people can look at my car? I don’t fucking think so.”
“Driving fast is one thing, racing is another. You’re going to blow out that pretty new engine of yours.”
Aaron laughed. “Not before I kick a few asses. So? You coming?”
“Nah.”
He heard Aaron growl in frustration. “Why the hell did you have me do all that work on your ‘Stang if you’re not going to race it? Haven’t we had this conversation before?”
“Yes, but you don’t listen. I just wanted my car to be all that it could be. All that horsepower’s nice to have. Besides, you didn’t add any nitrous or supercharger or anything, you just got rid of all the factory bullshit robbing power from the engine so the hippies can sleep well at night. Mostly.”
“Fine, pussy. See you on Friday?”
“Not if I see you first.”
Whether it was officially called a trailer park or a manufactured home community, his destination was not the nicest such he’d ever seen, but it was a lot newer and cleaner than some of the trailer parks he’d served papers or done surveillance in, which included the crappy park on the south side of Warren where Marshall Mathers spent some time growing up. Shit, Dave had spent more time in the worst neighborhoods of Detroit than Eminem could ever hope to dream of or rap about. They were so bad that he actually didn’t have any problem with those residents—when they saw his white face in that kind of neighborhood, they just assumed he was a cop. And cops always had guns, and backup, so he was left alone. Any cops driving by assumed he was a fed, which was pretty funny. It was in the middle class neighborhoods where he always had the most trouble with local cops. When there’s no crime to keep you busy, why not screw with the PI….
Most of the trailers were double-wides with car ports. While some of them were landscaped and still looked brand new, a majority of them showed signs of age and disrepair.
He found his address in the back corner of the park.
The trailer was off-white and double wide with a sagging car port, under which was parked a rusting Impala with bad rear springs. Dave parked on the street out front and walked up to the front door, the PPO stuck in his back pocket.
The front door was open, but a storm door with a Plexiglas window showed him the front room was empty. He pressed the doorbell with a thumb, but when there was no answering sound from within the trailer he knocked on the aluminum door with his knuckles. It rattled loudly in the frame.
He was up to Five Mississippi in his head when a woman walked into view. She was about thirty, with black hair, wearing a low-cut green blouse that matched the eyeshadow filling the entire space between her eyebrows and lashes. The blouse revealed a tattoo in the middle of her chest, two cherries hanging from their stems. Classy.
“Yeah?” She stopped several feet back from the door, a suspicious look on her face.
“Miranda Richardson? I have some paperwork for you from Oakland County.” He pulled it out of his back pocket and held it up for her to see.
The woman shook her head. “She’s not here right now.”
Dave just smiled. “Well, ma’am, you match the description I was given of Miranda Richardson, so unless you can show me a picture ID that proves you’re not her, or you can peel that tattoo off, I’m going to assume I’ve got the right person.”
She shook her head again, now getting angry. “I’m not taking that. What is it, anyway?”
“Do you know a Brad Meisner? Were you aware that he went to the Oakland County Courthouse and obtained a Personal Protection Order against you?” PPOs were Michigan’s version of restraining orders, and the way the system was set up the judge only had to have one person’s side of the story to issue them. Most of them, in his experience, were a waste of the court’s time and paper, but not all.
“That fucker,” she spat. “I’m still not taking it.”
“Ma’am,” Dave told her nicely, “I don’t need to hand it to you for you to be served.” Everyone seemed to be under the impression he had to wrestle them to the ground and stuff the paperwork into their hand before they were legally ‘served’.
“I’m not opening the door,” she told him.
“You don’t need to,” Dave informed her. “I can leave it out here if you’d like, on the porch. Do you know how to file for an appeal hearing?”
“Fuck off,” she spat at him. Behind her he saw a toddler staggering across the floor in a sagging diaper. Dave gave the toddler a wave as he stepped off the small porch, setting the PPO down on the concrete.
“Thank you!” he called back to her cheerfully. Nothing pissed them off more than being cheerful. In his car he noted the license plate on the car before driving out of sight. He paused in the clubhouse’s parking lot and filled out the date and time on the Proof of Service form, and in his own Service notebook jotted down a description of her as well as the car, in case she claimed she was never served and violated the order. It had happened more than once.
“Done,” he said to himself. Two served, forty bucks apiece to him, which meant eighty bucks in his pocket for not much more than two hours’ worth of work, including the time he’d taken to pick them up from the lawyer’s office. He’d have to stop and get the Proofs of Service notarized before mailing them out, but otherwise he was done for the day. He had time for a quick workout, then dinner, and maybe a late movie. Gina would be coming over after work, she always did on Fridays, but he didn’t expect her until well after two a.m. Still, he needed to remember to shower after working out. You never knew when Gina would show up with an extra girl or two in tow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Downriver” wasn’t on any map of southeastern Michigan, but that didn’t make it any less real. To Detroiters, “Downriver” meant any of the numerous suburbs located immediately south of the city, “down” the Detroit River. As a rule they were middle- to lower-income bedroom communities with a lot of blue collar workers, and once almost every worker in the area was tied in some way to the Big 3: GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
Back when the auto industry was booming everybody in and around Detroit was doing just fine, but in this modern market it was every man for himself. Auto plant jobs were once nearly guaranteed for life, but that was history, and as the Big 3 had suffered repeated hits their Tier 1 suppliers had almost all declared bankruptcy or reorganized.
Local tool and die shops were filled with guys who had learned their trades in the auto industry, even if they no longer made anything having to do with cars. The domestic auto industry had never completely died, but Dave thought it had sure undergone a series of controlled demolitions. There always would be fewer Toyotas and Hondas on the streets of Detroit than in other major cities in the country, in part because of the huge employee discounts the Big 3 gave out, but Detroit would probably never go back to the way it had been, no matter how many bailouts the government offered. The genie was out of the bottle.
Traffic hadn’t been bad for a holiday weekend, and he’d been able to do better than the speed limit the whole way down I-75 into Downriver. He exited at Eureka Road and headed west into Taylor. Some of the residents of Taylor were perfectly happy with the nickname Taylor-tucky, even though many of the people who used it weren’t trying to be funny. As Aaron liked to say, “Shit, I do like guns, God, NASCAR, and wearing wife beaters, so if that makes me white trash, sign me and Kid Rock up.” The driveway entrance Dave was looking for was just past Telegraph Road.
The trailer park was old enough that the management company didn’t try to pretty it up by calling it a “manufactured housing community”. Dave wasn’t sure how old it actually was, maybe thirty or forty years just from the looks of the sign at the entrance. Not all the trailers in the park were that old, however, and even though a few of them sagged a bit there was more an air of disrepair about the place than danger. Most of the residents were old, or poor, or old and poor. He knew from personal experience it wasn’t the trailer parks where retirees tended to settle that saw a lot of visits from the cops.
Dave was just starting to realize that most people viewed the world through eyes that had been colored by their own experiences—because he’d started doing it. Lately, as he’d been driving around the city and the suburbs, he’d been seeing two types of neighborhoods—those he’d done surveillance in, and those he hadn’t. In the three years or so that he’d been working part time for John, he’d done surveillance all over the Detroit area and a few places out in Michigan farm country. He’d hunkered down in at least two dozen trailer parks over the years, and in Taylor at least a few times, but he was pretty sure he’d never done surveillance in this trailer park. Although they all tended to blend together in his memory. He remembered houses and trailers he’d watched, and cars he’d followed, better than he remembered the claimants’ names.
The concrete parking pad at Aaron’s trailer was taken up by his Mustang and Arlene’s ancient pink Geo Tracker, which everyone called the BarbieMobile. Past the cars parked on a brown patch of grass was Arlene’s other car, a green Ford Taurus that sat on one flat tire. Dave parked on the narrow street in front of the house, hoping nobody flew around the curve and tagged his bumper.
He climbed the steps and banged on the storm door, and as he waited he looked over his shoulder down at the Taurus. The front end of the sedan was crumpled in slightly, but apart from the flat tire the vehicle looked driveable.
“Hey, dude, come on in!” Aaron said, holding the door open for him. “You haven’t been down here in a while, glad you could make it.” A Marlboro was wedged into the corner of his mouth, bobbing with every word, and the smoke curled around his head. Even though they had the day off, Aaron was wearing his uniform work shirt, untucked over blue jeans.
“Fourth of July, where Americans started a long tradition of kicking ass and taking names,” Dave said. He knew that Americans had actually been in combat for over a year before the Declaration o
f Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, but nobody celebrated April 19th, 1775. Well, almost nobody.
“Damn straight,” Aaron said, hoisting a big glass of something red and slushy. Aaron rarely drank, but the Fourth was one of those exceptions. “Can I get you something to drink, margarita? Arlene makes a killer strawberry margarita.” Aaron headed back toward the double-wide’s small kitchen.
“Whatever you’ve got,” Dave told him. “Hey Arlene, something smells good.” She was in the kitchen cooking something, and gave him a wave.
“My family’s spaghetti recipe,” Aaron told him. “She’s just stirring it for me, I don’t let anybody else make it.”
While he waited Dave eyed the amazingly long orangish-brown shag carpet in the front room of the trailer. He thought they’d stopped making carpet like that in 1980. Maybe they had. The front room of the trailer was surprisingly big. Some double-wide trailers were over 1400 square feet, he’d read somewhere. Aaron had room for a ratty L-shaped couch, a La-Z-Boy recliner, a coffee table, and a big screen TV on a pedestal, and there was still room on the floor to wrestle. Past the kitchen was a full bathroom, and two bedrooms.
A brown blur came rushing at Dave from the back room, and he turned a hip to protect his groin as Aaron’s dog slammed into him. “Hi Peanut,” Dave said with a laugh. He reached down and rubbed the dog behind the ears. About forty pounds, Peanut was a pound rescue of indeterminate lineage. Tail wagging fiercely, Peanut did three circles around Dave, then ran back to Aaron’s mother, who was rolling herself into view down the back hallway.
“Couldn’t find anywhere else to go, or nobody’d who take you?” Aaron’s mother asked Dave, then cackled. She had a thick cigarette hanging from her mouth as she rolled her wheelchair into the kitchen. After a second Dave realized the cigarette wasn’t thick, her face was just very narrow. She’d lost a lot of weight since he’d seen her last, fighting a desperate holding action against some sort of nasty leukemia. Aaron’s mother was wearing a graying sleeveless shift, and her arms were scary skinny, with very prominent blue veins.