“It’s got to be in here, nephew,” Weathers said as he loosened the rocker panel on the passenger side of the Falcon. “She’d put money out on the street for information as to where this short was.” The two men and the car they were disassembling were in the backyard on the driveway where it ended at a detached garage. Two good-size toolboxes were open and tools were strewn about on the cracked, oil-stained concrete.
Waid had his hands on his hips, looking at the rear bench seat they’d removed from the car. The neoprene covering had been carefully pulled back and the stuffing was exposed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this. Pebbles is gonna kill me.”
Weathers made a sound in his throat as he used a penlight to look into the cavity he’d exposed. “The payday we’re gonna see on this, you can buy her two of these wagons tricked out however she wants ’em.”
“Oh, these motherfuckers,” a female voice groused.
“Shit,” Weathers cursed.
Pebbles Hastings stood inside the back gate, which they’d left open. Her aunt Debra Hastings was with her. The two women were unarmed but they had little fear of being shot by the men. Both had been here before and the niece recalled seeing the snub-nose that belonged to Uncle Ro. He’d once been married to a second cousin of her aunt.
“Baby, when we bust them greedy fools, they’ll come clean. Or I’ll knock some sense into that Ro’s head,” Debra Hastings had said.
“I know how this looks...” Weathers began, hands in front of him.
“I know exactly how it looks, sucka,” Debra Hastings said, pointing at him. “You two figured you’d be slick and beat Pebbles out of whatever reward or lost treasure map you geniuses angled to find in this car.”
“I wouldn’t have used the gun on Peebles,” Waid said. “It was just for scare.”
“Shut up,” the aunt said, moving forward.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Debra Hastings stopped before Weathers, who wore overalls. “After all this time, you suddenly believe that bullshit about the Hauler?”
“Who?” her niece said, something familiar tickling a corner of her memory.
“It was on the other night on Astonishing Mysteries, Dee,” Weathers said pleadingly.
“I oughta slap the shit out of you, Ro. You two simple Negroes were smoking weed and watching that show when you thought this brilliant idea up, weren’t you?”
Waid looked chagrined. “They showed the car. You know, on the what you call it, the re-creation.”
“Of all the stupid,” she began.
“Who are you talking about?” Pebbles Hastings asked.
“Hauler Kershaw,” her aunt answered, exasperated.
That elicited a tingle of familiarity. “The football player.”
“Yeah,” her aunt drawled.
The younger Hastings snapped her fingers. “You two were a couple in high school.”
Her aunt sighed. “Aw, shit, here we go.”
1998
Hauler Kershaw: “I told you guys, I’m not gonna hurt anybody.”
Police Detective Tim Guidry: “We know that, Hauler. We know that. We just want you to pull the car over.”
On television screens across the Southland and the rest of the country, millions of viewers watched in real time as the LAPD did what was later dubbed the first ever little-old-lady chase through the tony neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Black-and-whites on his tail, Fenton “Hauler” Kershaw was driving his mint silver-gray 1967 Jaguar XKE through the winding roads of Brentwood. Unerringly, akin to his actions in his previous career as a Super Bowl–winning running back dodging defenders, Kershaw evaded the numerous dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs of the area with seeming ease.
An LAPD helicopter and two others from competing news outlets followed the Jag on its roundabout course while in-studio news hosts supplied the hyperbolic narrative. They knew that Kershaw was talking with a police negotiator. He had both hands free to drive and shift as he was using the then fairly recent Bluetooth device, which the talking heads made sure to mention for the enthralled afternoon viewers. Activity stopped at numerous workplaces throughout the city as people gathered in lunchrooms or offices to watch the chase. Kershaw had been a well-paid and well-exposed pitchman for the Bluetooth device. Later, after his capture and trial, after his stabbing death during a prison riot had spawned multiple conspiracy theories, a transcript of the communications during the slow-motion chase was released.
Guidry: Hey, man, it’s Tim again. You’re getting close, huh? Hello? I’m losing you. Hauler, you still there? Hello? Hauler, you still there? Come on, man, talk to me. Hello? Hello? Hauler? Hello! Hello, don’t freeze me out, man...We can resolve this. We’re almost at the goal line, right?
The transcript noted in parentheses that the phone cut off and the negotiator redialed.
Guidry: This is Tim again.
Kershaw: Oh, hi, Tim—
Guidry: Are you going up there, Hauler? What do you want to do? I know you’re not running.
Kershaw: I just need to clear my head is all, Tim.
Guidry: I know you do, man, but you got everybody scared.
Kershaw: I just want to get to my house, Tim. You know what I’m saying? I just want to walk through my front door and lay my head down in my own bed. You hear what I’m saying?
Present
Before the sun went down, they strung up four mechanic’s lights to see. As uncle and nephew put the Falcon back together, having essentially removed only the interior fixtures, niece and aunt sat on upended milk crates talking.
“When Hauler died in prison in ’04, there had already been plenty about how the cops had framed him for his girlfriend’s murder because of his brother.” Debra sipped from a can of beer. “Or that, what’s his name, Brody Deets had done it because she’d left him for Hauler.”
“He’s an actor, Aunt Deb. And a second-rate one at that.”
She spread her arms, holding on to her beer. “I know, but us colored folk think all them white folks in the public eye congregate together plotting on us, so you know.” She snickered.
Her niece chuckled too.
“Really, this mess started the night of that raid before you were born.”
The younger Hastings knew the story. Her aunt and members of the extended family were living in a house in South Central in the late eighties. This was during the time of the infamous—at least in black neighborhoods—administration of police chief Daryl Gates. That night the cops tore down the door and tore up the house—a home that wasn’t a rental and just happened to belong to a great-grandmother of Pebbles Hastings. The family subsequently sued the department and settled out of court for a sizable sum.
“How do you mean?” she asked.
Her aunt took another sip. “Jerome was doing his rap tapes then, selling them all over town and at swap meets. Back then NWA, Toddy Tee with his ‘Batterram’ song, they was all hot and had started like that so he caught some of that wave.” She winked at Pebbles. “See how I threw in that surfer reference?”
“Uh-huh,” her niece said, smiling.
“Okay, that night the cops bust him with less than an ounce of crack, which he didn’t indulge but used as, you know, bribes to get his tapes played at certain clubs like the one Ro had, the Crimson Lounge. Anyway, they also grabbed some of his tapes, thinking the lyrics contained secret code among gang shot-callers.”
“Who would be stupid enough to believe that?” the younger Hastings said.
“That’s what the cops testified to in court during the suit. But it was just Jerome’s raps on the tapes, at least when he had hold of them.”
“What do you mean?’
“The tapes supposedly disappeared from the evidence lockup at the Seventy-Seventh Division, where there were several renegade members of the CRASH unit. Dudes who were robbing the drug dealers they busted, framing suspects consorting with prostitutes, and on and on.”
Her aunt paused. The niece knew that the now disbanded anti-gang
initiative had been the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
“When Jerome started to get a name in the rap game, he became friends with one of those CRASH dudes who liked to bling-bling, an undercover cop who got all caught up in being a gangster his damn self, Jimmy Moore.”
“He did time, right?”
“A bank robbery. He’d been dating one of the tellers. The money was never recovered and he disappeared when he got out, having done his full stretch ’cause he never said boo about where the take was.” She looked over at the two men. “That’s what y’all saw on the mystery show, wasn’t it? That he was last seen in his mother’s Falcon wagon.”
Waid said, “Yeah,” as he and Weathers bolted the rear bench seat into place using socket wrenches.
His uncle remained quiet but when the Falcon was brought up on that show, this being the first time he’d heard of a connection to the wagon and Moore, he’d recalled years before hearing from a chick he knew from back in the day when he ran the lounge. She was a party-girl type, always working an angle. She’d been looking for a car but hadn’t said what kind. But on Astonishing Mysteries they’d re-created a scene with the woman and Moore, a connection Weathers didn’t know about till then as well.
“See, that’s what I’m sayin’,” her aunt commented, “this stuff has all gotten twisted up over the years. The facts have been thrown out in favor of the ghost stories. Hauler’s family did own a Falcon wagon like this one here. But this is not that car. This one used to belong to the retired gardener, Tyler Dircks, who died.” He’d been the elderly man renting a room in the house on Fifty-First Street.
Four years ago when Pebbles Hastings was going out with Scott Waid, they’d asked her aunt about the Falcon. Waid was something of a shadetree mechanic and the niece was also handy with tools.
Another thread of memory flitted through her niece’s mind. “Wasn’t there some kind of thing between this crooked cop and Hauler Kershaw?”
“Not exactly,” her aunt said. “But the cop who talked to Hauler that day they were trailing him through Brentwood, he’d been partners with Jimmy Moore at one point.”
“Another rumor being he’d been in on the robbery?”
“Right.”
“Was he?”
“Shit if I know, Pebbles,” she said, irritated. “But who knows what other crazy conspiracies that TV show is going to spawn about the missing money or the secret to Hauler’s death.”
Down south, the sea-level temperature rose in the Pacific off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador, while the trade winds weakened where they normally swirled with strength. These elements signaled specific shifts in the climate patterns in the atmosphere. This in turn would result in the winter storms that usually bestowed heavy rains on the jungles of Central America and southern Mexico being pushed further north, into Southern California. This El Niño effect portended a wet winter in drought-stricken LA. But currently, as the weeks of weather built up, in the South Bay on a humid fall evening, tipsy patrons drank craft beers in sports bars, pretty girls in stylish shoes checked out their gear in nightclub mirrors, and traffic was light on this stretch of Pacific Coast Highway where swaying palm fronds made their whisk-whisk sound in the air.
Pebbles Hastings had the windows rolled down in her Falcon station wagon as she cruised PCH. Against a backdrop of waves swelling and crashing, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings did their version of “Goldfinger” on the aftermarket CD unit. A hot wind blew through the car’s interior and warmed her skin as she came to a stoplight. A familiar-sounding engine rumbled and she looked left and up a hill to the access road that paralleled the highway. There, gliding past the guardrail, was another Falcon station wagon she was pretty sure was the same year as hers. This vehicle too had the wood-style side panels and sport rims not dissimilar to the kind Hastings had on her vehicle. She frowned while the car went along and disappeared from view around a bend. She didn’t get a good look at the broad-shouldered driver and considered trying to follow it.
But she quickly discarded that idea and instead stopped in at a bar and got a vodka gimlet, which she drank slowly, contemplatively.
THE KILL SWITCH
by Willy Vlautin
THE HOUSE HAD three stories and was on the National Register but the people who owned it, professors at a university, and their two teenage kids seemed to be hoarders. Eddie Wilkens, a forty-two-year-old housepainter, was standing on a ladder above a small alcove deck on the second floor scraping paint when Houston called to him from below. Eddie waved, set his scraper on the deck’s railing, and climbed down.
Houston, a fifty-three-year-old alcoholic, was thin and small in stature with greased-back gray hair. “Man, I don’t know about this place,” he said when Eddie got down to the ground. “The entire yard is covered in dog shit and it’s all around the base of the house too. I’ve never seen so much. And then when I was walking around near the garage, I found a pair of men’s underwear and a half-eaten sandwich sitting on top of it.”
Eddie nodded, took a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and lit it. He spoke quietly. “Where I am on the second floor, in the alcove, there are McDonald’s bags everywhere, and clothes sitting out, and stacks of moldy books. And on the railing there’s what I think is a bloody tampon half wrapped in toilet paper.”
Houston laughed and pointed to Eddie’s cigarette.
Eddie gave him one from his pack along with a lighter. “When I went inside to get the third-story windows open I saw a plate with a half-eaten steak and green beans sitting on the stairs. It was covered in mold and ants were all over it. And if they want to go upstairs, they have to climb over it ’cause there’s stacks of books and papers everywhere else.”
Smoke came from Houston’s mouth and again he laughed.
Eddie leaned against the house. “I bid this job on a Friday night. I always bid bad on Fridays. I barely looked around. I didn’t want it; I could feel something was off so I just doubled the price and forgot about it. And then, shit, they took it anyway.” He sighed. “Well, we’ll take over the yard from here on out. We can’t be stepping in dog shit, rotten sandwiches, and underwear for a month.”
Houston nodded and they went back to work. They filled four black plastic garbage bags with trash and shit and then took lunch. When they came back they went up the ladders again and scraped. It was August and hot and the afternoon passed slowly. From the twenty-four-footer, Eddie lit a cigarette and looked out at the neighborhood. He could see his white van with WILKENS PAINTING COMPANY on the side and, past it, the tops of a dozen houses. He gazed out farther, across two streets, and made out a derelict-looking Pontiac Le Mans. It was red with a white top. He’d always liked those cars and decided when the day ended he’d walk over and see it. He finished his cigarette and went back to work.
Houston was on the other side of the house on a sixteen-footer, scraping. He was scared of heights and wouldn’t go any higher. He kept in the shade and worked steadily until Eddie came into view.
“It’s five thirty,” Eddie yelled. “Let’s call it.”
Houston nodded and came down. They locked the four ladders together and left them next to the house. They swept the old caulk and paint chips from the tarps, folded them, and set their tools in the garage. They both had cigarettes in their mouths when they walked from the house. In front of the work van Eddie took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Houston.
Houston had been paid in increments for three years. Twenty dollars a day four days a week, and eighty dollars on Fridays. Once a month they’d stop by the post office and Eddie would buy money orders for Houston’s phone bill, electric bill, gas bill, and rent. He’d put them in envelopes and mail them off. Their next stop was the bank, where Houston put the rest of his money in a safe-deposit box. A box he could get to only on business days during office hours.
They had worked together for nine years with only two major lapses. The first was when Houston’s mother died and he traveled back to Wyoming to c
lean out her apartment. He told Eddie he would be gone a week and then went missing for five months. When he came back he was drinking a fifth a day and living in his car. The second time he just quit showing up. He didn’t answer his phone and wouldn’t answer his door. He fell into a three-month-long drunk and ended up losing his place and his car and living on the street. When Eddie finally found him, he was holed up near the river in an old camping tent. He let Houston live in his basement, got him back on his feet, and gave him startup money for an apartment.
Houston bummed another cigarette, got in his car, and left. Eddie finished his and walked down the two streets to the Le Mans. The car sat covered in dust and there was a large dent in the front right panel above the wheel well. The paint was faded and oxidized. A half a dozen spider cracks appeared along both sides of the car where bad Bondo patches had been attempted. The rims were cheap, aftermarket, and two of the tires were flat. The top wasn’t vinyl but metal painted white. It was oxidized also. He figured it to be a ’68 or ’69.
He took a small spiral notepad from his back pocket and wrote, I’d be interested in buying this car. I have cash. Eddie Wilkens. He left his number, put the note under the windshield wiper, walked back to his van, and drove home.
In the carport he found the kid, Russell, waiting on a lawn chair near the back door. The boy was eleven but looked much younger. He was small, had brown hair, and his ears were too big for his head, and even at that age he was getting picked on at school. He wore jeans, a red T-shirt, and black tennis shoes. He lived in the house next door with his grandmother, mother, and older half brother, Curtis.
“Where did you work today?” he asked timidly.
“We’re on the new job now,” said Eddie and opened the back door to his house. He yelled for Early, and an old black mutt got down from the couch and hobbled outside.
Russell went to the dog and began to pet it. “You’re done with the lady who had the orange fish?”
“We finished that on Friday.”
“Did she like the paint job?”
The Highway Kind Page 23