Then at the restaurant the Brit insulted her intelligence by trying to pass off Sonnet 116 — “The Marriage of True Minds,” that one, for God’s sake! — as his own. It was all too much: she poured fumé blanc down the front of his trousers and stalked out yelling she couldn’t abide an incontinent man.
Larry Ballard’s evening began beautifully when Beverly Daniels, a pert little blonde with big blue eyes and a dancer’s figure, picked him up in her yellow Nissan 280Z. He once had repossessed it from her, then had worked out a payment schedule so she could get it back. Beverly stood the same scant inch above five feet that Ballard stood below six, but somehow they fit together wondrous well on a horizontal plane. Which Ballard fully intended they should attain before the night was over.
Then everything went to hell. Blame it on Pietro Uvaldi, or maybe Dan Kearny — all Ballard did, after the movie and the pizza, was suggest they “swing by” the Montana...
“Don’t you do this to me,” said Beverly.
“Do what to you? All I said was—”
“I know what you said,” she snapped savagely.
Beverly had some justification. Their first date had ended with her all alone in Ballard’s car while members of a rock group called Full Moon Madness — whose Maserati Bora coupe Ballard had just snatched — tried to drag her out through the window without opening it first.
“This time isn’t like that at all,” he explained. “I even have a key for this one.”
And he told her about Pietro Uvaldi, the wispy little decorator at the Montana with the $85,000 Mercedes. If they could get into the under-the-building garage, and the car was there, it would be a piece of cake. Of course Ballard didn’t mention either the shotgun or Pietro’s poopsie, Freddi of the cellophaned hair and leather underwear, so Beverly couldn’t factor them into the equation until it was much too late.
A tenant was using his electronic door-opener when they arrived at the Montana; they swept into the garage on his rear bumper. He parked, they cruised, and there was the Mercedes, gleaming in a far corner like the Holy Grail!
“Just like you said — a piece of cake.” Beverly secretly got off just a little on the excitement of stealing cars.
Ballard opened the door of the Mercedes with the key he’d gotten from the dealer, and did a somersault. He managed to hit the concrete floor in some sort of shoulder roll, cushioning the shock; but he was still dazed when he staggered to his feet to try and block Fearsome Freddi’s second attack with a wobbly shiko dachi defensive stance, one hand at shoulder level in shotei, the other horizontal across his stomach in nukite.
Freddi didn’t know from martial arts: he slammed his arms up inside Ballard’s defense and smashed his head into Ballard’s face. Luckily, Ballard ducked so their skulls met forehead-to-forehead, or he would have been a wasteland from ear to ear.
Undaunted, Freddi got in a rib-crushing front bear hug; Ballard countered by slamming his cupped palms against Freddi’s ears. Freddi dropped him, screaming with the pain of almost ruptured drums. Ballard made a shambling run for the open door of Beverly’s little yellow sports car, yelling as he went.
“GO GO GO GO GO!!!”
As he tumbled in and slammed the door, Beverly WENT WENT WENT WENT WENT — but not before the heel of Freddi’s hand holed the windshield in a shower of plastic-coated safety glass. Trying to peer through the remaining opaque starburst, Beverly hit a post, ripping off the left front fender and bending the axle. She backed off and goosed it again, even more terrified than Ballard. The wheel was wobbling. By some miracle, another resident had just entered and the overhead steel mesh door was still clanking down as she zipped through.
Well, not quite zipped through. The reinforced lower edge of the descending door hooked under the front edge of the z’s roof just above the shattered windshield and stripped it back like opening a can of sardines.
Beverly kicked Ballard out of the car right there in front of the Montana and drove off in tears. He had to walk six blocks just to find a cab. When he finally staggered into the sanctuary of his apartment, with a blinding headache and a red welt the size of a bread plate on his forehead, he threw up all over the front-room rug from the effects of his concussion.
Only Bart Heslip, of DKa’s minions, had a totally satisfactory evening. His forever lady, Corinne Jones, who was a warm golden brown to his plum black and had a Nefertiti profile right off an Egyptian wall painting, fixed him soul food while making big over his damaged face and stitched pate. Then she took him to bed for the sweetest loving this side of paradise.
All of this without ever once bringing up the old tiresome I-told-you-so subject of finding some other line of work.
Chapter six
Friday. Show time. Even though they had nine hours because the banks were open until 6:00 P.M. on Fridays, Marino could allow only one and a half hours for his people to work the dealers in each area. They had to do it all in one day to keep ahead of the bank’s computers. He got the jump on his own part of the operation by strolling into the massive-pillared pseudo-Greco temple that housed Jack Olwen Cadillac on what was left of San Francisco’s Auto Row just as the doors opened at 8:30.
“Ah, Mr. Grimaldi,” exclaimed Sales Manager Danny McBain as he scurried up, “here for your limo?”
Marino grinned. “You said first thing Friday, so...”
“Ready and waiting for you.”
Marino’s Cadillac had been special-ordered from a limo-maker in Los Angeles to specifications he had gotten from a Gypsy in D.C. after a long hard barter. Of course it didn’t really have the Kevlar armor-plating and polymer bulletproof windows of the real McCoy, but it looked like it did, which was all Marino deemed necessary for the St. Mark Hotel scam to work.
They crossed the display floor toward the finance office, past a husky, cement-dust-coated laborer, swarthy and vaguely middle-European looking. His red satin warmup jacket had 49ERS WORLD CHAMPIONS across the back. He was kicking the tires of a Fleetwood coupe — one of those with the formal cabriolet roof.
“What’s the sticker on this here baby?”
“Thirty-two-four base, Mr. Kaslov. Of course...”
“As she stands,” said Kaslov gutturally. “No extras, nuttin’ like that. I can swing eight down...”
McBain chuckled and said to the man he knew as Grimaldi, “They always kick the tires — as if that’s going to tell them one damned thing about the quality of the car!”
Grimaldi chuckled also, in polite agreement. At three minutes to nine he drove the limo out into O’Farrell, one-way inbound, crossed Van Ness on the light, and was gone. Behind him he left a downstroke check for $9,800 drawn on the Blue Skye account in Cal-Cit Main at One Embarcadero Center. At that moment the check was good as gold; in ninety-three minutes it would be as good as, oh, say, the $8,000 check the artistically cement-dusted Kaslov would write on the same account at about the same time.
The San Francisco phone room was in a storefront on Turk, half a block short of what had once been and would again have been the Central Freeway’s Gough Street on-ramp if they hadn’t decided to tear down the earthquake-damaged skyway. Yana had refused the use of her ofica because she was working the Teddy White scam out of it, and didn’t want the location compromised.
She and Ristik expected calls on seven cars. Three from Jack Olwen — Marino’s phony paperwork on his limo scam had gone in earlier — two from Freeway Cadillac in Colma, two from Wilson Cadillac/Porsche/Audi Motor Car Company on Burlington’s aptly named Cadillac Way. San Francisco, first of the day, was the linchpin of the operation: if it went well there, reasoned the surprisingly superstitious Gypsies, it would go well all over.