Heslip did not turn in the new address at the office when he went back to DKA. He wouldn’t do that until he’d gotten his final shot at Sarah himself: no tomorrow for him on this case. He tossed an old yellow Plymouth with only half a transmission on his towbar and, out at Larson’s place, dumped it in front of the still-empty garage. He stuck a note hand-scrawled on cheap paper under the wiper arm: im sorry wont run pleez dont call cops.
Late tonight, when Sarah came back from whatever bar she was getting sloshed in, she would find the old Plymouth in front of her garage and, he hoped, being drunk and careless, would park the Charger in the street. From whence, Heslip thought as he drove through the night, he now would pluck it like an apple.
The Charger wasn’t there. Nor on any adjacent street. He ended up down the block with a good view of the house, waiting for the bars to close. And sort of hoping that when she came, Larson would be with her, drunk and belligerent: he had begun to feel like hitting someone male, his own size or larger, several times very rapidly in the face.
Not to be. At sunup, as Larry Ballard drove morosely away from the Montana on the far side of town, Heslip was still sitting there, chilled and stiff and also empty-handed. No Sarah. No Charger. And at ten o’clock he would have to go back to the office and hand her file over to someone else.
Wait a sec! At 9:45 the landlady, shopping bag in hand, laboriously made her way down the front steps on her swollen ankles. She waddled obliquely across the street to his car, panting from such exertion. Heslip rolled down his window.
“Young man,” she said, “I wish I’d told you the truth about that woman yesterday. She has been living with Mr. Larson, and she’s a fat lazy slob who all she does is lay around and drink hard liquor and never change the sheets. And all they’d ever do after he got home from work was drink and fight up there in his room until all hours.”
Noting the change of tenses, Heslip said, “Swell.”
“Last night, along about ten o’clock, they had a terrible row an’ she threw him down the stairs. Broke three of his ribs an’ give him a concussion. Amb’lance come an’ everything. Din’t even go to the hospital with him — just packed up an’ left. I seen you sittin’ out here all last night and still here this morning, an’ I just thought it was my Christ’an duty to tell you she was gone.”
After she was gone. After he’d sat there all night.
“Even if you are a nigger.”
Bart Heslip drove off cursing her, and himself for not slipping her a twenty yesterday, and for not being here last night at the right time, and Sarah, and the guy she’d thrown down the stairs, and most especially Dan Kearny for... well, just on general principles.
Kearny had sneaked into work early that Friday morning to upend the big metal barrels full of paper trash over a square of canvas laid out on the concrete floor — for once he was glad they were having so much trouble with their cleaning service. He was in before anybody else — especially Giselle — to look for Warren’s app and Trin’s business card. They should still be here, since the trash had been piling up for a couple weeks. No reason for Giselle to know he needed them after all, was there?
Forty minutes later he was still there, pawing away, when her voice made him leap and whirl as if stung by an asp hidden in the ejected paperwork. Giselle was holding up the elusive employment application and the wayward business card.
“Looking for these?”
He sighed and grunted his way to his feet and dusted off the knees of his trousers. “How’d you know I’d need ’em? When I tossed those, the Gypsies hadn’t even hit the bank yet...”
“Woman’s intuition.”
“Yeah, sure.” He eyed the offending papers as if they were cold-virus cultures. “A lying thieving conniving Mexican—”
“But a hell of an investigator.”
“If you can control him. I seem to remember that nobody cheered louder than you when I fired him the first time.”
Giselle shrugged. “Things change. Now we need him.”
“And this other guy, Warren! Donald Duck on helium—”
“He doesn’t have to talk, Dan’l. Not if he can grab cars. Maybe he’s the greatest carhawk the world has ever seen.”
“Yeah,” said Kearny bitterly, “sure.”
Something that sounded female and Latina and 15 max answered Trin Morales’s phone at 11:00 A.M. Morales took the receiver out of the girl’s hand to yell something short and Anglo-Saxon into it. The phone replied in Kearny’s voice.
“Put your pants on and get your butt down here. Now.”
Four hours later Ken Warren, also summoned by phone, wanted to give a great big YELL. Except nobody would have understood him, anyway. He wanted to yell because Kearny was showing him stuff right out of Auto Mechanics 101. And talking to him as if he had a mind defect instead of a speech defect.
“You put one alligator clip on the positive post of the battery, and the second one on the distributor...”
All right, Ken thought, I know how to hotwire a car.
Kearny showed him anyway. And then said, “These days we try to get key codes from the dealer and cut keys for the door locks. But if you don’t have a key, this funny-looking thing here like a Buck Rogers raygun is a...”
I know how to use a lockgun to open door locks.
Kearny showed him anyway, and then said, “If you don’t have a lockgun with you, this piece of thin strap steel can...”
I know how to go down alongside the window with a slim-jim and flip open door locks.
Kearny showed him anyway, and then said, “These days we use a lockpunch under the dash to...”
I know how to punch an ignition lock and substitute my own. I know how to hotwire under the dash. I know how to...
Kearny showed him all of it anyway. And then said, “Follow the instructions on the assignment sheet. If it’s REPO ON SIGHT, just grab the car. But if it says to make contact first—”
“NgYe gho ntawk ta ghu man.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Kearny looked suddenly deflated, as if he had forgotten the extent of Warren’s speech defect. “ ‘Gho ntawk ta ghu man.’ That’s very important — talking to the man if the case instructions tell you to. Most of our trouble with clients comes from field men who don’t talk to the man.”
He thrust the sheaf of field assignment sheets almost blindly back into Warren’s hand, started to walk away slump-shouldered, then stopped and turned back. He sighed.
“One more thing. Two of those files are pretty salty. That guy Uvaldi — that’s the Mercedes convertible — has a fag boyfriend who’s six-six and two-forty and leaps tall buildings in a single bound. He—”
“Ngye ndon’ gho ntawk ta ghu man.”
Kearny looked surprised, as if a guy like Warren wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. “Uhhh... that’s right, Ken, you don’t go talk to the man. You avoid the man like the plague. The other one you gotta watch out for is—”
“Ghu whooman.”
Kearny thought, This guy talks funny but he sure ain’t slow. All he’s had time to do is riffle through those files once, but he knows which cases I’m talking about. Could it be he might actually work out as a repoman?
Feeling almost hopeful, he said, “She busted Heslip’s head with a can of coffee and Heslip is pretty nifty on his feet — won thirty-nine out of forty fights professionally before he—”
Warren went into a sudden fighter’s crouch, bobbing and weaving, and threw a damned fast left hook/right uppercut combination at the chin of an imaginary opponent.