No, the problems Ken Warren had faced hadn’t been the subjects whose cars he was taking. The first was that along about 5:00 A.M. Monday he had run out of gas — him, not his car — and had fallen asleep on stakeout at 25th Ave and El Camino del Mar in Seacliff. The lady with the Beemer 535i never showed, and he woke bleary-eyed and fog-frosted at 6:30. He washed and shaved in the men’s room at the Seacliff Motel up behind Sutro Heights, even had toast and coffee in their dining room before driving unwillingly back toward the DKA office.
Unwillingly, because that’s where his other problem was waiting. He hadn’t had a key to the DKA garage, so he’d street-parked the cars he’d repossessed around the block the office was on. Worse than that, when he’d run out of parking places he’d left the final repo right-angled across the sidewalk with its front bumper nudging DKa’s heavy garage door.
He bet Dan Kearny was going to be really steamed about that.
Chapter sixteen
When Dan Kearny got to the office at 7:33 Monday morning, he was really steamed. Some idiot had nosed a car across the sidewalk to block the DKA storage garage door. And wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a single parking place in either direction where he could leave his car until he could move this one.
After double-parking in the street with the blinkers on, he went through the office deactivating the alarms, then out the back to unlock the heavy wooden sliding door and flick the switch on the little motor that rumbled it aside. Grumbling to himself, he got the car started and was backing it out into the street when Giselle double-parked behind it, boxing him in.
“What’s that doing here?” she demanded.
“My very thought. I’m going to leave it in the street for the cops to tag and tow—”
“You can’t. Until we turned in our files last week, I was carrying the paper on that one.”
“I’ll be damned!” said Kearny/ “It must have been in that fistful of cases I gave Ken Warren on Friday. He must have grabbed it over the weekend and parked it here because he didn’t have a garage key. Not too shabby for a new man.”
“There’s another one of mine across the street.”
“Got two? Hey, terrif!” He paused, suddenly uneasy. “Ah, listen, Giselle, I fired the cleaning service on Friday.”
“You what? Why didn’t you wait until I found somebody else who we can count on to—”
That’s when O’B drove up and half got out of his car.
O’B had spent most of Saturday at the airfield up in Sonoma, trying to get a line on the Gyppos who had “sold” the ancient biplane to Doc Swigart — no luck — most of yesterday in the Old Clam House under the freeway near the Army Street off-ramp, and most of last night in an ail-night steam-room on Market Street soaking clam juice out of his system.
One foot on the blacktop, he craned cautiously over the roof of his car as if he were still hung over despite his fresh-scrubbed, russet look from the steam. He shamelessly gargled his r’s for his best Blarney-stone brogue — a gone-slightly-to-seed Irish potato with bloodshot eyes.
“Faith an’ bejesus, an’ ’tis the wee leprechauns who’ve been busy this blessed weekend.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” demanded Kearny, though he was starting to get an idea that he already knew.
“Makin’ all the shoemaker’s shoon in the night an’ slippin’ away at first light.”
“How many of ’em are yours?”
O’B came around his car to slap a lean freckled hand on the hood of a green Cutlass Supreme right in front of the office.
“This.” He turned and pointed down the block. “That one. And that pickup over there from Marin. Two more around the corner...” He grinned at Kearny. “Maybe now you appreciate just how much work I turn out in the course of a day’s—”
Kearny had just begun pointing out that someone else had repossessed all those cars assigned to O’B, not the Irishman himself, when Larry Ballard drove up.
Ballard already had been around the block and through little one-block Norfolk Alley behind, and there was not one damned parking place to be found. Usually, early on a Monday morning, there’d be a dozen free.
And now this, people standing around in the middle of the street waving their arms. What was going on? A convention?
Or maybe it was trouble. Yeah, there were Kearny, Giselle, O’B... some guy’s car blocking the garage... He squealed to a stop behind O’b’s car and piled out, feeling behind the seat for his tire iron, only then belatedly realizing that nobody was there except the DKA crew. He went up to them.
“What happened?”
Kearny swept his arm around in an all-encompassing gesture. “How many of ’em were assigned to you, Larry?”
For the first time Ballard began checking license plates.
“Ill... be... damned...” He shook his head. “I see those his-and-hers Buicks from down the Peninsula, I bet I hit that address a dozen times without getting a sniff of those cars, just a big damn dog who tried to bite off my—”
“Don’t say it!” exclaimed Giselle in alarm.
“—foot,” finished Ballard, then said in equal alarm to O’B, “Nobody grabbed our Mercedes from Pietro, did they? I—”
“I didn’t see it.” O’B turned to Kearny, “How many guys did you have out in the field over the weekend, Reverend?”
Before Kearny could respond, Bart Heslip drove up.
He bounced out of his car like answering the opening bell.
“Who got run over?”
“Last week’s cases,” said Ballard.
“I don’t get it.”
“Somebody did. Repeatedly.” Then it was Ballard’s turn to wave his arm around like Balboa on a peak in Darién. “How many do you recognize, Bart?”
Surprise widened Heslip’s eyes.
“That Laser with the front end bashed in was one of mine.”
“I hope we didn’t do the bashing,” said Kearny quickly.
“I couldn’t say. I never laid eyes on the car while I was carrying the assignment. I’d started to think the guy was made out of smoke...” He interrupted himself in sudden panic. “Nobody got Sarah, did they? If I spent my weekend chasing Gyppos without a sniff and somebody knocked off that Charger—”
“I didn’t see it on the street,” said Ballard. “Unless it’s inside—”
“The guys I had out over the weekend didn’t have keys to the garage,” said Kearny.
Heslip’s eyes had lit on another of the parked cars. “Hey, there’s that Aerostar van, the one that—”
“Out in the Castro,” nodded Giselle, who had assigned the case to him in the first place.
“I only had it for a week,” said Heslip defensively. “With all the other cases I was working—”
“The guy who got it only had it for a weekend,” Kearny interrupted in his most offensive manner.
Heslip was indeed offended. “What guy?”
“I only had two men out, and one of them is a green pea who just started Friday. So probably Morales—”
Just then Morales drove up in one of the Gyppo Caddies!
Instead of being grateful, Kearny, that chingada, was on him like a junkyard dog.
“What are you doing with that Cadillac?”
“Driving it,” smirked Morales as he got out. He’d driven it the whole weekend, Jesus, what a boat! Power everything. “Bringing it in to make out my report and—”