Ballard had been looking through the windshield to check the I.D. number against their Gypsy Cadillac master list.
“Yeah, it’s one of ours,” he said in a crestfallen voice. “But what’s this bastard doing working for us again, anyway?”
“Chinga tu madre, maricón! You wanna go ’round right—”
Heslip got between them but Ballard was ready to go — last time Morales had knocked him down, this time that wouldn’t be so easy for him. Ballard was older, wiser, fitter, with a few years of karate under his belt.
Not that karate, come to think of it, had made much difference to Fearsome Freddi of the leather underwear.
Ignoring the ruckus, Kearny said, “We needed a couple of extra men to pick up the slack on the files you turned in so you guys could work the Gypsy stuff.”
“Only a couple of extra men?” Giselle was looking around with a dazed expression. Apparently all the parking places were filled with repos. “Two guys? All this?”
But Kearny had remembered all over again that Morales wasn’t supposed to even know about the Gypsy cases, let alone be working any of them.
“You snooped those Gypsy files!” he stormed. “That’s what you were doing when I saw you in the front upstairs office on Friday afternoon! Dammit, Morales, I want—”
“Hey, I got one, didn’t I?” Morales jerked a thumb at Ballard. “That’s more than hotshot here did over the weekend.” He stepped closer to Kearny, an insinuating look on his face. “Listen, I bet you’re offerin’ everybody a bonus on each Gyppo car they turn, right? Now it seems to me that if I was workin’ Gyppo cases along with the rest of the guys...”
“No bonuses, and I can’t trust you anyway,” said Kearny flatly. “Not on something like this. You were hired to pick up the slack—”
“I’d still like to know who repo’d all these cars, since it obviously wasn’t any of us,” said O’Bannon.
That’s when Ken Warren drove up.
He knew it, he just knew it. The car he’d left in front of the garage door now was backed halfway into the street, and Kearny was waving his arms at some Mexican dude in the middle of a bunch of people like maybe there’d been an accident.
He didn’t remember a Spanish surname on any of the cases he’d worked, but he’d been knockin’ ’em off pretty fast, he couldda forgotten a name. He’d never gotten a crack at so many easy repos in his life. These DKA guys must really talk to the man, like Kearny had said, instead of just grabbing cars.
Ken Warren really liked just grabbing cars.
He double-parked his company car like everyone else had, and sort of tiptoed down toward the group. Hey, they were all operatives, he bet. In fact, he bet he could figure out who was who just from reading the reports on the cases he’d been handed.
He couldn’t place the Mex guy, but the Mick with red hair and freckles and boozer’s face, that had to be O’Bannon, the one signed himself O’B.
The black guy he’d seen fight, that was Bart Heslip. Not very marked up for an ex-pro middleweight.
Kearny had said the tall good-looking blond lady was Giselle Marc, office manager. She also worked the field — he couldn’t blame her there, that’s where the action was.
And the lean handsome muscular guy, must do a lot of surfing or SCUBA-diving to have his hair bleached almost white like that, he had to be Ballard.
Inevitably, Kearny saw him. Came over working his face and waving his arms just as he’d been doing at the Mexican guy a couple of minutes ago.
“Warren, what the hell were you doing over the weekend?”
Giselle breathed, just loud enough for Kearny, “What do you think he was doing? Proving he is the greatest carhawk the world has ever known.”
The rest of them had turned to stare at Warren as if he were from another planet — and he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, trying to figure out what Kearny wanted him to answer. Then inspiration struck.
“Hey, Mr. Kearny, Ah gnthalk ta gha man!”
Kearny astounded him by busting out laughing. And then clapping him on the shoulder and demanding, “You talk to all the men?” He seemed to be getting the hang of the way Ken spoke.
“Well, no, juth nthoz who—”
“How many cars did you grab since Friday afternoon?”
He didn’t have to consult his case files to answer that one. He’d counted them up during breakfast. “Nthevnteen.”
“Seventeen?”
“Yeah.”
“Police reports?”
“Yeah.”
“Condition reports?”
He’d completed those over breakfast and he’d rather show than tell, so he held out the sheaf of completed forms. Kearny looked at them, then nodded and turned to the rest of them still standing around staring as if they were at Fleishacker Zoo.
“Ken Warren,” said Kearny with a flourish, then added with masterful understatement, “he’ll be covering for you while you work the Gypsy accounts.”
“For all of us?” asked Ballard.
“Him and Morales, yeah.” Kearny gestured at the repo-crowded street. “You got a problem with that, Larry?”
“Hell no, no problem, I just wondered how one guy...”
Ballard ran down. The guy had repo’d seventeen cars in three days! That was a decent score for a decent field man in a decent month. For the first time in his professional life he felt something akin to awe for another man’s work besides Kearny’s; the Great White Father, of course, was always the best. He stepped forward and stuck out his hand to Warren.
“I’m Larry Ballard.”
“GnYm kGen Gwarren.”
Then they were all crowding around and shaking his hand and clapping him on the shoulder, like football players mobbing the guy who took the opening kickoff and ran it back for a touchdown. Warren suddenly understood why they had been staring at him. Not because they’d heard he talked funny. Hell no. Because they were impressed.
For the first time in his life, the very first time, Ken Warren felt he was part of a group that didn’t give a damn how he talked. However he did it, he spoke their language.
Kearny said, “Okay, Warren’s got reports to write and cars to get back to the dealers. Giselle and Trin each have a Gypsy Cadillac to do the same with. The rest of us, the Gyppos aren’t going to waste any time spreading the word that someone dropped a rock on a couple of their boats over the weekend.”
“Hell, Dave,” said O’B, “they were both gotten on drivebys. Maybe the Gyppos’ll figure the law of averages just caught up with them. Only so many new Caddies on the street—”
“You really believe that?” demanded Kearny in disbelief.
“Nah.”
Chapter seventeen
“We knew somebody would be looking,” Marino offered tentatively. They were in the kitchen of Yana’s ofica, and although he would never admit it, she was pretty impressive on her own turf.
“Track is always good place to look for Gypsies,” agreed Ristik eagerly. But he came out sounding defensive just as Marino had, even though Yana was his kid sister, so he added, “Just some repomen getting lucky.”
“That’s some kind of lucky.” Yana shook her head. “No. Somebody very good and very clever is after us.”
“Repomen are not clever,” said Marino disdainfully.
“These are.”
“Or maybe your husband is up to his old tricks of selling our cars to the gadje, and maybe you are helping him...”