When that happened, Gordo drifted for a while. The occasional repo popped up from time to time, but it wasn’t enough. During a brief period, maybe six months, he lost his confidence a little bit. He began to think that maybe he was going to go down with ship, that he wasn’t going to be able to turn this thing around.
Then he stumbled on an idea while watching television one night. They did a short piece on some fluff news show about guys who went around serving lawsuit papers and summonses to people who didn’t want to be served said papers. The show said the guys worked for themselves, on their own, taking jobs from the courts and from law firms that operated around the court buildings. It could be a rough and tumble type job, according to the announcer, good for snoops who weren’t afraid when people got out of line. The news piece was over in about five minutes. Afterward, Gordo sat on his couch and drank a beer, staring at whatever came on the television next. But what he was looking at was an image in his mind’s eye, an image of the Bronx County Courthouse.
For as long as he could remember, Gordo had known about the Courthouse. It was that huge off-white ten-story Art Deco monster looming in the distance beyond the white bunting and the bleachers at the old Yankee Stadium. It sat high above the elevated subway line and all the shops and fast food restaurants wedged together along the wide boulevard of 161st Street. It ate up a whole city block. It always caught his eye, and he would gaze at it between innings, but he never imagined himself going up the hill and walking inside. Then one day he found himself there, as if he had floated there in a dream. He passed through the security checkpoint without incident. He asked some faceless person for directions, waded through the crowds, and stood in line at a window. He took a course, complete with a workbook and pencils and a buttoned-down instructor who told the twenty people gathered in the dusty classroom how it was all going to go down. Two weeks later Gordo was serving paper.
He liked it and was good at it. He could find people, even the people who didn’t want to be found – especially those people. And once he found them, there was no mystery to serving them. His first test came early on.
One day, he had to serve a mechanic who was delinquent in his child support payments. It was a typical set-up. As the economy went from bad to worse, a lot of women were chasing down a lot of deadbeat dads who claimed they had no money. And an auto mechanic would be a good candidate for deadbeat dadhood – cars were dropping off the road like houseflies had once dropped in the first chill of October.
It was 6:30 in the evening, and Gordo tracked his prey to a nudie bar a block away from the auto body shop. The bar had a steeple in front as though it were once a church. The guy Gordo wanted was in there drinking dinner with two of his buddies, watching some blonde-haired Bavarian sow in a lime green thong gyrate to loud disco music back behind the bar. She liked the night life, she liked to boogie. Her huge pink nipples hung down almost to her waist. The thong carved into her love handles. The bartender, a creaky old Slav, looked so bored he was about to expire from the tedium.
Gordo had a copy of the mechanic’s photo from a driver’s license, so he knew what the guy looked like. He walked up to the three of them at their table and sat down. The guy he needed to serve was the one in the middle, still wearing his grimy and oil-caked work coveralls. He had slicked-back hair, a pock-marked face, and oversized hands. His two friends were a small round Mexican in a baseball cap and a skinny, dark West Indian. Gordo envied them their openness – here in the Bronx, the various cultures mostly steered clear of one another.
The three men eyed Gordo.
‘Eddie?’ Gordo said. ‘Eddie Valence?’ Gordo thought that somewhere in the past the family had Americanized its name from Valenzuela.
‘Who wants to know?’
Gordo gave them all an apologetic grin. ‘Hey, I hate to bother you man, but I got a problem with my car outside. I think it’s the carburetor. A guy told me to look in here for you, said you might be willing to make some extra money. It’ll probably take somebody like you five minutes to fix it. Me, I don’t know anything about cars.’
He paused, Valence looking at him, the other men staring past him now, eyes glued to the girl on stage. At the end of a long day, and after a few drinks, even a specimen like that could get a man going. Gordo knew how they felt. He was the same way.
Valence nodded. ‘It’s me. I’ll look at it in a minute.’
‘Tell you what,’ Gordo said, taking the papers from the pocket inside his jacket and placing them on the table. ‘Before you look at the car, why don’t you go in and talk to the judge about all those child support payments you missed?’
All three men were gaping at him again.
‘What I’m saying is you’ve been served.’
Valence took it hard. Without a word, he stood and grabbed Gordo by the shirt. The West Indian also stood. A moment later, both men were splayed out under the table, with the Mexican standing ten feet away, wanting no part of the action. It happened so fast that Gordo had no memory of putting them down there, just a blur of throwing fists and knocking beers over. His hands were slimy from Valence’s hair gel.
Gordo looked at the Mexican, but the Mexican shook his head. Gordo looked at the girl, who had paused in her dance routine. She made no sign, just stared at him. The ancient Slavic bartender held a sawed-off pool cue, but made no move forward with it. Just before he left, Gordo folded the papers and placed them in the breast pocket of Valence’s coveralls.
That sort of thing got around, and Gordo started to gain a reputation. Somebody who’s gone to ground, with no forwarding address? Give it to Gordon Lamb. A hard-ass who popped the last process guy in the mouth? Lamb will take it.
Then, eighteen months ago, while hanging around the halls of justice one morning, he got to talking to a bail bondsman, a short guy named Leo who always wore a bowtie and pants held up by suspenders. Leo’s thing was that the suspenders and bowtie always had themes – whales against a deep blue sea one day, the red hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union the next day, green hundred dollar bills the next. Leo’s bald head glistened in the overhead fluorescents – if Gordo didn’t know better, he’d guess that the little man polished it like a bowling ball. Leo was also hanging around that morning.
‘If you’re so good at finding people,’ Leo said idly, ‘then why don’t you do the bounty hunter thing? Catch a couple of these assholes that’ve skipped out on me? I got criminals disappearing left and right. How am I supposed to make a living when nobody shows up for trial anymore? You want money, that’s where you can make some real money. Bring these fucking jerks back.’
‘Tell me more,’ Gordo said.
Inside Kelly’s Bar, ten minutes had gone by since Gordo brought over the beers, and Jonah’s headache had not improved at all. The sound system pounded out some bad rock tune. It was just after six o’clock, and almost nobody was in there. Three long hairs, skinny guys in black T-shirts and dirty jeans, crouched over in the corner getting loaded and shoveling dollars into the juke.
Jonah’s head thumped along to the music. A few moments ago, he had gone in the bathroom and seen the angry red lump growing on his forehead. It stung where the skin was broken and it throbbed with every beat of his pulse. He didn’t want to touch it.
Now he sat at their table and sulked while Gordo pored through a pile of mail he found in Foerster’s apartment.