Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [2]
By the time I hit the freeway, my adrenalin rush had subsided. In five years as a repo-man I had had a dozen or so such encounters, been shot at twice, and beat up badly once. But this was my first confrontation since getting sober, and I was pleased that the old instincts and tricks were still there. I don’t like hurting people, no sane man does, but there had been no alternative this time. My six years with the fuzz had taught me to read people for signs of violence, and that man had meant to fuck me up.
I recalled another repo from about three years back: a memo had come in from the bank stating that a woman had stiffed Cal with a rubber check for two months’ delinquent payments and three months in advance. I checked out her home address and learned from her neighbors that she was a honcho at the local Scientology Center, a lesbian, and a welfare recipient. No one at the Scientology joint or her apartment building had seen her for several days, so I broke in late that night and discovered she had moved out completely. When I told Cal what had happened and described the woman’s lifestyle, he went nuts. Cal is a big right-winger and took the ditch-out as a personal affront. He told me to find the woman and repo the VW bus regardless of the time and expense involved, promising me a fat bonus if I succeeded.
Through coercion and bribery I got the Scientologists to relinquish the woman’s new address in Berkeley. I flew up there, getting drunk on the plane. After sleeping off the booze in a rented room, I took a cab to the address I had been given. No VW bus, no one at home. I had the cabbie run me by the Scientology Celebrity Center. XLB 841 was not in the lot, or on any of the surrounding blocks. I told him that we had some waiting to do, promising him fifty dollars plus the meter if he kept me company. He agreed.
Berkeley gave me the creeps: the people passing by looked aesthetic and angry, driven inward by forces they couldn’t comprehend and rendered sickly by their refusal to eat meat. A lot of people passed through the center, but I didn’t notice any celebrities.
Finally the VW bus pulled in. Suddenly I was pissed. I had tickets for the L.A. Philharmonic that night, and here I was, four hundred miles away, putting the arm on some counter-culture bimbo for her sleazy bus. Rather than waiting until she entered the building and pulling a simple ripoff, I ran across the street and intercepted her. Flashing my repo order in her face, I yelled, “I’m a private investigator and I have a repossession order for this vehicle. You have five minutes to remove your things, then she goes.”
The pretty young woman nodded along with me, but when I went for the driver’s side, she attacked. I had the key in the door when I felt a sharp kick in my leg. I turned around, the door half open, and caught her purse full in the face. I had never hit a woman, but I swung around and cocked my right arm. Then I hesitated. The heavy leather purse was arcing toward me again, and I grabbed it with both hands, wrenched it free, and hurled it across the parking lot. She was at me now, shrieking and clawing at my face. Her shrieks alerted the Scientologists within the building and I could see them goggling through the plate glass window. I grabbed the woman and flung her to the ground.
Luckily, the bus started easily. People were pouring into the parking lot. I swung out into the alley behind the lot. The woman was on her knees hurling invectives. Her best shot was “urban barracuda.” The cabbie was nowhere to be seen. I found the address of the cab company in the phone book, drove over, and left the dispatcher with an envelope containing fifty scoots. He told me Manny, the hackie, would get it when he clocked out.
I went back to Berkeley to move out my things. I sorted out my observations of the woman, her lifestyle, and her reaction when I presented her with the price of her culpability. I came to one conclusion: