Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [22]
By the time the tow truck dropped me off in front of my friend’s garage in Overtown, the afternoon, while still hot and bright, was all but gone, along with any hope of profit. And by the time the traffic started crawling the other way, I was sitting in the thrift-store clutter of the garage’s office, sipping a cup of coffee and talking to Paul March, the owner, who sat across from me cleaning one of his guns.
March liked to clean his guns at his desk so his customers could see that he was a serious person. In the past he’d had trouble with some folks who wanted their cars back but couldn’t afford to pay for the repairs. It was Paul’s opinion that the timely appearance of a firearm in plain sight brought a new sense of reality to such negotiations and was worth a lot more than the sign on the wall that said NO CREDIT.
“That car of yours needs a new transmission,” he said. “Whoever sold it to you must have seen you coming.”
“I think his name was March.”
“Never heard of him.” He had finished putting the gun back together and was reloading it. “Come on out back with me,” March said. “I got something you might like.”
We went out to the lot behind the garage and walked toward a row of beaten-down-looking old cars parked near the fence. A tag team of Dobermans ran out from under a white truck and raced at me, their teeth bared, their small brains charged with inbred malice. Then they recognized Paul and started prancing around him as though he were a one-man party.
Paul, who had the same manner with animals as he did with people, smiled and kicked the male in the ribs. The bitch sat on her haunches and looked bemused. Paul made a sweeping gesture with his arms, and the hellhounds slipped back under the truck, where they lay watching us from the shadows, the two of them as quiet as a pair of snipers.
“What about this one?” Paul asked, patting the hood of a black 1977 Thunderbird with a bike rack bolted to the roof. “It’s only got a hundred thousand miles on it,” he said.
“Was that before or after you turned back the odometer?”
“After, of course. Hey, man, at least you can’t say I’m a liar.”
“I like the bike rack,” I said. “With this ride I’ll probably need it.”
At that instant a rat sprinted out in front of us and ran behind some stacks of retreads outside a rusted corrugated shed. We both saw it at the same time. Paul frowned at me and, with a stern expression on his face, placed his left index finger vertically across his lips.
“Time for safari,” he whispered. “Be right back.”
Paul crept behind the row of dilapidated cars and disappeared behind the shed, his gun barrel up and next to his ear. I was just thinking that I had to find a new mechanic when I heard the shot. The three men bent over the open hood of a car by the garage straightened up and looked in our direction. They stared for a moment, then went back to work. All of them knew their boss very well.
Paul came back a minute later. The gun was stuck into the waistband of his blue jumpsuit. From the look on his face, I knew that the safari had not been a success.
“Did you get him?” I asked.
“How the hell should I know?” he retorted. “You think I got the time to look for the body of a dead rat?”
It was six o’clock when I drove my “new” black Thunderbird out of March’s lot, and I hadn’t gone very far when I realized that, like the last car he’d sold me, this was one I probably wouldn’t be driving for too much longer. They had cleaned it up and given it a shiny new paint job, but it was nothing except war paint on a steel hag. The engine coughed at every stoplight, and I had a pretty good idea that there was something wrong with the carburetor. By the time I got home, I was glad just to have made it. When I shut off the ignition, the car kept making noises for the next thirty seconds, like loose bolts in a steel bucket.
I took a shower and drank a beer, then turned on the news and sat in my black recliner with my feet up, listening to the day’s calamities