Authors: Joe Gores
“Yeah, well, she ain’t gonna get it from us.”
Warren ripped the report from the typewriter and stood up. He jerked his windbreaker off the back of the chair and started
to shove his arm into the sleeve all in the same motion.
“Hnen Agh nquitt!” he exclaimed.
CLOSE AND BILL
on
WALINSKI, SARAH
.
CLOSE AND BILL
on
UVALDI, PIETRO
.
The guy was an absolute killer. Kearny got in Warren’s way as the big man tried to storm out of the room.
“You can’t quit,” said Kearny reasonably. “I need you to go down to L. A. with Trin Morales and ferry up a couple of Gyppo
Cadillacs. Besides, your registration hasn’t come back from Sacramento—and your raise hasn’t come through yet.”
Storm clouds still churned in Warren’s eyes. “Hngmaybelle?”
“A steal at forty a night, Dan,” said Giselle quickly.
“Hear that?” said Kearny. “A steal at forty a night.”
Warren looked suddenly flustered; he ducked his head and mumbled something and gathered up his folders and patted Giselle
on the shoulder and was gone.
“What’d he say?” asked Kearny.
“He has to drive Maybelle home.”
“
He’s
the Friend whose apartment she—”
“Yep. He knew her son in Vietnam. I didn’t know that when I assigned the reopen
REPO ON SIGHT
to him. He went out on it and rescued her from some rednecks and
then
repo’d her car.”
“How the hell do you find out all this stuff? The guy doesn’t say two words to me, and when he does I can’t…”
“Maybe ’cause I listen?” she said. Kearny shrugged, half shook out two cigarettes, extended the pack to her. She took one,
adding, “And how’d you know I’d started smoking again?”
He gestured at the ashtray of butts. “Warren doesn’t.”
They lit up. Giselle said casually, “Maybelle does a hell of a job, doesn’t she? A steal at forty a—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.”
* * *
Ballard and Yana both came at the same time, crying out together wordlessly in their mutual release. After a long minute of
dying spasms and thrusts, they fell apart and lay on their backs, sweating, panting, staring up through the semi-darkness
at the plush hangings over Yana’s bed. Incongruously holding hands.
Almost unwillingly, Yana rolled toward him and put her head on his shoulder and gave him a few leads on some Marino clan Cadillacs.
And then asked him for that favor she had in part brought him back here a second time to get.
At such a moment, what man in his right mind would say no?
I
f it isn’t raining in Seattle, it’s overcast. In fact, a publisher who wanted an aerial panorama for a book jacket once had
to wait eight months just to get a clear day for the picture.
Take today: overcast, moist, but not raining; none was forecast until after the weekend. Which suited Big John Charleston
right down to the waterlogged ground. Scraped out of the piney woods by his bulldozers here southeast of Seattle on Maple
Hill Road, Big John had a subdivision he’d figured for a sure thing. Urban refugees fleeing California for the good life in
God’s country, what did they care about a few trees got axed to give them space? How could he miss?
But despite a hell of a lot of money paid under the table to various officials, the permits and zoning and environmental impact
studies had taken so long that the goddam recession had its claws in when he’d been ready to roll. So Big John had fifty lots
all platted out, sewer and utilities in, roads dozed and graded for blacktopping—but no buyers. Not even Californians.
He needed loan extensions from the banks, but to show the project was viable he had to pre-sell lots, which meant paved streets.
And now the goddam envirofreaks were double-dipping for a second share, and there was an injunction against him getting any
more work done until some other goddam study had been made. Well, screw that. He’d do it anyway—except that all the local
contractors, knowing he was broke, wouldn’t work on the cuff.
“We got assets.” Little Johnny was Big John’s son by his first wife, and, sadly, a mere sliver, not a chip, off the old block,
“We got this model house done and three others framed, and the lake and the park and the golf course staked out—”
“We got dirt fucking streets is what we got.” Big John was the size of the late John Wayne, whom he would have resembled if
Wayne had worn Jay Leno’s outsized jaw. “It starts raining and the streets turn to mud and
we
turn to mud.”
“Joe Adams Road Paving, Inc., is really big down in Los Angeles, Pa.
Really
big. He’s got prospectuses and photographs of jobs he’s done, ten times the size of ours. His specialty is getting in and
getting the job done before the environmentalists can get a restraining order. He says even after they got one, like with
us, it’s awful tough to tear up paved streets once they’ve been laid. He’s just moving into the Northwest, that’s why he’s
willing to give us such a good deal.”
“But he wants the whole sixty thousand cash money up front,” said Big John, “and we got thirty thousand eight hundred sixty-one
dollars and twenty-two cents in the corporate account.”
“Maybe offer him half down, Pa, give him the rest after we get the bank loans renegotiated. Meanwhile, all the streets in
the subdivision will be blacktopped and ready for buyers—”
“Shut up. Lemme think.”
Big John heaved himself to his feet with a grunt, went to stand in the open doorway of the sales office in the model house.
Overhead was the huge illuminated billboard Little Johnny had insisted would catch the eye of motorists passing on Highway
169:
BIG JOHN’S BIG BUNGALOWS
BUY! RENT! LEASE!
FIVE MODELS TO CHOOSE FROM
FISHING—HIKING—BIKING—GOLF
CAREFREE MINUTES FROM THE CITY
He rubbed Jay Leno’s massive jaw. Southern California road contractor. Designer jeans and dark glasses, prolly driving some
shitty little foreign bug a real man couldn’t hardly get his butt into. But here Big John was, with an unfinished subdivision
would belong to the bank if he didn’t get those streets paved. So his kid’s $30,000 down wasn’t such a bad idea.
“We’ll see,” he said at last. He had no other options.
A filthy mud-spattered pale blue Cadillac Seville STS, the new one winning all those auto mag best-car-of-the-year awards,
swung in from the highway. California plates, on the door the silhouette of a big black bird with the tips of its spread wings
going off into ribbons of blacktop road. Below that:
JOE ADAMS, INC., CONTRACTORS
ROAD PAVING OUR SPECIALTY
GLENDORA,CALIFORNIA
A very fat man got out of the Seville. He wore a stained blue workshirt with the arms cut off above the biceps and khaki work
pants riding low under a balloon belly. The bottom two buttons on the shirt had strained open, showing a tepee of hairy skin
with a navel deep enough to hide a golf ball. His neck was thick and his arms enormous and sweat stood on a face too shrewd
for one so fat. He stuck out his hand.
“Joe Adams.”
Big John took the hand. “Big John Charleston,” he said.
Truth be told, Big John liked everything he saw. Even drove American, not Japanese, No flash—hell, construction game, a man
needed a heavy car to drive around in—not afraid to get dirty, not afraid to put a sign on the door of his car. But Big John
crossed belligerent arms over his own wide torso.
“That’s a substantial amount of money you want. Ain’t any way I’m gonna pay the whole contract off up front in cash.”
Adams had a heavy, almost guttural voice that went with his massive physique. “There’s reasons I’m askin’ for that.”
“I’d like to hear ’em.”
Adams gestured at Little Johnny, hovering behind his pa like a family dog waiting to be told whether he’s going to be allowed
to ride in the car or not.
“I thought I made ’em clear to your boy there.”
“Make ’em clear to me, too.”
“Primo, you’re in trouble with your bank.” Big John swung around to glare dangerously at his son; Adams put up a detaining
hand. “Not him. I got connections, even up here in Shitburg.”
“You mean God’s country,” chanted Little Johnny in the Northwest’s knee-jerk mantra about their heavenly land.
“Yeah? All God does up here is piss on a flat rock.”
“No rain’s slated ’til Monday,” said Big John literally.
“Good. I can finish the job by then, and our work is guaranteed. In writing. Second, you got the Greenies breathin’ down your
neck. But Joe Adams, Inc., Contractors, we just do it—and once it’s
in
, it’s hard to tear out. That’s why we can undercut anyone else’s bid by fifty percent. And that’s why we get our money up
front.”
Unfortunately, Big John still had only half the needed cash. But then Little Johnny surprised him with, “It isn’t good business
to pay you up front for a job you haven’t even started.”
“Tell you what,” said Joe Adams. “Thirty thousand Monday morning, the other half in sixty days. Fair enough?”
Yes indeed! Big John was proud of his son for the first time in the kid’s miserable weak-kneed life. All he had to do was
figure out a way to hold this guy off on the second $30,000 until he could scratch up the dough. He stuck out his hand.
“Couldn’t be fairer,” he rumbled.
* * *
As Joe Adams drove away from
BIG JOHN’S BIG BUNGALOWS
up in Seattle, down in L.A. Ken Warren was turning his company car into the Sherman Oaks Inn on Ventura and Coldwater. Ignoring
the office, he went down the sloping drive and turned left, as Kearny had instructed, to check the under-the-building parking
stalls.
“There they are,” said Trin Morales.
Next to the end wall was Dona Dulcinea’s Fleetwood Sixty Special four-door sedan. In the stall this side of it was Adam Wells’s
Seville. They’d flip a coin to see who had to tow the company car back up north. But Morales spoke abruptly.
“I’m staying over.” He dug an elbow into Warren’s ribs. “Just came down cause I got a little
chiquita
lined up, ’course I couldn’t tell Kearny that. You drive one Caddy back up, tow the other— I’ll keep the company car. Got
it, dummy?”
Without answering, Ken Warren got his towbar from the trunk and tried the key Kearny had given him for the Seville. It worked.
Kearny’s other key worked in the Fleetwood. Only then did he turn back to Morales.
“Hndon’ cat’th
AIDTH
,” he said.
* * *
The others had already left when the nigger showed up. Wasn’t nothin’ wrong with niggers playin’ wide-out for the Seahawks,
say, goin’ long for them bombs and them Hail Marys. But not around Big John’s subdivision. Hell no. Niggers was lazy and couldn’t
keep their eyes and hands off your women.
This one was a little feller, couldn’t go over 160 pounds, but had the widest shoulders Big John’d ever seen on a man his
size. Stood looking around the staked-out subdivision under the lowering skies, clipboard in hand.
“Looks like you’re going to have some road-paving work done,” he said pleasantly. “All graded and ready to go.”
Big John fisted his hand around the roll of nickels he’d gotten from the desk drawer before coming down the steps.
“Ain’t any work, that’s what you’re after.”
“Not looking.”
“They’re all sold, closed escrow on the last one yestiday.”
“Before the streets are in,” marveled the nigger. “Before the houses are even framed up. In a recession economy. You’re a
hell of a salesman, Mr. Charleston.”
“You gettin’ wise-ass with me, boy?”
The nigger just shook his black poll and said, “Wouldn’t know where I could find your paving contractor, would you?”
“Joe Adams? Try his office.”
“Which is…” Ballpoint poised.
“In Seattle.” Big John chortled at his own wit, then demanded abruptly, “What ya wanna see him about, boy?”
“I’m with the State Contractors Licensing Commission…” Big John put a hasty hand in his pocket to deposit the roll of nickels
there. “Question of whether he has the necessary permits and has paid the necessary fees.” He was looking into Big John’s
eyes for the first time, and there was unexpected steel in his gaze. “We don’t want him to do any road paving here on your
subdivision until it’s cleared up. Do you understand?”
The nigger obviously didn’t know about the Greenies’ injunction against
any
work being done on the subdivision.
“I most surely do,” said Big John evenly.
He’d keep away from the job over the weekend, in case this guy
did
come around and catch Adams paving without a permit. And just to be sure he’d… But he stopped his hand on its way to his
money clip. The nigger somehow looked like a bribe offer might not set too well with him. And hell, wasn’t no need. No gov’ment
pussy’d ever worked the weekend in the entire history of bureaucracy, and the paving would be done by Monday.
Which gave Big John his really brilliant idea.
Make
sure
this pansy coon came around with his pansy little clipboard on Monday, after the job was finished, so he’d arrest Adams,
at least shut him down for operating without a permit. Maybe Big John’d get himself a $60K job for
zero
K bucks.
“Mr. Adams plans to start work on the project first thing Monday morning,” he said. “You can catch him here then.”
* * *
Bart Heslip drove away satisfied. Josef Adamo indeed was in Seattle, calling himself Joe Adams. And would be out here at this
subdivision Monday morning bright and early in his Seville.
But as he headed north on Empire Way, Bart got thoughtful. Big John Charleston had been too cooperative. What if the work
was going to be done over the weekend, not next week?
Considering that rain was forecast for Monday, and considering what he’d learned that day going around to recyclers and paint
wholesalers in the greater Seattle area, he’d hold off until Monday. He laughed aloud as he jinked over to the 1–5 skyway
that would take him all the way up to Seattle Center.