Hot Wire

by Carson, Gary

  "I searched the car myself. There was nothing there."

  "You must have missed something."

  "I searched the trunk. Under the seats. The glove box. There was nothing there."

  "A hidden compartment, maybe."

  "That's what Deke said." The light changed and I turned left on Cedar, driving around a flooded sink hole. "He wanted me to turn the car over to this detective on the Emeryville Auto Theft Detail – leave it on the street or something and let him know where to find it."

  "Deke?" Brown looked distracted. "You mean Deacon? Your boss?"

  I told him everything that had happened with Deacon and Heberto, but he just shrugged it off and blew some more smoke at the window.

  "Listen," he said. "Matthews is probably trying to use the Emeryville cops to help him recover the car, but it doesn't make any difference, OK? One way or another, this doesn't have anything to do with the Oakland P.D. and Jacobo sounds like the detective I heard about a couple months ago. I didn't get his name, but I heard the Task Force and Internal Affairs had busted a corrupt detective in their smuggling probe. It's probably the same guy."

  "I knew it," I said. "I knew he was a rat."

  "Forget about Jacobo," he went on. "The Task Force is secondary, all right? It's the least of your problems right now. If you want my advice, you should turn yourself in when this is over and make a deal with them – testify against Deacon and Gonzalez and go into protective custody. Or cut a deal with Matthews."

  "You're crazy."

  "That's your decision, but we've got to find out if there's something hidden in that car. The bastards who snatched your friend aren't going to stop until they get it back or until this whole deal goes public. If we don't get there first, you'll never be safe, not even in jail. This goes all the way to the top and you saw what they did to that stripper. You were there. You found her after they left."

  I didn't bother to deny it.

  "You were in the wrong place at the wrong time." Brown came off sympathetic. "That's all there was to it."

  "All right," I said, making up my mind. "Here's the deal. You can have your story and get famous and go on all the talk shows for all I care. It won't do jack for me. I'll take you to the car and you can look it over all you want, but when you're done, I'm giving it back to this Matthews jerk and you've got to help me make the deal. We find some papers, you can make copies or whatever, but they're going back to him. Understand? I mean the originals. Screw politics, but they've got Arn and this is the only way they'll let him go. And I want full immunity. For everything. That's the deal."

  "Take it easy," he said. "You want to make a deal with Matthews? Trade the car for your partner?"

  "And immunity. What else do I have to trade with?"

  "It might be too late," he said quietly. "Arn might be dead."

  "I'm screwed," I said. "I've got to try."

  "OK," he said. "Matthews can help, but if you go to him, you'll probably have to turn yourself in. Let's check the car and I'll put you in touch with him if that's what you want to do, all right? He's the only one who can really help you now."

  "He knows this Oliver scumbag?"

  "Oh yeah," Brown said, lighting another cigarette. "He's known him for years. They used to work together."

  "Well, isn't that cozy."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I headed back towards the highway and the storm picked up the closer we got to the Bay. Rain hammered the traffic, fogging the windshield, and I could hardly see the street through this muddle of wipers, headlights and spray. One thing for sure: nobody was going to spot us in this slop.

  Brown kept his mouth shut for a while, brooding over his big story, I guess, or maybe he was trying to figure out how to screw me after he got what he wanted. Slumped in his damp trench coat, he smoked his way through a couple of cigarettes and stared out the trickling window.

  "You're doing the right thing, Emma." He said it like he thought I cared about his opinion. "I checked you out before I tried to reach you and the cops say you're smarter than the average car thief, so I figured you'd at least listen to what I had to say. If you were one of Deacon's thugs, I never would have met you like this."

  He was one deluded moron. We made the highway, sat on the ramp for a while, then finally merged with the rush-hour traffic: a parking lot of brake lights and glossy car tops backed up for miles in both directions. The Bay had vanished, clouds touching the water, the lights of San Francisco haloed and blurred in the fog. Wind whipped the station wagon. The windshield rippled. I could hardly see past the wipers, but I kept an eye out for patrol cars, tow trucks, Hummers and black SUVs.

  It took thirty minutes to make the Ashby exit and my nerves settled into a steady buzz. Brown passed the time by yammering about politics, giving me the dirt on the feds in this tone of moral indignation. He went on and on about Washington and the CIA, ranting about how Crewcut was part of this shadow group that wanted to set up a police state and how they had to be stopped before they used one of those Loose Nukes to start another war and take away all our freedoms, but he could have saved his breath. They were maniacs. I got the picture.

  "So they're crooks," I said. "What else is new?"

  "They're looters and killers." He'd worked himself into a lather. "Psychopaths. Mass murderers. You've got no idea how dirty they are. They smeared me like they smear everybody who tries to expose them – wrecked my career with their phony charges. Sex crimes and dope. They love that stuff. The Congress is full of pedophiles and faggots and they're all on the take – shills for the corporations and foreign lobbies, the worst kind of whores. They've got sick minds and they're going to wreck this country if somebody doesn't stop them." He sucked at his smoke. "I'm going to break this story, Emma. They think I'm washed up, but I'm going to see them in jail."

  "Yeah, well...good luck."

  He finally shut up, settling down to brood again, plotting his revenge against the feds. Or maybe he just needed a drink – I couldn't tell. We passed under the tracks and I took a left on Seventh, turning down Potter, a back street with a lot of chuckholes and a collection of junkers parked along the curb. The neighborhood had all the charm of a dead rat in a trash can. The rain battered a row of stucco houses crowded together in yards full of weeds and fan palms, the wind chasing leaves past a laundromat and a liquor store with barred windows. I checked the rearview – nobody had pulled in behind us – then I turned on Fifth and went around the block.

  "What's going on?" Brown stirred when I headed down Potter for the second time, dodging ruts at five miles per hour. The sidewalks were deserted. The houses looked like abandoned crime scenes.

  "It's down there." I pointed to a cluster of buildings half a block away. "Back where it dead ends."

  "You stored cars down here?"

  "Yeah, sometimes. It used to be this body shop and filling station, but they went bust a couple months ago." I drove around a sawhorse and a bubbling sinkhole. "We haven't used it for a while, but I've still got a key."

  "Looks condemned." Brown leaned forward, clearing a patch of windshield with his hand. "Buster stashed it here?"

  "That's what he told me."

  I checked the mirror again, then pulled into the filling station and drove around some rusting pumps, turning down an alley that ran between the station and a junk yard next door. A transformer hummed overhead. Water streamed down the body-shop wall, puddling the cracked blacktop.

  "We're trapped if somebody's waiting." Brown scanned the junk yard, twisting around in his seat to look out the rear window. "Doesn't your boss know about this place?"

  "I don't know." I pulled up next to a garage door covered with graffiti and peeling paint. Rain splattered a dumpster, dripping from the phone lines, banging the roof of the car. "He mostly uses parking garages and pay lots now, so he probably forgot it's even here."

  Brown nodded like he didn't buy it. Checking the alley, looking behind us again, he fumbled with his pockets, lit another cigarette and coughe
d up some smoke. I turned off the engine and went through my keys.

  "OK." I felt like a million roaches had just hatched in my stomach. "Let's take a look."

  I got out and a gust of rain slapped me across the face. I walked over to the garage, splashing through a puddle, and Brown joined me by the door, hunched inside his trench coat with his glasses fogged over and his collar turned up. The padlock on the door had rusted and I had to try a couple of different keys, but I finally got it open. The door made a lot of noise when we pulled it up.

  "All right," I said.

  Don't ask me why.

  #

  The Lexus glistened like a death machine in the murk of the body shop. Buster had parked it facing the garage door and I could see my reflection on its tinted windshield – a shadow framed by a warp of rainy light. Brown walked in, looking around, his coat dripping on the floor. The shop was bigger than it looked from the outside: four bays with jack mounts and exhaust ducts, a stripped-down paint booth, everything reeking of mold and oil. I walked over to the Lexus and ran my hand along a shining fender. The smooth lines felt cold and glassy.

  "Chase's car." Brown tried the front passenger door. It was unlocked. "Do you have the keys?"

  I got in on the driver's side, reached under the dash and popped the hood and trunk. The interior felt like a space capsule. It smelled like smoke and leather.

  "I left them in the glove box," I said, keeping my voice down for some reason. "Deke didn't have them, so they're probably still in there."

  "What about the registration and insurance papers?" Brown was whispering, too. He sat down in the passenger seat and looked around.

  "I don't know. Buster might've tossed them."

  Brown opened the glove box, pulling out some road maps and stuff.

  "Here's the keys," he said, holding up a key ring, then sticking it in his pocket. "Can't find any registration."

  I looked under my seat, checked the handrest compartment, poked around under the dash, then I sat up again, took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes.

  "I already did this," I said. "There's nothing here."

  "There has to be something."

  We searched the car from bumper to bumper and came up with a big zip. I went through the trunk, pulled up the cargo liner and took out the spare. I got the jack and took off the wheel covers, then I crawled under the car, checking the tire wells and chassis, poking around for magnetic boxes and hidden compartments. Meanwhile, Brown searched the interior inch by inch. He tugged at the seat liners, peered into vents and checked all the ash trays, then he got out and took off the gas cap, looking inside. I checked the engine compartment the best I could, but I couldn't find a thing.

  We finally gave up and just stood there, staring at the car like a couple of retards. A street light came on outside. The rain drifted through the alley.

  "It's clean," I said, "unless he hid something in the rocker panels or some place like that, but we don't have the tools to check that kind of stuff."

  "There has to be something." Brown looked desperate, like he sensed the Pulitzer Prize slipping through his fingers. "Matthews can tow it off and get some mechanics to tear it apart." He checked his watch. "We should call him right now."

  "What's the point?" I asked. "All he gets is an empty car, so why should he make a deal with me?"

  "Chase hid something in this car." Brown lit another cigarette. "It's got to be here."

  He blew a cloud of smoke at the Lexus.

  "Forget it." I wiped my hands on my jeans. I was cold, wet and hungry. "Everybody thinks there's something in the car just because I took it, and they all think I took it for some reason except the reason I took it. The whole thing's a big screw-up."

  "Hang on a minute." Brown peered through the driver's side window, both hands on the glass. "Are you sure you didn't find anything the first time you searched it?"

  "I'm positive," I said, walking over to the garage door and checking the alley.

  "Just the keys and registration papers?"

  "Yeah." I watched him circle the car.

  "That's all you found?"

  "That's all we found."

  He dug out the key ring, then walked over to the garage door and checked the keys in the fading light. While he was doing that, I went through the Lexus to make sure I hadn't left anything behind that could be used to identify me. I had just closed the trunk again when I remembered my own fingerprints. Wonderful. I wasn't wearing gloves, so I'd just signed my name all over the hottest car on the West Coast – not that it really mattered anymore. By now, every cop in the world knew I'd ripped off that stinking car.

  "Come on," I said. "Let's get out of here before somebody shows up."

  "Just a minute." Brown walked over and showed me a big key marked Yah Joe. "This looks like the key to a storage locker or something. Does the name mean anything to you?"

  "No." I reached up and grabbed the garage door. "Sounds like a Chinese restaurant or something."

  "We need to find a phone book."

  #

  We booked in the station wagon and I was glad to get out of there while we still had the chance. The neighborhood had this stench of poverty and disaster and the garage was the kind of dump a serial killer would use to hack up his victims. And something about the Lexus freaked me out. It gave me the creeps – this lawyer's car hidden away like bad luck on wheels, just waiting for some idiot like me to take it for a ride.

  Driving back through the alley, I got this flash of clarity. It was weird. I felt like I'd just snapped out of a trance or something. I don't know what happened, but I suddenly realized that I was driving through the rain in a hot car with a total stranger – a stranger who said he was going to help me cut a deal with another stranger who was supposed to be this spook working for the CIA. Jesus Christ. I'd just shot a fed and now I was tooling around with this scumbag reporter looking for a phone book. It was insane. The thing at Vincent's had really put the zap on my head.

  Total immunity. I must've been dreaming.

  "Matthews probably left his office by now." Brown checked his watch while I drove to Seventh and headed back to Ashby, clenching the wheel with my clammy hands. The sun had gone down and circles of rain glimmered around the streetlights. "We'll check the key, then give him a call if you still want to try for a deal. He'll want the Lexus – I know that much – and he can reach out to Oliver if he has to, but it's your decision. He'll probably want you to turn yourself in."

  I pulled up to a flashing red, waited for the traffic to clear, then turned right on Ashby, checking the rearview and sneaking a look at Brown. I still had the gun under the seat and a box of shells in my pocket.

  "If I stick around here, they're going to pick me up for sure."

  "Most likely," he said. "I don't know if we can still help your partner, but you stand a better chance with Matthews than anyone else at this point."

  "You got his private number?"

  He shrugged. "I've got a cell-phone number. It's probably a cut-out of some kind, but I think I can reach him tonight."

  "You're pretty tight with the guy."

  "I knew him in D.C., but we weren't exactly friends." He took out his cigarettes, then crumpled the pack when he found it was empty. "We had a working relationship, OK?"

  "Let me guess." I checked the mirror again. "He fed you stuff and you printed it."

  He frowned at that, but he kept his eyes on the road.

  "You make deals for access," he said. "That's the name of the game."

  "Some game." A passing car kicked up some spray. "And I'm supposed to trust the jerk."

  "You're lucky it's him." He shook his head. "Matthews is a good guy in a rotten business, all right? He's not interested in your criminal activities – that's not his jurisdiction – but you're going to have to deal with him and you're going to have to deal with this Task Force if you want to get clear of this mess."

  "I'll talk to Matthews if he goes for my deal."

  "That's your
decision. Everything's going to come out eventually."

  "You going to write about this stuff?"

  "I don't know yet." He held up the Yah Joe key. "Right now, it depends on this."

  #

  I pulled into a Quick Trip and slouched down on my seat while Brown went inside to look for a phone book. At least, that's what he said he was doing. For all I knew, he was calling the feds now that he knew where the Lexus was stashed, but I couldn't make up my mind to just drive away. Maybe he was a snitch. Maybe he was for real. Maybe Matthews would buy my deal and maybe he'd screw me over. I decided to play it out for a little while longer before I took my chances on the highway. Glancing around, I got the gun and stuck it under my belt.

  I chewed on my lips for five or ten minutes, then Brown finally came out of the store and splashed over to the car with a plastic bag in his hand. I was actually relieved to see the grubby bum. He got in and sat there for a minute, rubbing his face and brushing off his trench coat, then he grinned at me, his hair dripping, a neon sign reflecting on his glasses.

  "Yah Joe's a shipping business on University," he said. "It's one of those 24-hour places that rents P.O. boxes and storage lockers." He held up the key. "I think we just got lucky."

  "Chase stashed something there?" I backed out and turned right on Ashby, heading towards the Bay. Taillights floated through the rain and a Muni bus drenched the windshield with spray.

  "I wouldn't be surprised." Brown gave me the address, then he settled back and took a carton of Salems out of his bag. "No wonder we couldn't find anything," he said, opening a pack and tapping out a cigarette. "We were all focused on the car because you took it at just the wrong time. It's classic tunnel vision. Your first idea is always the worst, but you can't seem to shake it."

  He lit up, took a long drag, then let out a cloud of smoke.

  #

  Yah Joe was a tiny place hidden by some trees and I had to circle around for a while before we finally spotted the neon sign on the door. Crammed between a furniture outlet and a liquor store, the building had a bunch of signs in the window: UPS, DHL, FAXES, ID PHOTOS, PRIVATE MAILBOXES. I parked in the alley in back, then we walked over to University and went inside.