When the door shut, it came to her. Reach someone. All at once, she recalled her cell phone. It was still in the back pocket of her pants. She looked across the room, to where her pants lay on the floor. Stupid girl! Stupid, stupid, stupid! You should’ve made a phone call when you had the chance! You couldn’t have made a sound but someone could’ve traced the call, maybe! Now your hands are chained up! Good job, Big Sis!
A whimper.
Kaley looked over at Shannon. Her sister was sniffling and looking down at her lap dejectedly. A wave hit Big Sister. Ultimate fear of the unknown. Also…yes, yes…Shan had a sense of something shifting unfairly. Yes, hope had been unfairly dashed. It’s not fair, she’s thinking.
And there was something else. Deflation? Yes, deflation. She’s thinking we’re not such awesome ninjas anymore. She’s thinking about what a stupid little game it was. She’s yearning…yearning…for Mom? Mom, the meth-head? Mom, the woman who never remembers to pack her a lunch or give her lunch money? Yes, it seemed that no matter how dedicated a mother was to earning the Worst Mother of the Year award for the tenth year in a row, a little girl would always crave her mommy.
She’s feeling like we’re gonna die without her.
“Mmmm,” Kaley said, because it was about all she could manage. Shan looked over at her. Big Sister leaned over as far as she could, and looked Little Sister dead in the eye. We will make it through this, she thought. Kaley didn’t blink, and kept sending the thoughts. Or rather, the feelings. But she couldn’t send a feeling of confidence when she didn’t feel confident herself. Still, Shan seemed to get the idea, and nodded. She hadn’t picked up on any confidence, but she’d gotten the intent, the love, the caring of Big Sister, which would have to do.
Another wave hit her. Something from down the hall. Tension. Anger. Men were getting heated.
Yes, it would just have to do.
“Dig, son: welcome to the new an’ improved Pat’s Auto,” said the proud owner. Pat took him to the back work area and opened the door, which swung on new hinges. On the other side of it was a new peg board that held pneumatic drills, socket wrench sets, tubing, funnels, pliers and spare nuts and bolts.
“Nice,” Spencer said, unimpressed but pretending to be. The chop shop was almost exactly how he remembered it. His ears were assaulted by the sound of car work being done. A Lincoln Town Car was jacked up, half of it gutted. Beside it was a Mazda3, up on the hydraulic lift, two grease monkeys working underneath it with a VIN scraper. There was the same parts room off to one side, the same three bays with the hydraulic lifts. There were some improvements, but they all had to do with a certain cleanliness and order being kept—shelves filled with engine blocks, boxes of carburetor pieces, drive shafts, wheels, tires, screws, bolts, spark plugs, and the engine hoists all appeared more organized. The floor was cleaner. The lights weren’t so dim as Spencer recalled. Things were more efficient now. The pneumatic hoses drooped down from overhead, no longer creating a troublesome web the floor. The three grease monkeys Pat had working for him were either white or black. No more Mexicans, which was smart. Pat was figuring this shit out.
Pat hollered out, introducing Spencer to some of his employees. Their greeting was a lot less effusive than Pat’s had been. They were busy with their work, and none of them deigned to give him more than a cursory, and slightly suspicious, glance.
Many of the improvements Pat spoke of were invisible to the naked eye, though. Before he came up from Baton Rouge, Spencer had learned from a cat named Uncle Ben what sort of operation Patrick Mulley was now running. Since Spencer’s last visit this way, Pat’s Auto had become a multifaceted criminal venture, dealing a lot with the local gangs and cartels, providing reconfigured vehicles with sly compartments for hiding contraband. No more selling stolen parts for scrap or to unknown buyers online. Pat had moved up in the world.
Moving up meant newer, bigger connections. And with these new connections, he’d begun establishing himself as a key provider of perhaps the most important service in any big money scheme—Pat’s Auto was a haven for the placement of ill-gotten money, then the layering of it, and then the integration of it: the three main steps to money laundering.
Spencer walked slowly with his old acquaintance, taking it all in with the studied look of a man appreciating a young artist’s growth, but also seeing where the artist had yet to truly see his own potential, seeing that he was just on the cusp of his greatest breakthrough. This is the stage where most artists flounder, he thought. The first change that needed to be made would be taking such an operation out of the Bluff—Pat had enough friends now to help him do that, so why was he hanging out down here in Vine City with all these losers instead of going for the big-time?
One word answer: nostalgia.
Pat wouldn’t leave this town until it left him. He no longer needed its seclusion and safety from the police, yet he would remain. He would remain here until the day he got caught, probably sold out by one of these grease monkeys in overalls.
“What’choo think, money?”
Spencer sighed. “You’ve come a long way.” An’ still got a long way to go. But what do I know about these things? I’ve never been in charge of a chop shop.
“Yo, Eddie, m’man!” Pat shouted to one of the grease monkeys. “Me an’ my boy here gonna step inside my office fo’ a piece. I want them VINs scraped off.”
“You got the VIN books on the new Lincolns?” asked the skinny dude in blue overalls. “Because if you ain’t, we ain’t gettin’ all these VINs off tonight.”
“I gave those books to G-lo over there,” Pat replied, a bit testily. “G-lo, man, don’t tell me you lost them books, boy.”
“I got ’em right here, Pat,” said a big, solid-looking black fellow in a tone that said Pat should get off his ass about it.
“You boys better communicate better. Ya daddy here ain’t gonna be around forever.” He was referring to himself, of course.
Spencer watched them pull out their VIN scrapers and get to work.
Vehicle Identification Numbers were hidden all over cars and car parts, and some of their locations were kept very secret, known only to those in the know throughout the industry. If a fellow had connections like those that Pat had culled throughout the years, he could get a hold of the books that documented how many VINs had been etched onto the vehicle and where they were hidden. A VIN was a car’s fingerprint. If all the VINs couldn’t be scraped off and changed, then there was as problem if a driver got taken in, because it would be very easy to find out he was driving a stolen vehicle by checking the VIN.
Spencer knew this because he was a booster. Not from the sexy Gone in 60 Seconds type of bullshit, but the real, more mundane variety. It wasn’t actually all that exciting. Just scope out a Mustang GT you wanted and follow it to the owner’s house. Come back a week or a month later and smash the window. Toss down a towel so you don’t sit on glass, then use a screwdriver to pry out the ignition cylinder. Jam the screwdriver into the slot that fit a flathead so well you had to wonder if the idiots who made the car had purposely made it easy to steal, and then you’re off with your brand new Mustang, all without having to play that Price is Right game show like a sucker.
Spencer took in the entirety of the chop shop and wondered, Why would anyone wanna live the life of a simple sucker? How could anyone feel the energy of this kind of operation an’ not want in for the rest o’ their lives?
Pat clapped him on the back and opened his office door. “ ‘Step into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly. Remember you said that shit to me, what, twelve years ago it’s been since we met in New Orleans?”
“Thirteen,” Spencer said, stepping inside and taking a seat in a squeaking rolling chair. “But who’s counting?” He looked about the office, which hadn’t seen as much orderly improvement as the shop itself had since the last time he’d been here. There were two empty Dorito bags that sat on top of a desk piled high with folders that were in desperate need of a cabinet and filing s
ystem. A Hustler magazine peeked out from this pile, as did a number of used yellow legal pads and a copy of Fortune 500. Spencer pointed to the Steelers flag on the wall, unchanged since last he was here. “Still bettin’ on those guys?”
“Yeah. Dig: lost three g’s on ’em last week. Fuck me,” he laughed.
“Need to start betting with yer head and not yer heart, Pat.”
“Ya don’t turn ya back on where ya came from, money. Thought you woulda figured that out by now.”
Spencer smiled and leaned back, interlacing his hands across his belly.
“So?”
Spencer shrugged. “So?”
“So talk, nigga. What’choo showin’ up here fo’ like a lonely muthafucka in need of a friend?”
“I told you. Work.”
“Bullshit. They’s somethin’ else.”
“No. Honest to God. I need work.” And he really did. Money wasn’t just scarce these days, it was nonexistent.
Coming up from Baton Rouge he’d managed to work out a few ways of wrangling what he needed to get gas and food, but most of that had been ill-gotten. The Baton Rouge PD was still looking for him when he came across the Chevy Tahoe, one of the easier vehicles to boost because of its limp ignition cylinder setting. The damn thing had been sitting nearly on empty, though, so he’d only managed five miles before he had to pull over and snatch up an F-150 from a Wal-Mart parking lot. He’d gone straight for the Ford because there was a gun rack on the inside of the back window, but, alas, once inside he found no guns at all. Fifty miles later, though, he got his weapon. A Glock sitting in the glove compartment of an old Camry. He’d selected this one because of the NRA bumper sticker, right next to the sticker that said WORST PRESIDENT EVER with the O replaced with the Obama logo with the half blue circle at the top and the three red stripes at the bottom. One could always count on a card-carrying NRA redneck who despised the first nigger president to have a weapon nearby.
Never know when the End Times will come an’ the Anti-Christ will emerge, Spencer had thought at the time.
The Camry had gotten him forty miles into Mississippi. Spencer had gone far, far south, into a town called Spenceville (which he thought was providence) and knew that he was probably plenty safe when he started seeing billboards that relayed messages from God Himself. The first one was black with only large, white bold letters saying, God, why don’t you answer our prayers and send us a person who can cure AIDS, cancer, and all disease? Two miles down the road, God gave his answer on another billboard, I sent you that person and you ABORTED him!
Yes, Spencer had entered the realm of Hallelujah and Amen! Churches were placed literally every three miles, sometimes four, but that was a rarity. The Camry ran out of gas and he felt safe enough to stop at a station to fill up, but only went another fifteen miles down the road to a parking lot behind a Ryder truck factory in Buford County. Here, where third-shifters had been toiling away their nights, he obtained a Civic. He quickly switched the plates with another similar car nearby, then hotwired that sucker and got to movin’.
The Civic was a piece of shit. It kept listing off to the left and its engine made enough noise to raise the dead. You don’t wanna raise the dead in the South. Spencer’s mother used to say that. He never knew what it meant, only that she said it whenever talking about how difficult it was to debate anyone with a Southern accent.
Spencer stayed off major highways, feeling far safer in the back roads that took him through towns of simple country folk. These people would be more likely to shoot him if they knew who he was and what he’d done, true, but they were also less likely to pay attention to anything besides Fox News, and anyone with an IQ above 110 knew that channel ran almost nothing but political rhetoric that soothed these humble, smalltown folk and eased them to bed at night, confident that they were right about the liberals and how the country was going to hell.
He hadn’t even sweated seeing patrol cars while pushing through these territories. Once in Alabama, he switched cars twice; first into a Mazda Miata that had an awesome CD collection for him to listen to while he blazed a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros he’d found in the Civic, and then into a Dodge Grand Caravan at Tallapoosa County.
All during this long game of musical cars, Spencer had checked in with news radio stations. So far, there wasn’t any mention of what had happened in Baton Rouge. Amazing to think that as violent as it had been, there was still other shit in the world that people cared about more. He did learn, however, that Kim Kardashian was rumored to be engaged again.
Now there’s knowledge I can really use, he thought, chuckling and burning another Marlboro. It was little wonder Spencer got away with all that he’d gotten away with in life.
He chanced Interstate 20 for a few miles before he hopped off again. The Caravan he was in came with a detachable GPS, which was pretty sweet to have.
The next car he stole was in Muscogee County, right near the Chattahoochee River. That officially brought him to Georgia, the land where local legend had it a young man named Johnny had an epic duel of fiddles with the Devil. It was a Chevy Blazer that carried him thirty miles to Troup County, where he came across the Tacoma in the parking lot of a hair salon. He’d moved through Heard, Carroll, and finally into Fulton County, all the while using the same screwdriver to tear off ignition covers. By this time, the game had changed, gotten tenser. The closer he came to the cities, the more wary he had to be of police vehicles.
Once there, he hadn’t stopped until he was in a city called Roswell. There, he’d approached an unsuspecting well-to-do-looking man in an empty parking lot and clubbed him over the head with a tire iron he found in the back of the Tacoma, taking his wallet. Spencer had tailed the man into a gas station, watched him count out some cash, and knew this was the guy. He’d taken off in the Tacoma, leaving no witnesses (as far as he knew) and perhaps leaving the man for dead (also as far as he knew).
It had been a long journey, and it had been fun so far. In fact, reflecting on it now, the mad dash to get away from Baton Rouge had been one of the most liberating experiences of his life. Second, perhaps, only to his escape from Leavenworth. And speaking of Leavenworth, it appeared Patrick Mulley had read his mind.
“Yo, Spence dawg,” Pat was saying. “Befo’ we get into any kind o’ business arrangement, I just gotta know what up. Ya feel me?”
“What’s up with what?”
“Leavenworth, playa.”
“You really wanna know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?” He leaned forward, elbows propped up on his knees. He reached into a mini fridge beside his desk and plucked out an ice cold Bud, tossed it to Spencer without asking if he wanted it. Spencer caught almost without looking.
Spencer popped the top of the bottle—and was glad it was a bottle, because it didn’t taste as good in a can—but winced when he heard the snap-hiss-pop of the cap coming off. He’d never liked that sound. It got under his skin. Like Miles Hoover, Jr.’s voice had done. He took a sip, savored it. “It’s been two years,” he said. “I’m sure ya heard it all by now. It was on the TV for a minute.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Pat conceded with a knowing smile. “But I wanna hear you tell it, playa-playa. I wanna know what really went down. ’Cause it went down a bit differently than they reported it, didn’t it?” Spencer smiled at him, and Pat smiled wider. “Didn’t it?”
Spencer leaned back in his seat and put his feet up on a desk, knocking over a Burger King bag and a paperback novel that looked like the binding had never been cracked. “What do you wanna know?”
“E’rythang.”
So Spencer obliged him.
At 12:13 AM, the Fulton County Police car pulled up to 157 Beltway Street. It was the left half of a boarded-up duplex that had been built in 1965, with repairs performed repeatedly down through the decades, but always to the plumbing and electrical work, never to anything that reinforced the integrity of the structure. Many times over Atlanta City Hall had debated condemning the entir
e area around it and tearing down the apartments, townhouses and duplexes that made up this section. As one city councilwoman once famously said of the homes there: “Those aren’t houses. It’s a bunch of cockroaches doing handstands on each other’s backs.”
Jovita Dupré didn’t see the patrol car pull up. She had been near the window, curtains drawn, but the light that splashed across them looked like a white fire blooming against her shut eyelids. When she opened her eyes, Jovita blinked. Her mouth had been open while she was sleeping. Her collar was soaking wet with drool and her tongue was as dry as sandpaper.
The light from the headlights pried her eyes open, slowly and painfully, until finally she realized she was back in the waking world. Back in the slowed down version of reality. Back in the uninteresting part.
Jovita’s bones hurt. She wondered how long it had been since she had moved. She wondered what time it was. She wondered a lot of things.
As she stood up, Jovita became faintly aware of the knock at her door. Paranoia, distant but familiar like an old friend that hadn’t called in a while, settled in for a visit. She blinked. Her eyes felt dry, and her vision was blurry. A stark contrast to the sharpness she had experienced earlier, a distinction to the vibrant colors that had defined her life. There was also a cluttered mess in the place where her former clarity had been. Jovita’s thoughts moved sluggishly, trapped on a freeway during a rainstorm where an accident had happened way, way up ahead, too far to actually see. The great importance that she had felt for both herself and the world around her had now evaporated. The world was topsy tur—
Shan! Kaley!
Paranoia called up his cousin, Fear, and they had a little get-together in Jovita’s brain just then. The last thing she recalled was that she had handed something to her daughters. Maybe some money? Told them to go get something? Groceries? But now they were gone. Jovita searched the room for another kind of light, those being the red numerals of the alarm clock on the living room table (the living room had been her bedroom a lot lately). But those reassuring red numbers were nowhere to be found.
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