Bad Guys (9 page)

“How come they’ve got you doing stuff like this?” I asked.

“I’m in town for a while, catching my breath,” he said. “Until all hell breaks loose someplace else, which shouldn’t be long.” Stan’s in his early forties, unmarried, lives in a tiny apartment someplace in the city, and isn’t saddled with the kinds of obligations that might keep the rest of us from leaving at a moment’s notice for the North Pole or Taiwan or the Falkland Islands. His jeans and multipocketed jacket hung loosely on his thin frame.

“So, what kind of shots you looking for?”

I shrugged. “I just got here. I’m gonna talk to people, see what they’re looking for.”

“Well, give me a shout if you need me. I’ll wander.”

I found Lawrence checking out a Saab convertible, then looking it up on the sheet he’d been given listing the items available for sale.

“Interested?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“I’m going to talk to some people,” I said.

“Knock yourself out. Auction doesn’t start for another half hour.”

I meandered with my notebook open, pen in hand, chatted people up. Some were civil servants of one stripe or another—cops or firefighters or clerical workers—who had an inside line on when these kinds of auctions were held and made a point of attending them. And there were general members of the public who were on mailing lists, or signed up at Internet sites that, for a fee, let one know when and where these types of sales were going to be held.

One guy, an accountant, told me he thought it was cool that his current car, a Lexus, was once owned by some notorious cocaine dealer. “Gives me something to tell my lady friends, gives me a little cachet,” he said. Sort of like being a badass by association, which struck me as pitiful.

Even though a lot of these cars were going to go for rock-bottom prices, I didn’t see much in my price range. Most of the vehicles were listed with a suggested opening bid, and maybe a loaded 7-series BMW at $25,000 was a good deal, but it was still a lot more than I could spend.

I’d just finished talking to a guy who planned to bid on a 1998 Land Rover that had sustained a lot of damage in a police chase and was going for next to nothing (“I can rebuild anything,” he said) when I spotted the silver compact four-door that Eddie Mayhew had pointed to earlier. Nice flowing lines, but not too flashy. Bucket seats, a sunroof, reasonably roomy backseat.

A couple of other potential bidders were checking it out as well. A woman I guessed to be in her early sixties, and a short, balding guy built like a fire hydrant. He brushed past me as he rounded the car, and I noticed he was dressed in an expensive suit that didn’t fit him worth a damn. You spend that much money on clothes, you figure you could spend a few more bucks on alterations. He coughed, took a swig of juice from a glass bottle in his right hand, coughed again. There was a jingling noise coming from his left hand, which turned out to be full set of keys hanging from his index finger. I guessed they must have been a set belonging to his wife or daughter. You don’t see that many guys with a two-inch Barbie doll hanging from their key ring.

“Nice, huh?” the woman said, noticing that we were both admiring the same car. “The Virtue is such a cute car. It’s perfect for my daughter.”

Hmmm. It might be perfect for mine, too, if the price was right.

The guy in the ill-fitting suit kicked the car’s tires, coughed again, took another sip, and shot me a look as I made a closer inspection of the car’s interior. I looked at the dash, the layout of the gauges, which were placed in the center of the dash and angled toward the driver. There were several buttons I couldn’t figure out the purpose of, then realized they controlled the CD player. A CD player!

I found Lawrence and asked him for the auction list. “What’s a Virtue?” I asked. “I think I’ve seen some ads.”

“One of the big Japanese companies makes it. It’s one of those hybrid cars.”

“A who?”

“A hybrid. Has like two engines. A gas one and an electric one. The electric one keeps the gas one from working so hard. When you’re stopped at a light, electric motor kicks in so you don’t have to waste gas; light changes, you hit the accelerator, gas motor kicks in. Like that. Great gas mileage, hardly pollutes the environment.”

“Okay,” I said, remembering what I’d read about hybrids in the paper’s weekly automotive section. “Is this the one, the electric engine is always recharging its own batteries?”

“Yeah, and it’s got a lot of them. They got one of those here?”

“I guess it belonged to a drug dealer who was environmentally conscious,” I said. “There’s a little good in everybody.”

“Yeah. Wasn’t Hitler nice to his dog?”

“Come and have a look at it.”

Lawrence followed me over. “Looks in pretty good shape,” he said. He opened the door, checked the odometer. “Not all that many miles on it. And I hear they have a pretty good reliability record.”

“And the suggested opening bid,” I said, finding the car again on the list and holding my thumb there for future reference, “is kind of reasonable.” I slipped in behind the wheel. “I like it,” I said.

I checked out everything. The size of the glove box, the map pockets on the door, more storage pockets on the back of the seats, the interior trunk release, the sunroof buttons. “Seems pretty well equipped. And you know what else I like?”

“Tell me,” said Lawrence. “What else do you like?”

“The statement it makes. Says you care about the planet, that you want to do your part to preserve the ecosystem.”

“Yeah,” said Lawrence. “Chicks love that.”

“Some might.”

“So, you gonna bid on it?”

I was nervous. I’m always this way when I consider spending a lot of money. I get short of breath and my mouth goes dry.

“I think maybe it’s worth a shot.” I paused. “You know what? Let me give Sarah a quick call.” I dug my cell phone out of my jacket and called her at her desk at
The Metropolitan
.

“City,” she said.

“Me. I’m at the auction. I think maybe I found us a car.”

“Uh-oh.”

“No, just listen. It’s perfect. Good on gas, perfect for Angie commuting to school, an excellent repair record according to Lawrence.”

“Is it a convertible?” Sarah sounded tentatively hopeful.

“No, it’s not a convertible.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You’re something else, you know that?”

“I didn’t say it had to be a convertible, I was just asking. What color is it?”

“Silver,” I said.

“I’m not crazy about silver, but I can live with it. What kind of money?”

I told her the minimum bid was $8,000, and I could almost feel her intake of breath. “Listen, you said that was sort of in the ballpark of what we could manage. If I have to go way over, then I’ll just walk away.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

“And don’t do something dumb like pull on your ear. They have all these signals. You could end up buying it and not even know it.”

“I’m not in a Dick Van Dyke episode,” I told her. “I just have to— Oh shit.”

“What?”

“I didn’t bring my checkbook. I figured there was no way I’d buy anything. No, wait, Lawrence said he could buy it for me, I could pay him back after. That way—”

“Don’t fucking take my picture, man!”

I whirled around. Stan Wannaker was being shoved up against a Ford Explorer by the short guy with the bad cough and the Barbie keys. “Call you back,” I said, and slipped the phone back into my jacket.

“Fuck you!” Stan shouted back, the two cameras hanging down on his chest suddenly flinging about like enormous necklaces.

“Give me your film!” the man demanded.

“Fuck you!” Stan said again. He’d dealt with bad guys all over the world, in countries a lot scarier than this one, and he wasn’t about to surrender his film to some short asshole with a bad attitude in an ill-fitting suit.

“I wasn’t even taking your picture,” Stan told the man. “I was just doing an overall shot. Take a pill or something.”

The short guy was in Stan’s face now, as best he could, being about six inches shorter. He set his bottle of juice on the hood of the Explorer so he could poke a stubby finger into Stan’s chest. “You gonna hand over—” and he coughed “—that film?”

Stan backed up an inch to avoid any incoming phlegm. “Listen, dickwad, I’m here for
The Metropolitan
and if you want my film you better call our fucking lawyers and take it up with them. And if you touch me with that finger again, I’m gonna snap it the fuck off.”

The short guy was a bomb about to go off. His face went flush red, his shoulders tensed, and even Stan, as fearless as he’d been a moment earlier, looked like he was getting ready to move sideways in a hurry if he had to.

But then Stan’s attacker began to notice that he was getting a lot of attention. People had stopped looking at cars and boats and motorcycles and turned their heads in the direction of the commotion, not sure whether to intercede, watch, or move on. The guy glanced around, his lips pressed firmly together, breathing in and out in short bursts through his flat, wide nose. He gave Stan a final shove up against the SUV and strode off in the direction of the paddock exit.

“You okay?” I said once I’d reached Stan.

He was unruffled, just checking his cameras for any damage. “Fucking little Nazi,” he said. “Thought I was at an Afghan checkpoint there for a minute.”

“He was crazy,” I said. “I thought he was going to explode there for a second.”

“A suicide bomber without the dynamite,” Stan said flippantly. “Anyway, good thing he decided to take a hike.” He smiled, nodding his head toward the crowd. “Too many witnesses around. I’ll have to watch myself in dark alleys for a while.”

Once I was sure Stan was fine, I rejoined Lawrence.

“Let’s bid on the Virtue,” I said. “But I don’t want to go over eight-five. Eight-six, maybe. But that’s it. Maybe eight-nine.” I’d started sweating again.

Lawrence said, “You’re grace under pressure, aren’t you?”

THE OLDER WOMAN who’d been eyeing the Virtue the same time I was bailed out at $8,800. And I managed to go through the bidding process without tugging my ear or nodding my head in such a way as to end up with a $100,000 yacht by mistake.

There was some paperwork to deal with, forms to fill out, and then the car was ours. And not just any car. But a fuel-conserving, environment-saving, socially responsible automobile. And yet, I had a feeling, once I got home with it, I was going to be made to feel like Charlie Brown after he came back with the spindly Christmas tree.

Actually, it wasn’t quite mine yet. Lawrence wrote the check, and once I’d repaid him by the end of the day, he’d transfer the ownership to me.

We split up outside the government auction headquarters. Lawrence left in his Jag, and I had the Virtue. I decided that its first adventure would be a drive down to the newspaper. The car’s mileage was relatively low, and it had cleaned up nicely. The ashtray didn’t even appear to have ever been used for anything but candy wrappers, and the coils on the lighter weren’t smudged with ash. What were the odds, a drug dealer who didn’t even smoke? Lawrence’s theory was that it had been a drug dealer’s wife’s or daughter’s car. How else to account for its pristine condition?

It was roughly the same size as our old Civic. Sleeker looking, too, but not necessarily peppier. I floored it as I got onto the highway and merged with traffic, and it felt a tad, well, anemic. But it hadn’t been my intention to buy a sports car. This vehicle was going to do just fine, and when you figured that I got it for about half the price of a new one, it was a hell of a good deal. There were times when I wasn’t even sure the car was still on. Sitting at red lights, when the electric motor took over to conserve fuel, the car was practically noiseless, like a golf cart. It wasn’t until the light changed, and I tapped the accelerator and moved, that I was certain the car was still in the game.

I found a metered spot on a side street around the corner from the
Metropolitan
building, walked past the huge bay doors where the papers rolled down off the presses, were bundled, and loaded into dozens of waiting trucks. I took the stairs up to the second-floor cafeteria and grabbed a coffee on my way to the fourth-floor newsroom.

I set my paper cup down next to my “work station,” part of a cluster of four desks separated by chest-high partitions, and pressed a button on my computer to bring it to life. I dug my notebook out of my sports jacket and flipped it open as I slipped down into my chair. I was typing a possible first sentence for the auction feature when I sensed a presence over my left shoulder.

I whirled around in the chair, catching one of my fingers on the edge of my notebook. It was Sarah. “Hey,” I said, glancing at the side of my index finger where a slender red line was developing.

“Hey yourself. What the hell happened when I was talking to you on the phone? Why didn’t you call me back? If you’re trying to give me a heart attack, your plan’s working perfectly.”

For a moment, I couldn’t remember ending our conversation so abruptly. “Oh yeah. Some nutjob went ballistic on Stan. No biggie. He’s dealt with worse.”

“How am I supposed to know that if you don’t call me back?”

I didn’t see Sarah’s other staffers getting chewed out like this. “Could we just move on?” I asked.

She took a breath, let it out slowly. “What are you doing now?”

“I’m gonna knock off this auction feature, Metro can use it any time they want with the pics Stan took.” I sucked on the side of my index finger. It was stinging like hell.

“Okay. How long?”

“Twenty inches or so.”

“Let it run. There’s a lot of big holes in the section tomorrow.”

Welcome to the newspaper biz. No one cares what’s in your feature, just so long as it will fill the space.

“And this feature on Larry? Is it—”

“Lawrence.”

“Right. Lawrence. Is that thing going to be done soon, because I was telling the M.E. about it, that things got a bit hairy last night.”

“Did you really have to do that?”

“Zack, there was no way I could not tell the managing editor about that. If Magnuson finds out about it from someone else, then comes to me and asks why I didn’t let him know, I’m toast around here.”