The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (23 page)

“That’s okay.” Smooth as always. She’s sipping the beer but knocks back the shot of bar whiskey and pushes the shot glass toward Larry, who nearly kills himself rushing over to refill her glass. “Give us a bag of chips,” she says, and when she opens the bag she slides it toward me so we can both partake. We take turns, chip for chip. I wish I could think of something to say, but I can’t. But the silence isn’t awkward; its like we’ve known each other a long time and talk isn’t necessary anymore. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I turn my pager off.

“From now on, Dwight, I want you to call me Jamie.”

She’s waiting for a reply. I speak to her image in the mirror. “All right, Jamie.”

Licking her fingers, she whispers, “I know who you really are.”

I’m not taken aback by the statement. I catch on now. She thinks I’m part of the Petrov family. We exchange looks in the mirror. I nod. A couple of years back the Petrovs ran supreme in the tow-truck business on 99 from Stockton to Redding. They were from somewhere in the former Soviet Union, and there must have been at least 120 in the extended family; there was even a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother who got indicted. You get the picture. I got hired just before the ring got busted, started working for Nick Petrov in the storage yard about half a mile from here. This was after the army had given me a medical discharge but denied me any benefits—I had problems from the Gulf War, which should have been a 65 percent disability. Anyway, I was a trained diesel mechanic, and I did maintenance on the Petrov trucks for eleven months, until the place was raided.

It turned out the Petrov family wasn’t just towing wrecks or disabled cars. They had extended their business by towing expensive cars out of driveways and parking lots and taking them to their storage yards. The owners, assuming their cars were stolen, reported their loss to the cops and insurance companies. After an appropriate wait, the Petrovs sent the owners a bill for storage fees at a hundred dollars a day, and took the owners to small claims court if they protested the fees. If it got messy and an owner tried to fight back, his car disappeared into one of the chop shops to be sold for parts. It had been going on for twenty years.

About thirty-five of the Petrovs got indicted and sentenced. Mr. Petrov got twenty-three years; the grandmother, who I’d met once, fourteen years. When the state was ready to sell some of the Petrovs’ properties, I was ready to buy the yard I’d worked at. It was going cheap: the light-industry park by then was mostly vacant buildings with fading
FOR LEASE
signs. I’d received three years back medical payments from the VA, enough for a down payment on the half-acre storage yard with shop, office, and apartment. All I had to do was change the name to
AAACE TOWING
.

When Jamie stands up, and says, “Let’s get out of here,” I’m not the only one who’s surprised when we walk out of the place together. She clicks the doors open on a black Mercedes convertible parked in front. I still can’t think of anything to say, but it doesn’t matter as we glide under the streetlights. I don’t come much to this part of Sacramento where we’re driving, but I remember that Ronald Reagan lived around here when he was governor.

I’m too unsettled to see much of the living room because I’m sitting on a white sofa with my greasy boots on her white rug. The place is just too big to take in. She’s standing in front of me, hands on hips, looking down at me. She is so perfect. It’s the only word I can come up with. She is beyond anything I can imagine. “I want you to do something for me, Dwight.” I wait for more. “I have two brothers who are cheating me. I want you to beat the shit out of them for me.” The words don’t convey any real message to me. “When the time comes I’ll give you more particulars.” I’m still waiting for a sentence I can grasp. It isn’t the drink. I’m not hammered. “I know I can find you at the Silver Dollar.”

She pauses. “Go home now, Dwight. I’ll call a cab.” And that’s what she does, walks me to the street, gives the driver some money, and says goodnight. I have the cab let me out at the Dollar. When I step through the front door there is a spontaneous burst of clapping and someone says, “That a boy.” I give them a low bow in return.

When I was a kid I stayed one whole summer with my mother’s aunt, Carmen, who ran a bar, the Dog House. Some guy owned it, but he was too old to put up with all the aggravation that comes with the business. It was situated near the old Governors’ Mansion, and there were stories that the first Governor Brown used to cross the street in his bathrobe to use the swimming pool at one of the motels opposite the mansion. The Dog House was about a half-mile away from where the Silver Dollar is now. We lived upstairs over the place, and I could hear the music from the jukebox as I fell asleep. I had little jobs, separating the empties into their own beer boxes, sweeping, swamping the place out, taking the trash to the Dumpster. This was in the eighties. I begged my mother to let me stay with Carmen.

Once she opened, I wasn’t allowed in the bar. In the daytime we’d go to eat at what Carmen called greasy spoons, restaurants in the neighborhood, anything from Chinese to the Pronto Pup Palace. Carmen didn’t cook or drive. We walked everywhere. She had been everything—from a waitress on roller skates at a drive-in to a welder in the shipyards during the war. At night, after she opened, I’d climb up on the roof of the place once it got dark and watch through the skylight, through smoke so thick it was like looking down through the clouds. I’d hear the jumble of conversations above the music, and I would speculate about the people down there. Who was the drunkest. The best-looking woman. I couldn’t wait to join this crowd; it all seemed so exciting. I didn’t understand that nightlife is artificial—this whole business of looking for a good time, real or imagined, such a small part of what matters.

I stick around for another beer, but I leave early. I’m pretty sure I’ll see Jamie again. It’s just a matter of time. I usually check in at the Dollar a couple of nights a week, working my way through the smokers gathered outside the entrance, most of them looking through the glass door as if they’re missing something. There’s a butt can outside and a bench, and also a fine spray of mist to cool the smokers off. It gets hot in Sacramento in the summer, and humid.

I don’t see Jamie until Saturday. She comes in like last time and sits down next to me. I’m wearing better clothes this time, ones I bought for my mother’s funeral. Larry is attentive, wiping the bar top in front of us with a clean towel. Everyone is cool, not staring too openly. Jamie will never belong here.

“How have you been, Dwight?”

“Pretty good.” I’m cool. We knock back our shots. We sip our beer, crackle a few chips. I’m waiting for her to start up, give me the next installment.

“My family owns one of the largest vineyards in the Sacramento Valley, twenty-three thousand acres. Our grapes are made into jug wine. We’re not some cute Napa Valley boutique winery making vintage wines. We make the bulk wine winos drink. We sell our grapes to small wineries who pretend they’re the ones who grew the vines. No one gives us gold medals at the state fair.

“When my father died, he left me and my two older brothers each a third of the business. They sent me to school to get me out of the way. I’m the one with a degree in viniculture and the MBA from USC, and they want me to run the tasting rooms, jolly the tourists into buying cases of our three-dollar wine.”

I’ve heard a lot of grievances in bars: spouses vs. spouses, siblings, whole families battling over houses and jewelry and pet dogs. There is a certain similarity in the stories. I listen. She only pauses to sip her beer. She’s not ordering any more whiskey. She’s all business now. I’m realizing she’s like everyone else, except for the amount of money her family plays with.

I’ve been so worked up about the chance she might show up tonight, I’ve forgotten supper. When she pauses, I ask, “Are you hungry?” The Greek place a street over delivers, so we order pizza and eat it at the bar. She’s hungry too. “Sometimes I’m so pissed off at my brothers I forget to eat,” she tells me.

We stop chewing eventually, and she wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Let’s go to your place, and I’ll fuck your brains out.” I agree to that, although I’ve heard the line before.

I’ve partaken in the closer-relationship thing before. It always starts out with such enthusiasm on the part of both persons—a letting go, a release. You think this one will last forever. Jamie and I do all the things you do with someone new: laugh a lot, shower together, drink more, eat more, screw like we just invented it. We tell each other our life stories, the less important parts, as if we are rushing to get through the first week before the newness rubs off. And I almost stop wondering why she’s really here with me. The apartment built onto the cinderblock office has 8-foot ceilings and only a couple of windows; it’s dark and dank. The yard is dirt with patches of pea gravel; the wind blows the dust up in waves; fourteen cars left over from the Petrov era are parked to one side. The 6-foot Cyclone fence surrounding the whole property has concertina wire coiled along the top. But she doesn’t mind the place, stays over sometimes. Spending a few evenings at the Dollar, walking back to the yard hand in hand after the place closes, we’re a couple now. An item. The talk of the neighborhood.

Towing is a waiting game; you have to be patient till someone runs out of gas or breaks down, has an accident, locks himself out of the car. But in the meantime I have an arrangement with a loan company that uses me to repossess cars. Jamie insists on coming along. “It can get messy,” I tell her. She gives me her grin of happiness. We drive to an apartment complex with overflowing Dumpsters and a tangle of abandoned shopping carts by the driveway. The vehicle I’m looking for is parked on the street, a 2009 Dodge Ram pickup. In about forty seconds I have my slim jim down the inside of the window, the car door open, the brake off, and the front end up hanging from the hook on my wrecker. I’m home free until the owner comes out carrying a baseball bat, yelling what he’s going to do to me. When I took Doc with me a couple of times, he gave me some long theory on how when you repossess a man’s car you’re not only taking his transportation, possibly his livelihood, but his whole identity, his self-image, his manhood even.
It’s because we’re a car culture
, he said. I’m calm: it’s a no-sweat situation. I’ve done this so many times I know there’s only a couple of possible outcomes.

The guy takes a swing when he’s close enough, and I duck back out of the way of the bat. And before he can recover I kick him in the kneecap with my steel-toed boot. From the ground he decides he’s had enough. I tell Jamie as we’re driving away how I used to try and reason with people. I’d ring the bell and explain I had to take their car. I’d tell them,
I’m just doing my job
. That never made any difference. They’d still call me a bloodsucker and a scab, and I would still say,
Why didn’t you make your payments?
and they’d always have good reasons. Now I take the car any way I can, as long as it’s fast.

Jamie asks me to pull onto a dirt road, and we brush through some willows to the river. Sex is sex. But this time with Jamie on the front seat, with the guy’s Ram pickup hanging from the hook on the wrecker, it’s spectacular. In Technicolor. It’s like rainbow lightning is striking the wrecker. Again and again . . .

We are hanging out full-time together. She’s living with me in the yard. Jamie doesn’t come with me anymore for calls out on Highway 5, where everyone is going at least 80 miles an hour. Not after the first time, which was a pickup with a camper sideswiped by an eighteen-wheeler. The camper had fifteen people inside, fruit pickers on their way to Butte County. Its aluminum side was split open like the lid on a can of beets; 25 yards of blood and flesh was spread out 3 inches thick against the blacktop. Five cars got rear-ended trying to avoid the bodies. The tanker caught on fire. Ambulances, cops, Caltrans workers, and fire trucks; the highway was closed; cars backed up for 5 miles. I tried to warn her. Even with airbags it can get messy.

Jamie takes on some of my paperwork; there is a lot of it in this business. She gets a couple more filing cabinets and paints the cement-block office walls light green, which makes the room a little less dark. She’s not one of those people who can just sit there and answer the phone. She has too much energy, too many ideas. She talks me into buying two flatbed trucks. The front end of most new cars is all plastic; you can’t hook them; the best way is to winch them up onto a flatbed. I hire two guys: one lives in Roseville and the other in Elk Grove. They take the flatbeds home with them.

There is no money in scrap metal, and the pick-a-part places don’t need any more old cars, so Jamie phones Sister Meredith’s soup kitchen and donates all the leftover Petrov cars in the storage yard. They come right over and drag the cars away. The yard is looking good, empty, and I have a couple of dump-truck loads of pea gravel spread over where the dirt is showing. Jamie plants flowers in the new flowerboxes in front of the office. Gets business cards made and thumbtacks them in every 7-Eleven, bar, and liquor store in the neighborhood.

I’ve always been reluctant to get bigger, maybe because of what happened to the Petrov family, and I don’t store disabled cars for that reason. But with Jamie handling all the paperwork, it doesn’t seem too big a step. The money is rolling in. We only go to the Dollar on Friday and Saturday nights; we’re too busy. Doc would call us domesticated now. Jamie likes to cook. She plants some parsley out back.

She wants to take me to a friend’s Labor Day picnic. Somehow she thinks I think she’s ashamed of me. My job. My mother was a waitress. Et cetera. “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “Why can’t I introduce you to some of my friends?” I decline to answer. She wouldn’t understand. I believe there’s a shelf life to a romance like ours, though maybe if you can get past the use-by date you might be on to something. Doc used to go into that a lot. He’d been married four times. We’re not very close to the shelf date, but I’m counting. She likes telling me I’m the best thing that ever happened to her. I buy it and I don’t buy it. I have no release mechanism that allows me to reciprocate. For her it’s like the clichés are true: love, soulmate. For me they’re still clichés. I’m wary.