Bad Guys (8 page)

Lawrence listened.

“And she’s not really making a big deal of it. She says the guy’s just a pest, nothing to worry about.”

“Okay,” Lawrence said. “But it seems like a big deal to you. What do we know about this guy?”

“Well, he’s twenty or so, I gather, seems to be living on his own, his parents are out west or something, kind of a computer geek, into the whole
Matrix
look, the sunglasses and long coat, not badlooking according to those who’ve seen him, but a loner.”

“And how long has he been following your daughter?”

I was about to remind him that this was a “hypothetical” case, then figured what the hell. “Doesn’t sound like a long time. Couple weeks, maybe. Calls her cell phone quite a few times every day, calls the house. He called at breakfast yesterday morning, I had to field it because Angie didn’t want to talk to him. Angie, she’s going to college now, and I think he’s—”

“He got a name?”

“Wylie. Trevor Wylie.”

“Okay.”

“And he’s shown up, just the other night, outside of one of her friend’s houses, like it was just a coincidence, but this was clear across town.”

“So he would have had to follow her there, that’s your thinking?”

“I guess.”

“He’s got a car?”

I shrugged. “I’m guessing yes, but I don’t know.”

“What’s she said to him? Your daughter. Angie, right?”

“Yeah. I don’t think she’s told him to drop dead or anything. She’s not like that. But she’s probably given him the brush-off, bordered on rude. When she thinks it’s him calling her cell, she doesn’t answer. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have gotten the message by now.”

“Some people often don’t read the signals very well.”

I looked out the window. We were approaching the Oakwood exit, and from the highway you could see the hundreds of new suburban homes, each one barely distinguishable from the next.

“What would you do if you were me?”

“Well, you could do nothing. Chances are he’s harmless and this whole thing will work itself out.” Lawrence put on his blinker.

“Or?”

“Or you could check him out. Find out a bit more about this kid. Which might put your mind at ease, or tell you that you’ve got reason to be concerned.”

“And how am I going to do that? Start tailing him?”

“Hey,” said Lawrence, “you’re not exactly learning from the master. I blew that tail last night in the first mile. What you could do, though, is follow Angie.”

“Huh?”

“Well, what you want to know is, is he following your daughter around? You follow her, you’ll find out whether he is, too.”

I shook my head. “That’s crazy. I couldn’t follow my own daughter.” But even as I dismissed the idea, I was working out the logistics in my head. Would I wear a disguise? Rubber nose and glasses? And if Angie was using our car for the evening, and Trevor was following her in his car, then how was I going to follow him following her if we didn’t have a second car? Well, we didn’t have a second car yet, but—

Enough, I told myself. This is crazy talk.

What kind of father would consider, for even a moment, actually tailing his own daughter around town? And what would his wife do to him if she found out he’d been doing such a thing?

“No, no, I could never do that,” I said quietly.

“Hey, I’m only talking out loud,” Lawrence said. “Your other option is, let someone else check the kid out.” He paused, considering. “I’ll do it if you want.”

“No, no, that’s okay. I don’t think Sarah and I really have money in the budget for hiring a private eye. No offense. I mean, if we were ever going to hire somebody, you’d be the guy.”

Lawrence smiled. “Don’t worry about it. When you finally do your story about hanging out with a private eye, I’m gonna be getting lots of business.”

“I can’t accept services in return for editorial coverage,” I protested, but not, I have to admit, very strenuously.

“We didn’t even have this conversation,” Lawrence said.

He was quiet for a few more blocks, then said, “The thing is, Zack, where your own family is concerned, you have to trust your instincts. If your gut tells you something’s wrong, it probably means something’s wrong. Read the signals. If a guy thinks, just because his wife is coming home late from work every night, closing the door when she gets a phone call, and dressing a lot hotter than usual, that maybe she’s having an affair, odds are she’s having an affair. If your gut says this kid is weird, he’s probably weird.”

“But weird doesn’t always mean dangerous.”

“No,” Lawrence said, “it doesn’t. You’ll have to listen to what your gut has to say about that. And let me tell you something else, pal. Don’t ever let anyone hurt someone who’s important to you. Don’t hesitate. Don’t second-guess yourself.”

“I hear ya,” I said.

“And don’t miss your moment.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Years ago, I was a cop, but off duty, didn’t have my weapon, and I walked into a drugstore right in the middle of a holdup, guy has a sawed-off pointed at the cashier, screaming at her to empty the till.”

“Jesus.”

“So I freeze, and the guy knows I’m there, tells me to back off, but he’s doing this thing with his nose, sniffing, you know? It’s ragweed season, and he’s doing these funny little intakes of breath, and not only has he asked the cashier for money, but a box of antihistamine on the counter behind her. The guy’s very jumpy, like he wants to use the gun even if he gets everything he’s asking for, and it’s clear he’s got a sneeze on the way, and I’m guessing that when it comes, it’s gonna be a doozy. So I wait for my moment.”

“The sneeze.”

“We’re in the windup, each intake a bit bigger than the one before, and it’s just about to happen, and I figure, this is the moment, there will never be a better opportunity to deal with this situation, and then he blows. Nearly blew out a window with this sneeze, and I tackle him the millisecond before it happens, because when you sneeze that big, you close your eyes. He never saw me coming.” He smiled to himself.

“How do you know,” I asked, “if it’s
the
moment?”

“If you don’t know,” Lawrence said, “then it’s not the moment.”

He brought the car to a stop outside a bureaucratic-looking red brick building that fronted the street and was flanked by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence, and beyond that, hundreds and hundreds of vehicles. Lawrence took the key out of the ignition. “Let’s go look at all the shiny cars. Maybe we can find one with a few million in coke still in the trunk, you and I can both retire.”

“WE GOTTA FIND EDDIE,” Lawrence said. “He’s not the actual auctioneer, but he oversees this whole operation. He’ll tell you everything you want to know, but don’t be afraid to make a run for it if he starts to drive you crazy.” Lawrence asked around inside the office and was told we could find Eddie out in the compound.

He was peering through the windshield of a Cadillac, double-checking the vehicle identification number against a sheet attached to the clipboard in his hand, when Lawrence called to him. He was a slight man, about five-six, probably late forties, bookish in appearance with his oversize black-framed glasses and half a dozen pens clipped to his shirt pocket. His hair was short, curly, and greasy looking, like maybe he hadn’t stood under a shower for a number of days.

“Hey, hey, Lawrence, how are ya, how are ya?” he said. Even with the big glasses on, he was squinting through them at us.

“Good, Eddie. How’s life treatin’ ya?”

Eddie Mayhew shrugged. “Oh, you know, busy, busy, all the time, busy. The stuff’s always coming in, you know, always coming in.”

“How’s the missus?”

I looked at Lawrence. Missus?

Eddie made a face, like he’d caught a whiff of something that smelled bad. “Oh, you know, still talk talk talking, wants me to drive her out to see her sister in the spring, out in Milwaukee. Both of them, talk talk talk, for a whole week.”

“They got a lot of beer there,” Lawrence said, trying to offer Eddie a glimmer of hope.

“Yeah, beer, yeah, that’s good. What I really need, really need, is something to put me out for the drive out, so I won’t have to listen, won’t have to listen, to my wife.”

“That’s kind of difficult if you’re the one doing the driving.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Can’t win.” But then, oddly, a look of calm came over him. “Oh well, oh well. Maybe it won’t be so bad, so bad after all. A lot could change by the spring, yeah.”

“I’d like you to meet my friend here, Eddie,” Lawrence said, allowing me to step forward. “This is Zack Walker. He’s a writer for
The Metropolitan
, he’s going to do a feature on the auction, have someone take a few pictures.”

“Oh sure, yeah, sure, that’s fine. Good paper,
The Metro
, I read that. Read that all the time.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I explained that I was doing a color piece on what it was like to buy a car at a government auction. Eddie said he could spare some time to answer my questions, and Lawrence excused himself to register and check out what vehicles were available.

“We’ve got boats, motorcycles, furniture, high-end stereo equipment, oh yeah, we got everything,” Mayhew said. “Sometimes we have people submit written bids, whoever bids highest wins.”

“Like those silent auctions my son’s high school does sometimes for fundraisers,” I offered.

“Well, sort of, I don’t know, I don’t have any kids, never had any kids, but the stuff they’re auctioning off at your kid’s school probably didn’t all belong, at one time, to drug dealers and smugglers, am I right? Huh?”

“That’s probably true.”

“But today, okay, today we’re auctioning off some big stuff, and we’re doing it the way you’re probably more familiar with, with an auctioneer, right? Mostly cars, SUVs, couple of boats, good stuff, really really good stuff. Come on, we’ll go out into the paddock, out in the paddock, I’ll show you.”

We wandered out into what looked like a used-car lot, with the odd boat, motorcycle, and RV tossed into the mix.

“So, who’d this stuff used to belong to?” I asked, scribbling into my notebook.

“We’ve got goods here that belonged to biker gangs, mean ones, you know, mean bikers, and drug smugglers, big-timers who got away with it for a long time, and small-timers who thought they could make it big but were a bit too stupid to do this kind of thing without getting caught. Even some CEO types, stock fraud guys, get their fancy Beemers and boats seized. I know the history of everything out here. Make it my business to. It’s interesting, you know? You got your whole crime microcosm here, wrapped up in these cars.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Ask me anything,” Eddie said. “Go ahead, go ahead, ask me anything about anything you see. Go on.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. I pointed to a shiny red Mustang. “What’s the story there?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, okay, okay, I know,” he said quickly. Eddie seemed to be running on premium unleaded. “Bobby Minor, twenty-four, bought the thing from money he made dealing crack on the north side, it’s got a V8 under the hood, barely 15,000 miles on it. Go ahead, check the odometer, go on, check it, see if I’m right.”

With some reluctance, I opened the door and glanced at the dash. The car had 14,943 miles on it.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Ask me another,” he said. “Go on, ask me.”

I didn’t know how long I wanted to play this game, but figured I could go another couple of rounds.

“All right,” I said. “That one.” I indicated a motorcycle.

Eddie, cocky behind the Coke rims, circled the bike. “Harley-Davidson, belonged to a member of the Snake Eyes gang, yeah, that’s right, loosely affiliated with the Hell’s Angels, those Hell’s Angels, ran prostitution, table dancers, that’s what they did. This bike belonged to Buzz Crawley. They called him Nut Crusher.” Eddie giggled. “Guess why? Go on, guess.”

“I think I have an idea.”

“You know why? He’d go visit guys, guys who owed the gang money, grab their boys with a set of pliers, drag ’em around the parking lot that way. Oooh, that would hurt, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that hurt?” He was smiling big-time now.

“That would hurt.” I had stopped taking notes.

“You see that Land Rover? That got taken away from the Jamaicans; that little silver car, that was in Lenny Indigo’s driveway before they put him away; that one, that green Winnebago there, that was—”

“You really know your stuff, Eddie, no doubt about it. I think what I’m going to do is, talk to some of the people who’re planning to bid on something, get a bit of color for my story.”

“Oh, good idea. But you need anything else, I’m always here.”

“Don’t you ever go home?” I asked.

He grinned, leaned in toward me. “You knew my wife, you’d know why I’m here all the time. Like to avoid going home as long as possible, you know? You married?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about, right? You know what I’m talking about, oh yeah, I can see it.”

“Well, thanks again,” I said, and broke away.

I’d called
The Metropolitan
’s photo desk ahead of time to arrange for a photographer to meet me here. I’d been a reporter-photographer myself on another paper a few years back—what they called a two-way—but my new employer was content to limit my skills to writing.

I spotted Stan Wannaker, one of the paper’s most distinguished shooters, who you’d be more likely to run into in Afghanistan or Pakistan or one of the other “stans” where people are always shooting each other and blowing up things because they don’t have access to cable. He was evidently slumming it to be covering something as mundane as a police auction alongside a lowly reporter like me.

“Hey, Stan,” I said, interrupting him as he snapped a couple of frames of a guy inspecting a Lexus.

He glanced away from the viewfinder. “Hey, uh, Zack, right?” He reached into his pocket where he’d stuffed a folded blue assignment sheet, opened it up and confirmed that I was the reporter he was supposed to meet. I was still relatively new on staff, and this was the first time I’d linked up with Stan. Given that I’m not exactly a foreign-correspondent type, what with my aversion to getting sand in my shoes or visiting nations where intense heat is likely to cause me a rash, our paths had not crossed.