Psycho Save Us (10 page)

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 system.  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.