.Skip Tracer

Installment 1: The Taste of Death and Rumple Minze

OAKLAND — Police arrested three reporters from The Independent, a free weekly “alternative” newspaper, and charged them with kidnapping and assault yesterday. Police Sgt. Leon Whitbrow described the case as “seriously weird” and indicated additional charges related to the possession of stolen medical cadavers and auto theft might be handed down later today. (AP)

Frankie didn’t see the gun right away.

Instead, the sound of the rickety screen door flying open and slapping against the weathered bungalow got his attention. The big white dude wasn’t wearing a shirt as he jumped off the porch, flew over four steps, and headed toward them in the early morning darkness. Just tan Carhartt pants with a brown work boot on one foot and a white sweat sock on the other. This disparity in footwear made him run like one of the gorillas in Planet of the Apes. It would have been funny if it weren’t for the Glock 17 — Frankie finally noticed! — raised awkwardly into firing position as he hustled primate-style across the yard and into the street.

It’s strange, Frankie thought, what you fixate on when you might die.

But that makes it seem like he was familiar with such moments. He was not.

The man with the Glock skidded to a stop five feet in front of Frankie, his sock slipping on the damp street, causing him to jerk the gun upward as he fought to regain his balance. The Glock mimicked the motion Uncle Ted’s rifle had made when he took Frankie deer hunting years ago back in Michigan, one of his mom’s well-intentioned attempts to provide a positive male role model after his dad took off. The image of the doe shuddering — almost dancing — and falling flashed in Frankie’s head. Involuntarily, he mimicked that shudder. He just shot me, he thought, but there was no sound. After a few seconds of not feeling the pain he was sure he would feel, Frankie actually held his arms out to the side and looked down at his torso to survey the damage. He expected blood. Vietnam War footage. A clear view of his vital organs, like the plastic display models in anatomy class. Hell, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see cartoon holes with light shining through from the streetlight behind him. But there was nothing. Relief flooded him, but he managed to feel ashamed at the same time as he looked back up at shoeless Joe. The guy was skinny and muscle-bound at the same time, like a well-groomed version of Iggy Pop.

“I ain’t shot nobody yet,” Iggy said, his chest rising and falling with each breath. “But we’re just gettin’ started.”

He swung the Glock toward Mateo, who was behind the wheel of the tow truck ten yards to Frankie’s right, looking back at them with one arm hanging loosely out the window. His blank expression didn’t change when he became the primary target. Frankie half expected him to light up a cigarette.

“Lower the car, repo man!”

Mateo just stared at the guy. There was nothing but silence and moonlight now. Frankie was close enough to the shirtless one to see white foam drying at the corners of his mouth. Had he been brushing his teeth when he heard them taking his Mustang? His hair was damp, carefully parted, and shaving cream smudged one ear. Without thinking, Frankie lifted his notebook to record these vital grooming details.

“What are you doin’?” the guy yelled as he trained the gun on Frankie again. He seemed more exasperated than angry. No one was acting the way they were supposed to when he had a Glock and they didn’t. “Writin’ your will?”

Frankie tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come.

“Alright now, son,” Clay said to the gunman, a big smile on his face. Clay was between Frankie and the truck, standing in the shadows where the tow arm was attached to the front of the Mustang. Frankie had forgotten he was even there. “The bank’s gonna get the car eventually. Let’s just take it easy and get it over with tonight. No sense dragging this out. And there’s no need to shoot anybody. That’s just making a bad situation worse.”

The man turned the gun on Clay and started walking toward him, his awkward gait giving him more menace, Frankie imagined, than your average pissed-off, Glock-wielding bad ass from El Sobrante who’s six months behind on his car payment. Clay kept smiling as the debtor walked right up to him and gently touched the barrel of the gun to his forehead.

“Put the car down, motherfucker” he said again.

Frankie had a strange taste in his mouth. Like nails. Maybe this is the taste of death, he thought before almost instantly convincing himself he was being melodramatic. It was just the fear of death. Metallic, like the stainless steel autopsy tables at the morgue. Or maybe something far more prosaic — stomach acid.

“This ain’t no big deal,” Clay said, the sweat dripping unconvincingly off his face, his eyes turned upward toward the barrel, like he was making his claim to the heavens.

“It is to me, goddamnit,” the gunman said. “Put the car down.”

“Okay, now, you got it,” Mateo said as he leaned out the truck window. He had a look in his eyes that Frankie hadn’t seen before, a look that he’d never want leveled at him. Frankie hoped Mateo didn’t carry a gun in the truck, or things could get worse. “I’m going to put her down, but it’s going to lurch a little. I don’t want any accidents. Why don’t you put the gun down first?”

“Oh, so you’re giving the orders now, tow jockey?”

For emphasis, he rapped the gun barrel hard against Clay’s forehead, like he was using it to break out a window. Clay’s head bounced back from the force.

“Lower it, Mateo,” Clay said. His fake smile was still in place but the corner of his mouth was twitching. A small trickle of blood ran down from his forehead over his nose.

With a whir and clank, the car started to descend. When it reached the ground, Clay asked, “You want me to unhook it now?”

“What do you think, you li’l bitch?” the gunman responded, stepping back and taking a quick glance at the cab. “You in the truck: Don’t try anything. You either,” he added, looking at Frankie almost as an afterthought.

“It’s free,” Clay said.

“So get in the truck and get the fuck outta here.”

Clay and Frankie backed toward the truck without losing sight of the Glock. As the three of them drove away, Frankie watched through Mateo’s sideview mirror. The guy was still standing in the middle of the street, one boot on, one boot off, aiming the gun at them. They were about to turn the corner when the mirror blew out, a fraction of a second before the sound of the shot reached them. Clay and Frankie ducked instinctively. When Frankie looked up, Mateo was driving with his knees, carefully brushing glass off his arm and out the open window.

“El Sob’s a better shot than I would have thought,” Mateo said. “Or maybe he was aiming for something besides the mirror.”

Frankie sat between Mateo Cruz and Clay MacIntyre — the intrepid owners of Cobalt Auto Recovery in East Oakland — and silently reflected on his near-death experience. It was three in the morning on an August day in 1990. He was fighting the urge to throw up. As was often the case, a Smiths song kept running through his head: This night has opened my eyes, and I will never sleep again.

He’d arrived in Oakland six weeks earlier to work at a newspaper long on attitude and short on profits: The Independent. It was a free tabloid (or, officially, an alternative newsweekly) that fancied itself “The New Yorker of Oakland” without realizing the ridiculousness of such a claim.

The staff prided itself on being smarter, funnier, and edgier than the daily hacks at the Oakland Tribune. But most of their scorn was reserved for the East Bay Express, the dominant alt weekly they derided for its meandering cover stories, pretentious cultural criticism, and vaguely left-wing editorial slant. Alas, most readers and advertisers didn’t agree; the Express was profitable and The Independent was decidedly not.

It didn’t help that the Express mockingly dubbed Frankie’s paper The Dependent, a reference to the fact it was part of a Dallas-based chain of alt weeklies and survived solely on the largesse of its corporate overlords back in Texas, who were determined to gain an advertising foothold in the Bay Area.

This was Frankie’s first real job, unless you counted caddying, lawn mowing, and snow shoveling as a kid in Detroit. Mateo Cruz was supposed to be the subject of his first cover story. He “recovered” about 75 cars a month for banks, finance companies, and auto dealers when the owners missed their car payments. He was a repo man, although the preferred Orwellian public relations term in the industry was “recovery professional.” He worked almost exclusively when most people were asleep.

Despite his editor’s healthy skepticism about the subject’s merits, Frankie wanted to write about shadowy men jacking cars in the middle of the night. He’d seen the movie Repo Man in a pot-induced stupor more than a few times in college and wanted to try it out for himself.

So this was his first chance to see his name, Frankie Hardwick, in big type on the front page. He’d worked hard to convince Mateo to allow him to hang out with them for the story. He’d called Mateo. He’d visited his repo yard repeatedly. He finally went to his house and had a Tecate with his wife. Mateo was not pleased when he got home and Frankie was sitting in his garage, pretending to relax in a lawn chair. But when his wife said she thought Frankie was a nice young man and it couldn’t hurt, he reluctantly agreed. He gave Frankie this look — a mixture of disgust and sympathy — that embarrassed Frankie. He seemed to sense Frankie’s desperation. Mateo must have felt sorry for him.

Frankie was a few inches over six feet tall, his shirts didn’t stay tucked in, and he had a habit of bumping into people and various large objects, like walls. He liked to think he wasn’t clumsy, just distracted. Frankie gestured too much when he got nervous. He worried that the weird springy thing his hair did on top looked like he had an accident with a blow dryer. It was black, this genetically warped hair, so any attempt to subdue it with various pomades, waxes, and industrial-grade shellacs made Frankie look like Dracula for a few hours before it bounced up again. He liked to say it resembled the quiff made famous by Morrissey, the former lead singer of The Smiths, but that wasn’t true. On a good day, he looked like he was auditioning for Grease. Frankie sensed that Mateo — wiry, precise, and fortysomething — interpreted the hair and the gawkiness as a character flaw. And who could blame him? Frankie thought.

I need some air,” Clay said as they rolled in silence down a darkened, tree-lined street about three miles away from Glock boy’s house that same morning. “Mateo, I think you better pull over.”

“You got it,” Mateo said before he eased the truck to the curb.

“Aw, hell,” Clay said, pushing the door open while the truck was still moving. He walked a few steps onto the front lawn of a surprisingly meticulous ranch-style house. Clay put his hands on his knees and calmly threw up.

“Hunt around in there and find his bottle,” Mateo said, a dark look on his face. A battered brown briefcase was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Frankie snapped it open and saw a pint of Rumple Minze peppermint schnapps resting on top of some manila files.

“He drinks this?” Frankie asked as he held up the half-empty bottle, a favorite winter libation back in Michigan. “In the middle of the summer?”

“He’s from Oroville, man, so who the hell knows,” Mateo snapped. “Go give it to him.”

Frankie walked over to Clay, who was standing up now, taking deep breaths. He’d cleaned his face up in the cab with an old bandana, but the raised red circle where the gun barrel had connected remained. A half-inch cut bisected the circle. The whole arrangement looked like the letter Q had been stamped angrily on his forehead.

“Here you go, Clay. Want some?

“Why, yes. Thank you, sir,” he said with mock formality. He took a swig and swished it around in his mouth before spitting it out.

“You gotta put up a fight so they know you’re serious,” he said, taking another draw and swallowing it this time. “Usually I can talk someone out of a stunt like that, but that dude was serious. He just didn’t care.”

He paused, hand on hip, surveying the neighborhood. With his short-sleeved plaid shirt and battered khakis, he resembled a frat boy relaxing at a house party. He was out of shape, with a paunch and a puffiness to his face that obscured any angles his cheekbones or chin might have formed. He’d already told Frankie he was 28.

“I think he woulda pulled the trigger,” Clay said, taking another long drink. Then he looked at Frankie. “How you doin’? You don’t look so great, son.”

Frankie realized he was shaking.

He’d been proud of himself for not falling apart or even appearing that scared while everything was happening. Now that the excitement was over, he had a chance to feel something. His teeth were chattering. The smell of wet grass and Clay’s vomit didn’t help. “Why don’t you have a swig,” Clay said, passing Frankie the bottle and patting him gently on the back. He gulped down a mouthful, which hastened what was going to happen anyway. Frankie handed the bottle back to Clay, turned away and barfed in a violent, hunchbacked motion.

“All right now, that’ll probably help,” Clay said.

No one talked as they drove down a street lit only by scattered, fuzzy balls of light from the porches of trim houses lining the block. The windows were open and the truck’s deeply treaded tires filled the cab with a low hum. The August air was cooler than it had been during the day. Frankie was sticky and tired. Clay was resting his elbow on the door and staring out the window.

“When you start out like we did, you know you’re in for a rough night,” he said, his words muted because he was addressing the open window. “I ain’t had a gun held to my head in a long time.”

He sounded wistful, perhaps recalling with nostalgia some earlier showdown involving firearms.

While the rest of the night hadn’t been as terrifying as the encounter with the gunman, it had been equally fruitless. When they managed to track down a car, there always was something preventing them from getting it. One car in Richmond was blocked on all sides by a pickup, a motor home and two other cars. They were about to hook up a van they found in a San Pablo parking lot when the two men and a woman who apparently lived in it emerged with tire irons and aluminum baseball bats.

Frankie interpreted Clay’s lament as a condemnation of his very presence in the truck. He felt responsible for the way the night had gone. He’d jinxed them, cost them time and money, and, if you wanted to go all the way with this, almost got somebody killed.

Too groggy to be calculating, Frankie blurted out, “I think we should go back and take another shot at the Mustang.” He just had a feeling that they could salvage the night if they tried one more time. And he didn’t want Mateo and Clay to think he was bad luck.

“Yeah, let’s get El Sob fired up again,” Clay said, turning toward Frankie. “Let’s really piss him off. Maybe he’ll come out with a shirt on and no pants this time — just to spice things up — and blow us away.”

Frankie tried to think of a good reason to go back. Part of him wanted to do it for the story. But another part was angry about having a gun aimed at him. Ridiculously, he wanted to teach that deadbeat a lesson.

“I know he had his shirt off, but his work pants were on and he’d already put on his socks and one of his work boots. I bet he works construction. He’s probably on the job right now. You saw the pickup in the driveway. Maybe he’ll take that and leave the Mustang on the street. He’s feeling like a bad ass right now. He may think it’s okay to just leave the car there, like we’re too scared to come back.”

“That’s crazy,” Clay said without much enthusiasm, but Frankie sensed he was thinking it over as he stared out the window.

More silence. Then Mateo spoke. “Let’s just roll by and take a look.”

Clay let out a sigh.

“Maybe we can pay the bastard back,” Frankie said with way too much gusto, overplaying his hand.

“Shit,” Clay said, shaking his head as he looked at him. “Just relax there, Dirty Harry. We said we’ll take a look.”

Mateo pulled over about a block away from the house. The porch light was on now, but the driveway was empty. The Mustang was still parked on the street.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Clay said, looking expectantly at Mateo.

“He could still be in the house,” Mateo said. “Maybe his wife took the truck. You got the papers from the finance company?”

“Sure do,” Clay said, fishing in the briefcase at his feet and coming out with a manila file folder. He leafed through the papers. “Says he’s single. And his sister in Fresno co-signed for the car.”

“He might have a girlfriend,” Mateo said. “She could have taken the truck or be in the house ready to call Glockenspiel when we show up.”

“I didn’t know you spoke German, Mateo,” Clay said. “I’m impressed.”

“Man, shut up or I’ll take your schnapps away from you,” he answered.

“No lights came on the first time,” Frankie said. “If there was someone in there, it seems like they might have turned on a light when he came out with the gun.”

Mateo and Clay mulled that over. Frankie figured he was violating journalism’s hazily defined code of ethics by trying to influence the outcome of a story, but ethics were not a priority at The Independent. Besides, he wanted the car.

“Bank gave us a home and a work phone, right?” Mateo asked.

“Home number, but no work,” Clay answered. “Just says he’s self-employed.”

“We’re gonna find a pay phone and call the house,” Mateo declared.

They drove three blocks to a 7-Eleven. Clay got out and dialed. “No answer,” he said, hopping into the truck.

They drove back and passed the house. Aside from the porch light, it looked dark. They looped around the block, parked up the street again and started watching.

“Well, it’s gonna be daylight soon,” Clay said. “Whadya think, Mateo?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to Frankie. “You got any theories?”

Once it hit home that Mateo might take his plan seriously, Frankie got nervous. Mateo was not overtly threatening or aggressive. He was almost unnaturally calm. But Frankie sensed he was the kind of person you’d have to knock out or kill in a bar fight before he’d quit. Not that Frankie had ever been in a bar fight, but he had hidden under a table at one back in Detroit. Frankie just got the sense that you needed to watch yourself when you were around Mateo.

Now he was asking Frankie a question and the answer mattered.

“He’s gone and the house is empty,” Frankie said, surprised at how sure he sounded.

Mateo offered up a tiny, non-committal smirk.

“I’ll drink to that,” Clay said, grabbing the bottle out of his briefcase and downing a quarter of it. The cab was filled with the smell of peppermint. He handed it to Frankie and he took a swig without thinking.

“Hand it over,” Mateo said, grabbing the bottle. “We gotta get at least one car tonight. It might as well be a red Ford Mustang.” He took a long draw, handed the empty bottle to Frankie and started the truck.

Frankie had a stopwatch so he could time the repossessions and give the story a certain exactitude, sort of like John McPhee. He pulled it out as they approached the Mustang. Clay sprinted after he hopped out of the truck, and Mateo backed into position with some speed. Frankie didn’t leave the cab this time. Clay had the car unlocked, in neutral and hooked in 45 seconds. It took Mateo 50 seconds to hoist the car and gun the engine to leave. They were headed home in less than two minutes.

The sky was beginning to lighten as they towed the car back to the lot at 5:30 in the morning. Clay had talked Mateo into stopping for a six pack of Bud Light, so everyone had a cold one as the sun came up over the strip malls lining the road out of town. A bottle of Korbel Brandy also had magically appeared.

Mateo wasn’t saying much, as usual, but Clay was excited.

“You called that one right,” he said to Frankie. “You’re goddamned Sherlock Holmes!”

“I just had a feeling,” Frankie said, too happy to adopt his standard self-deprecating tone. It was a strange thing to come out of his mouth because he was usually utterly incapable of knowing what he was feeling. The therapist he saw briefly in college said he was a “classic dissociative personality.” Frankie wasn’t sure how to take that so he quit going.

“I know what you mean,” Clay said. “I get hunches on cars and they’re almost always right. But I have to tell you, I wanted no part of that one the second time around. I was thinking we should just leave it for another night. But I deferred to Mateo Cruz’s wisdom and years of experience.”

Mateo finally cracked a smile. “Experience my ass,” he said, calmly sipping his beer as he drove. “Doofus here made the call and he’s never even been in a tow truck before. Hell, you even have a driver’s license?”

“I’m 22,” Frankie said. “Of course I have a license.”

“Hell, you do,” Clay said. “You look like you’re 15. We oughta make you our mascot. Maybe a little Raiders action — a skeleton mask and some metal studs.

“Fuck the L.A. Raiders and Al Davis,” Mateo yelled, showing more emotion than he had all night.

“Come on, man, they’re still our Raiders,” Clay yelled back. “Who else are you gonna back? The Niners?

Frankie took a hit of brandy. He had a feeling that was rare for him. Without second guessing himself, he’d taken a chance, proposed a bold — if not stupid — plan and it worked. He was probably loopy from sleep deprivation when it happened, but he didn’t want to nitpick. He felt like someone who acted first and thought later. And he liked it.

Even though Frankie had been fighting to keep him from seeping into his thoughts, especially at a happy moment like this, he also knew he’d done some real damage to Mr. Darlington. He’d let him know it wouldn’t be easy to beat Frankie Hardwick.

And who was Mr. Darlington?

He killed Frankie’s mom.

Coming Thursday, June 3 on our new fiction blog —

Installment 2: Pay Up or Else