“You two screwed like weasels,” Davey said around a mouthful of french fries. “Admit it.”
I was laughing so hard I almost fell off of the rusty hood of Davey’s Corolla. “We didn’t,” I said.
We were in the parking lot of Dick’s Drive-In on Forty-fifth, leaning back against the windshield of the Corolla and eating cheeseburger combo meals. Or Davey was eating. I was trying to catch my breath.
Davey liked to fill his paper container of fries so full of ketchup that it drowned any hint of potatoes. He licked his fingers clean and grinned even wider. “You did. You snuck Eden Adler out of the dance and went into the equipment room and did it right on top of the rolled-up gym mats.”
“Fuck you, Tolan.” I swung a lazy fist at Davey’s head, and he ducked it. Our clowning was attracting attention from the long line of UW students waiting to place their orders at the window. A couple of the girls had been looking at Davey even before he started needling me about Eden.
“I swear I can’t figure out why she’s so wet for you,” he pressed. “Is it the lapsed-Catholic thing? Yeah. Eden knows you and your granddad never go to Mass. She’s trying to lure you into renouncing the true faith and putting on a beanie.”
I flicked one of my fries at him, and it bounced off the center of his treasured vintage Clash T-shirt.
“Hey!” he said.
I grinned. “I can’t lapse if I never started.”
“You’ll be speaking Hebe by Saturday,” Davey insisted.
We had beaten the dinner rush at Dick’s. Sundown had brought a wave of students from across the freeway, nearer the campus. You could tell the difference between the ones from the dorms and those from the fraternities and sororities by how they arrived. The dorm rats were on foot, the Greeks piled into cars.
“What time is it?” I asked.
Davey checked his battered Timex. It had been his dad’s watch, back when old Joe Tolan was still spending any time with the family. “Six-fifteen,” he said. “What time’s tip-off?”
“Seven-oh-five. Close enough. Let’s go.”
We got off the hood, and I tossed my bag of trash to Davey. He walked over to put it into one of the plastic garbage bins at the corner of the restaurant. I could tell that Davey was feeling full-on rock star tonight, in his favorite shirt and black jeans and battered Doc Martens. He took the long way around, so he could walk parallel to the customer line and get a closer look at the sorority girls. None of them were as hot as Eden Adler.
On the way back, Davey slowed and smiled with full wattage at a petite blonde. She pretended to ignore him while watching out of the corner of her eye as he loped back to the Corolla. A tall jock in a U-Dub volleyball sweatshirt was standing next to the girl, not quite close enough to claim ownership. He scowled at Davey.
“You drive,” I said to Davey, and we got into the Corolla.
“You see that girl?” he said, his eyes still on her as he pulled out of the lot and turned east.
“I saw her boyfriend ready to kick your ass.”
“Shit,” he said. “You got my back. What’s the planley, Stanley? You want to go around back?”
I shook my head. “Too much security right now. The valets will wonder why anyone’s leaving the lot this early. Hit the main parking lot by the stadium.”
Davey made a face. “Ain’t much there there, man.”
“We’ll find something. This isn’t a custom order, just Frankenstein.”
“Parts work. We dig up what we can.”
He grunted. “Dono call it that?”
“Dono doesn’t call it anything.”
“’Cause you don’t tell him.” Davey was fumbling in his jacket pocket for something. I reached over and steadied the wheel as we half drove, half coasted down the long viaduct toward Montlake Boulevard and the university parking lots.
“He doesn’t tell me everything he does, either,” I said.
Davey laughed. “I’m sure he’d see it that way. Real understanding.” He pulled a joint and a plastic lighter out of a partly crumpled cigarette box.
“Save it,” I said.
“It’s cool. I’m just staying slick.”
“You’re greasy enough. Take the back entrance, here.”
“You’re the only one doing real work tonight,” Davey said, but he put the joint back in the box.
We pulled in to the parking lot and stopped at the gate. I handed Davey ten bucks, and he handed it to a guy in a shiny orange safety vest. The gate guy waved us toward another guy standing eighty yards in, who was motioning with lighted flashlight wands toward the nearest open parking lane.
The gate was the far side of Husky Stadium, maybe a quarter mile from the Hec Edmundson Pavilion, where the women’s basketball game was being held tonight. The Huskies were doing well this season. Better than the men’s team by a wide margin, and the lot was crowded. Two, maybe two and a half thousand cars.
It was cold. One of the reasons that basketball games made for good targets. Nobody wanted to stand around outside. Fans hurried from their cars toward Hec Ed, toting seat cushions and backpacks. We cruised slowly along the lanes, toward the impatiently gesturing flashlight guy.
“The lights here suck,” I said.
“Told you we should’ve gone for the valet lot.”
He turned in where the flashlight guy was pointing and drove past the open parking spaces, across the middle lane, and into the next row. I kept scanning the cars.
“What are we looking for?” Davey said.
“German.”
“Ja, mein Führer. There’s a Beemer.”
“Too old. Hit the next row.”
We circled through two more rows before I spotted a Mercedes CL500. This year’s model, I was pretty sure. “Make another pass,” I said, reaching down into the toolbox on the passenger-side floor. I took out half a dozen plastic Mercedes key fobs hooked together on a loop of twine. None of them had keys attached.
As we circled past the car again, Davey let the Corolla roll. I pointed the first key fob at the 500 and clicked it, then the second.
“Shit. Are we gonna have to do this the hard way?” Davey said.
I tried the third one, and the parking lights on the Mercedes blinked once.
“Nice,” Davey said. He accelerated, and we drove across the lot to park in the next row. We put the seats back and relaxed a fraction. The moon roof of the Corolla was a big light gray rectangle in the darker gray of the car.
“Where’d you get the new keys?” Davey said.
“From Luis. He said they should cover about half the cars coming off the line.”
“Not bad. You get to keep ’em?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t seem fair,” he said.
“Three hundred for one hour’s work. That’s fair.”
“I still think we should hit something with a better profit margin.”
I grinned at him, not that he could see it in the dark. “Profit margin? Didn’t Missus Gramercy give you a D in econ?”
“Fuck you,” he said cheerfully.
“Parts work is easy. And safer. On a custom job, Luis tells me what car he needs and I have to run all over town and find it and wait for my shot at it. I don’t want to waste a whole week sneaking around country clubs.”
“Sneaking around Dono, you mean. You still ticked off at him?”
“No.”
Davey snorted. “You are too.”
“No.” Davey knew that Dono and I had fought. I’d told him Dono was making me work construction over the summer.
What I was really pissed about was Dono not taking me with him to Portland.
I had spent a lot of time during the past two weeks reading through news articles online. One story in particular, about a dot-com billionaire in Hillsboro who had his collection of sculpture stolen from right out of his massive garden. The billionaire had been quoted as saying he was trying to create a postmodern Luxembourg, whatever that meant. The papers called the theft “brazen,” which was their way of saying it happened during the daytime and someone should have been watching.
Statues, for fuck’s sake. It must have taken six or eight guys and a couple of front-loader machines to pull it off. I could drive a loader.
“Where’s the gate guy?” I said to Davey.
He raised his head to look out the hatchback window. “Gone.”
“Can’t be gone. Keep looking.”
“All right, stay calm. Maybe you need a hit more than I do.” He craned his neck, squinting across the shadowed field of parked cars. “There’s the shithead. Talking to his buddy with the glow-in-the-dark dildos. They’re still too near the exit.”
I reached up and clicked the overhead light to the OFF position. “Where’d you get the joint?” I said. “From Bobby Sessions?”
“Fuck me. Don’t start in on that again, Grandma.”
“Some of that ditch weed he claims he imports from BC?”
“Like you’d know. The fuck is wrong with you and him?”
“Not a thing. He can sell all the dandelion stems he wants. And you should let him.”
“I know people he doesn’t know,” Davey said. “I can move it with no risk.”
“What about the risk on Bobby’s end? He tries too hard. Someday he’ll try to sell to the wrong guy. He’ll say your name before the cops even finish cuffing him.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not if. It’s when. He’s a fuckup, Davey.”
“I can handle Bobby Motherfucker Sessions.”
We sat and stared out the moon roof. The edges of it were starting to blur as the overcast sky outside darkened.
“Let’s go,” I said, opening the car door and slipping out. I had the Mercedes key fob in one hand and the toolbox in the other. A handful of latecomers making their way from the parking lot toward Hec Ed, and no one down at this end. I kept my head low and walked quickly along the cars until I reached the Mercedes.
I knelt on the asphalt and looked back toward the entrance gate. No sign of the two attendants. I waited. After a minute I spotted them, midway along the lot, sharing a smoke.
I clicked the key fob and heard the clunk of the Mercedes unlocking behind me. The flash of parking lights didn’t attract a look from the attendants. I opened the door and got in.
It was nice inside the car. Tan-colored leather, fake hardwood dash. The owner had removed the faceplate of the stereo and taken it with him, or more likely tucked it in the glove compartment. Didn’t matter. The wheels and seats and engine components were worth a whole lot more than his Blaupunkt.
I took a cordless power drill and a flathead screwdriver out of the toolbox. I’d fixed a slim tungsten bit in the drill before Davey and I had left the house. I lined up the bit with the keyhole, just slightly off center, and pushed it hard as I drilled out the first lock pin. The whine of the drill was rock-concert loud in the car. The first time I’d drilled a lock, I’d been sure everyone from two miles away was going to come running. I drilled it again, and then once more, wiggling the drill a little to make sure the pins were toast. I put the metal end of the screwdriver in and turned it, and the engine rumbled politely to life.
I switched on the lights, and Davey immediately pulled out of his parking space, taking point. I followed him from the lot, each of us waiting for the long wooden arm to rise and let us pass.
When we were farther down Montlake, we stopped at a red light before the onramp to 520. I was already dialing Luis to let him know we were on the way. I looked up and saw Davey in the Corolla. He’d turned around and was grinning at me out of the hatchback window. The joint was between his teeth, glowing bright. I gave him the finger, and he laughed and turned around to face the green light and floored it, leaving a yard of Goodyear rubber on the boulevard.