The Garage People

I’am looking through the second of my three computers, the one with the silver duct tape—the one with relocated witnesses A—F in a nice, clean word document. There’s so much shit here—information I can’t believe anyone ever wanted to record—but it is the government. And I found them—the unfortunate As through Fs that will make me rich enough to leave this life. I feel mildly sorry for them, but sense a certain them-or-me vibe that melts the sharp corners of my guilt.

I scan them down by location and find that, no surprise, none are in Long Beach or Los Angeles. What’s wild, though, is that there’s a whole nest of them down in Orange County. I MapQuest a few of the ones in the nicer neighborhoods.

The information on these hard drives only goes back to 1986; anyone relocated and protected prior to that is probably in some file in the bowels of some building, dusty and forgotten.

One not dusty and not forgotten, and not very far away, is Mr. Frank Carr. Mr. Frank Carr—he had the “Mr.” legally added so that people would have to address him as “Mr.”—Mr. Frank Carr got in over his head with heroin and turned evidence against, among others, a Spencer Durrell, a major player in Vegas and a major drug dealer, who also dealt in various chemical weaponry and anarchist cookbook goodies, to read Mr. Carr’s reports.

Mr. Frank Carr is now known as Timothy R. Shay and he lives in a development of hilltop town houses in the Anaheim Hills. I run a Web search for him and find out he does custom tile work in high-end kitchens and bathrooms.

On the follow-up paperwork to Mr. Frank Carr’s case is the information that the feds botched Spencer Durrell’s case and only put him away for two years. He’s in Vegas, and to hear what they say about him is that he’s as mean as rickshaw and talking to him is like cutting meat with a spork. Useless and futile. The physical description is that he’s five-ten and wears an eye patch over the right eye and to have that eye patch walk through your door is like having death incarnate come calling and he’d probably love to know what became of Mr. Frank Carr. And I’m hoping Mr. Frank Carr will pay handsomely for that not to happen.

It’s 7 P.M. when I tell Sergei the specifics, names, directions, and so on, of what I’ve found.

It’s 8 P.M. and we’re headed east on the 22, driving out toward the Anaheim Hills under a crooked smile of a moon, and we decide we’ll ask Mr. Frank Carr for ten grand to get his name off our list.

I’m in the backseat.

“Nick Ray,” Sergei says from behind the wheel. “You must talk tonight.”

“In what sense?” I say.

“You must do talk,” he says. “Do the talk.”

“Do the talk? You mean talk to Mr. Frank Carr?”

Sergei nods.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “And what are we saying?”

Sergei says, “You not talking—you upset people.”

“How?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“You act like you think you’re smarter than other people.”

Maggot Arm Joe lights a cigarette and cracks his window. “I am smarter than other people.”

Sergei nods. “But you need to show them.” He looks over at Maggot Arm Joe. “That bad for business. Nick Ray blends. Like blending lizard.”

I’m nervous, but Sergei’s confidence buoys me a bit. Unless I’m reading it wrong, I think being called a blending lizard is meant to inspire confidence.

“Chameleon, you mean?” Maggot Arm Joe says. “Nick’s like a chameleon?”

Sergei says, “You see? Nick Ray would have just nodded and left it at blending lizard. I talk—people understand. No need for you to make correct.” Sergei simultaneously puts the blinker on and turns into the next lane without looking. “Look out,” he says in a calm voice. The car next to us swerves and the driver lays on the horn for a good five seconds. Sergei cuts him off, smiles, and waves: “Fuck you, mister.” He looks back at me. “That lucky little man. Lucky we have somewhere to be.”

We get to the bottom of Stagecoach Road and wind our way up toward Mr. Frank Carr, aka Timothy Shay’s house. At the top of the hill, we take a left on Ruby Lane. I point the house out to Sergei and we park down the street in a guest spot. The guest spot is at the end of the dead end, and we have to pass four houses on the left and five on the right before we get to where we’re going. I worry about being spotted here and then I catch myself: We’re not killing anyone, I tell myself. People can see us. It’s okay.

This calms me and it’s a good thing, because plenty of people do see us. We’re not hard to miss. I look out of place most places. Maggot Arm Joe’s probably the only black guy in this neighborhood, and Sergei’s wearing a black leather suit that looks straight out of Elvis’s ‘68 comeback special.

The street is lined with old men sitting in their garages. Some sit on couches drinking beers. Some at card tables with empty seats around them. All of them wave and nod as we pass. We wave back.

“What the shit is going on?” Sergei says.

“They’re garage people,” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“Garage is a kind of people?”

“Retired people,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “Retired men, actually. They sit in garages and watch the sun go from one end of the sky to the other. It’s a whole culture.”

“How do you know this?” I say.

“My father’s a garage person,” he says.

“Where?”

“Right around here,” he says. “Tustin. In Orange County.”

“You never mentioned him,” I say.

Maggot Arm Joe points to his maggot arm. “We’ve kind of lost touch. I’m not his favorite reminder that life has some curveballs.”

I think of my own parents. We’ve had our troubles, but I should give them a call. It is the holidays. Maybe we can say something to one another without setting something off.

“This is it?” Sergei says, pointing to the right.

I look at the number and nod. We single-file our way up the walk.

A woman who looks like Martha Stewart, like Sydney Barrow, like blond money itself answers the door. I smell something freshly baked, sweet with cinnamon coming from the kitchen. We tell her we’re there to see Mr. Shay and she gets him. We meet the family.

Mr. Frank Carr’s transition to Timothy Shay is so complete, so smooth, that I wonder if the wife and kids came with the house as part of the government’s program. You’ve seen these people. You’re buying a cheap frame at a Rite Aid. The family in the frame, that’s who I’m looking at, trip their way through piles of yesterday’s torn wrapping paper.

“What can I do for you guys?” Mr. Shay says, looking at us with mild confusion. Mild confusion, until he gets to Sergei in his black leather suit, then he seems to realize we’re not good news.

Sergei looks at me and it becomes clear that this is what he meant by me doing the talking. I stumble for a second, not sure what to say.

“It’s about a tile job,” I say.

“I’ve got an office,” he says. “A Web site.” He starts to lean back into his perfect house, his perfect life. The door inches toward closing.

I say, “It’s a tile job for a Mr. Frank Carr.”

That stops him.

“He’s a friend of ours,” I say. “Mr. Frank Carr.”

His face opens, whole and vulnerable. He’s been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Never saw it coming but should have known. We stand around quietly shifting the weight from one foot to the other while he recovers from our sucker punch.

“Come in,” he says. He leads us to a heavy wood-paneled room and tells Mrs. Shay he’ll be out in a while. It’s about a job, he tells her, and these men can’t wait. He closes the door and doesn’t sit down.

“So how much do you want?”

“Ten grand gets your name off the lists,” I say.

He looks at me, not saying anything.

Sergei says, “Ten grands stop us from sending the information to Durrell.”

He nods slowly. “Ten gets me everything and I never hear from you again?”

This seems way too easy. We must have asked for too little. But it’s too late. We’ll just jack the price up on the next guy. “Sure,” I say.

“It’s a deal then,” he says. He slides over a legal pad that has THINGS TO DO across the top. “Give me an address and give me a time. Try to make it a weekday.” He pauses. “It’s easier for me to be away then.”

I can’t believe how well this is going. I figured there’d be some struggle, some name-calling, some threats hurled back and forth, but maybe that’s shit for the movies. This is business. This guy’s willing to pay.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “You don’t seem to have much of a problem with this, Mr. Shay.”

Sergei gives Maggot Arm Joe a dirty look.

“I try to worry only about things I can control,” Shay says. “I don’t see me holding the cards here.”

“That’s it?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

He shrugs in a weary way. “I had the fight kicked out of me a long time before I met you three.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out quickly. “Now. I have accepted your terms, and it’s time for you to go. Give me the address where we can end this.”

I write my address and the phone number of the Lincoln on the pad and slide it across the table. Sergei grabs it.

“Which address?” he says, and looks. He says, “I have better phone for you to call.” And he writes his cell number, for reasons I can’t quite see, and I wonder if he doesn’t trust me. He puts the pad back on the desk and slides it over to the man who used to be Mr. Frank Carr. “Yes,” Sergei says. “That proper address.”

I’m doing quick math in my head, thinking about a bunch of Mr. Frank Carrs willing to shut us up, thinking about a fast three hundred grand split three ways. I look over at Sergei and get a quick shiver, knowing he’s violent, and there’s Maggot Arm Joe, who’s smarter than me and pretty much said he’s in it for himself—a bad set of circumstances when there’s $300,000, or more, on the table.

And it’s settled. We make nice with Martha Stewart on our way out, we’d love to stay but we can’t, just a quick business trip. On the way back to the car, all the garage people wave at us. We wave to them all twice—once on the walk to the car and once on the drive out of the neighborhood. When we go past his house, I see the man who used to be Mr. Frank Carr watch us roll by from behind the curtain.