STANDING IN THE DIRT lot behind the office, Maynard Ance scowled at the cracked window, crushed another half-smoked cigarette under his toe, and spat after it as if to make sure it was out. “Lucky I got glass insurance. What’d he use?”
“His hand.” Doc played with the keys.
“Hope he didn’t bust it like last time.”
“He’s done this before?”
“No. Tried to punch a hole in a block wall. Taber’s one mean drunk. He isn’t anybody’s Mother Theresa sober, but when he gets a snootful he’s worse’n the bleeding shits. You’re lucky it was just the window.” He brightened; or at least became less dour. “So how do you like the bus? I had it customized.”
“I didn’t think it came with the cell.”
“Oh, that. That came later. I used handcuffs until this Robbery Armed we were bringing back from Chicago snapped the chain and brained Taber with a jack handle. Taber was driving and we ran up a bank and turned over. I busted my collarbone. The scroat was a pro wrestler, the Mad Sheik or the Hindu Warrior, some crap like that. About a thousand cops tied him down in Evanston ten days later and I was out eighty grand plus the hospital bill and five hundred bucks deductible on the bus. That’s when I ordered the bars. They’re made of the same kind of steel they use on the space shuttle. The torch hasn’t been made that can cut through them.”
“Ever use them?”
“Wilson McCoy was going to be the first one, but Taber and me missed connections. Well, that’s why you’re here. Let’s go to Redford.” He walked around to the passenger’s side.
Doc got in and started the engine. “Quite an arsenal back there.”
“Checked it out, did you?” The bail bondsman cut him a quick glance from the other seat. “The tommy gun’s just for looks. You’d be surprised how fast they come around when you slam one into the breech. One thing these scroats know is their Eddie Robinson flicks.”
They had been on the road several minutes when Ance spoke again, his eyes on the scenery. “Don’t worry, it’s legal. A motor home isn’t a vehicle behind the front seats. We could be hauling around a loaded howitzer.”
“Which we’re not.”
“Too hard to get shells.”
They arrived at the address in Redford a few minutes ahead of the appointed time. There was just room enough to park the Coachmen in the driveway of a red brick house with an attached garage and a picture window in front. A small white-haired woman in a gray wool dress and orange beads answered the door.
“Mrs. Wizotsky? I’m Maynard Ance. This is my associate Kevin Miller.” It was a manner Doc had not previously seen in the bail bondsman.
She grasped her beads. The creases from her nose to the corners of her mouth were as deep as gashes and there were pink swellings like welts under her eyes. Doc noted with a start that she was at least ten years younger than his first estimate; fifty at most. She said something welcoming and got out of their way. The living room was small, neat, the furniture fairly new but unremarkable. It looked like a display in a discount furniture store. Family pictures crowded the mantel of the gas fireplace, the only personal items in the room.
“Thanks for coming. I’m Howard Wizotsky.”
Ance and Doc shook hands in turn with the man who got up from the sofa when they came in. He looked younger than his wife but was probably about the same age, a solid man starting to go soft around the middle in a blue work shirt and slacks with shards of gray in his black crew cut. His hands were heavily calloused, with square, thick nails, and his face was burned reddish brown and grainy as if from long exposure to the sun or some other source of dry heat.
The men sat down. Mrs. Wizotsky turned off the TV set in the middle of a commercial for a trade school and went to the kitchen for coffee. “I hear you work at McLouth,” Ance told her husband. “I poured steel a couple of summers when I was going to Wayne State.”
“They laid me off last week. Business went all to hell when GM took the Saturn to Tennessee.”
“Bastards. They’ll have to do a lot more than dump Roger Smith to turn that board around. Where’s your son?”
“Oakland County Jail. Bond’s twenty-five thousand dollars. All he did was take a car out for a joy ride. I’m not defending it. I stole a pack of Juicy Fruit from a newsstand when I was eight; my old man broke his hand on my ass and I never took another thing without paying for it in my life. Maybe I should’ve broken mine on Roy a long time ago. But, Jesus, twenty-five grand! It’s not like he took a shot at the mayor.”
“Collect the bounty, huh?” Ance grinned.
Wizotsky made an exhausted smile.
“I called the Pontiac Police this afternoon,” the bail bondsman said. “Your boy shoved a salesman out the passenger’s door during a test drive. The salesman landed on his head. He’s been unconscious for thirty-six hours. The county prosecutor is talking assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder. Your son’s nineteen. That’s a mandatory one to five in this state.”
“Fucking yuppie made more on his worst day than I did in a week frying in that plant. Roy’s been working for minimum wage since he was sixteen.”
“The man’s a human being, Howard.” Mrs. Wizotsky set a tray containing three steaming cups and a sugar bowl on the coffee table and took a seat on the edge of an upholstered chair with her hands in her lap.
“Fuck him. He’s got insurance. I want my son out of that hole before he gets nailed by a bunch of fag bikers.”
“There’d be a lot more chance of that if he were in the Wayne County lock-up. They get a better class of scroat in Oakland.” Ance tore open three packets of Sweet’n Low and stirred the contents into his coffee. “How much can you raise?”
“I can scratch up ten percent. That’s customary, right?”
“Do you have any collateral?”
“The house is paid for. I’ve got eight more payments to make on the car.”
“Model and year?”
“’Eighty-eight Celebrity. It’s got less than forty thousand miles on it,” Wizotsky added hopefully.
The bail bondsman pulled a face. “I’ll need you to sign the deed to the house over to the M. W. Ance Bail Bond Service. We can do it in your lawyer’s office if you want.”
The couple exchanged a look. Wizotsky said, “We weren’t planning on signing anything over. If we wanted to put up the house we’d’ve just mortgaged again.”
“But you came to me instead, because you know a bank or a mortgage company can take up to six weeks processing your application and all that time your boy will be sitting in jail. I’m prepared to go straight to my bank from here, get a cashier’s check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, and head right up to Pontiac with it this afternoon, unless you want your lawyer present when the deed changes hands. Roy will be home in time for supper.”
Another look. Mrs. Wizotsky said, “Would you excuse us?”
Ance said certainly and put his hands on the arms of his chair, but the couple got to their feet first and went through a swinging door into what Doc supposed was the kitchen. While they were gone the bail bondsman sat back, shook a cigarette out of his wrinkled pack, studied the brand name printed on one end, then put it back in the pack and returned the pack to his pocket. “Nice place,” he said. “Clean.”
Howard Wizotsky came back alone. The skin around his mouth was the color of a clenched knuckle. “I keep everything in a strongbox upstairs,” he said without looking at anyone. He crossed the room without stopping and mounted the steps off the entryway. In the kitchen, pots and pans clattered. “My first wife was like that,” Ance told Doc. “Bang, clang, kee-rash, every time we had a fight. After she left I had to throw out every pot I owned. None of ’em would hold water.”
“What did you fight about?”
“Same thing I fought with all of them about. I never talked to them, they said.”
Mrs. Wizotsky came out finally, looking unruffled, and freshened the cups from a glass carafe. Ance and she were agreeing that coffee never tasted as good as it used to from old-fashioned percolators when Wizotsky came down with the deed to the house and quarter-acre lot. Ance put on his glasses to read it, then produced a long stiff fold of paper from an inside pocket. Wizotsky squinted at it, patting his pockets, then accepted Ance’s reading glasses and slid them down the sheet like a magnifying lens, his lips moving as he read. Finally he spread the paper on the coffee table and used a fountain pen Ance gave him to sign at the bottom. His wife was next, then the bail bondsman, and finally Doc added his signature as witness. Ance fished a notary seal out of a side pocket and clamped the lower left-hand corner. He pocketed the two documents and stood to shake Wizotsky’s hand. “You’ll get it back at the preliminary.”
At the door he said, “Better put on a fresh pot, Mrs. W. That stuff they serve at County would strip varnish.”
They got into the Coachmen. “Nice couple,” Ance said. “Too bad they’re going to lose the place.”
“What makes you so sure they will?” Doc leaned out the open driver’s door as he backed into the street.
“Desk sergeant I talked to in Pontiac said the kid was a stone puke. Everyone was a motherfucker, including his parents. He’ll skip, Ozzie and Harriet will lose their house, and I’ll be stuck with another fucking piece of Detroit real estate I couldn’t give away if I threw in a case of Stroh’s. Maybe the guy on TV is right. I should go in for the exciting life of a bartender.”
“I didn’t believe you when you told me how much you pay in taxes. I guess it’s true.”
“Sure it’s true. I pay about the same amount to a firm of accountants to keep from paying twice as much to the government. Which come to think of it if I went ahead and paid, I wouldn’t be spending it on accountants. I’m going to have to give this some thought. I may have stumbled on to something here.”
He rolled down his window, letting in a stream of sweet cool air; the day was getting nicer by the minute. “Listen, I’m not the guy in the stovepipe hat who ties the girl to the railroad tracks. That’s the kid. I paid forty-eight thousand for this rig outright, but I had cosigners: Dr. Spock and Tim Leary and Asshole Abbie Hoffman and the Beatles and my late great client Wilson McCoy, may he rot in hell with his head up his sphincter. They built this generation from the ground up with that drug counterculture-civil disobedience horseshit. Without it I’d be down to my last sodomite.”
“I heard on the radio Alcina Lilley may speak at McCoy’s funeral.”
“Maybe. The M-and-M’s been trying to tie themselves to her halo for years, but she hasn’t said boo to them yet. She’d rather go on as a symbol of the civil rights movement without ever doing anything but be Mahomet’s widow. But I’m not knocking it, that’s her angle. Mine’s bankrolling worried parents of little assholes and shoveling the shit with a bucket-loader.”
“The police think Starkweather Hall may show up.”
“If they thought that they sure as hell wouldn’t say it on the radio. Maybe they think he’ll take the dare. That big an asshole he isn’t. That power-to-the-brothers fist-in-the-air crap is an angle, too.” Ance bared his teeth at the windshield. “I copped a peek once at his jacket down at the Federal Building. Drug Enforcement thinks he took his name from Charles Starkweather, that crazy-ass killer they fried in Nebraska thirty years back. It’s the name of the chapel at Eastern Michigan University. He must’ve read it somewhere. He reads more than the entire population of Watts. And they’re treating him like some little ghetto snotnose can’t write his own name in the snow on Antietam.”
“Sounds like he trusted you.”
“Up to a point. I don’t go get the pry bar out when they decide to clam. You never hear about a bail bondsman being found all trussed up like a pullet and shot full of holes in the trunk of his car.”
“Where to now, your bank?”
“Nah, let the little scroat scratch his balls a couple more hours. We’ll spring him just before feeding time. He’ll stay home long enough to eat anyway. Let’s go to the State Farm office, let the adjuster look at that window Taber busted.” Ance fired a cigarette off the dashboard lighter and let the slipstream pull the smoke out the window.