The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

The Wrecker by Ernest Finney

FROM The Sewanee Review

I’M SITTING AT THE BAR in the semigloom of the Silver Dollar, as far away as I can get from the loud music. A babe comes through the door. It’s still before nine; too early for anyone else to be eyeing the sign taped to the bar mirror: NOBODY’S UGLY AT 2 A.M. I watch her in the mirror. She looks around-a dozen or so patrons, the usual crowd. The Dollar is still a workingman’s bar, no video games, no retro pinball machines, no happy hours, no grill. The clientele comes from the big Basque bakery next door and what’s left of the failed industrial park down the road where I live. About a fourth of the customers are women: after eight hours of unloading ovens in 110-degree heat, they’re here to replace body fluids, and they’re not romantically inclined, but that’s weekdays. Fridays-paydays-like tonight, and Saturday nights are different.

This woman is dressed mostly in white. Blond, probably in her late twenties, shapely. Stunning. If we’re looking her over, she’s looking us over too, unhurried, calm, unaware of the effect she’s having, or maybe just used to it. Her eyes are adjusting to the low fluorescent lights and the kind of alcohol-induced boredom that takes the place these days of outlawed cigarette smoke. The woman walks over and sits down beside me.

I look what I am: a forty-three-year-old tow-truck owner and operator. Tall, like my mother’s brother. I went through the windshield of a Camaro when I was a kid and the scars crisscross both sides of my face. I briefly thought I was tough, and got my nose broken twice while I was in the army. I stay in shape because I’m crawling around wrecked cars night and day. My hair is thinning on top, which I don’t notice too often. Even in my driver’s license photo, I look normal.

I’m still in uniform, my dark blue coveralls with Dwight over the pocket and the name AAACE TOWING stitched across my shoulders. I don’t stutter; I can spell; it’s AAACE so my ad in the yellow pages will be first, stand out. Trust me, it makes a difference. I’m in a competitive business.

I’m thinking this woman might be part of the fallout from the book about the Silver Dollar written eight years ago by a sociology professor at one of the local colleges. We called him Doc; he liked that. He’d bring his seminar class in on Saturday nights. Cellophane-wrapped young women and men, untouched, who turned everyone’s head, as if we’d all got a magic wish: twenty years off our ages, young enough to act foolish again. We learned words like ambience and acculturation. When the book came out, Closing Time at the Silver Dollar, you couldn’t get in the place; it was jammed with gawkers. Local TV kept doing segments, and the newspapers never passed up a chance to mention the place. City officials, politicians, famous athletes-you name it, they were there. Everyone knows the rest of the world wants to come to California, but not necessarily to the capital. A tour bus full of people from Warsaw, Poland, stopped here once. Our part of Sacramento had never seen anything like it. Larry had to hire two more bartenders. We locals from the neighborhood were left outside. It didn’t last; a year, eighteen months. It was like a blackout: the electricity goes, you’re left in the dark, the lights come on, it’s over; and you go back to where you were. A brief interruption. Doc still comes around-misses the camaraderie of the Dollar, he says-and shares his opinions and keeps track of things. He’s the one who taped the other sign on the bar mirror: NEVER GO TO BED WITH ANYONE WHO’S GOT MORE PROBLEMS THAN YOU. SIGMUND FREUD. Sex and money are his usual topics.

I’m perplexed. Good-looking babes don’t usually sit next to me or hit on me. If I’m surprised, Larry, the owner and bartender, is in shock. He moves toward us like he’s afraid to come too close. “Give me what he’s having, and hit Dwight again,” she says. She puts down a fifty-dollar bill. The jukebox is still playing, but it’s quiet now, like we’re waiting for someone. I have to look in the bar mirror at our reflection. She speaks to my image in the mirror. “Do you remember me?”

Nowhere in my memory bank do I have this woman. It’s like there are four of us in the conversation, the two in the mirror and the two of us sitting on the stools. I’m confused, and I shake my head.

“You came out when I was rear-ended by those drunks in April. On 99 by the Fruitridge exit.”

I remember. I’d heard the CHP call on the scanner and raced out there to beat out the other tow trucks. Five belligerent drunks, too many for the CHP patrolman. Backup was on the way. The drunks were blaming the woman for being in their way. The cop had cuffed one, but another had jumped on his back, and a third had him around the legs. The two other drunks were chasing the woman. Normally I don’t participate in crashes. I don’t stop the bleeding or console the bereaved. And I never ever subdue the unruly. What I do is tow your car and sweep up the broken glass, an added service for the state. Cops like that. But this time I say to the drunks chasing the woman, “Hey, slow down; you’re just making it worse for yourselves.” The big one pauses to spit a stream of tobacco juice in my face. I lose control and head-butt him. My forehead smashes his nose, and he goes down. The other one lets go of the woman and tries to punch me, and I kick him in the nuts. I’m too pissed off to stop there. I pull the guy off the CHP’s back and punch and kick him into silence. The CHP clubs the other drunk. Quiet. It’s three o’clock in the morning-no traffic, no gawkers slowing down to stare. Between the red glare from the road flares and the smoke, it’s like the blacktop is burning. I back up my wrecker and tow the drunks’ car away. End of story. How could I forget this woman?

“I want to thank you, Dwight. I didn’t get a chance that night.”

“That’s okay.” Smooth as always. She’s sipping the beer but knocks back the shot of bar whiskey and pushes the shot glass toward Larry, who nearly kills himself rushing over to refill her glass. “Give us a bag of chips,” she says, and when she opens the bag she slides it toward me so we can both partake. We take turns, chip for chip. I wish I could think of something to say, but I can’t. But the silence isn’t awkward; its like we’ve known each other a long time and talk isn’t necessary anymore. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I turn my pager off.

“From now on, Dwight, I want you to call me Jamie.”

She’s waiting for a reply. I speak to her image in the mirror. “All right, Jamie.”

Licking her fingers, she whispers, “I know who you really are.”

I’m not taken aback by the statement. I catch on now. She thinks I’m part of the Petrov family. We exchange looks in the mirror. I nod. A couple of years back the Petrovs ran supreme in the tow-truck business on 99 from Stockton to Redding. They were from somewhere in the former Soviet Union, and there must have been at least 120 in the extended family; there was even a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother who got indicted. You get the picture. I got hired just before the ring got busted, started working for Nick Petrov in the storage yard about half a mile from here. This was after the army had given me a medical discharge but denied me any benefits-I had problems from the Gulf War, which should have been a 65 percent disability. Anyway, I was a trained diesel mechanic, and I did maintenance on the Petrov trucks for eleven months, until the place was raided.

It turned out the Petrov family wasn’t just towing wrecks or disabled cars. They had extended their business by towing expensive cars out of driveways and parking lots and taking them to their storage yards. The owners, assuming their cars were stolen, reported their loss to the cops and insurance companies. After an appropriate wait, the Petrovs sent the owners a bill for storage fees at a hundred dollars a day, and took the owners to small claims court if they protested the fees. If it got messy and an owner tried to fight back, his car disappeared into one of the chop shops to be sold for parts. It had been going on for twenty years.

About thirty-five of the Petrovs got indicted and sentenced. Mr. Petrov got twenty-three years; the grandmother, who I’d met once, fourteen years. When the state was ready to sell some of the Petrovs’ properties, I was ready to buy the yard I’d worked at. It was going cheap: the light-industry park by then was mostly vacant buildings with fading FOR LEASE signs. I’d received three years back medical payments from the VA, enough for a down payment on the half-acre storage yard with shop, office, and apartment. All I had to do was change the name to AAACE TOWING.

When Jamie stands up, and says, “Let’s get out of here,” I’m not the only one who’s surprised when we walk out of the place together. She clicks the doors open on a black Mercedes convertible parked in front. I still can’t think of anything to say, but it doesn’t matter as we glide under the streetlights. I don’t come much to this part of Sacramento where we’re driving, but I remember that Ronald Reagan lived around here when he was governor.

I’m too unsettled to see much of the living room because I’m sitting on a white sofa with my greasy boots on her white rug. The place is just too big to take in. She’s standing in front of me, hands on hips, looking down at me. She is so perfect. It’s the only word I can come up with. She is beyond anything I can imagine. “I want you to do something for me, Dwight.” I wait for more. “I have two brothers who are cheating me. I want you to beat the shit out of them for me.” The words don’t convey any real message to me. “When the time comes I’ll give you more particulars.” I’m still waiting for a sentence I can grasp. It isn’t the drink. I’m not hammered. “I know I can find you at the Silver Dollar.”

She pauses. “Go home now, Dwight. I’ll call a cab.” And that’s what she does, walks me to the street, gives the driver some money, and says goodnight. I have the cab let me out at the Dollar. When I step through the front door there is a spontaneous burst of clapping and someone says, “That a boy.” I give them a low bow in return.

When I was a kid I stayed one whole summer with my mother’s aunt, Carmen, who ran a bar, the Dog House. Some guy owned it, but he was too old to put up with all the aggravation that comes with the business. It was situated near the old Governors’ Mansion, and there were stories that the first Governor Brown used to cross the street in his bathrobe to use the swimming pool at one of the motels opposite the mansion. The Dog House was about a half-mile away from where the Silver Dollar is now. We lived upstairs over the place, and I could hear the music from the jukebox as I fell asleep. I had little jobs, separating the empties into their own beer boxes, sweeping, swamping the place out, taking the trash to the Dumpster. This was in the eighties. I begged my mother to let me stay with Carmen.

Once she opened, I wasn’t allowed in the bar. In the daytime we’d go to eat at what Carmen called greasy spoons, restaurants in the neighborhood, anything from Chinese to the Pronto Pup Palace. Carmen didn’t cook or drive. We walked everywhere. She had been everything-from a waitress on roller skates at a drive-in to a welder in the shipyards during the war. At night, after she opened, I’d climb up on the roof of the place once it got dark and watch through the skylight, through smoke so thick it was like looking down through the clouds. I’d hear the jumble of conversations above the music, and I would speculate about the people down there. Who was the drunkest. The best-looking woman. I couldn’t wait to join this crowd; it all seemed so exciting. I didn’t understand that nightlife is artificial-this whole business of looking for a good time, real or imagined, such a small part of what matters.

I stick around for another beer, but I leave early. I’m pretty sure I’ll see Jamie again. It’s just a matter of time. I usually check in at the Dollar a couple of nights a week, working my way through the smokers gathered outside the entrance, most of them looking through the glass door as if they’re missing something. There’s a butt can outside and a bench, and also a fine spray of mist to cool the smokers off. It gets hot in Sacramento in the summer, and humid.

I don’t see Jamie until Saturday. She comes in like last time and sits down next to me. I’m wearing better clothes this time, ones I bought for my mother’s funeral. Larry is attentive, wiping the bar top in front of us with a clean towel. Everyone is cool, not staring too openly. Jamie will never belong here.

“How have you been, Dwight?”

“Pretty good.” I’m cool. We knock back our shots. We sip our beer, crackle a few chips. I’m waiting for her to start up, give me the next installment.

“My family owns one of the largest vineyards in the Sacramento Valley, twenty-three thousand acres. Our grapes are made into jug wine. We’re not some cute Napa Valley boutique winery making vintage wines. We make the bulk wine winos drink. We sell our grapes to small wineries who pretend they’re the ones who grew the vines. No one gives us gold medals at the state fair.

“When my father died, he left me and my two older brothers each a third of the business. They sent me to school to get me out of the way. I’m the one with a degree in viniculture and the MBA from USC, and they want me to run the tasting rooms, jolly the tourists into buying cases of our three-dollar wine.”

I’ve heard a lot of grievances in bars: spouses vs. spouses, siblings, whole families battling over houses and jewelry and pet dogs. There is a certain similarity in the stories. I listen. She only pauses to sip her beer. She’s not ordering any more whiskey. She’s all business now. I’m realizing she’s like everyone else, except for the amount of money her family plays with.

I’ve been so worked up about the chance she might show up tonight, I’ve forgotten supper. When she pauses, I ask, “Are you hungry?” The Greek place a street over delivers, so we order pizza and eat it at the bar. She’s hungry too. “Sometimes I’m so pissed off at my brothers I forget to eat,” she tells me.

We stop chewing eventually, and she wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Let’s go to your place, and I’ll fuck your brains out.” I agree to that, although I’ve heard the line before.

I’ve partaken in the closer-relationship thing before. It always starts out with such enthusiasm on the part of both persons-a letting go, a release. You think this one will last forever. Jamie and I do all the things you do with someone new: laugh a lot, shower together, drink more, eat more, screw like we just invented it. We tell each other our life stories, the less important parts, as if we are rushing to get through the first week before the newness rubs off. And I almost stop wondering why she’s really here with me. The apartment built onto the cinderblock office has 8-foot ceilings and only a couple of windows; it’s dark and dank. The yard is dirt with patches of pea gravel; the wind blows the dust up in waves; fourteen cars left over from the Petrov era are parked to one side. The 6-foot Cyclone fence surrounding the whole property has concertina wire coiled along the top. But she doesn’t mind the place, stays over sometimes. Spending a few evenings at the Dollar, walking back to the yard hand in hand after the place closes, we’re a couple now. An item. The talk of the neighborhood.

Towing is a waiting game; you have to be patient till someone runs out of gas or breaks down, has an accident, locks himself out of the car. But in the meantime I have an arrangement with a loan company that uses me to repossess cars. Jamie insists on coming along. “It can get messy,” I tell her. She gives me her grin of happiness. We drive to an apartment complex with overflowing Dumpsters and a tangle of abandoned shopping carts by the driveway. The vehicle I’m looking for is parked on the street, a 2009 Dodge Ram pickup. In about forty seconds I have my slim jim down the inside of the window, the car door open, the brake off, and the front end up hanging from the hook on my wrecker. I’m home free until the owner comes out carrying a baseball bat, yelling what he’s going to do to me. When I took Doc with me a couple of times, he gave me some long theory on how when you repossess a man’s car you’re not only taking his transportation, possibly his livelihood, but his whole identity, his self-image, his manhood even. It’s because we’re a car culture, he said. I’m calm: it’s a no-sweat situation. I’ve done this so many times I know there’s only a couple of possible outcomes.

The guy takes a swing when he’s close enough, and I duck back out of the way of the bat. And before he can recover I kick him in the kneecap with my steel-toed boot. From the ground he decides he’s had enough. I tell Jamie as we’re driving away how I used to try and reason with people. I’d ring the bell and explain I had to take their car. I’d tell them, I’m just doing my job. That never made any difference. They’d still call me a bloodsucker and a scab, and I would still say, Why didn’t you make your payments? and they’d always have good reasons. Now I take the car any way I can, as long as it’s fast.

Jamie asks me to pull onto a dirt road, and we brush through some willows to the river. Sex is sex. But this time with Jamie on the front seat, with the guy’s Ram pickup hanging from the hook on the wrecker, it’s spectacular. In Technicolor. It’s like rainbow lightning is striking the wrecker. Again and again…

We are hanging out full-time together. She’s living with me in the yard. Jamie doesn’t come with me anymore for calls out on Highway 5, where everyone is going at least 80 miles an hour. Not after the first time, which was a pickup with a camper sideswiped by an eighteen-wheeler. The camper had fifteen people inside, fruit pickers on their way to Butte County. Its aluminum side was split open like the lid on a can of beets; 25 yards of blood and flesh was spread out 3 inches thick against the blacktop. Five cars got rear-ended trying to avoid the bodies. The tanker caught on fire. Ambulances, cops, Caltrans workers, and fire trucks; the highway was closed; cars backed up for 5 miles. I tried to warn her. Even with airbags it can get messy.

Jamie takes on some of my paperwork; there is a lot of it in this business. She gets a couple more filing cabinets and paints the cement-block office walls light green, which makes the room a little less dark. She’s not one of those people who can just sit there and answer the phone. She has too much energy, too many ideas. She talks me into buying two flatbed trucks. The front end of most new cars is all plastic; you can’t hook them; the best way is to winch them up onto a flatbed. I hire two guys: one lives in Roseville and the other in Elk Grove. They take the flatbeds home with them.

There is no money in scrap metal, and the pick-a-part places don’t need any more old cars, so Jamie phones Sister Meredith’s soup kitchen and donates all the leftover Petrov cars in the storage yard. They come right over and drag the cars away. The yard is looking good, empty, and I have a couple of dump-truck loads of pea gravel spread over where the dirt is showing. Jamie plants flowers in the new flowerboxes in front of the office. Gets business cards made and thumbtacks them in every 7-Eleven, bar, and liquor store in the neighborhood.

I’ve always been reluctant to get bigger, maybe because of what happened to the Petrov family, and I don’t store disabled cars for that reason. But with Jamie handling all the paperwork, it doesn’t seem too big a step. The money is rolling in. We only go to the Dollar on Friday and Saturday nights; we’re too busy. Doc would call us domesticated now. Jamie likes to cook. She plants some parsley out back.

She wants to take me to a friend’s Labor Day picnic. Somehow she thinks I think she’s ashamed of me. My job. My mother was a waitress. Et cetera. “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “Why can’t I introduce you to some of my friends?” I decline to answer. She wouldn’t understand. I believe there’s a shelf life to a romance like ours, though maybe if you can get past the use-by date you might be on to something. Doc used to go into that a lot. He’d been married four times. We’re not very close to the shelf date, but I’m counting. She likes telling me I’m the best thing that ever happened to her. I buy it and I don’t buy it. I have no release mechanism that allows me to reciprocate. For her it’s like the clichés are true: love, soulmate. For me they’re still clichés. I’m wary.

Jamie surprises me on Saturday night by bringing two couples into the Dollar. Her friends. Nice people. I’m wearing my coveralls so I drive a wrecker for the night. I don’t ask what they do, and they don’t volunteer anything. We sit in a booth and chat. Everyone is polite. Doc says American society is egalitarian.

When the grape-picking season starts in September, Jamie moves over to her vineyards in Yolo County. She’s still battling with her brothers but has not mentioned anything more about roughing them up. She’s trying to wrest control of her third of the family property. I really miss her. She phones me every night, and there’s always plenty to talk about. She gets away one Saturday night and meets me at the Dollar. I am so glad to see her. We can’t keep our hands off each other. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “why people buy into the whole package-marriage, kids. It’s like taking the next step.” I listen, surprised. Noncommittal.

Doc happens to come in that night, and I introduce him to Jamie. He’s impressed. She’s read my copy of his book on the Dollar and has a lot of questions for him. Jamie can’t be anything but what she is: smart, educated, rich, and beautiful. I go to piss, and Doc comes in after. He says to me, taking the big brother tone, “Dwight, do you know what you’re doing?” I know what he’s talking about, but I’m stumped for a comeback. “She may be out of your league.” I still can’t think of anything to say, until I realize he’s jealous. “Go fuck yourself, Doc,” I tell him.

I try to relax around Jamie, not always jump to the wrong conclusions. I can see her making an almost visible effort to slow to my pace. She throws me off: she’s always so happy to see me. She wakes up in the morning bursting with energy, like those commercials on TV with athletes smashing through some paper wall to get onto the playing field. Early one morning she takes me to the country club, and we wait on the road by the first hole of the golf course. We’re in her convertible. She hands me her binoculars. “See those two with the plaid shorts? Those are my brothers. I’ve been thinking, it’d be better if we killed them instead of just beating the crap out of them. It would be easier. I don’t mean you-I mean get someone in your family to off them. I’ll pay a hundred thousand dollars. Each. Is that the going rate?”

Is this a test? I’m not ready for this. I know this could be the end of us, too. Why would she stick around if I say no? But I want to be explicit. We are not going to be conspirators. “Listen to me, Jamie. I have no association with the Petrov family. I don’t want to rough up or do anything else to your brothers. Do you understand that? If that is why you’re with me, just forget it. I’m not going to do your dirty work. You shouldn’t ask me that.”

She doesn’t answer me. We drive back to the yard, but she doesn’t pull in through the gates. Lets me off at the entrance. Won’t answer when I ask, “What about tonight?” Is this the last I’ll ever see of Jamie? I’m full of regrets.

What no one knows is that I am in touch with Mr. Petrov. His trial lasted three months. I was the only one working for him who wasn’t indicted. The only money coming into the company legally was from what I was bringing in with my wrecker. That’s what I thought. Until he phoned me from his lawyer’s office and told me to look carefully in the tire rack for a 16-inch 650 Michelin on a chrome rim. The tire was full of hundred-dollar bills. He must have known he was going down and felt he had to trust me. Over the last five years I’ve paid people, maybe half a million dollars: family, when they get out of jail. I get a phone call, probably one of his lawyers, saying, My good friend So-and-so will come by, and then the amount I’m to pay out. I’m Mr. Petrov’s bagman. I owe the man. To tell the truth, it was some of his money I used for the down payment on the yard.

I don’t see Jamie for a week. Then two. But I don’t want it to be over. I think a lot about ways we could get together. But then there would always be that unspoken deal between us. I go to the Dollar early on Saturday night. Doc is there. Always generous, he buys me a drink. That means I have to buy him one back, so we’re on our way. I’m just getting comfortable when two uniformed cops come into the Dollar. This is not unusual. The place quiets down except for the two customers playing liar’s dice at the bar, banging the leather boxes hard against the top of the bar. But this time they come for me. One cop reads me my rights. Doc asks, “What’s he supposed to have done?”

Attempted murder. I know the rest of the story before they go on. The brothers have been shot up but are still alive. Doc yells, “Don’t say another word. I’ll call my brother-in-law; he’ll meet you at the station.” One of the cops knows me from service calls; his wife is always running out of gas. Whispers, “You dumbbell, you dropped one of your business cards at the scene.”

When we get to the station, Doc’s lawyer brother-in-law is there. “Dwight, have you been shooting a firearm in the last few days?” When I say no, he demands that the cops give me some test to see if I have any residue from firing a weapon. It turns out there are no witnesses; the brothers, sedated now, never saw their assailants. As I’m being fingerprinted I can hear Doc’s brother-in-law yelling, “If you found my card, would you arrest me too?”

They don’t set bail. I’m put in the drunk tank for the night. Waiting is not easy when your mind is full of things that won’t let you alone. I don’t want to think that Jamie had anything to do with me sitting here on a hard bench with half a dozen other guys. I did a couple things when I was younger. Once you get in the system, it’s like a card game you can’t win. You may have a full house, but they always have four aces. It’s better never to sit down at the game. Worry and despair enter the big cell like it’s being filled with water.

I’m surprised: I’m out by noon. I have an alibi. The cops on their own checked their accident reports and found out I was on the scene of a fender bender on I-5 during the time of the shooting. There’s a CHP report. No one is waiting for me, so I take the bus back to the yard. I feel relief; I can’t say how much. I strip my clothes off and hop in the shower. Thinking it all over, I speculate that one of the Petrov family must have got out of jail and come by the office without the usual phone call, and Jamie made a deal. Whose idea was it to drop my card? After a lot of thought, I decide it was too obvious a move for Jamie. I like to think she would have known better.

I follow the story in the Sacramento Bee. The brothers recover enough to buy their sister out. Jamie relocates to Chile and buys one of the largest vineyards in the region. I could get her address, if I want it. Sometimes I think of taking a trip to South America.

Doc never tires of telling me I’m a lucky fuck. “You got in over your head.” And sometimes he adds, “What did you learn from that?” Always the teacher. I stay in character: I’m someone who drives a wrecker. After taking my time to think it over, I say, “Nothing.”