He was right, I almost did. I got out of the Yugo and stared as he stood by my truck, arms folded across his chest and smiling like a proud father. He said, “Pretty good, huh?”
“What did you do?”
“I put a little class on her, gave her some pride.
Won’t be any others around LA like this baby.”
I was speechless. There was my truck with a huge, black dorsal fin on the roof. The body man wiped his hands on a red rag and patted the top of the Ford. He said, “I got to looking at it and felt it was incomplete. I had this fifty-seven Chevy out back was just junk, and it came to me.”
“It came to you,” I said.
He nodded like I got it, “Yeah, take the fifty-seven’s fin and weld it to the roof, lengthen and customize the shape and add some metal here and there, paint it black to match, and...tah-dahh.”
My head hurt. “Can you take it off?” He looked like I’d slapped him. I said, “It looks uh, like nothing I’ve ever seen, something out of my dreams,” Nightmares is what I was thinking, “But I work undercover a lot, and everybody’d recognize me this way.”
He frowned, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I have to make a living,” I shrugged as if I was sorry.
“I hate to.” He rubbed his chin and thought for a good thirty seconds, “Okay, bring it by in a couple weeks. I’ll take it off.”
“Two weeks?”
“It’s the best I can do. My customizing work is backed up.”
“You can’t slip me in?”
He shook his head, “I’ve got my ethics to think of.”
“Well, can I drive the Yugo until then?”
“No can do. Somebody else is taking it this afternoon. They’ll have it for a month.” He smiled, “She’s a starlet, got like forty first names, Mary Annie Billie Bobbi Ulysses Johnson, something like that. She was in that big teen slasher movie showed last month, said she’s in a very turquoise mood and wants me to paint her Beemer turquoise and inlay the dash with silver and rhinestones. In the meantime she wanted to drive something people wouldn’t pay attention to and I told her she could take the Yugo.”
Well, she had it there. I tried one more thing and pointed at the big fin, “Are you sure that’s legal?”
“Yep. Had some CHPs drop in to make sure. They were so impressed they called their buddies to come by and take a look. Must have been twenty or so stop by in the last two days.”
Great, my days of driving over the speed limit and whizzing through the pack was over. I imagined a trooper watching traffic coming at him on the freeway and seeing the black dorsal fin knifing through the cars like an orca chasing seals on a National Geographic special. Be hard to miss.
I surrendered, “Are the keys in it?”
“Yep. I’ll send you the bill, no charge for the extras.”
As I drove down the highway people in every vehicle within a quarter mile, coming and going stared with big eyes and often, open mouthed laughter. I sympathized with every zoo monkey I’d ever ogled.
It wasn’t over when I pulled into the parking lot because Arch and his girlfriend were on the steps. Arch pointed, grabbed his stomach and laughed so hard he had to sit down. He sent his laughing girlfriend inside to tell everyone and before I could find an empty space, get out and run to my office, forty or fifty people came out and joined Arch. I parked and tried to remain dignified as I walked to my office. Once inside I pulled the shades and didn’t answer the knocks on the door.
The knocking and hoots of laughter stopped after ten minutes or so. I waited another minute, then went out the door and into Archie’s apartment. Waylon was there and gave me a nod. I asked, “Is he awake?”
“Yeah, I had to push him back in bed, tell him I’d give him an enema if he didn’t behave.”
“I’ll bet that worked.”
“Always does.”
I went into the bedroom where Hondo was sitting up, reading Macbeth. He looked good, with color back in his face.
“Don’t start talking like that,” I pointed at the book.