Deadly Assets (Badge of Honor 12)

[ TWO ]

Torresdale Avenue and Kinsey Street

Frankford, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 3:12 P.M.

The silver late-model Volkswagen Jetta slowed as it passed an automobile salvage yard, then braked hard and turned off the street. It nosed up to the faded orange overhead steel door of a freestanding two-story masonry building. Stenciled on the door in three-foot-high black letters was DO NOT BLOCK DOOR!!! TOW AWAY ZONE!!! To the right of the overhead door there was a steel man door, in the same faded orange, and stenciled in smaller black lettering was MARIANO’S COLLISION CENTER. FREE ESTIMATES.

The driver of the VW, a chunky five-foot-four twenty-year-old Puerto Rican with a black stocking cap pulled low on his head, anxiously hit the horn three times as his dark eyes scanned down the street. He took a long draw on his cigarette, then exhaled audibly.

Torresdale was lined with small businesses, most of which were involved in some fashion with the automotive trade. On one side of Mariano’s was a three-dollar drive-through car wash, now closed due to the snow, and on the other side was Worldwide Quality Imports.

The larger of two used-car lots on the block, Worldwide had an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. Strung from light poles above that were ribbons of faded multicolored plastic banners imprinted with SALE. The painted wooden sign on the fence read WE FINANCE. EVERYONE IS APPROVED. GOOD CREDIT. BAD CREDIT. BANKRUPTCY. REPOS. NO PROBLEM! YOUR JOB IS YOUR CREDIT! 215-555-2020. The lot itself was packed with about thirty late-model vehicles. Another half-dozen older models, with neon stickers on their windshields announcing LOW MILES! CLEAN! LIKE NEW!, were parked on the sidewalk and in public parking spaces at the curb. Two of them—a Nissan Ultima sedan and a compact Toyota SUV—the driver recognized as ones he had delivered a couple of weeks earlier.

The driver saw the steel man door crack open about six inches, then immediately swing shut. A moment later he could hear the sound of the overhead door clunking as it began opening.

Then the driver, remembering what he had meant to do minutes earlier, quickly glanced around the dashboard area. He reached for the glove box, yanked it open, and began rifling through it. He pulled out a handful of paper napkins and drinking straws wrapped in plastic sleeves from a fast-food chain, tossed them on the floorboard, then found a black vinyl folder that contained the owner’s manual for the vehicle. He threw that back in, slammed the glove box shut, then opened the ashtray.

Here we go! he thought, glancing up to check on the opening door.

The ashtray held a mix of papers—gas pump and other store receipts crammed in with a wad of one- and five-dollar bills—and a small pile of coins. He stuck his fingers in, clawed at the mass, then managed to grab all but a few coins and stuff it in his pants pocket.

He looked again at the opening door. It was now about a third of the way up, and the snow was beginning to blow inside the garage. A brown hand then poked out and began motioning in a rapid fashion for the Volkswagen to pull inside.

The driver eased the car forward, stopped as the top of the VW’s windshield neared the bottom lip of the steel door, then when clear pulled completely inside. The overhead steel door then began to close.

The interior was harshly lit in a gray-white of industrial mercury vapor lamps. There were seven or eight wrecked cars on either side of the workshop, all in various states of repair. At the back of the garage was a nearly new white Volkswagen Passat that had been badly rear-ended and, next to it, a red Honda Accord with no wheels sitting up on blocks, its damaged front end cut free from the rest of the vehicle.

The driver of the Jetta could now see the rest of the hand that had waved him inside—a Hispanic male who looked to be in his twenties, of average height but very thin, his faded blue overalls hanging loosely on him. It clearly was cold inside the shop; the driver could see moisture when the Hispanic male exhaled. His hand now motioned for the driver to stop.

After putting the Volkswagen in park and killing the motor, the driver stepped out just as an older man, wiping his hands with a dirty red shop towel, stepped out from a doorway by the big roll-up door. Above the doorway was painted OFFICE.

The older man, olive-skinned and rotund and balding, wore faded blue overalls that had paint splatters. The patch over his shirt’s left breast pocket read MARIANO’S COLLISION CENTER; the one over his right read GABBY.

He approached the Volkwagen, not saying anything to the driver as he circled the car, inspecting it. When he had made a full circle, he took a long moment studying the stickers on the inside of the front windshield on the driver’s side. One was a red parking pass with six numbers under the letters “UMA HS.”

“What’s the story, Ruben?” Gabriel Mariano said to the driver.

“I need to get a thousand for it,” Ruben Mora said, glancing at the silver Volkswagen while trying not to appear nervous. He dropped his cigarette butt to the grimy concrete floor and ground it with his toe. “You’ll get five times that from it.”

“What’s the story?” Mariano repeated. “Where’d you get it? Any papers?”

Mora turned to him, and in a jerky motion pulled out a disposable butane lighter and lit another cigarette.

“That matter?” Mora said. “It’s gonna be parted out anyway.”

He leaned back against a steel worktable that held paint-splattered gallon cans—one was marked TOLUENE; the other, with a few dirty shop towels on top, had a paper label reading ACETONE—and exhaled a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.

“You told me what you needed,” Mora said, “and I put the word out.”

Mariano looked past him, to the back of the shop, then at him.

“I said Volkswagen Passat, Ruben, not Jetta. And do me a favor and don’t be smoking around those cans.”

Mora glanced at the worktable, shrugged, and took two steps away from it.

“This one’s a cherry, not an hour old,” Mora said, then, almost as an afterthought, nodded toward the bumper and added, “I stuck new plates on it just to be safe.”