Frankie glanced at the Honda. “Not worth my time, man,” he said. “Piece-of-crap purple rice burner from the Nineties—”
There was a loud, explosive crash from the garage ahead that sounded like someone had hurled a metal trash can into an empty dumpster. We froze. Standing in the doorway of the nearest bay was a tall, rawboned man in stained coveralls, a backward Atlanta Braves cap on his head. He held a drop-forged wrench in one hand. It took me a moment to realize he had swung the wrench and struck the side of the garage with it, resulting in that horrible echoing crash.
“You talking about my car?” the man said.
Frankie didn’t falter. He beamed a smile bright as the sun. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “My apologies.”
“Shut the fuck up, Chachi,” the man said. Frankie’s smile vanished, a total eclipse. The tall rawboned man pointed at me with his wrench. “What you want, kid?”
I glanced at Frankie, then back to the man. “I’m looking for Brandon Cargill.”
The rawboned man clenched his jaw, his nostrils flaring. “Brad,” he said.
I blinked. “What?” I said.
“It’s Brad, motherfucker,” he said. He swung the wrench so it banged off the side of the garage, the crash shivering in the air. “Who sent you?”
I glanced at Frankie to get his reaction. What the hell? But the man banged the wrench once more. “Don’t look at the spic, look at me when I’m talking to you,” he said. “Who the fuck sent you?”
I’d heard racist speech and jokes before, but I’d never been confronted by an adult who used such speech so openly. I gaped at the man, who pointed at me again with the wrench. “Who the fuck sent you?”
“Gavin Lester,” I said.
The man raised his wrench and threw it. Frankie and I ducked involuntarily. The wrench spun end over end between us and smashed through the windshield of the maroon Honda. Safety glass bounced off my jeans. Before I could move or put my hands up or even breathe, the man was in front of me, close enough that I could see an almost translucent mole on his jaw, just below his left ear.
“The fuck does he want?” the man said. “Shut up,” he added as I opened my mouth. “I know what the fuck he wants. You tell him Brad Cargill needs his first.”
Frankie held up the manila envelope. Quietly, he said, “I think this is what you want, Mr. Cargill.”
Cargill whipped his head around to stare at Frankie, who stood his ground, looking straight back at him, the envelope held between them like a flag of truce. At that moment, I realized Cargill was just wrong. He was a stupid, loud kind of wrong, the kind of wrong that would blow his nose in his hand and then wipe it on your shirt with a sneer. The kind that would, with malice and intent, call a Latino teenager a spic, then chuck a heavy wrench through a windshield to make a point. The kind that would walk into your house one evening and blow your life away.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Cargill pointedly looked away from Frankie to me, his eyes round with outrage. “You know who the fuck I am?” he said.
I fought to keep my voice level and mostly succeeded. “You’re the gentleman who gets this envelope. Once you give us what my uncle needs.”
Cargill worked his jaw as if trying out a few words silently, getting the shape of them in his mouth, before discarding them. “What did you say?” he finally said.
“You’re the gentleman—”
He cut me off with a chopping motion of his hand. “About your uncle,” he said.
“Gavin Lester,” I said. “He’s my uncle.”
Something seemed to melt away from Cargill then, as if he had shrugged off a coat and left it on the ground. He smiled, revealing a discolored eyetooth. “I’m sorry,” Cargill said, and his soft voice, almost a croon, caused my back to crawl like a bag full of live bait. “I just lose my temper sometimes, is all. So Gavin Lester’s your uncle, huh?”
I nodded, not trusting myself enough to speak.
Cargill chuckled, then reached out a hand like a spider and ruffled my hair with it. “Gavin Lester’s nephew,” he said. “Jesus. Well, all right, Gavin Lester’s nephew, let’s have that envelope.”
I looked past that smile at the pale, flat eyes set back into his skull. “Yours first. Sir.”
Something shifted in Cargill’s face then, like a snake coiling. Then he snickered and clapped me on the shoulder so that I nearly stumbled. “Damn, you got a brass set on you,” he said. “Okay, okay.” Cargill rubbed his nose, then dipped his hand into a coverall pocket and pulled out a fat, crinkled envelope, the kind you’d put a letter in, except this one wasn’t big enough to hold whatever was in it. It looked like someone had shoved a paperback in it and tried to lick it shut.
“Let’s make sure it’s all here, shall we,” Cargill said, tearing open the flap. He pulled out a wad of bills, the kind with Benjamin Franklin on them. Cargill began counting aloud by hundreds, thumbing through the bills, but his eyes kept returning to me, a ghost of a grin dancing around his mouth. When he ran out of bills at ten thousand, he pushed the stack back into the now-ruined envelope and handed it to me. I took the envelope and held it with both hands. Ten thousand dollars. Jesus.
“Thank you,” I managed.
Cargill reached out and put a finger on my forehead like he was pressing an elevator button. “Not so fast,” he said. He removed his finger. “You and your amigo have something for me.”
Dumbly, I nodded and looked at Frankie, who stepped forward and handed his envelope to Cargill, who plucked it so quickly out of Frankie’s hand that Frankie blinked in surprise. Cargill hooted with laughter. “Gracias,” he said with a wink, pronouncing the word
