Bad Guys

through them at us.

“Good, Eddie. How’s life treatin’ ya?”

Eddie Mayhew shrugged. “Oh, you know, busy, busy, all the time, busy. The stuff’s always coming in, you know, always coming in.”

“How’s the missus?”

I looked at Lawrence. Missus?

Eddie made a face, like he’d caught a whiff of something that smelled bad. “Oh, you know, still talk talk talking, wants me to drive her out to see her sister in the spring, out in Milwaukee. Both of them, talk talk talk, for a whole week.”

“They got a lot of beer there,” Lawrence said, trying to offer Eddie a glimmer of hope.

“Yeah, beer, yeah, that’s good. What I really need, really need, is something to put me out for the drive out, so I won’t have to listen, won’t have to listen, to my wife.”

“That’s kind of difficult if you’re the one doing the driving.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Can’t win.” But then, oddly, a look of calm came over him. “Oh well, oh well. Maybe it won’t be so bad, so bad after all. A lot could change by the spring, yeah.”

“I’d like you to meet my friend here, Eddie,” Lawrence said, allowing me to step forward. “This is Zack Walker. He’s a writer for The Metropolitan, he’s going to do a feature on the auction, have someone take a few pictures.”

“Oh sure, yeah, sure, that’s fine. Good paper, The Metro, I read that. Read that all the time.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I explained that I was doing a color piece on what it was like to buy a car at a government auction. Eddie said he could spare some time to answer my questions, and Lawrence excused himself to register and check out what vehicles were available.

“We’ve got boats, motorcycles, furniture, high-end stereo equipment, oh yeah, we got everything,” Mayhew said. “Sometimes we have people submit written bids, whoever bids highest wins.”

“Like those silent auctions my son’s high school does sometimes for fundraisers,” I offered.

“Well, sort of, I don’t know, I don’t have any kids, never had any kids, but the stuff they’re auctioning off at your kid’s school probably didn’t all belong, at one time, to drug dealers and smugglers, am I right? Huh?”

“That’s probably true.”

“But today, okay, today we’re auctioning off some big stuff, and we’re doing it the way you’re probably more familiar with, with an auctioneer, right? Mostly cars, SUVs, couple of boats, good stuff, really really good stuff. Come on, we’ll go out into the paddock, out in the paddock, I’ll show you.”

We wandered out into what looked like a used-car lot, with the odd boat, motorcycle, and RV tossed into the mix.

“So, who’d this stuff used to belong to?” I asked, scribbling into my notebook.

“We’ve got goods here that belonged to biker gangs, mean ones, you know, mean bikers, and drug smugglers, big-timers who got away with it for a long time, and small-timers who thought they could make it big but were a bit too stupid to do this kind of thing without getting caught. Even some CEO types, stock fraud guys, get their fancy Beemers and boats seized. I know the history of everything out here. Make it my business to. It’s interesting, you know? You got your whole crime microcosm here, wrapped up in these cars.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Ask me anything,” Eddie said. “Go ahead, go ahead, ask me anything about anything you see. Go on.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. I pointed to a shiny red Mustang. “What’s the story there?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, okay, okay, I know,” he said quickly. Eddie seemed to be running on premium unleaded. “Bobby Minor, twenty-four, bought the thing from money he made dealing crack on the north side, it’s got a V8 under the hood, barely 15,000 miles on it. Go ahead, check the odometer, go on, check it, see if I’m right.”

With some reluctance, I opened the door and glanced at the dash. The car had 14,943 miles on it.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Ask me another,” he said. “Go on, ask me.”

I didn’t know how long I wanted to play this game, but figured I could go another couple of rounds.

“All right,” I said. “That one.” I indicated a motorcycle.

Eddie, cocky behind the Coke rims, circled the bike. “Harley-Davidson, belonged to a member of the Snake Eyes gang, yeah, that’s right, loosely affiliated with the Hell’s Angels, those Hell’s Angels, ran prostitution, table dancers, that’s what they did. This bike belonged to Buzz Crawley. They called him Nut Crusher.” Eddie giggled. “Guess why? Go on, guess.”

“I think I have an idea.”

“You know why? He’d go visit guys, guys who owed the gang money, grab their boys with a set of pliers, drag ’em around the parking lot that way. Oooh, that would hurt, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that hurt?” He was smiling big- time now.

“That would hurt.” I had stopped taking notes.

“You see that Land Rover? That got taken away from the Jamaicans; that little silver car, that was in Lenny Indigo’s driveway before they put him away; that one, that green Winnebago there, that was-”

“You really know your stuff, Eddie, no doubt about it. I think what I’m going to do is, talk to some of the people who’re planning to bid on something, get a bit of color for my story.”

“Oh, good idea. But you need anything else, I’m always here.”

“Don’t you ever go home?” I asked.

He grinned, leaned in toward me. “You knew my wife, you’d know why I’m here all the time. Like to avoid going home as long as possible, you know? You married?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about, right? You know what I’m talking about, oh yeah, I can see it.”

“Well, thanks again,” I said, and broke away.

I’d called The Metropolitan’s photo desk ahead of time to arrange for a photographer to meet me here. I’d been a reporter-photographer myself on another paper a few years back-what they called a two-way-but my new employer was content to limit my skills to writing.

I spotted Stan Wannaker, one of the paper’s most distinguished shooters, who you’d be more likely to run into in Afghanistan or Pakistan or one of the other “stans” where people are always shooting each other and blowing up things because they don’t have access to cable. He was evidently slumming it to be covering something as mundane as a police auction alongside a lowly reporter like me.

“Hey, Stan,” I said, interrupting him as he snapped a couple of frames of a guy inspecting a Lexus.

He glanced away from the viewfinder. “Hey, uh, Zack, right?” He reached into his pocket where he’d stuffed a folded blue assignment sheet, opened it up and confirmed that I was the reporter he was supposed to meet. I was still relatively new on staff, and this was the first time I’d linked up with Stan. Given that I’m not exactly a foreign- correspondent type, what with my aversion to getting sand in my shoes or visiting nations where intense heat is likely to cause me a rash, our paths had not crossed.

“How come they’ve got you doing stuff like this?” I asked.

“I’m in town for a while, catching my breath,” he said. “Until all hell breaks loose someplace else, which shouldn’t be long.” Stan’s in his early forties, unmarried, lives in a tiny apartment someplace in the city, and isn’t saddled with the kinds of obligations that might keep the rest of us from leaving at a moment’s notice for the North Pole or Taiwan or the Falkland Islands. His jeans and multipocketed jacket hung loosely on his thin frame.

“So, what kind of shots you looking for?”

I shrugged. “I just got here. I’m gonna talk to people, see what they’re looking for.”

“Well, give me a shout if you need me. I’ll wander.”

I found Lawrence checking out a Saab convertible, then looking it up on the sheet he’d been given listing the items available for sale.

“Interested?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“I’m going to talk to some people,” I said.