One Perry Reed, who was facing charges of possession of a class A drug with intent to supply, possession of child pornography, as well as being wanted for questioning in New York in connection with his possible involvement in at least two murders, had been refused bail by a county Superior Court and would remain in custody until his trial began. More to the point, someone had burned Perry’s piece-of-shit auto dealership to the ground, along with one of Perry’s titty bars. This was a cause for celebration.
Ray Wray raised his coffee cup in salute.
Sometimes, the world just upped and fucked over the right guy.
So this was how Ray Wray come to hate Perry Reed . . .
The car was a piece of shit. Ray knew it, Perry Reed knew it, even the fucking squirrels collecting nuts in the parkland behind the lot knew it. The ’02 Mitsubishi Gallant looked like it had been used to transport troops in Iraq, it had so much dust in the engine, and it smelled of dog food, but it wasn’t as if automobile salesmen were lining up to offer someone like Ray Wray a credit option. He’d been told that, if he couldn’t get Perry Reed to cut him a deal, he might as well resign himself to being the white guy on the bus for the rest of his life, so he convinced his buddy Erik to drive him up to Perry Reed’s place and see what could be negotiated. Erik had dropped him off at the entrance to the lot and headed on to Montreal, where he was cutting his own deal for some prime weed that Ray planned to help him offload. The downside was that, if Ray couldn’t get Perry Reed to sell him a car, he’d have a long walk home. He would also miss out on a sweet deal with Erik, since pretty much a prerequisite for distributing drugs was the ability to get them from point A to point B, and Ray couldn’t see himself getting far on a bicycle with five pounds of cannabis in the basket. Securing a set of wheels was, therefore, a priority if he wasn’t to live in penury for the foreseeable future.
Perry Reed came out personally to deal with Ray, which might have been flattering if Reed hadn’t been such a nasty fat stocking of shit: brown eyes, brown hair, yellow shirt, brown suit, brown shoes, brown cigar, and a brown nose, just as long as he thought that he might be able sell you something. Ray shook his hand and had to resist the urge to wipe it clean on his jeans. He knew Perry Reed’s reputation: the man would fuck a keyhole if there wasn’t already a key in it, and it was common knowledge that he had only avoided trial way back on charges of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor because the statute of limitations had been exceeded, hence his nickname of ‘Perry the Pervert’. But even a pervert had his uses, and in desperate times people learned to hold their noses when dealing with lowlifes like Perry Reed.
It turned out that Perry Reed had yet to meet a man who didn’t meet his less-than-strict customer criteria, which could be summarized as having a down payment and a pulse, although for a time it seemed that Ray Wray might be the man who made even Perry the Pervert think twice about cutting a deal. Ray had scraped together $1,200 to put down, but Reed wanted $3,000 up front, and another $399 per month for the next four years. Ray calculated the interest rate at somewhere around twenty percent, which was mob vig, but he needed that car.
So Ray dug around for the emergency money that he’d been holding back and put a further $300 on the table, and Reed adjusted the monthly payment up to $500 a pop over four years, which made Ray’s eyes water, but the deal was struck and Ray drove off the lot in a car that coughed and spluttered and stank but somehow kept moving. Ray figured that with his share of the proceeds from the sale of the weed he could more than cover his payments for the months to come, with enough left over to reinvest with Erik in the wholesale end of the business. He had no intention of stiffing Perry Reed, though. Reed might have looked like a turd squeezed out by a dying dog, but he had a reputation as a man not to be crossed. People who welched on deals with Perry Reed ended up with broken bones, and worse.
As a goodwill gesture, Reed had thrown in free admission to the titty bar next to the lot, which Ray had heard that he owned as well, and a free beer to help make the time pass more pleasurably. Generally speaking, Ray wasn’t a man for titty bars. The last time he’d been in one, which must have been a decade before, he’d found himself sharing bar space with his former geography teacher, and Ray had been depressed for a week after. The 120 Club didn’t exactly promise good times, resembling as it did the kind of pillbox the Germans had defended during the D-Day landings, but a free beer was a free beer, so Ray pulled up at the side of bar, presented his admission ticket to the bored brunette at the door, and headed inside. He tried to ignore the uric stink, the damp carpets, and what he was pretty sure was the odor of stale male seed, but it wasn’t easy. Ray wasn’t a fussy guy, but he thought the 120 Club might be as low as a man could sink without licking up spilled beer from cracks in a floor.
The reason for the club’s name became apparent to Ray as soon as he looked up at the small mirrored stage, 120 being the combined age of the two women who were currently doing their best to make pole dancing as unerotic an activity as possible. Half-a-dozen men were scattered around the place, trying not to catch one another’s eye – or catch anything else, given the standards of hygiene in the place. Ray took a seat at the bar and asked for a Sam Adams, but the bartender told him his voucher was only good for a PBR or a Miller High Life. Ray settled for the PBR, although not happily. He’d never much cared for drinking beer out of cans.
‘Perry give you this?’ the bartender asked, holding the beer voucher between his fingertips like it might be infected.
‘Yeah.’
‘You buy a car from him?’
‘Mitsubishi Gallant.’
‘The oh-two?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus.’ The bartender poured Perry a bourbon from the well, and put the can of PBR beside it. ‘You can have the liquor on me. Go ahead, drown your sorrows.’
Perry did. He knew he’d been screwed, but he didn’t have much choice. He watched the women gyrate, and wondered how often the poles got cleaned. He wouldn’t have touched those poles without a hazmat suit. The bartender came back to him.
‘You want, I could arrange for you to spend some time with one of those ladies in a private booth.’
‘No thanks,’ said Ray. ‘I already got a grandmother.’
The bartender tried to look offended on their part, but couldn’t put his heart into it.
‘Better not let them hear you say that. They’ll kick your ass.’
‘They can barely lift their legs,’ said Ray. ‘It wasn’t for the poles, they’d fall over.’
This time the bartender scowled. ‘You want another drink, or what?’
‘Not unless it’s free,’ said Ray.
‘Then get your ass out of here.’
‘My pleasure,’ said Ray. ‘And tell your sisters to find another job.’
It turned out that the Mitsubishi ran pretty good, better than Ray had anticipated. It got him home without any problems, and he spent the weekend working on it, clearing the worst of the crap out of the engine and getting the smell out of the upholstery. He was all set to help Erik move the weed when he learned that Erik had been arrested by the Mounties when he was five miles shy of the border, and he and the weed were now likely to be staying in Canada for the foreseeable future.
So Ray picked up some bar work, and moved some stolen goods, and managed to keep up his payments to Perry Reed for four months, always paying in person and in cash, before he started to fall behind. When the calls began coming in from Reed’s people he tried to ignore them, but when they started getting insistent he decided that continuing to ignore them was inadvisable if he wanted to remain in the state of Maine with his limbs intact. He called the lot and asked to speak to Reed, and the big man duly came on the line, and they discussed the matter like gentlemen. Reed said he would find a way to make the loan more affordable for Ray, although it might mean spreading out the payments over two or three more years. Reed told him that he’d have new loan papers drawn up, and Ray could just come by and sign them so everything was above board. Figuring that he had nothing to lose, Ray drove up to the lot, parked outside the main showroom, and headed in to add his initials to whatever needed to be signed. As he took a seat to wait for Reed, a guy in overalls told him that he had to move the car as they were expecting a new consignment of vehicles, and Ray had tossed him the keys without thinking.
That was the last Ray saw of his car. It had just been repossessed.
When he asked to see Perry Reed, he was told that Mr Reed wasn’t around. When he started to get loud, four mechanics dumped him on the sidewalk. Ray’s mistake was to believe that Perry Reed was in the used car business, but he wasn’t. Perry Reed was in the finance business, and the more defaults there were, the better his business was. He could simply sell the same car over again at the same extortionate rates to people who needed a
