Read Online Never Street by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online

with a toothbrush and a cup of gasoline. The cup was the same one he used for coffee, with his first name lettered on it in gold-leaf Gothic. His Aryan Nation poster-boy features had begun to slip past sixty, the clean chin blurring and the skin growing thick around his chilly blue eyes. The rest of him was the same as always, stunted and misshapen under what had to be the first pair of coveralls he had ever owned, strataed and sub-strataed with layers of black grease.
    “I need you to look at my car when you get a minute.” I had to shout to make myself heard above the whimpering of air wrenches and the clanging of tire irons.
    “I’ve seen your car.” He blew through the carburetor. It made a sound like a flute. Then he went back to scrubbing. It wasn’t the note he was looking for.
    “You need new material, Ernst.”
    “You need a new car.”
    “You say that every time I come in.”
    “I mean it every time.”
    “Well, take a look at it.”
    “I don’t need to.”
    “Why not? Did you find that Nazi gold you buried in forty-five?”
    “Go to hell, Amos. I was too young to serve in the Wehrmacht.”
    “I heard it was the Hitler Youth.”
    “I don’t need to look at your car to know what’s wrong. You’ve got fissures in the block. You had fissures in the block last time. They don’t heal.”
    “Use more epoxy.”
    “It’s ninety percent epoxy now. That’s not a car you’re driving. It’s a rolling advertisement for miracle adhesives.” He wiped the carburetor with a rag slightly less filthy than his coveralls, blew through it again. “I got a car for you. Let you have it for a grand.”
    “You’ve been trying to sell me a car ever since I bought this one.”
    “You should’ve come here instead of buying it hot.”
    “We’re not married, Ernst. I wasn’t being unfaithful.”
    He wiped the carburetor again, with a clean rag this time, and set it on the bench next to the sawed-off Remington shotgun he used to protect himself at night from burglars and the Jewish Defense League. “You want to see it or not? I already got one offer from a collector. Thousand, cash.”
    “Why didn’t you take it?”
    “I hate collectors worse than bolsheviks. They treat cars like pussies.”
    “Show me what you’ve got.”
    He climbed down from the stool and hobbled through a back door propped open with the block from a Packard Eight. He moved painfully, using only the balls of his feet. He had not used the rest since the Russians had got hold of him three hundred feet from the Bunker. All it took to turn Ernst Dierdorf violent was to order a glass of vodka anywhere within his hearing.
    Behind the garage was a gravel apron where the hopeless cases were parked, with the occasional work-in-progress mixed in to camouflage it from thieves, should they get over the electrified fence with all their internal organs intact; his lawyer had been trying for years to persuade him to stop cranking the current up to lethal levels. One of the vehicles was covered with a canvas tarpaulin. With no ceremony whatsoever he flipped up the end of the cover and rolled it back over the hood, across the roof, and down the sloping rear window to the trunk.
    It was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, twenty-five years old, with a white vinyl pebbled top and a dusty blue battered body. The distance from the nose to the base of the windshield was nearly as long as the rest of the car. A conscientious traffic cop would have been tempted to ticket it for speeding while it was standing still.
    “I had one just like this,” I said.
    “Like hell. You had this one.”
    “You told me you sold it to a guy for parts two presidents back.”
    “I did.” He stood doubling and redoubling the canvas tarp in his strong hands, as close to bursting as he ever got. He was almost smiling.
    I got out a cigarette and speared it between my lips, then decided against lighting it. The ground was soaked as deep as I was tall with gasoline and motor oil.
    “It was