even ask you yet.â
Her voice dropped half an octave. âThis is about Hector Zuñigaâmaybe youâd better hold.â After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows, on came the mellifluous Dr. Deeply.
âDonât want to alarm you, Doc,â Zoyd said, âbut I think heâs stalkinâ me.â
âYouâve . . . had these feelings for some time?â In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing âTV Crazy.â
âYeah, in Hectorâs case fifteen or twenty years. Some guysâs in the
joint
for longer ân that.â
âLook, I can put my people on standby, but I donât think we can protect you around the clock, or anything.â About then Chef âTi Bruce put his head in the door hollering âYou still on?â and seeming anxious to have Zoyd out of there, when formerly it had been their custom to linger over beignets and chicory coffee.
Crawfish business done, Zoydâs next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chickâs Born Again, an auto-conversion shop located among log piles and county motor pools. The owners, Humboldt County twins, had found Jesus and their seed money at about the same time, during the fuel panic of the seventies, when, to get a tax break for bringing out the first U.S. passenger diesel, GM took its 5.7-liter V-8 Cadillac engine and, in some haste, converted it. In the season of purchaser disenchantment that followed, engine experts, including Rick and Chick, found they could make on the order of $2,500 per job reconverting these ill-considered mills from diesel back to gasoline again. Soon theyâd expanded into bodywork, put in a paint shed, and begun doing more customizing and conversion, eventually becoming a byword up and down the Coast and beyond the Sierras of the automotive second chance.
Standing with the twins as Zoyd pulled up were the legally ambiguous tow-truck team of Eusebio (âVatoâ) Gomez and Cleveland (âBloodâ) Bonnifoy, all in a respectful tableau observing a rare, legendary (some believed only folkloric) Edsel Escondido, sort of a beefier Ford Ranchero with a complexity of chrome accents, including around that well-known problem grille, now pitted by years of salt fog, which Vato and Blood had just finished winching to earth from V & B Towâs flagship F350,
El Mil Amores.
Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partnersâ heads. It was some elaborate game of doubles they played with the twins every time they came in here, the basic rule being never to say out loud where the vehicle inâoften deepâquestion had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase âact of conversionâ might here be taking on some additional sense.
Today, inspired by a wave of Bigfoot sightings down in the Mattole, Vato had nearly convinced the skeptical lookalikes that the Escondido had been found abandoned in a clearing, its owners frightened off by Bigfoot, in whose territory the car had then sat, anybodyâs prize, making its retrieval by the boys, whoâd just happened to be out in that part of the brush, an adventure full of perilous grades, narrow escapes, and kick-ass four-wheeling all the way, followed at each turn by the openmouthed Rick and Chick, upon whom at last Blood, usually the closer in these proceedings, laid, âSo Bigfoot beinâ force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights.â Dazed, the twins were nodding at slightly different rates, and another story of twilight reconfiguration, soon to be the talk of the business, was about to get under way.
Zoyd, already jumpy enough from peopleâs reactions to him all day, was not reassured at seeing the gathering break up at his approach into short edgy nods and waves. They were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to
Her voice dropped half an octave. âThis is about Hector Zuñigaâmaybe youâd better hold.â After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows, on came the mellifluous Dr. Deeply.
âDonât want to alarm you, Doc,â Zoyd said, âbut I think heâs stalkinâ me.â
âYouâve . . . had these feelings for some time?â In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing âTV Crazy.â
âYeah, in Hectorâs case fifteen or twenty years. Some guysâs in the
joint
for longer ân that.â
âLook, I can put my people on standby, but I donât think we can protect you around the clock, or anything.â About then Chef âTi Bruce put his head in the door hollering âYou still on?â and seeming anxious to have Zoyd out of there, when formerly it had been their custom to linger over beignets and chicory coffee.
Crawfish business done, Zoydâs next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chickâs Born Again, an auto-conversion shop located among log piles and county motor pools. The owners, Humboldt County twins, had found Jesus and their seed money at about the same time, during the fuel panic of the seventies, when, to get a tax break for bringing out the first U.S. passenger diesel, GM took its 5.7-liter V-8 Cadillac engine and, in some haste, converted it. In the season of purchaser disenchantment that followed, engine experts, including Rick and Chick, found they could make on the order of $2,500 per job reconverting these ill-considered mills from diesel back to gasoline again. Soon theyâd expanded into bodywork, put in a paint shed, and begun doing more customizing and conversion, eventually becoming a byword up and down the Coast and beyond the Sierras of the automotive second chance.
Standing with the twins as Zoyd pulled up were the legally ambiguous tow-truck team of Eusebio (âVatoâ) Gomez and Cleveland (âBloodâ) Bonnifoy, all in a respectful tableau observing a rare, legendary (some believed only folkloric) Edsel Escondido, sort of a beefier Ford Ranchero with a complexity of chrome accents, including around that well-known problem grille, now pitted by years of salt fog, which Vato and Blood had just finished winching to earth from V & B Towâs flagship F350,
El Mil Amores.
Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partnersâ heads. It was some elaborate game of doubles they played with the twins every time they came in here, the basic rule being never to say out loud where the vehicle inâoften deepâquestion had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase âact of conversionâ might here be taking on some additional sense.
Today, inspired by a wave of Bigfoot sightings down in the Mattole, Vato had nearly convinced the skeptical lookalikes that the Escondido had been found abandoned in a clearing, its owners frightened off by Bigfoot, in whose territory the car had then sat, anybodyâs prize, making its retrieval by the boys, whoâd just happened to be out in that part of the brush, an adventure full of perilous grades, narrow escapes, and kick-ass four-wheeling all the way, followed at each turn by the openmouthed Rick and Chick, upon whom at last Blood, usually the closer in these proceedings, laid, âSo Bigfoot beinâ force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights.â Dazed, the twins were nodding at slightly different rates, and another story of twilight reconfiguration, soon to be the talk of the business, was about to get under way.
Zoyd, already jumpy enough from peopleâs reactions to him all day, was not reassured at seeing the gathering break up at his approach into short edgy nods and waves. They were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to
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