“Oh, gosh, do I have to?”
“Such a sacrifice,” Alicia laughed, and slapped my back.
Kelly held out the chicken wishbone, hooked around her greasy pinkie finger, I took the other end and pulled.
Oh, please, let us build this thing.
Short end.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she said. “Maybe we wished for the same thing.”
18
“JUBAL THINKS AMERICANS ought to be the first people to set foot on Mars,” Travis said. “I agree with him, but before a few weeks ago it was impossible. Now it is possible, with something Jubal has made, and I’m going to tell you how it can be done.”
Travis, who had been pretty much on the wagon for several weeks, had told us he had to have a shot or two… or three, before facing an audience scarier than any he had ever faced in his life: Mom, Aunt Maria, and Dak’s father. Alicia had doled the whiskey out to him, and he had walked into the lion’s den.
The three of them sat in Mom’s living room on the old sprung couch and easy chair that qualified as a “family heirloom” in my poor family. It was after midnight, the vacancy sign had been turned off and the office door locked. It was now just the six of us and the three of them. Travis was going to explain how he and Jubal proposed to build a spaceship and take their precious sons to Mars.
You couldn’t find stonier faces on Mount Rushmore.
Sitting on the coffee table along with a couple open two-liter bottles of generic cola and some Dixie cups was a pitiful torn bag of stick pretzels and a small plastic container of cold supermarket guacamole dip. I [184] swear, if Fidel Castro himself climbed out of his grave and came to visit, Aunt Maria would have at least heated up a little refried beans and salsa.
Travis sighed deeply and started in on his spiel. I squeezed Kelly’s hand and said a silent prayer to Ares, the God of War.
THE NIGHT AFTER we launched the test rocket we all pulled into the lot behind Strickland Mercedes and parked. Travis and Jubal got out of the Hummer and squeezed into the backseat of Blue Thunder. Dak beeped the horn once as he pulled out, and Kelly and I went to the back door. One of her keys opened it, and she hurried over to the security control on the wall and punched in a five-digit code.
Kelly’s dad was the kind who liked to keep a close eye on his employees, even when he was busy with other things. Therefore, he’d had his office located above and slightly behind the salespeople’s cubicles. He could look down through a glass wall onto the tops of their desks, and beyond them to the showroom floor.
“Master of all he surveys,” Kelly said as we climbed the broad spiral staircase. Another key got her into his office, and another five-digit number entered into another keypad got us secure access.
I couldn’t help feeling like a burglar, and like a goldfish in a bowl. I knew I hadn’t done anything illegal, Kelly had a perfect right to invite me in, but I also knew I was emphatically not welcome by her father. And what Kelly was going to do was illegal. I hated it that I could see right outside to the new cars parked out in front, and the road, and the I-95 freeway just beyond it. Traffic was light at three A.M.
She booted the computer and I pulled up a chair to watch an artist at work.
“Enter Daddy Dear’s security code, right out of the book… done,” she muttered. “Password… oh, my, now whatever could his password be?” She looked at me, and I shrugged.
“Let’s try something…” She typed, her fingers moving too fast for me to get any of it. In the password box ************ appeared, then the security page disappeared and a menu came up.
[185] “Pretty good,” I said. She smirked at me, and pulled out a flat wood panel above the side drawers on the big executive desk. She turned it over. Taped to the bottom was a piece of paper with the word ferraristud in ballpoint, and several numbers.
“PIN numbers,” she said.
“Dumb.”
“ ‘Ferrari-stud’ is his online handle, too. He uses that when he goes to an escort service website and has one of the girls drop by here when he’s working late. I have quite a file on him. I read all his mail. I know all his secrets, and believe me, some of them could get him ten to twenty in Raiford.”
She called up an internal database and easily changed the color of her borrowed Ferrari from “red” to “black.” She did something involving dealer plates and registrations that I didn’t really understand. Then she went to the DMV.
“Every car dealer in America has some kind of fiddle going with somebody at the DMV, if they can afford it,” she said. “The guy I’m leaving an e-mail with makes good money on the side by doing little chores for us, when the need arises.”
A patrol car was passing along the street out there. His turn indicator was on, and he was about to enter the lot. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder and pointed.
She stood and waved. The officer riding shotgun spotted her and waved, said something to his partner, and they sped off.
“Safer up here,” she pointed out. “The cops are used to me working late.”
When she shut the computer down we went to her office, where a printer was chattering. She pulled the paper out. It was a dealer’s window sticker listing equipment and options and price. She pointed to where it now listed the color as black. She said it was listed that way in all the documentation at the dealership, and in the morning it would be listed that way at the DMV, too.
“They’d have to go all the way back to Italy to hear any different,” she said. “We don’t have any red Ferraris in inventory. They’ll have to look elsewhere.”
[186] “The one problem I see with that,” I pointed out, “the car actually is still red.”
“Not for long.”
Out back, a guy was sitting in the car scraping the old dealer sticker off the window with a razor blade. Another, younger man was standing by the car. The older guy smiled at Kelly.
“Midnight black, right?” he asked.
“As soon as possible.” She held up two key rings.
“Let my boy drive the Hummer. This is my son, Josh.” Kelly tossed him the Hummer keys. “What color you want it?”
“Whatever’s most ordinary.”
“That would be Desert Storm beige. Most of the right-wing militia generals in Florida drive around in Desert Storm camouflage Hummers.”
They drove off, and Kelly told me that by this time tomorrow Travis’s flamboyant red-and-black super-jeep would look like a Gulf War veteran.
“Sounds expensive,” I said.
“Bob owes us some favors. He almost got himself in trouble a few years back, some pesky business about changing engine block numbers and paint on some cars whose ownership was… not quite crystal clear, let’s say.”
“Stolen.”
“We car dealers don’t like that term much. Misplaced.” She grinned at me, and I realized Kelly was more of a pirate than I’d ever suspected.
I didn’t have a problem with that.
THAT MORNING I caught up on some chores, got a few minutes’ sleep in the afternoon, and then spent the evening and night in Kelly’s little apartment on the beach south of town. We swam, lay on the beach and talked until it was dark, bought a pizza and took it to her place.
Kelly talked a lot about making a final break with her father but she hadn’t done it yet. The fact was, she still kept a lot of her stuff in the huge, gated, fake-Greek pile of stone where her father lived with his [187] second wife. She spent some nights there, some with her mother in Ormond Beach, some with me, and some at her own place. She didn’t really live anywhere, in the way that most of us do.
The fact is, she didn’t make enough money to afford the payments on her Porsche if she’d had to buy it herself.
She had money. I didn’t know how much, but I figured it was substantial. It was in a trust her father had set up so she couldn’t use any of it until she was twenty-five. Until then, she had to get by on the wages her father paid her-which even she and I, who loathed him, had to admit were fair for the work she did. He knew her value, and intended to keep her under his thumb as long as he could.