Serge turned toward his passenger.
“What?” said Coleman. “Why are you looking at me in that creepy way?”
“Coleman, you’re a genius!”
“I am?”
Serge nodded hard. “You just gave me the perfect concept for my next science project.”
Coleman smiled confidently and hit a joint. “Never really thought about it, but I guess I am a little on the brainy side.” Another exhale. “So how am I smart?”
Serge waved for him to be quiet. He already had the phone to his head. “Alfonso, Serge here. I need a favor . . . What do you mean you don’t want that kind of trouble? . . . When has anything ever gone wrong? . . . That was just that one time . . . Okay, twice . . . Okay, now that time I did not burn down your warehouse . . . No, it was an electrical short from shoddy contractors . . . I did not overload the circuits making a Tesla arc transmitter to create artificial bursts of indoor lightning. Nikola Tesla won the Nobel Prize, so it had to be perfectly safe . . . Listen, I hate to remind someone when they owe me big-time . . . That’s better . . . Just a few things: a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums, arc-welding equipment and secure privacy. Got a pen? . . .”
Coleman noticed the Trans Am speeding up. “Where are we going?”
Serge still had the cell to his ear. “. . . And of course safety goggles.” He hung up. “Did you say something?”
“Where you driving to?”
“Alfonso’s Scrap Metal, Recycling and Lounge.”
“Lounge?”
“It’s on the edge of a weird municipal zoning thing, and Alfonso took advantage of it.” Serge hit his blinker for a Hialeah exit. “But he learned that after the lounge opens at night and drinking starts, it’s a good idea to turn off the hydraulic car-crusher and the big magnet that picks vehicles up. What were those people thinking?”
The Firebird rolled down an access road in an industrial district characterized by forklifts and Dobermans. They turned through a barbed-wire gate and into a cavernous sheet-metal building.
Serge zestfully jumped out of the car. “Alfonso!”
A lanky man in jeans raised the visor on his welding helmet and cut the gas to his torch. “Serge, it’s been three years.”
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“Whatever happened to ‘You wanna get some lunch’?”
“Why? You hungry?”
“No,” said Alfonso. “It’s just that most people don’t call out of the blue and go, ‘I’m five minutes away, and I need all this crazy shit, and seal the building tight so police can’t get nosy. And why do you need three different types of fire extinguishers?”
“To cover all bases,” said Serge. “I wouldn’t want you yelling at me again: ‘What’s with all the fucking lightning in here?’ ”
“Forget it.” Alfonso made a casual wave. “All your stuff is over there.”
“Excellent!” Serge clasped his hands together. “First I’m going to weld—”
“Stop!” Alfonso held up a hand. “I don’t want to know. I’m going to lock the place up now, and if you’re interrogated, I was never here.”
Coleman suddenly gasped.
“What is it?” asked Serge.
He pointed in horror at a sign on the door to the adjacent building. LOUNGE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
“Oh, that,” said Alfonso. “One of the bar customers figured out how to turn the big magnet back on. Made the papers.”
Serge walked over to his new toys and picked up a heavy black helmet. “I won’t forget this.”
“I wish you would.”
Serge lowered the visor on his helmet and ignited the torch.
Chapter Fourteen
PALM BEACH
Police had no leads on what they referred to in-house as the “Swinger Bandits.”
South Philly Sal had struck gold. And diamonds and artwork. It seemed Gustave and Sasha couldn’t fail. Until they did.
The de Gaulles owned the biggest mansion yet. And the grifters didn’t even have to detain them at lunch. The old farts just talked and talked. Usual stuff. Their vacation cottage on Nantucket, the chalet in Zurich, meeting the royals in Lisbon. Then, chaos. A cell phone vibrated in Mr. de Gaulle’s pocket.
The burglary crew had failed to detect the secondary alarm system, and a text alert had just been sent. But since the primary system hadn’t gone off, the couple figured their dog had probably gotten into mischief.
Mr. de Gaulle abruptly stood. “Sorry, but we have to go.”
“They’re bringing dessert!” said Gustave.
De Gaulle tossed a few hundreds on the table. “Our alarm went off. Probably nothing, but our dog is home.”
His wife grabbed her purse. “We just love Poopsie.”
They sped away in an Aston Martin.
Gustave fished out his own cell for the standard abort call. “Shit.”
“What is it?” asked Sasha.
“Battery’s dead. Give me your phone.”
“I didn’t bring it because you had yours. What are we going to do?”
What they did was race to the home. The Aston Martin was already in the driveway, but the couple was still on the footpath.
Gustave screeched up to the curb and yelled out the window. “Wait!”
Mr. de Gaulle’s face was a swirl of questions. “What are you doing here? . . . How’d you know our address? And why are you driving that crappy Datsun?”
Gustave jumped out and ran across the lawn, followed by Sasha. “Hold up! I have something important—”
“Just a second,” said de Gaulle. “Right after we check on our dog. Why isn’t she barking? That’s not like Poopsie.”
Gustave was almost there, ready to try anything. Seize the house keys and explain later.
Too late. He was already twisting in the knob and the door opened. The couple casually blustered inside. “Here, Poopsie, Poopsie— What in the hell?”
Four men with gloves froze where they stood in the dining room, literally holding the bag. Next to a dead dog. Everyone locked eyes.
The staring contest seemed like it lasted an hour, but was less than two seconds. The de Gaulles turned to run out the door for help and crashed straight into Gustave and Sasha, who beat their skulls in respectively with a sterling candelabra and a bronze statue of a little boy peeing.
Mr. de Gaulle was pronounced DOA, but his wife lay safely in a coma. Swingers or not, police closed ranks around the town and turned up the heat. Time for South Philly Sal to move south.
THAT EVENING
Coleman contentedly burned through an ever-dwindling twelve-pack suitcase of Busch. A lawn chair in the back of the warehouse gave him a front-row seat to the fireworks show of sparks shooting toward the ceiling and bouncing benignly off Serge’s thick rubber apron.
Serge turned off the torch and walked over to a drill press. Even louder noise this time. When the metalwork was finished, he gathered all the machined parts in the middle of the building and banged them together with a mallet.
Serge stood and nodded to himself in approval. He dialed his cell phone again. “Crazy Legs? This is Serge. I need a huge favor immediately . . . Has it really already been five whole years? . . . Because I was in the neighborhood . . . But— . . . I thought— . . . Why? Are you hungry? . . .”
Serge eventually negotiated an end to the conversation. Then he grabbed a crowbar and began disassembling the apparatus.
Coleman raised his hand.
“Yes, the student in the back of the class.”
“Serge, you just put it together. Why are you taking it apart already?”
“You always do a test fit in the lab to avoid on-site glitches during final assembly and launch.” A round disk clanged to the floor. “I should have worked on the Hubble Telescope.”
Coleman cringed at the sound of heavy metal dragging on concrete.