I’d told Delahaye that I was done stealing cars, or at least done stealing whole cars. Carjacking was a noble trade once upon a time, with a mannered and cordial community around it. Even considering the ideological schism between the whole-hog hotwire or key-fob clone artists and the more targeted hubcap and wheel men, who may be better considered as a subspecies of bipper (these being not so much car thieves as they are general purpose thieves in the habit of stealing from parked, unoccupied cars) we could count ourselves lucky to conduct business like gentlemen. There was a sober-minded quality to our little industry that I often found lacking in the adjacent trades. It was about the money, plain and simple. The drug guys or gun guys claim to be about the money but then they start shooting each other on a whim. I never saw anyone even pull out a gun when I had those Baltimore connections, but things are different now. Whatever disease drove the corner boys and the stickup men feral got into my industry as well. The damn KIA boys, the hobbyist joyriders and social media self-incriminators, the attention they draw, increased police presence, license plate and VIN number trace task forces, more cameras, drivers all on edge and half of them holding concealed carry permits. It’s no way to do business.
Still, though, a man must make a living. I found my new line wasn’t quite as sexy as real, honest car theft but it did possess a certain prankster’s whimsy that I came to enjoy after a while. I’m in headlights, these days, Porsche headlights especially. A set of Porsche 911 or Taycan headlights retails for $5,000, I can turn them around for seven grand apiece, though I drop the price to MSRP if I’m dealing with a bulk order. New clients tend to buy in bulk up front and if you establish a reputation as a fair dealer, you’ll have business sourcing replacements, backups, spares, and so on, for years to come. They buy in bulk up front because in their business, scale is very important, it’s how they make money.
Their business is the cultivation and retail of cannabis sativa, without license or permit, and in whatever location they can procure it. Limiting overhead costs is very important for any business and so it’s long since stopped surprising me that some of the most profitable farms in the state of Maryland can be found in dour strip malls and roach-infested tenement high-rises. This is why they must be uncompromising about the product I provide. Porsche headlights produce very little heat and can easily be fitted with ultraviolet bulbs to grow high-quality cannabis in even the most brutal urban confines. The low heat signature is the real thing. The purchase of cannabis for recreational purposes in the state of Maryland is, nominally speaking, legal. But put this question to one of my clients and you’ll quickly be informed, at unreasonable volumes and possibly by force, just what a sham this arrangement is. Buying it is legal, possessing it in flower, oil, prepacked gel candy, or aerosol form is legal. But for whatever reason, growing your own at scale is still illegal. You can have two plants per person and four per household, which is lovely for homeowning hippie hypocrites in NIMBY havens like Takoma Park but tends to leave my clients, often enterprising and conscientious people from disadvantaged backgrounds, in the lurch. An unlicensed greenhouse can see the police coming through your door uninvited with riot shields and submachine guns just as readily today as they did when Nixon or Reagan were in residence at that mausoleum on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is why they must have my headlights at whatever price I set, and many in my business set it far higher than I do. A heat signature picked up by the infrared cameras of a police helicopter can very quickly become a search and seizure warrant.
So yes, when I bumped into Vince Delahaye at the track the other day, and he suggested he may have something for me, I told him thanks but no thanks. Was lovely to see him though, good old Vince. We’d been running buddies back when we had the Baltimore connection. When the RICO charges started coming down the Washington Post called us a syndicate. That really burned me because it really shows how far the editorial standards have fallen at these places. It’s the kind of word you use while you’re holding a flashlight under your chin and telling scary stories at your little sleepover. There was nothing so dramatic about any of it, not that I’d expect some hack journalist to understand that. We were a corporation, transparent, professional, pursuing a very well-thought out business plan. We’d headhunt certain makes and models, Mercedes G Wagons and Range Rover Evoques were particular specialities of mine, and ship them out of the port of Baltimore, usually bound for the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, or the Caucasus. Prices fluctuated like they would in any market but people had their niches and we had all the incentive in the world to help each other out. Nobody ever caught a 25-year minimum for sitting in the front seat of a stolen Porsche 911 and nobody living in a $5 million home in Chevy Chase or McLean was gonna get killed over something insurance would replace by the end of the next month.
Delahaye’s tastes always ran Japanese. This made him a bit of an odd bird among the west Baltimore carjacking tradition in which he was raised. To a man, every western district car thief I ever knew aspired to either the current top-of-the-line muscle car, Scat Pack Hellcats being the en vogue pick these days, or to something old and impractical, nursing some lost image of a confident and liberated gentleman of color behind the wheel of a Lincoln Town Car or some similar midcentury land battleship, ideally with a few lady friends crammed into the bench seats. Car thieves are all fetishists, pornographers of aerodynamics and metals. There is an immense degree of adrenal satisfaction one feels in proximity to their ideal automobile. Delahaye certainly felt it. When we ran into each other he was parked trackside, leaning ever so slightly on the front fender of his prize 1998 Toyota Crown Majesta. Japanese domestic market model. All black, murdered out windows, deep dish chrome rims. A ride fit for an oyabun of the Yamaguchi-Gumi or a gentleman of leisure living off the percentage residuals of the zaibatsu his ancestors founded. He watched the drift drivers scream by, vulcanized rubber turning to smoke as they went about their smooth angular dance, taking his attention off the drifters only when someone came to kiss the ring. He’d nod, accept the compliment to his fine automobile, and maybe even pull down his black surgical mask to return a compliment if he liked you. He was magnanimous in that way.
Neither of us had been senior enough players in the old corporation to be worth prosecuting even if they could make a case. The difference was that Delahaye had been smarter with his money. As soon as the coast was clear he liberated it from a locked briefcase kept in his mother’s crawlspace and had a down payment on the overgrown roadside lot in Baltimore County which would soon, through thrift and labor, become BaltimOsaka Imports, the DMV’s finest retailer for Japanese Domestic Market Automobiles. A prosperous little business, after some initial harassment by bitter cops, soon turned into a down payment on a house and a cozy little domestic existence with a wife from the same Haitian-American sinecure as Delahaye. It was mutually understood without comment, between the two of us, that we would be meeting less frequently, and that I would certainly never be receiving an introduction to Mrs. Delahaye. He’d become the Bugsy Siegel of Baltimore car thieves, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to drag him back into the muck and mire of an illegitimate lifestyle.
This is what made it so odd to me that he beckoned me over and, mere seconds after the pleasantries concluded, asked me to steal him a car. Not just any car, a real black label. Something that could comfortably sit at roughly 120 miles per hour and ideally take corners around 100. It couldn’t be for him, of course, he was never much of a cowboy to begin with, none of us were. Good car thieves drive the speed limit religiously. So I asked who, and this was my mistake, because it let him tell his story. He offered to buy me lunch and I accepted, that was the second mistake.
I got into the passenger seat of the Crown Majesta and we had Chick-fil-A. We ate inside, we never spoke in cars to begin with and I’d never insult the man by suggesting I could eat in his car.
Way he told me, this is how it happened; guy comes into his office, curious about the inventory on site and dissatisfied with the available photos on the internet. Says he’s come all the way from Crystal City, in Virginia. Says he’s tied in with some defense people, one of the big firms up there, and has the disposable income for an expensive toy like the type Delahaye could sell him. Delahaye believes him, says he looked the part. Little chubby, but clean-cut, constant smile and straightforward manner of a sales guy. Wardrobe by Banana Republic, quarter zip and chinos. I stopped him there. “He’s a cop,” I said.
Delahaye tells me he thought so too, and so he played it close to the vest. This went on for a few weeks. They’d get something new in and this guy, his name was Benson, would show up as if on cue, wanting to see the new piece, asking questions about performance models, Nissan Zs and GTRs, Spoon and MUGEN aftermarket conversion kits for Honda Civics, was it really possible to get 400 horsepower out of a little gen-five Civic? What about a Supra? A Lancer Evo? Was that sort of thing gettable? Were they as fast as they looked in the movies? I said again. Cop. Had to be. Benson the Cop.
Eventually, Delahaye decides he’ll ask Benson the Probable Cop why he’s so interested in all this high-end performance equipment? He looking to build or buy? Foot traffic is nice every once in a while when you’re accustomed to doing business via text messages and only meeting your clients long enough to hand over a set of keys and a title and deed but come on, he’s running a business here, not a museum.
Benson plays it coy. He’s a middle man seeking to acquire high-performance automobiles for a consortium of benefactors who would prefer to remain anonymous. Benson’s backers were under the impression that Delahaye was experienced in sourcing performance automobiles with minimal paper trail. I’m practically screaming by this point. Cop. Cop. Cop. Cop. Tell him to leave and call a lawyer. Delahaye was thinking he’d do just that, but then Benson produced a brown paper bag, left it on the sales counter in the shop, thanked Delahaye for his time, and left the way he’d come in. It was 40 large in non-sequential hundreds, rolled up and rubber-banded, real old school. A handwritten note spelled out the proposition in full; black labels only. Dead drops in northern Virginia. Forty grand apiece – now hold on a second, 40 grand? Forty grand for one black label? That was the market rate, that was the per-unit price. Delahaye’s margins had to be pretty thin with import costs and all, but at the end of the day it wasn’t worth pulling that kind of exposure again at 40 large a pop, what was that to him, one Silvia? A couple Kei trucks? For me, though, 40 grand was something and he knew it and that was my mistake, was letting him know it.
Forty grand in cash, three cars would net six figures. Six cars, just six, would be almost a quarter-million dollars. Could be laundered in a few months into a down payment on a house or at least a condo. Maybe just give it to my grow house connections and tell them to put it on the street, bring me a percentage. Can’t go legit on less than a million, but maybe I could be the bank. Call it a career, no more late nights roaming Chevy Chase or Georgetown with a sawzall hidden under my trenchcoat. No more threatening Deloitte consultants with a spray painted BB gun while my breath soaks my ski-mask. No more wet dog smell under that ski mask and in my gloves. Do the tour of the old chop shops, ask after their best prospects, hire a few apprentices and franchise the whole operation.
Delahaye gave me 20 grand in walking around cash, giving me permission to take a few weeks off the headlight beat. We left it like you’d leave a girl at a nightclub bar, there was no formal yes or no but Delahaye knew I was ready to give it up. I swung by his office the next week and told him that I’d keep an eye out but I told him I expected payment in full if (when) I handed over whatever I could put hands on, no haggling. I told him as well that I didn’t want to meet the kid, under no circumstances would I be meeting the kid.
I was at Pike and Rose when I got a bite. P&R, a monument to gentrification in action, was a favored hunting ground of mine due to the Porsche dealership around the corner from the upscale retail, overpriced high-rises, and one and a half good bars on the block. You couldn’t make any moves in the area, too well monitored, but it was a brilliant place to tail people, follow them home, see what they were driving and whether they had a gate or a fence or even a garage. The thing about DC is that you’re never wealthy enough to have it all. People make a quarter million a year before performance bonuses and park their dream cars on the street where any jackass can key them, spit on them, break their windows, or, in the case of a professional jackass like me, relieve them of their headlights by means of an electric sawzall.
This dream car was a modern classic, a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, nero black, just sitting there right around the corner from the gate leading out to Old Georgetown Road, 10 minutes from the beltway and, as far as the vehicle owner and the police were concerned, total disappearance from the face of the earth.
Security cameras do not make you or your property nearly as safe as their operators want you to believe, but they do at least make the would-be thief apply more effort if they’re not trying to get caught. I left the garage and proceeded past the Warby Parker and the Brazilian steakhouse, loaded with crowded tables and leaking scents of butter and pulped herbs, and navigated up to the Popeyes on Rockville Pike. I ducked into the bathroom and began my quick change routine. I fished the gloves, balaclava, and glass cutter out of the inner pockets of my Uniqlo down jacket and then packed the whole thing up and rolled it into the pouch pocket of my hoodie. Then I returned to the garage at Pike and Rose as a whole new man.
For the first time in ages I sat in the driver’s seat of a stolen car, and what a car it was. Like an alcoholic falling off the wagon and into a 6,000-dollar bottle of scotch. Six thousand dollars might have bought me a shift lever for the 599. It was, if I had to guess, a 2009 model, analog ignition system. Giving it a screwdriver to the steering column was like running a pizza cutter over a Rothko. Once I’d passed my own queasiness at the act, I felt it purring. Six liter V12, one of the last of its breed before the electronics and the environmental concerns began to dilute the cocktail. This was a car designed to kill the driver in style, with beauty and drama and force. They never tell you that about those V12 Italian supercars. None of the millions of dorm room posters of rear-engined Lamborghinis and Ferraris they’ve sold over the years come with a note from the surgeon general about what 610 horses really feel like, and what the pound-feet of torque involved can do to a human body in the event of an unplanned, spontaneous deceleration. It’s just assumed that if you have the money to afford one in a form more immediate than a poster, you or someone you’re paying can do the math for you.
I didn’t venture a committed advance on the throttle until I’d rolled off Old Georgetown Road, southbound, and hit the Interstate 270 spur. The damn thing was a teleporter, folding space, not weaving in and out of traffic so much as phasing through it, immaterial. Cabin John passed in between heartbeats. Then the Potomac, across into Virginia. McLean. Dunn Loring. I had to pull off at Annandale, just to catch my breath, call Delahaye for drop-off instructions. I should have pulled off at McLean. The 599 would stick out less around there, richest residential real estate in the country.
I did a cursory lap of the address I’d received, scoping for plainclothes police. No dice, near as I could tell. They were either serious about picking me up or not there at all. I left the 599, as directed, in the parking lot of one of those mixed-use concrete polygons that all seemed to compete to see who could host the most esoteric array of specialist doctors. On the yellow line back from Huntington I was jittery, looking for a tail. Nothing.
Delahaye called me 72 hours later and told me to come by, which meant he had my money. All 30 grand.
“Waitasecond now, thirty?” I protested. “What happened to forty?”
Ten grand, he said, was his finder’s fee.
“Now that’s horseshit and you know it, Vince. I’m pulling all this God damn exposure, don’t talk to me about a finder’s fee.”
“Now don’t get grabby,” he told me, “think of it as insurance.”
“Insurance? Against what? Acts of God?”
“No, no, more like the other guy. Who do you think,” Vince asked, “we’re in business with, here?”
I told him I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but privately I had some ideas. Money from out of nothing, fairy godmother cash, is the kind of thing that turns career criminals into fussy Versailles aristocrats. It is an obvious object of interest, motivation, commerce, everything, yet it must never be commented on and certainly never inquired after. If you start pulling on strings, people assume you’re out to unravel the whole sweater and nobody likes the idea of being naked in the cold, get it? The immune systems that develop around large, unaccountable sums of money do not take chances, leave witnesses, or discriminate between due diligence and malicious intrusion.
All of which sounds very spooky in theory but is, in practice, generally quite mundane. Way I saw it, they (whoever “they” were) had tracked down Delahaye as the most public surviving associate of the old Baltimore connection and were looking to reboot the thing at a cut rate, could be a Russian thing, Black Sea or Ural Basin money looking for expensive toys without import fees. Could apply the same basic framework to some Arabs, Chinese, South Americans, Africans, who cares? The money arrived promptly and without faces attached. If Benson had returned to the offices of BaltimOsaka Imports to push the petty cash through the mail slot, he hadn’t been seen on any of the lot’s video cameras. In fact, no one had.
I suppose it was the idea of the unseen delivery man which made me cotton to Delahaye’s logic. If these people were stealthy when things were simpatico, it stood to reason that they’d be even more stealthy when things turned malicious. In that sort of situation, it made sense to at least have someone else with skin in the game, who knew what the stakes could be. Thirty grand was better than nothing, and I was still four more little licks away from a nice even 150 large to retire on, or at the very least book a nice long hiatus, maybe out of the country. That rising desire, getting away, betrayed the rotten feeling in my own gut, however. I told Delahaye as much. I suspected I’d made a mistake. “Yeah, maybe,” he said, “but you stole one, we got paid, may as well go again.”
He didn’t need to push me. I was jonesing by that point. I felt like a pervert, walking through the car parks of upscale shopping centers, window-shopping. Porsches and BMWs and Z06 Corvettes. A little light breaking and entering was all that separated me from 30 grand and got me a little bit closer to the escape hatch I knew I’d be crawling through once I hit that magic number, $150,000. I had it all worked out, 100 large was going to my grow house guys, an investment, to grow my nest egg and claw back some of what Vince was hoarding for himself, 25 was going in a safe deposit box, the rest was for me. I was going abroad in style, thinking about where would be best for a man in dire need of a vacation to spend an awful lot of money living rich for a month or two. Japan held a certain appeal, what with the yen looking weak, but I had a bad feeling I’d find some action and turn it into a work trip before long. Too many appealing automobiles over there. I decided I had better go somewhere with no cars at all. Remove the temptation. I wish Venice was cheaper. How did anyone do it? How much money is enough to really go wherever you want and live however you want?
I finally blew my load on a slate-blue McLaren 720s parked right in the street in the middle of downtown Bethesda. Already I was getting sloppy, pairing an accomplished car thief’s casual sense of command and control with the reckless habits of an amateur. I was way too far from the Beltway and caught in murderous traffic on Connecticut Avenue, eyes darting into every mirror, convinced I’d see red and blue flashers any second. Broad daylight, bait car, had to be. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I must have sweated a whole pound of grease and salt and stinking acid into those beautiful Alcantara seats before I reached another anonymous NoVA parking lot.
I walked off clean though and the money came again. Sixty grand, I could have walked there. Sixty was good for a couple days’ work. Ninety would be better, though. I decided this one would have to be planned, exactly. I had a mark in mind. Was one of those things that makes you feel stupid when it comes to you. I wasn’t really sure why the first one on my shopping list when I got this gig wasn’t that ridiculous “scandal verde” Lamborghini Huracan I’d seen driving around Rockville Pike. The owner of a screen printing company, of all things, owned it and parked it regularly in the potholed lot of a dour little aluminium-sided office park across from a trading card shoppe and a Salvadoran greengrocer. I stole it 20 minutes after he arrived at his place of business, dropped it off, and began to see daylight on the whole affair. A fitting end to a career, the kind of big score you brag about when the statute of limitations is up. Around these parts, that’s just five short years. But, then again, five short years can be a lifetime. Five years ago I was running with the Baltimore boys, and if there was ever a sure thing in the world of car theft, I thought that would be it. Overnight, though, it all turned to vapor, and I was left counting more blessings than dollars.
The day I got my payoff from Delahaye was the day the first fatality hit the local TV news affiliates. Young kid, turned to hamburger at the overpass where I-495, the Capital Beltway, runs into the I-270 spur, right near where I’d done my stealing. I didn’t think anything of it, don’t think I even noticed. Kids do stupid things behind the wheel. Grass grows. Birds fly. Water is wet. Not my business.
It wasn’t until later that I got to see the wreck. I’d taken to using Instagram to shop for black labels, following well-to-do lawyers and consultants with an adventurous side and a poor grasp of the bills involved with keeping a supercar operating. I passed an on-the-scene picture of the beltway crash taken by a self-described “citizen journalist” who I followed just to get a sense of how much heat might be coming down due to street takeovers and things of that nature. My heart jumped into my throat. Black Ferrari 599, mangled into a bent, smouldering husk after hitting the divider at a buck-35 and going airborne. He’d been working for the Governor of Virginia’s reelection campaign. Nobody suspected anything was wrong. Nobody thought of him as the type of guy to die instantly when the 12-cylinder death machine behind him self-actualized at 135 miles per hour.
I decided then and there that 90 large was enough, more than enough, actually. You don’t wait and see once there’s a dead body in the equation that can’t reasonably be argued as an overdose or a suicide. Even if an especially lazy traffic detective drew this crash (and there are some absolute humps on that squad in Montgomery County, believe you me) they’d still have to work back on the plates and the VIN number and see it had been well over a week since the initial theft, they could check the cameras at Pike and Rose, maybe track the car all the way across the state line, at which point, it could become an inter-agency investigation. In most jurisdictions that sounds scarier than it is, but most jurisdictions aren’t the greater DC metropolitan area. With two state police agencies in constant contact and the Feds lurking just offstage with a rolled-up newspaper ready to bat anyone getting an attitude around the head, I had reason to be worried.
I didn’t call Vince. That may have been my mistake. I figured we were both veterans, knew the signs and signals, the if-then statements. If you feel heat, make no moves, do not talk on the phone, do not associate with known associates, and certainly do not talk on the phone with known associates about the need to avoid making moves.
I was standing in the parking lot of a Kensington strip mall with a duffel bag containing 50 grand in cash when I scrolled past the news item that BaltimOsaka imports had burned to the ground.
I gave the money to my grow house friend and did not stay to make small talk. Planes were out, I decided, too easily traced. Trains were more doable but confined me to the East coast. Bus, I decided. Bus to Chicago. Shake the tail, if I had one, by feinting towards St. Louis, then run like hell towards the Mexican border, steal a car if I had to. Get into CDMX and figure out the next move from there. I didn’t even go home to pack. Coach buses pick up from Bethesda and I had cash on hand to pay my way. Don’t complicate things, just go.
I was standing in the aisles of a 7-Eleven, cradling half a dozen protein bars, a bag of chips, and one of those jumbo water bottles with the flip cap. I wasn’t planning on sleep or stopping for a meal at any point in the next few days. A man, a young man, in a zip-up fleece vest walked in, setting off the door chime. By the time I turned my head to size him up, he’d positioned himself at the mouth of the aisle where I stood. He was taller than me, in better shape than me, his shirt ironed and tastefully patterned and name-brand, coming from a display table at an upscale mall, Montgomery or Tysons, maybe. He wore his black hair fashionably long, pushed backwards off his head and varnished with some product which gave it a textured look, rather than something cheap and artless which would simply glue the hair as close to his scalp as physics would allow.
I briefly considered throwing the water bottle at him and running. Instead I asked: “You Benson?”
He smiled. “No, no, Benson has an appointment this evening. I’m just another associate.”
“You got a name?”
“Not one that means anything to you.”
“So what now?”
“Put that dog food back and I’ll buy you a proper meal and explain some things. I suspect we’ve put a terrible scare into you here. That was never our intention and we apologize for it. We simply had no idea how to contact you.”
“We, huh?”
“Yes. And it’s a fairly broad, potent ‘we.’ Now come on, steak frites au poivre, sauteed spinach, cold beer, I know just the place.”
What was I going to do? He wouldn’t have come alone, not after all of the implied hassle of finding me. They had me, it was just a question of what they had in mind for me.
The mystery man in the vest finessed a secluded corner booth for us at a crowded bar bistro without a reservation and a pair of Miller High Lifes in frosted glasses arrived without him having to order them.
“First and foremost,” Mister Vest began, “I’d like to apologize on behalf of my benefactors. You were misled and cheated by your friend Mister Delahaye. He was only ever meant to connect us with a car thief who could be relied upon, a qualification which you have proven beyond any doubt. He was paid in advance for his services as an agent, and has been cheating you out of a quarter of your gross wages. Our move against his place of business was retaliation for betraying our trust, and keeping compensation which was not his to keep, it had nothing to do with you, but all concerned parties agree that efforts should have been undertaken to assuage any fears on your part and make you whole for services rendered beforehand. Once again, I apologize.”
“What’s happened to Vince?”
His expression grew flat as Mister Vest leaned forward into the smoky gold of an overhead hanging light fixture; “I have been sent here to deal honestly and transparently with you, but I really would advise you to only ask questions to which you actually want to receive answers.”
I sat there for a while, just looking to get my breathing under control, before I asked “What even is this? What is it for?”
Mister Vest said, looking older now than he had in the 7-Eleven. “We are — I am a servant of an exalted and obscure power. Maintaining the affections of such a force requires certain oblique methods.”
“Buddy if you’re about to try and convert me I’m gonna scream.”
“Conversion’s for religion, we’re something a bit more direct.”
“A cult, then.”
“That’s a pejorative, and one we try to avoid, but it’s not inaccurate.”
I buried my head in my hands. “Jesus Christ, I’ve been stealing cars for McKinsey David Koresh.”
“Koresh was writing Revelations fan fiction. Our fraternity is more pragmatic. It’s an assembly of ambitious young people of good breeding, prestigious qualifications, and sensible temperament who couldn’t care less about the end times and merely wish to prosper here in our own times.”
“And how does my stealing supercars so one of your buddies can become tomato puree on the beltway lead to that, exactly?”
“Are you familiar with the saying, ‘to whom much is given, much is expected?’ Invert it. One who expects much, must be willing to sacrifice much.”
“Human fucking sacrifice?”
He smiled, disarming, reasonable. “No, no, no, a simple risk-reward proposition. A great station in this life is promised to one of our number who completes the task; a cannonball run around the Capital Beltway in under twenty minutes.”
I did the math as the spinach and steak frites, glistening with peppercorn sauce, arrived at the table. Roughly 64 miles in circumference, so an hour is gettable even if you never go above the speed limit. Forty-five minutes would be gettable in just about any consumer automobile in the right traffic flow circumstances. Twenty minutes? You could never come off the throttle to even have a chance, one long turn, taken flat out. Impossible. I told him so.
“I’m not surprised you say that, there’s a difference in worldview here. You make a living mitigating risk, chiseling the edges of this great nucleus of power and wealth. We, my brothers and sisters, seek to inhabit that nucleus, to be reborn as its avatars. Any mortgaging of crude flesh and bone is consensual, and negligible in the grand scheme of things. If we can’t do it, we were never worthy in the first place.”
“So what happens now?”
“Well, it’s up to you, really. I have sixty thousand dollars here for you, double what you’re owed for your services. You can take it and leave town as you planned, if you’d like. Or we’d be happy to continue our current arrangement without troublesome middlemen. Benson is making his attempt tonight. We have another lined up for next week. We’ll be needing hardware. You needn’t worry about police, not while you work for us.”
“And if I leave?”
“Then you may leave. Wander the Earth, devote yourself to penance and good works. But your name will always remain in our ledger.”
It seemed pretty clear cut, then and there, with the beer warming and the steak and fries in front of me.
Benson didn’t pull it off. Got close! Real close. Bad luck, popped a tire and flipped end over end into the Potomac. I knew the kid in the Lamborghini never had a chance, those things are designed for posters and night clubs, not race tracks. Maybe the next guy will fare better, beautiful little gray Porsche 911 GT3 RS here. Ceramic brakes, race aero package, the works. Maybe one day I’ll get to say I stole a car for the President of the United States, or the CEO of CitiBank, or whoever it is these crazy kids think they’ll be at the other end of that Cannonball Run.
J.W. Yablonsky has published short fiction in Apocalypse Confidential, Muleskinner Journal, and The Republic of Letters. He essays regularly on film, sports, technology, and culture on his Substack, Genius of Loathe. J.W. lives in Washington, D.C., with his fiancee and a large, needy cat.