Her voice dropped half an octave. "This is about Hector Zu-?iga — maybe you'd better hold." After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows, on came the mellifluous Dr. Deeply.
"Don't want to alarm you, Doc," Zoyd said, "but I think he's stalkin' me."
"You've . …… had these feelings for some time?" In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing "TV Crazy."
"Yeah, in Hector's case fifteen or twenty years. Some guys's in the joint for longer 'n that."
"Look, I can put my people on standby, but I don't think we can protect you around the clock, or anything." About then Chef 'Ti Bruce put his head in the door hollering "You still on?" 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, Zoyd's next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chick's 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 they'd 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 （"Vato"） Gomez and Cleveland （"Blood"） 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 Tow's flagship F350, El Mil Amores. Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partners' 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 in — often deep — question had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase "act of conversion" 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, anybody's prize, making its retrieval by the boys, who'd 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, "So Bigfoot bein' force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights." 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 people's 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 talk to Zoyd.
"This is somethin' about Hector again, right?"
"We heard he was back," Blood said, "but this ain't him, Blood, it's, uh, somebody else. And me and my partner were just wondering if you were planning to sleep on the base tonight?"
Here came another of those deep intestinal pangs. Zoyd knew that long ago in Saigon, Blood had more than once heard this warning from elements of the Vietcong in whose interest it was to keep him alive and in Business. "Well shit. If it i'n' Hector, then who is it?"
Vato came over, looking as serious as his running mate. "They're federal, Vato, but it ain' Hector, he's too busy keepín ahead of that posse from the Tubaldetox."
Zoyd suddenly felt like shit. "I better see about my kid." Rick and Chick made mirror-image go-ahead gestures at the phone. "That Jikov 32, that Skoda carburetor you 's lookin' for, it's in my front seat, see what you think."
Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.
Zoyd happened to catch Prairie on a meditation break. "You OK over there?"
"Don't want to alarm you, Doc," Zoyd said, "but I think he's stalkin' me."
"You've . …… had these feelings for some time?" In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing "TV Crazy."
"Yeah, in Hector's case fifteen or twenty years. Some guys's in the joint for longer 'n that."
"Look, I can put my people on standby, but I don't think we can protect you around the clock, or anything." About then Chef 'Ti Bruce put his head in the door hollering "You still on?" 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, Zoyd's next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chick's 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 they'd 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 （"Vato"） Gomez and Cleveland （"Blood"） 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 Tow's flagship F350, El Mil Amores. Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partners' 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 in — often deep — question had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase "act of conversion" 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, anybody's prize, making its retrieval by the boys, who'd 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, "So Bigfoot bein' force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights." 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 people's 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 talk to Zoyd.
"This is somethin' about Hector again, right?"
"We heard he was back," Blood said, "but this ain't him, Blood, it's, uh, somebody else. And me and my partner were just wondering if you were planning to sleep on the base tonight?"
Here came another of those deep intestinal pangs. Zoyd knew that long ago in Saigon, Blood had more than once heard this warning from elements of the Vietcong in whose interest it was to keep him alive and in Business. "Well shit. If it i'n' Hector, then who is it?"
Vato came over, looking as serious as his running mate. "They're federal, Vato, but it ain' Hector, he's too busy keepín ahead of that posse from the Tubaldetox."
Zoyd suddenly felt like shit. "I better see about my kid." Rick and Chick made mirror-image go-ahead gestures at the phone. "That Jikov 32, that Skoda carburetor you 's lookin' for, it's in my front seat, see what you think."
Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.
Zoyd happened to catch Prairie on a meditation break. "You OK over there?"