Mercy Street(42)

9


The Russian kid worked out of a garage in North Quincy. Timmy pulled his new Honda Civic into the parking lot just as the shop was closing. As instructed, he parked behind the shop and texted: I’m here. And then, as an afterthought: This is Tim.

He got out of the car, twisting to stretch his back. He missed the legroom of his Ford Escape, the roomy seat that reclined to the perfect angle. After a week of driving the Civic, he’d developed a chronic twitch in his sacrum. In nearly every way, the Civic was a disappointment. Mechanically, aesthetically, it was a piece of crap. Its only virtue was its banality. The Civic was the sort of anonymous tin can a law-abiding citizen would drive.

His naked face tingled in the cold.

That morning, after a long shower, he’d studied his face in the mirror. It was not the face of a law-abiding citizen. The beard was the problem. The beard would have to go.

He had planned ahead, bought shaving cream and a razor—an item he hadn’t owned in years and that now, apparently, cost twenty dollars. First he went at the beard with a pair of scissors. Hair mounded in the sink like some exotic plankton.

What am I doing? he thought as he took the first swipe.

His face didn’t look the way he remembered it. The last time he saw it, the face was twenty-nine, the face of a new husband and father. His face had missed its thirties. Under all that hair it had sagged and softened into the face of a middle-aged man.

The garage door opened. A teenager with a patchy goatee waved him inside.

THE RUSSIAN KID CAME HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. THERE WAS A story Timmy had heard many times, now legendary among the weed sellers of Greater Boston. One of the kid’s customers, a Portaguee from Fall River, had been traveling west on I-84 when he was pulled over by a Connecticut statie, his SUV searched with a sniffer dog. The dog alerted at a spot behind the rear seat, the exact location where the Russian had installed a trap. The cop searched by hand, but found no loose wires or extra rivets or signs of jerry-rigging. The Portaguee drove back to Fall River a free man, with twenty pounds of product in his truck.

In the shop’s back office, they smoked a joint to get acquainted. Alex Voinovich was a skinny kid, possibly still growing at age nineteen. Since childhood he’d enjoyed ripping shit apart. A vacuum cleaner, a stereo, the thermostat in the snug apartment where he lived with his mother and sister. He was no more destructive than the average boy. He dismantled these machines not to destroy them, but to see how they worked.

He explained this emphatically, as though Timmy had argued otherwise. He seemed to enjoy explaining himself. In the daytime he installed car stereos at Def Jam Sound Design, a job he found unsatisfying. He did the same two or three generic installs over and over again, for punks with no sense of style; they cared only about the size of the speaker and the whomping bass line it could put out.

“Punks,” he repeated. He had a faint accent that didn’t sound Russian. He could have come from Chicago or Philly or Detroit or New Jersey. To Timmy he sounded American, nothing more.

The punks had no interest in the kind of sick installation Alex had done in his own car, a rebuilt Golf hatchback: custom subwoofer mounts in fantastical shapes, wood frames he’d cut himself and covered in fiberglass. And so it was boredom, ultimately, that had brought him to this body shop in North Quincy, owned by a distant cousin. The cousin let him use it nights and weekends, on the DL, to do his real work.

His real work, his money work, was building traps.

He led Timmy to a newish Toyota Camry, parked at the rear of the shop. “This is just an example,” he said. “Your job will be a little different. Every customization is unique. No two vehicles have same code.”

A Camry was the one car Timmy could think of that was even lamer than a Civic.

He thought, I should’ve bought a Camry.

“Basically there’s four steps,” said Alex. “You got to do them in the exact order or it won’t work. First all the doors got to be closed. If you have that driver door open, it’s not going to work. So like if you get pulled over, that cop, he’s not going to search your car with all the doors closed. Meaning he ain’t going to find shit.”

“Doors closed,” said Timmy. “Got it.”

“Then you sit in the driver’s seat,” said Alex. “There’s a pressure sensor in the seat so it knows if someone is there.”

They got into the car, Alex behind the wheel, Timmy beside him in the passenger seat. “Next you turn on the rear defroster,” said Alex, switching it on. “But here’s the key thing: at the same time, you got to push these two.” He indicated the switches for the front and rear passenger-side windows.

Timmy pressed one switch, then the other.

“No, at the same t-time.” The kid was jazzed, nearly trembling with some weird manic excitement.

“Like this?” Timmy said, holding down both switches.

“Yeah, but you messed up the order, so you got start again from the beginning. Watch.”

Alex demonstrated again, flicking on the defroster while holding down the two window switches.

“That’s it?” said Timmy.

“No. Now you got to swipe the card.” He took a white plastic card from his chest pocket and swiped it across the center air-conditioning vent.

On the passenger side of the dashboard, a compartment opened soundlessly, in the spot where an airbag would go.