“You came to the right place.” Fittich reached toward the portable television that stood on his desk.
“No, that’s okay, leave it on,” Joe said.
“You’re a fan, you might not want to see this one. They’re getting their butts kicked.”
Right now the transmission-repair shop next door blocked them from the surveillance team. If the camper truck appeared across the street, however, as Joe more than half expected, and if directional microphones were trained on the big picture window, the audio from the baseball game might have to be turned up to foil the listeners.
Positioning himself so he could talk to Fittich and look past him to the sales lot and the street, Joe said, “What’s the cheapest set of wheels you’ve got ready to roll?”
“Once you consider my prices, you’re going to realize you can get plenty of value without having to settle for—”
“Here’s the deal,” Joe said, withdrawing packets of hundred dollar bills from a jacket pocket. “Depending on how it performs on a test drive, I’ll buy the cheapest car you have on the lot right now, one hundred percent cash money, no guarantee required.”
Fittich liked the look of the cash. “Well, Joe, I’ve got this Suburu, she’s a long road from the factory, but she’s still got life in her. No air-conditioning but radio and—”
“How much?”
“Well, now, I’ve done some work on her, have her tagged at twenty-one hundred fifty, but I’ll let you have her for nineteen seventy-five. She—”
Joe considered offering less, but every minute counted, and considering what he was going to ask of Fittich, he decided that he wasn’t in a position to bargain. He interrupted the salesman to say, “I’ll take it.”
After a disappointingly slow day in the iron-horse trade, Gem Fittich was clearly torn between pleasure at the prospect of a sale and uneasiness at the way in which they had arrived at terms. He smelled trouble. “You don’t want to take a test drive?”
Putting two thousand in cash on Fittich’s desk, Joe said, “That is exactly what I want to do. Alone.”
Across the street, a tall man appeared on foot, coming from the direction in which the camper truck was parked. He stood in the shade of a bus-stop shelter. If he’d sat on the shelter bench, his view of the sales office would have been hampered by the merchandise parked in front of it.
“Alone?” Fittich asked, puzzled.
“You’ve got the whole purchase price there on the desk,” Joe said. From his wallet, he withdrew his driver’s license and handed it to Fittich. “I see you have a Xerox. Make a copy of my license.”
The guy at the bus-stop was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and slacks, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Therefore, he wasn’t equipped with a high-power, long-range listening device; he was just keeping watch.
Fittich followed the direction of Joe’s gaze and said, “What trouble am I getting into here?”
Joe met the salesman’s eyes. “None. You’re clear. You’re just doing business.”
“Why’s that fella at the bus stop interest you?”
“He doesn’t. He’s just a guy.”
Fittich wasn’t deceived. “If what’s actually happening here is a purchase, not just a test drive, then there’re state forms we have to fill out, sales tax to be collected, legal procedures.”
“But it’s just a test drive,” Joe said.
He checked his wristwatch. He wasn’t pretending to be worried about the hour now; he was genuinely concerned.
“All right, look, Mr. Fittich, no more bullshit. I don’t have time. This is going to be even better for you than a sale, because here’s what’s going to happen. You take that money and stick it in the back of a desk drawer. Nobody ever has to know I gave it to you. I’ll drive the Suburu to where I have to go, which is only someplace on the West Side. I’d take my own car, but they’ve got a tracking device on it, and I don’t want to be followed. I’ll abandon the Suburu in a safe area and call you by tomorrow to let you know where it is. You bring it back, and all that’s happened is you’ve rented your cheapest car for one day for two thousand Bucks tax free. The worst that happens is I don’t call. You’ve still got the money—and a theft write-off.”