Chad saw the big, fancy sedan, a BMW 700 series, sitting all by itself back in a darkened corner of the parking garage as the bus drove around and around, spiraling up to the top, open deck, where it came to a stop. That had been the only car he'd seen in the garage. It was a Sunday, and this was a city workers' garage.
"Strange. No one in the ticket booth," the driver said to the man standing in the well by the door of the bus, a shotgun in his hands, pointed to the ceiling of the bus.
"Maybe the garage is unattended on a Sunday," the shotgun man answered, not showing much interest.
"That would be unusual," the driver muttered under his breath, thinking this guy was less vigilant and more just along for the ride.
"OK, everyone out." The bus had come to a stop on the top deck. The supervisor turned, facing the young men sprawled out across the seats of the bus, and added. "Grab a brush and a bucket of paint on your way out."
"We gonna be told what we're here for at some point?" Jareed, the black guy who usually asked the questions for them, asked.
"This is your lucky day," the supervisor answered. "You get to work indoors—sort of. Did you ever wonder who repainted the white stripes on those parking space dividers in parking garages?"
"Not really," Jareed said. A couple of the other guys snickered, but the supervisor just smiled.
"Loser jackasses like you guys, that's who. That's what you get to do today, men and girls. You get to slap new paint on the parking place dividers . . . all of them. And you'll get demerits for painting outside the lines or wasting any of the white."
"But there must be—" a thin voice piped up.
"Five stories. Yep, it's a five-story parking garage," the supervisor said to Larry, who was the runt of the group and never said anything that didn't come out as a whine. "And so, ladies, you need to get to it."
"Starting where?" Jareed asked.
"Way down on level one, from the ticket booth," the supervisor answered.
"Then why's the bus parked up here?" Another whine, so it was Larry who asked.
"Because you'll be working through your mandatory exercise period, so you're exercise will be in trotting down to the first level."
"And I suppose when we've worked our way up here, the bus will be down on level one," Jareed said.
"Do you have a problem with that, Jackson?" the supervisor asked. "Can your little girlie legs walk that far?"
"No, boss, no problem." Jareed could tell from the supervisor's voice that he'd had enough backtalk.
"Then it's time for you to stop lollygagging around here and get your asses down to the street level."
That was OK with Chad. He wanted to get another look at that sleek sedan on the third level and maybe someplace where stuff could be stashed between there and the street level that no one would see.
The sedan was still there when he reached the third level and there, on level two, was the type of city trash can he loved. He knew that the bottom of the can had space under it—that the side skirts lifted the bottom of the can a good six inches off the ground. He also could see that the can was just about empty. It wasn't likely anyone would be back to empty it for a month or more, and they wouldn't lift the whole unit anyway. The actual trash receptacle was a separate can inside the outer shell. Underneath the whole thing, as he well knew, was the perfect place to stash something for days on end.
He'd be able to come back in two weeks—if he didn't get into any trouble in the meantime.
When they were down on the first level and divvying up who would work on what, Chad volunteered to work at the top of the first-level ramp and paint his way down toward those starting at the bottom. There were enough of them there that day that the supervisor and the bus driver wouldn't be able to watch and account for them all continuously. Like most of the other guys, Chad stripped off his T-shirt and hooked it in the backside of the shorts he was wearing. He didn't want to get paint on the shirt. He'd get shit for doing that. It was a jail-issued black shirt with white stripes. It didn't need any extra white stripes.
He knew he could slip away for the time it would take to check out the sedan and be back without them noticing there was one guy fewer painting for a while.
He told the two guys he was painting with that he had to take a leak and would be gone for a couple of minutes. He knew they wouldn't report him as missing for any time he took and that it was plausible that he'd go on up the ramps to an out-of-the way dark corner to take his whizz. There was no bathroom around. They all had to piss where they could from time to time. Homeless guys no doubt did that in here all the time. It was a city building, not a fancy shopping mall.
As Chad walked up the ramp, he rummaged around in the pocket of his shorts. He always kept some of what he called his "aides" with him, entangled with other metal rings and such that the powers that be thought it was just some sort of puzzle he liked to work during the times when the guys were just sitting around waiting for something to happen—which was most of the time.
One of the pieces he took out of the tangle as he moved up the ramps to the third level was something that enabled him to pop car doors and trunks quickly and silently.
The BMW was a real honey. It would have a nifty tape deck, but he decided to check out the trunk first.
He popped it quickly, raised the trunk, and reared back, with a loud "Yo!"
There was a body of a young man in the trunk. Not a dead body, Chad could see. The guy was trussed up and had thick tape over his mouth, but he was moving. And he was looking at Chad with his eyes wide open. But only at first. His eyes sifted to beyond Chad and got even bigger.
