The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel by John Vorhaus Page A

I thought it was his. “Price of gas … we can’t all drive these green machines.”
    “True,” he said, indicating no ownership in turn.
    When you’re running the car trouble grift for real, you need to string together a few components before you make the pitch. First, you try to bond with the mark, make like you’re kindred spirits somehow, so thatwhen you put the touch on him, he’ll feel like he’s hooking a brother up. Next, you roll out a sob story, something perilous but credible, like employment desperation or a medical emergency. Finally, you have to sell that you’re good for the money, and will pay him back as soon as you reach your checkbook. Garb has a lot to do with this; a three-piece suit would be a good deal more assuasive than the traveling clothes I was wearing just then. Not that I was trying to vend the grift, per se. Like I said, I was pinging the target. I wanted to see if he’d out himself.
    So I ran the script.
    “Where you coming from?” I asked.
    “Santa Fe,” he said. This disappointed me a bit. I was hoping he’d go fabricat on me right away—start lying, that is—as that would confirm my growing suspicion.
    “Me too,” I said. “Nice town. Can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an artist, though.”
    “You an artist?”
    “Of a sort.”
    He took a drag on his clove cigarette and blew out a cloud of its characteristically tangy smoke. “What sort?”
    “Draftsman, really. I’m on my way to Phoenix. Got a job lined up.”
    “Yeah? Moving there for good?” I felt good about the way he asked the question. He sounded engaged. Made me think he was buying in.
    “Gotta go where the work is,” I said.
    He peered inside my rig. His eyebrows arched. “You’re traveling pretty light,” he said. It was a canny observation, for if I were genuinely relocating from point A to point B, I’d doubtless have a few more household goods.
    I covered as best I could. “You know how it is,” I said. “Pawn shop got half, girlfriend the rest.” I essayed to establish a link. “I guess we’ve all been there.”
    He nodded solemnly. “That we have,” he said. “That we have.”
    “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can’t get to Tucson now.”
    “Phoenix.”
    “Phoenix.” I’d made this mistake on purpose to see if he’d catch it. He caught, but didn’t seem to mind. “My brother wired some money ahead, plenty, but …” I looked at my car and blew frustration through my lips. “It might as well be on Mars.”
    He took a last drag off his clovie, threw it down, and ground it out under his shoe. “So, how much you think a tow might be?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe thirty, fifty bucks.”
    “How would a hundred set you up?”
    Damn. If he was ready to Franklin me on the strength of this weak grift, shot through with intentional errors, then clearly he wasn’t in the game. I fretted that my assessment of his intelligence had been so far off. Still, I had to see the thing through. “That …,” I said, choking up, “that’d be great.”
    He thumbed through his wallet for a bill and handed it to me. I took it, intending to disengage as quickly as possible, wait for him to take off and then get my ass back on the road. But when I touched the bill, I almost had to laugh out loud. It utterly failed the fingertip test, and I knew that when I looked at it, I’d find it to be a clownish counterfeit. It was. Some smarmy car salesman grinned out from where Big Ben should be, and on the back it said, I N W ALT W E T RUST— S IOUX C ITY D ODGE . I studied the bill as if taken aback. “I, uh, I don’t think this is real.”
    “Oh, don’t you?” I could hear the chuckle in his voice. I looked up to find him grinning at me, like he’d just played the greatest joke in the world. He waved a hand at my car engine. “Any more than your steam-powered breakdown is real?”
    “I, uh …” I ran out of words.
    “I think you’re going to say, ‘I’m ready to