Karma

Karma grew up on the passenger seat of a tow truck, at night, in a family that ran the county impound lot. The school of the street, parking-lot division: years of listening to people in bad faith swear they had only been there two minutes. She came away with a complete theology — everything badly parked pays in the end, you just have to wait — and an unbeatable eye for reading a pocket, a lie, a doctored plate. She entered the night through an invoice: a Boss’s car, towed from in front of his own club. She returned it against payment, with a detailed assessment of his lighting and his line. He paid the invoice, then he paid for the assessment. She stayed.

She has the kind of face you hand your keys to. Customers sit down, relax, talk — that calm draws people the way a streetlight draws moths, and she barely has to lift a finger. Behind the calm, there’s the file: she knows every scheme in the city because she has towed them all at one time or another, and she keeps one move ahead of people in a hurry.

Ask her for no speeches and no sermons: the impound lot doesn’t negotiate, it bills. And don’t count on her in the middle of a fire: emergencies are not her department — when things blow up, she takes one step back and lets the universe do its work. Her signature is right there: a squad that fails in her neighborhood finds its van gone, destination unknown, and walks home, for a long time. She calls it the processing fee.

A professional’s fatalism: at four in the morning, when everyone is scrambling, she shrugs, says ’that’ll get paid for,’ and it always gets paid for. At dawn she walks her neighborhood and notes what’s badly parked — the cars, the ambitions, the stares; it all goes on the same list. And nobody stops a woman in a tow-company parka carrying a clipboard: she goes in everywhere, checks everything, walks out without being remembered. What she wants: one whole night with every tab paid up. She knows it doesn’t exist. She waits anyway.