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. He 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. He entered the night through an invoice: a Boss’s car, towed from in front of his own club. He returned it against payment, with a detailed assessment of the lighting and the line. The Boss paid the invoice, then he paid for the assessment. He stayed.

He 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 he barely has to lift a finger. Behind the calm, there’s the file: he knows every scheme in the city because he has towed them all at one time or another, and he keeps one move ahead of people in a hurry.

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

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