Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: The activity casually referred to as Party Crashing rejects the idea that driving time is something to be suffered in order to achieve a more useful and fulfilling activity.

Tina Something: At the next gaddamn police impound auction, I'll be bidding against Echo. In less than one odometer click, we'll both need new wheels.

Shot Dunyun: And the bullshit Shark drops back.

Echo Lawrence: Tina's slammed against her headrest. Her tits and pearls thrown up, high, around her neck. Veil burn. Steam rises behind them, and their six o'clock's been tagged. Taken out.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Our Shark has been preyed upon by someone else. The Maserati has been slaughtered amid a litter of cowbells, shattered glass, and tin cans.

Shot Dunyun: Echo pitches us around a corner, into a dark alley. She shuts off the headlights and taillights, letting the motor idle. She parts her veil to take a better look at Rant, and Echo says, "Get your Day Boy ass out of my car!"

Offering the gold coin to her, Green says, "Do you know what this is worth?"

And Rant Casey, he touches the backseat and sniffs his fingers, saying, "That girl who peed, three, maybe four weeks back" — Rant looks at us—"she ate bell peppers that day."

Rant grins his tar-black teeth at us and says, "Any of you folks know a fellow by the name of Chester Casey?"

17–Hit Men

Lynn Coffey (Journalist): The poet Oscar Wilde wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves…" Each man except the smart ones. The ones who don't want to serve time in prison, the smart men used to hire Karl Waxman.

Tina Something (Party Crasher): How'd I know what Wax was up to? I couldn't know. The first night he Tag Teamed me, that Honeymoon Night when Echo ditched me, Wax pulled over to the curb in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT. Painted dark red, Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Rosewood panels in the dash. The headliner is sewed out of Alcantara suede, and the heated seats actually give your butt muscles a constant Swedish massage.

Wax buzzed down the electric window on my side. I'm still standing on the curb in my pink bridesmaid gown, and Wax waves something floppy and white at me. That's how Wax introduced himself.

"Before you touch anything, baby," he tells me, "you put on these."

It's latex gloves.

Lynn Coffey: It's tragic. Young people seldom purchase these exotic sports cars, certainly not professional basketball or football players. They could never fit in the bucket seats. No, almost all such cars go to older-middle-aged or elderly men who seldom drive them. These Maseratis and Ferraris and Lamborghinis sit garaged for years, like lonely mistresses, hidden from direct sunlight.

Jarrell Moore (Private Investigator): As per my investigation, nobody's 100-percent sure who runs Party Crashing, but it can't be any single individual. That guy would have to keep track of fouls for every player. Anybody calls three fouls on you inside of two months, and you stop getting notified about the next game. Fouls include tagging too hard—figure the impact by the speed of each vehicle. Anything totaling more than twenty miles per hour is a foul. If I'm driving ten, and you're driving eleven, and you swerve to hit me head-on, that's an impact over twenty. I can call the foul on you.

Excess impact is only one foul to call.

Tina Something: Wax could tell you details the gaddamn owners never could. All types of convertibles: the Fiat Spyder, the Maserati Spyder, and the Ferrari Spyder, they're all named after some kind of seventeenth-century horse-drawn coach. With no top and high wheels, this black olden-days carriage looked like a spider.

Wax could work the steering-wheel paddles to shift a Formula I or Cambiocorsa trannie. He saw how Jaguar Racing Green shows up a half-shade lighter than British Racing Green. When you open the door of a Maserati, and only a Maserati, you hear a faint, high-pitched whine…Wax could tell you that was the hydraulic trannie pressurizing.

"Nice," Wax would say, gunning the V8 of a Jaguar XJR, painted Winter Gold. Flexing his fingers, he'd say, "They sprung for the heated steering wheel…" Then he'd drop the J-gate trannie into second gear and butt-ram some rusty Subaru wagon.

Lynn Coffey: In Party Crash culture, Karl Waxman was known as a "Hit Man." A species of paid assassin.