There's a great Tom Lehrer song that has a line in it about life being like a sewer. What you get out of it depends upon what you put into it. Or in our case, clean off of it. My brother and me, we take care of what most of the world doesn't want to think about.
You've all seen those cars chases in the movies or, if you are lucky, on TV. The cars are often close to being destroyed, but in some cases, they are just a mess and need to be cleaned up. That's where we come in. We are The Car Rescue League! Well, that's my name for our little business. My brother, Arturo, calls it the Palacios Car Service. I like mine better. Oh, I'm Consuelo, by the way, but my friends call me Connie. Only Arturo insists upon using my Christian name.
In some cases, the cars are brought to us so covered in stuff that you need a shovel to figure out what color it is. We wash them, clean them inside and out and then let the owners do with them as they will. We don't care what happened before or after. We clean them up as best we can and send them away. As far as we're concerned, officially, we don't care what happened. Unofficially, Arturo and me, we love to spin tales. It would be that which would save our lives, but we didn't know it at the time.
Our reputation for keeping our mouths shut kept us pretty busy. Law enforcement started sending more work our way and so did the other side. There were some days when a pile of dirt would reveal a police car sitting next to a Mafia hit car. That's what I call irony.
We cleaned mud, blood and even poop – I hated the last one, so I made Arturo charge double for it.
One day it was business as usual. Arturo was using a high pressure hose to try and shift some cosas from the undercarriage of a car and I was wrestling with the front seat of another car. There were some days when I wished I'd been born a boy. Gus, mi primo helped me get it out of the car. That made cleaning the interior so much easier, plus you never know whatsorpresitas you might find. Once I found a wad of hundred dollar bills, another time a diamond broach. We always returned what we found and that helped our business as well. People like it when you don't try to pull something over on them.
The car was filled with leaves and tree branches, a dead squirrel, pobresita I crossed myself and said a fast prayer for it. If I hadn't pulled the seat, it probably would have been missed and, Dios mio! We aren't fast, but we pride ourselves on being thorough. I set the little body aside, vowing to give it a proper burial in our back yard along with all the others. Well, not the rats. Those I just toss. It is probably bad of me because God tells us to love all creatures, but I don't think he meant sewer rats.
There was a rumble, almost like thunder and I thought back to the weather forecast of the day. It was supposed to be sunny and humid. Maybe the weather guy got it wrong.
He hadn't, for within the next minute I realized the noise was getting louder and coming straight towards us. This sedan drags itself in and practically oozing…mierda. It reminded me of when my baby nephew had the squirts and discovered how to remove his diaper on the same day. It wasn't pretty and neither was this.
I gagged at the smell. The car looked more like a pile of garbage looking for the dump.
A man stumbled out, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. I couldn't even imagine what it must be like inside that mess, but I have a feeling I was about to find out.
He walks up to me, a dark menacing look on his face. He didn't scare me, well, not very much.
"Cuando mucho?"
"What?" I almost laughed at his slaughter of my mother tongue, but his look strangles the laugh in my throat. "I… I don't know. Arturo?"
He was right behind me and I moved away to let my brother do what he did best, negotiate. I returned to what now was a nice straight forward. I swept, taking the mats out to wash them later. When I was happy there was nothing else hiding in any little crevices, I got the vacuum out.
My brother caught my hand as I reached to turn it on.
"Good news or bad news?"
"Bad news is that it's a rush," I guessed and he nodded. "Good news is that he's willing to pay double." Arturo held up three fingers. "Triple?" I whispered.
"Si. Up front."
That almost made it worth the smell. "Should I call in some extra help?" That meant our other cousins, the ones who didn't usually work for us.
Arturo nodded. "I will make the call." He was being machista on me, damn him. That meant I'd be doing the nasty end of this job. I climbed out of my present task and set my shoulders.
Approaching the car, I was suddenly grabbed and the dark-faced man was glaring at me. "Anything you find is mine. Comprende?" He shook me and then found himself sitting on the floor, gasping for air.
"¡Nadie!Nadie metocaasí! (No one, no one touches me like that)!" I screamed at him in Spanish. He started to reach for something and suddenly I was surrounded by my brothers, my uncles and my cousins. Dark face thought twice about it.
"Trouble?" Papi asked and I shook my head.
"No." The man stood up and brushed himself off. "Anything!" he shouted and stormed out.
"¿Qué fue todo eso (What was that all about)?" Papi's arms were strong and comforting and I wrapped them around me. I knew he was my héroe.
"Apparently anything we find in that belongs to him."
"That goes without saying."
"Which he said twice." I hugged my father back. "I think we need to get this out as soon as possible."
The mask didn't help much. The sweat made me itchy inside the jumpsuit and I longed to pull off the gloves and race away into the coolness of the front office.
I was digging through the heap of maggot riddled garbage in the backseat when I saw a shoe. It wasn't in bad condition, so I grabbed it to toss it onto the keep pile. It resisted me and so I gave it a tug and it moved in my hand.
"Hay Dios mio,"I prayed, for it wasn't a shoe I held, it was a foot attached to a leg. "Aruro, ven andale!"
I had a feeling CaraOscura (Dark Face) wasn't far away and he was watching everything I was doing.
"Que?" He didn't look happy about being pulled from his job.
"Something is stuck, I need help," I said loudly. "Arturo, there is a man in here. I think that's what he mean when he said anything in here was his."
"A man can't own another man."
"What do we do?"
"First we get him out of here, then we will decide." Arturo called for our cousins and we surrounded the car, effectively hiding it from view. To our cousin, Benjamin, Arturo said simply, "Watch."
I didn't worry about anything now except saving whoever was beneath this filth. I dug quickly and uncovered his face. For a moment there was nothing, then a gasp for oxygen. The next few seconds were a blur as we freed him.
He was horribly beaten, then worse I'd ever seen and I didn't want to think of what poisoned had crawled into his body from the filth he'd been in.
"Arturo," Benjamin's warning was soft.
"Get him out of here." Immediately the cousins tossed a tarp over the man and bundled him away, along with another tarp of garbage.
"What are you doing? What did you find?"
I turned and saw my little bundle awaiting burial and prayed to God to forgive me. I tossed the dead squirrel to him. "This. You want?"
CaraOscura acted as if I'd thrown acid at him. He cried out and fell back a step. Then suddenly there was a gun pointed at me. He cursed and kicked the poor squirrel aside. "I want him!"
"I don't understand." I gestured to the squirrel. The poor thing was looking a bit worse for wear. "I gave him to you."
"The man! I want to the man. Give him to me or I begin shooting, starting with you. Say hello to God for me." He aimed and pulled the trigger. At the gunshot, I cringed, then realized I hadn't been shot. I frantically looked around at my family, but they were as puzzled as me. That was when I realized CaraOscura was on the floor and there was another man behind him. There was something kind in the eyes that found mine.
"Are you all right, Miss?" He had a nice voice, although he looked nearly as bad as the one we'd pulled from the car. He knelt beside the fallen man, checked for a pulse and nodded. "Don't worry. He's just asleep."
"Thank you for your timely arrival."
"I'm just sorry that I wasn't here earlier." His eyes grew sad. "You didn't happen to find someone, a man?" He looked so hopeful. "He's about 5'9" blonde hair and I can't trust him to stay out of trouble for a moment." He pulled a slender wallet from a pocket and held it out for all of us to see. "I'm Napoleon Solo from UNCLE. I'm looking for my partner."
"Him?" I looked at CaraOscura, who didn't seem all that threatening anymore.
"Definitely not my partner. In fact, he's a very bad man who isn't going to have the opportunity to threaten beautiful women ever again.
"He's in the office," I said. There was just something that made me trust that this man was who and what he said he was. "He's alive."
"Thank you. Thank all of you."
QQQQ
Our lives would change after that, although we didn't realize it immediately. I took the squirrel home and gave it a hero's burial. The next day, we returned to work. The car was gone, which we didn't care much about. Arturo tried to return the money, but was told to keep it. It was good to have a little cushion.
I was polishing a fender when I realized there was a second person in the reflection. I turned and there was a man standing there. He wasn't much taller than me and he still bore some of the marks of his beating, but I recognized the man from the garbage.
"Miss Hernandez?" He held out a hand to me. I noticed that a couple of the fingers were taped together, so I took it very carefully.
"Si."
"Thank you for your quick thinking. I don't know how much longer I could have survived in there."
"I am truly amazed that anyone could have even managed that. How did you end up there?"
"A man does what he must to live."
"But you are healing?"
"I am, thank you." Arturo joined us. "I am Illya Kuryakin and we have a little proposal for you."
That is how we came to be the official car washers for UNCLE. They keep us pleasantly busy and there is the added benefit of a regular salary, health benefits, even retirement. The people we meet are much nicer and it's good to not have to look over our shoulders for the bill collector every month. Mr. Kuryakin visits us regularly and has even taken to working on engines with Arturo. When one of my aunts asked about him, I told her that he was our blond cousin. She didn't understand, but laughed anyway.
Our future is secure and UNCLE's secrets are safe. After all, we always look out for family.