Customer Service: Repo Man

Customer service comes in many forms. Here's an unexpected lesson I learned one night in Las Vegas... (all names except mine have been changed.)

Repo Man

Santos Davila wears a Wal~Mart vest complete with nametag on the front and a box cutter in the right side pocket. Mrs. Santos, Melissa, writes in neat, feminine cursive remembered from grade school. Cassandra gets good grades as attested by the report card found in the console of the Davila’s Suburban. I know because I helped steal their car last night.

Well, we didn’t exactly steal it. It was more a matter of stealing it back.

Santos hadn’t made a payment since he drove the aging suburban from tiny Mission, Texas where everyone knows nearly everyone to not so tiny Las Vegas, Nevada where, in the words of the illiterate who come for jobs and dreams, “nobody knows no one.”

I found a prescription for Albuterol under the front seat and guessed that the littlest Davila has asthma and maybe a reason for leaving a large Mexican family and the familiarity of one desert for the promise of another. Santos, like so many young and foolish men had swapped the tires and rims native to the aging Chevy for fancy rims and a set of well-used low profile tires considered cool. The springs had been cut short, the shocks replaced and now the old gray boat sails low to the ground looking squat and slow. A stereo had been added and the windows tinted all the while the important things like making the payments were neglected.

Lonnie and I searched the map jousting for fading sunlight and focal distance, two white guys juggling drug store reading glasses in an attempt to find Sabroso Street and the Davila home. A few minutes earlier we had been cruising Wal~Mart in hopes of finding Santos on duty in the garden department while the low gray tank waited for us in the parking lot. But there was no tank. Our 95% chance of getting lucky turned to a 100% chance of no luck at all.

But our luck improved when we turned past Sierra Ridge rolled past Cady and turned down Sabroso.

I drove past the tank slow enough for Lonnie to be sure but not so slow as to attract attention. On the second pass I stopped short and Lonnie hopped out. While I waited he walked up the street. He looked out of place even to me. A middle-aged white guy with but a fringe of hair moving on foot at dusk through a neighborhood of young Hispanic families. He would not be mistaken for Tio Sanchez visiting his newlywed brother.

A door opened and a young man trotted out and got into a car parked just across from the tank. Another man stepped from the shadows garden hose in hand and took up what must be a desert summer ritual. And Santos, much to our unhappy surprise, opened his door and stepped into his tiny side yard.

Lonnie quickly crossed the street, turned back to the north and then crossed again before slipping into the back seat of my rental car.

“Man! All of a sudden the neighborhood came alive! Let’s go. We’ll try again later.”

And later we did indeed try again. The neighborhood was sleeping or at least dozing when I pulled up alongside the tank. Lonnie stepped into the shadow between the two vehicles. The key fit. The engine cranked and then coughed. The tank sounded like one and for a moment there was the possibility that the tank would not start but that the neighborhood would and in an instant we would be contending with an angry Santos and maybe, if he did not understand, a pistol or worse.

But it did start and Lonnie shifted into drive before the engine warmed, before he located the headlight switch, before Santos could know that the tank and the Wal~Mart uniform and the baby seat and little Cassandra’s report card were all gone.

Santos meant to make the payments but there were bills to pay that were owed to closer faces. Someday he knew he would make good on the payments or, maybe not. Maybe the owner would forget. Someday seemed long in coming and the owner grew impatient instead of forgetful.

So we slipped into the night triumphant but unsure. Certain we had the vehicle and certain that no matter how the law defined the act, Santos is a thief. But we were also certain that Santos would have a tough time getting to work, that Melissa would be angry at him. She would question his position as head of the family and certain that the baby would need the car seat we had taken along with the Suburban.

In the morning we would leave the seat and the Wal~Mart vest with the nice lady in the Garden department. We would slip a five-dollar bill in little Cassandra’s report card along with a note to “keep up the good work” and an unspoken prayer that a family would heal even as the faded gray tank sailed back across the desert to Texas.