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The Mercedes must have been in an accident or something, then had been made pretty again. The steering pulled hard to the left, for instance; not too bad on a divided highway like the Northern State but maybe a little hairy in traffic on a two-way street. Also, at higher speeds, it took too long to switch through the gears, so the engine was half the time racing and straining and making loud, uncomfortable groan noises. Also, it was running hot.
    Well, if they give you a lemon, trade it in. Instead of going straight to Max--who would be open till 10:00 p.m. this Friday night to grab that impulse buyer who just had to have that reconditioned eleven-year-old Dodge Dart with the bullet holes in the doors carefully filled and sanded and painted over--Stan drove on into Queens, switched to the Van Wyck Expressway, and sped on down to Kennedy Airport, where he took a ticket at the entrance to the long-term parking lot and went trolling. (We're back to the fish metaphor.) There were a lot of nice cars here in the long-term parking lot. Stan would come here more often, actually, but there was just something about the name of the place--long-term parking--that sounded like what the judge would say at sentence time. It put Stan off his feed.
    But there were times when this resource should not be lightly dismissed, and this was one of them. Stan drove, slow and easy, passing a lot of excellent vehicles that Max would really appreciate, but the fact was, Stan had his heart set on dark green Mercedes with fawn upholstery tonight, and there it was] Perfect. The same car. Stan stopped the lemon, got out, incur sed the new Mercedes, backed it out of its slot, drove the lemon into that location instead, and briefly considered switching license plates. There was nothing to be gained from that, though, except the long-distance scrambling of a onetime Mercedes owner's brain, so Stan left the lemon intact and drove to the exit, where the toll taker looked at his ticket and said, "You weren't in there long."
    "I realized," Stan told him, "I don't want to go anywhere. I'm going home and tell the little woman everything, and see can we work it out."
    "Good idea," the tolltaker said. He took Stan's money, and when he gave him his change he also gave him some advice: "Probly," he said, "you don't have to tell her everything."
    "You may be right," Stan said, and drove the new Mercedes--a cream puff, a delight--to Maximilian's Used Cars, lighted, after dark, by what appeared to be all the night-game lights from the former Wrigley Field.
    A little discussion with Max provided a dollar figure they could both be happy with, and then Stan took the subway home to Canarsie, where his Mom, eating a pizza before taking her cab out for some of the late-night airport action, said, "Sit down, Stan, have a slice. Pepperoni."
    "Thanks, Mom." Stan got a paper plate from the shelf and a beer from the refrigerator and joined his Mom at the kitchen table. "You gonna be late tonight?" he asked.
    "Nah," she said. "Just a couple hours. Go over to Kennedy, take a fare to Manhattan, hang around the hotels, the next one brings me out to the airport, I call it a night."
    "I was at Kennedy a while ago," Stan said. 'Traffic wasn't bad. You could do a Hundred-thirtieth Street, get there like that." He tried to snap his fingers, but they were full of oil from the pizza slice and just slid around together, not making any noise at all.
    "Thank you, Stan," his Mom said. Companionably, they ate some pizza, drank some beer, and then she said, "Before I forget. Actually, I already forgot, but now I just remembered."
    "Yeah?"
    "Tiny Bulcher called. He'd like a meeting tonight at midnight."
    Stan glanced at the wall clock; not yet ten. "I guess so," he said. "He say who's gonna be there?"
    "John, he said, and Andy, and some other guy."
    "AttheOJ?"
    "No, he said the other guy got drunk after the meeting last time and kind of broke some things at the OJ, so Rollo eighty-sixed