Delgado picked up the phone. Using his thumbs on the tiny keypad, he punched out:
Delgado grinned at the mental image that came with “tigertails.” It had been a tigertail that had got him sent for his brief first and only visit to the Dallas County Jail in Texas.
He’d just turned eighteen years old and had started to move a lot more product on his own. He needed some help. In order to trust the help, he put the guys through some tests. And one of those tests was torching the cars of some of their East Dallas neighbors. The damn picky people were making louder and louder noises about traffic-both foot traffic and the lawn care trucks and trailers-in and out of Delgado’s house and property.
The term “tigertail” came from a gasoline company and its cartoon tiger mascot. One of the company’s giveaway promotions was a foot-long fake furry black-striped orange tail to tie to the gas tanks.
For a while, judging by all the tails flapping from gas caps, it seemed cars everywhere had “a tiger in their tank.”
Delgado had stolen that idea, but there were a couple of critical differences with his. He had taken a wire coat hanger, straightened it out, then wrapped it with a gas-soaked strip of bedsheeting, bending a hook in the wire’s end to secure the fabric. The sheet-covered wire was then stuck down a target vehicle’s gas tank. Then the “fuse” was set afire.
The neighbors’ cars became blackened hulks in minutes.
As a message sender, the tigertail had been an effective tool. Too much of one, in fact, because Delgado’s boys began torching enough vehicles that the Dallas Police Department had decided it necessary to put together a small task force. And the first night out, the cops caught one of Delgado’s boys-a fifteen-year-old who shit his pants the moment the cuffs were slapped on.
And he quickly fingered Delgado.
Delgado’s lawyer had been able to convince the prosecutor that discrediting the kid’s word would be effortless-“He shit his pants, for chrissake! He’d roll over on his own grandmother if it got him out of this. No one’s going to believe him!”-and that resulted in the charges against Delgado being dismissed.
Delgado never saw that kid again. That, of course, did not stop the unfortunate event that followed-the car belonging to the fifteen-year-old’s mother being tigertailed.
Delgado’s cellular phone vibrated again, and he read the screen: