You can’t believe the adrenaline-driven clarity that settles over you as a six-foot, 190-pound hapkido warrior bows to you, then flows into his fighting position and waits for you to attack. You see every shift in his balance, every tiny feint, every flicker in his eye. You know when his breathing changes. Then all hell breaks loose. A two-minute round never seems to end. And the second you get tired is the second that someone lands a fist to your solar plexus or a foot to your head.

I go six rounds. At the end of the session I’m bent over and breathing hard and I can hardly hold myself upright to bow to Quinn before I head for the locker room.

An hour later I’m standing in Angel’s shop up in Phelan. Phelan is in the desert north of L.A., not far from Interstate 15. Angel is the man who taught me how to steal cars and what to do with them once they’re mine.

Here in Phelan they’ve got black sky and nice stars but not much else. The shop is made of metal and has no windows, which defeats the popular LoJack device. I can hear the wind knocking against the panels. Angel is doing a walk-around on the Mustang, nodding, clicking and sending pictures and text messages with his phone. Demand is high. Angel is always selling. He might have sold the thing already for all I know.

“Thirteen,” he says.

“Fifteen.”

“Thirteen seven fifty, and no higher, Suzie.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fine, fine, fine.”

“Where will you send her?” I ask.

“Mexico. I have a buyer waiting. Someone who prefers American. You’ve always had good instincts for the right car.”

A loaded Mustang GT is a thirty-two-thousand-dollar car new-drops to twenty-five if you sell it low-mileage to a private party. Angel will take it from here: pay me, replace the VIN with a clean one, forge counterfeit title and registration, remove LoJack or any other antitheft devices and transport it by truck to a Tijuana leather shop for custom upgrades, where it will change trucks and be taken south to Mexico City, maybe Sinaloa, maybe Puerto Vallarta or Cartagena or Bogotá. Angel will be paid in dollars. Since the airlines got tough after 9/11, roughly one million American drug dollars a day journey by car through Tijuana to points south. A day.

So the narcotraficantes have plenty of cash on hand. For the Mustang Angel will get about twenty-two grand. The cartel guys who buy them aren’t getting a steal, but they’re getting something they can’t buy legally in the United States. One reason that Angel’s stolen cars are so popular in Mexico is that suspected drug heavies are banned from spending money here in the States, a law originally passed to keep them from financing “dream teams” of lawyers for their defense in U.S. courts. What narcotraficantes get now is a court-appointed defender. But they can always get a VIN-switched Beemer, Benz, Porsche, Jag, Ford, Chevy or Chrysler from Angel. In most corners of the world, money talks.

Angel pours us each a shot of reposado tequila, offers it to me on a varnished wooden tray. It’s a ritual of ours.

We sip and I stare at the Ford. It’s a bitchin’ ride-honestly aggressive, capable, fun just to look at.

“Angel, I might want to move some diamonds.”

“Oh.” He frowns. He studies the car, then me. “There’s Jason.”

“I won’t deal with him.”

Angel nods. One of the many things I like about Latin men is that they understand that many things in life are fated and final and beyond discussion.

“They’re beautiful, Angel. Gem quality-the best. One is two carats and close to perfect. They’re unbelievable. Retail is four hundred and fifty. I’ll take forty and there’s five in it for you.”

“Ten percent is top dollar. But let me see.”

I thank Angel but I don’t like the look on his face. He’s a strong man with broad shoulders and chest, a lion’s gut and a high, back-sloping head blessed with thick silver hair. He dresses beautifully. His face is all crags and he’s got a smile like a sunrise. We were us for a while, but we both knew that wouldn’t last long. Mostly we were business. Angel charged me five hundred dollars to show me how to steal my first car. Later, when I’d learned the craft, he had a custom slide-hammer made just for me, a little shorter than the usual ones and the handle a little thinner for hands my size. I rarely sell a car to anyone else.

But I see no sunrise in Angel’s face right now.

“Does this relate to the diamond broker in the body shop?”

“Directly.”

“A terrible thing.”

“I wasn’t involved. I was lucky.”

“I’ve never had good luck with diamonds,” he says. “They seem to have minds of their own. But an automobile, it always goes where you steer it. Speaking of this, come with me.”

We walk past some very choice American cars-two loaded Escalades with twenty-inch shoes and big meat, two Suburbans with more of the same, a Mustang GT, a black-on-black GM Yukon and a genuinely beautiful custom cobalt blue Denali XL that actually makes certain parts of me tingle. The paint and chrome gleam in the fluorescent lights and each one seems smug with its own secret behind the heavily tinted glass. Customers love heavily tinted glass.

This is the domestic part of Angel’s operation, which is different from the high-end German stuff that Angel processes in a warehouse down in San Ysidro.

See, the German cars are more valuable per unit but they’re also a lot harder to steal. If you physically move a Beamer or a Porsche more than a few feet, the systems all lock down-the antilock brakes take hold, the steering fails, the ignition and injectors and electric all go spastic and all you’ve got is a three-thousand-pound paperweight. The only practical way to steal the German cars is with a key or a tow truck. Both work. But keys are difficult to get-although some people leave the valet keys in their glove boxes, which is the first place a thief looks. And a tow truck usually means a broad-daylight lift, which takes time and a partner.

So, for business I steal American. They’ve got lousy security systems that are easy to override and there are more of them to choose from. Angel sometimes has a customer interested only in a specific color or option package, and that’s almost never a problem because when Detroit does something they do it in a big way. Great selection!

But the best part of stealing American is the huge market in Europe and in the Middle East. Those guys know a deal when they see one. Especially in the Middle East. They hate us, but they love paying oil cartel cash for our SUVs and trucks. The Mexicans have the drug cartels and the Arabs have the oil cartels. I have a friend who did a tour in Iraq and another in Kuwait, and he saw American cars with California plates still on them being driven all over the place. The American cars hold up well over there and they’re functional. You try driving a Mercedes SL or a BMW M5 on dirt roads across the Yemeni desert and tell me how far you get. You know how much German air filters cost? But get yourself a Ford Explorer, man, and you’ll make it on time with a decent sound system, the air conditioner still blowing ice, and you’ll get decent mileage, maybe seventeen miles per gallon with the six cylinder. Then you just hose it off and vacuum it out and head to Dubai for a round of golf or some indoor skiing or some gambling at the casinos. Plus, if you show up in an Escalade or a trick Denali XL with the big chrome shoes and the subwoofer pounding like the bass drum in a marching band, it says you kick ass.

So all these American cars will go overseas, and to get them there Angel will load them into containers and truck the containers to the Port of Long Beach. Angel has his system and his people in place. I’ve seen the operation. The port is one gigantic buzzing hive of cargo containers, cranes, trucks and thousands of workers and drivers and longshoremen and hundreds of millions of tons of cargo coming and going every hour. It’s a full-blast throbbing city out there, everything timed out to the minute. In the apparent confusion, which is actually not confusion at all, Angel’s containers get handled by the right longshoremen and they get on the right vessels inspected by the right people. They’re not on the ground for more than a few hours. This is the meat and potatoes of his business because Angel sells twenty American workhorses for every one high-end German stallion.