Final Notice – Joe Gores | Full Story+ Audiobook

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In the quiet streets of San Francisco, a man named Daniel Kearny had built a small but sharp operation called DKA—Daniel Kearny Associates. It wasn’t a big company or a famous detective agency, but within the world of repossessions, it was known for being relentless. The people who owed money on cars, boats, and furniture often met DKA at the worst moment in their lives—the moment when what they hadn’t paid for was being taken back. DKA wasn’t sentimental about it. They had a job, and they did it clean. But sometimes, the work wasn’t just about paperwork or keys. Sometimes, it crossed over into something darker, something that could turn deadly.

Daniel Kearny ran his team like a captain runs a ship. Every man had a job: ball-busting repo men, investigators, and skip tracers who could sniff out a missing debtor through two counties and six fake addresses. They worked out of a cluttered office with flickering lights and half-dead coffee pots. What they lacked in glamour, they made up for in efficiency. Among them was Bart Heslip, one of Kearny’s best men—big, tough, and fiercely loyal. Bart had a taste for action and a sense of humor that made him both endearing and dangerous. He could spot a liar or a stolen car faster than most cops.

The story begins when a seemingly simple job comes in. A car needs to be repossessed—a late model, nothing fancy. The kind of job DKA did ten times a week. But the paperwork is odd. The name on the loan doesn’t match the address on record. When Kearny sends Bart and another man to handle it, they find the house empty, the neighbors silent, and the car gone. The trail looks cold, but DKA never lets a vehicle slip away without finding it.

Bart starts digging. He checks garages, talks to mechanics, visits pawnshops, and follows a whisper of a lead through the industrial districts. Then, the job takes a strange turn. The missing car is found abandoned in a field miles away—with blood inside. No driver, no license plates, just the faint trace of a struggle. It’s supposed to be just a repossession, but now it smells like murder.

Daniel Kearny doesn’t like it. His business is built on legality and reputation. The cops already don’t love DKA—they see repo men as half-thieves themselves. If a DKA car turns up in a murder, the police will be all over them. Kearny warns Bart to back off, to let the police handle it. But Bart can’t. He’s stubborn, and something about the case feels wrong. He’s convinced someone’s trying to use DKA to cover up something bigger.

As Bart keeps investigating, he crosses paths with a young woman named Ginny, who seems to know more than she lets on. She’s scared and secretive, and though she tries to brush him off, Bart senses that she’s tied to the car somehow. He starts shadowing her, and soon enough, she’s running—from him and from someone else. The more Bart learns, the more dangerous the trail becomes.

Meanwhile, back at the DKA office, the other agents start picking up fragments of the same story. A man with a fake ID, a loan taken out under a dead person’s name, and a string of car thefts that seem unrelated—but aren’t. The clues point to a sophisticated ring, one that steals cars, alters their identities, and resells them with clean papers. It’s an operation that needs someone on the inside of the repo business to work. Someone like one of them.

Kearny begins to suspect that DKA has been infiltrated. Maybe not his own men—but someone has access to their files, their schedules, and their routes. Someone is always one step ahead, taking the cars before they arrive. The thought eats at him. He built DKA from the ground up; loyalty is everything. So, quietly, he begins to check his own crew. He watches, listens, and keeps his suspicions close.

Bart’s hunt leads him through the backstreets of San Francisco, through used car lots that sell dreams and junkyards that hide secrets. He finds Ginny again, this time hiding in a small apartment near the docks. She’s trembling, terrified, and on the run from a man she calls Johnny. She tells Bart that the car he was after wasn’t just a stolen vehicle—it was being used to transport something far worse. When she opens her bag, Bart finds photographs, receipts, and a gun. She’s in deeper than he imagined.

Then Johnny appears—a cold, calculating man with a salesman’s smile and a killer’s patience. He and Bart have an immediate tension between them. Johnny used to work in the repossession game too. He knows how Bart thinks. He knows DKA’s methods. It doesn’t take long for Bart to realize that Johnny is behind the ring—that he’s been using fake repo contracts to move stolen cars, and when people got in his way, he silenced them.

The blood in the abandoned car belonged to a man who caught Johnny in the act. Ginny was supposed to disappear, but she ran, taking evidence with her. Now both she and Bart are targets.

Kearny gets word that Bart has gone missing. For all his toughness, Kearny worries. Bart is one of his best, and losing a man in the field is bad for business—and conscience. So he personally steps out of the office, something he rarely does anymore. He drives through the city, retracing Bart’s steps, visiting garages, bars, and motels, piecing together the pattern. He starts to see it: every false repo order, every missing car, every setup is part of a larger web. Someone wants to crush DKA’s credibility while running their own criminal empire under its name.

Bart, meanwhile, finds himself ambushed in a warehouse near the waterfront. Johnny and two of his men corner him. There’s a brutal fight. Bart, though outnumbered, fights like a man who refuses to die. He manages to take one down and escape through the back, bleeding and exhausted. He makes it to a payphone and calls the office.

When Kearny answers, Bart just says, “They’re using our name, boss. It’s bad. Real bad.”

That’s enough. Kearny calls in his men—old-timers and young guns alike. The DKA team becomes a small army, fanning across the city, tracing every false document, every license number, and every scrap of evidence. It’s not just about business anymore. It’s about pride.

Through tireless digging, they uncover how Johnny’s operation worked: he’d pose as a repo agent, take legitimate cars off the street, re-tag them, and sell them overseas or to chop shops. To make it worse, he’d plant paperwork linking the thefts to DKA, ensuring the blame landed squarely on Kearny’s company. It was an elegant, vicious setup.

Ginny, realizing she can’t keep running, agrees to meet Bart and Kearny to hand over the evidence. But the meeting is intercepted. Johnny gets there first. He drags Ginny away and torches the meeting place, leaving a trail of chaos. Bart survives, barely, and now he’s out for blood.

The final chase stretches across San Francisco’s industrial edge—wharves, storage yards, and abandoned factories. The rain falls hard, turning the streets slick and silver. Johnny drives a stolen car, Ginny in the passenger seat, screaming. Bart follows close behind, his headlights cutting through the downpour.

They crash through a fence and end up in a dead-end yard surrounded by shipping containers. Bart steps out, soaked and furious. Johnny taunts him, gun in hand, confident and smirking. For a moment, it’s a standoff between two men who once played the same game but chose different sides. Then Johnny fires. Bart dives, rolls, and returns fire. The noise echoes across the metal walls. When the smoke clears, Johnny lies motionless, his body slumped beside the car.

Kearny arrives minutes later with the police. They find the documents Ginny risked her life for, enough to clear DKA’s name and bury Johnny’s operation forever. As the sirens fade, Kearny looks at Bart—bruised, bleeding, but alive—and says quietly, “You always make things complicated, kid.”

Bart grins through the pain. “Yeah, but I get the job done.”

In the days that follow, DKA rebuilds. The office hums again with phone calls, paperwork, and the clatter of typewriters. Clients return, trusting them again. The newspapers run short blurbs about the “Car Theft Ring Broken by Local Agency,” but DKA doesn’t care about headlines. For them, it’s just another job closed, another notice served.

Kearny stands by the office window one night, watching the city lights flicker. The life of a repo man isn’t glamorous—it’s dirty, dangerous, and thankless. But it’s honest. And in a world of scams and lies, that’s worth something.

Somewhere in the dark, a car engine starts. Bart is back on the road, another assignment in hand, chasing another debtor. The work never stops. There’s always another car, another name, another story waiting to end with two words stamped across a file: Final Notice.

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