The rental company required that they deposit two hundred dollars. It was very frequent for hustlers and delinquents to rent cars and total them. The man told Riverbed he was sorry, but six cars had been lost the previous week. “Some are returned,” he said. “But they are useless.” Others, he explained, were sometimes found on the bottom of bays or the sea-port. “Many times,” the car-dealer said, dropping tears from his eyes, “we never receive our car, but ransom letters. They leave parts of its body. Pictures of them being tortured, fingering the cars’ assholes.” Riverbed needed to have five-hundred dollars available on his credit card. For the past couple of years, since Riverbed got his first credit card, he’d maintained the card’s balance steadily at fifty-under its limit, enough to pay for a good meal if necessary.