One Got Away

by S. A. Lelchuk

  Buster and I sat on the couch. Devin sat at the desk and clicked away at the computer. No one spoke much. Big Brad sat next to Devin on a stool that shuddered under his weight. He reached into a pocket and took out, improbably, a Game Boy. As if he had never left the ’90s, he started pressing buttons with both thumbs, the console lost between enormous, grease-stained hands.

  Buster yawned, lit a cigarette, and scratched his nose.

  Big Brad looked up from the Game Boy. “You’re getting ash on the carpet.”

  “Lucky it’s a shit carpet.” Buster flicked more ash.

  Big Brad’s eyes followed the ash as it drifted down but he said nothing more as he went back to his game.

  Devin’s phone rang. He picked up and listened, then nodded and said, “We can wait.” He hung up and looked our way. “Another couple minutes. Hang tight.”

  Buster smoked. Big Brad loomed like a lighthouse. Devin fiddled with the computer.

  I got a strange feeling.

  There was an analogue clock on the wall. Another minute ticked past.

  I tried to decide where the strange feeling was coming from.

  Buster finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the side table. “How much longer we gonna be here?” he wanted to know. “We didn’t bring our sleeping bags.” He waved his glass. “And the bourbon’s going fast.” He sounded annoyed. Buster sounding annoyed was a useful sort of gauge. Like a barometer signifying that a storm was on the horizon. Not something to panic about, no need to drop everything right then and there, but maybe time to move the sails a bit, head in a different direction.

  Devin looked up. “Sorry,” he said. “Almost there. Leo’s gonna call any second. We have a lot of inventory to sort through.”

  “Good,” said Buster. “I haven’t felt this cooped up since my San Quentin days.”

  I looked around again. The two men, plain walls, bathroom door, desk, computer.

  I realized why I had the strange feeling.

  I spilled half my drink on Buster’s leg.

  “Hey, watch it!” he exclaimed. Then he saw my eyes.

  That was enough. His face changed the smallest bit. We were on the same wavelength.

  Several things happened at almost the same time.

  I stood. Devin’s cell phone chimed as I reached my feet. A single, bright beep. He looked at the screen, then over to us. “Good to go.” The smallest trace of puzzlement beginning to form as he spoke. Seeing me standing. In motion.

  By that time I had taken three fast steps and kicked the bathroom door open. A hard push-kick, throwing my hips into it, my full weight behind my outstretched right leg. The sole of my boot crashed into the door, leg and door meeting at a perfect perpendicular angle. The cheap latch broke and the door flew backward. There was a pained grunt and a man holding a gun staggered from where the door had bounced off his forehead. Dazed, he tried to get the gun up. Not enough time. I was too close. I got my left hand on his right wrist, angling the gun barrel away toward the floor. He might have been stronger than me but I was pushing down and he was pushing up. Less than a second later any debatable differences in deltoid and triceps capabilities stopped mattering as I put my right hand around the back of his neck, pulled him close, and drove my knee into his groin three vicious times.

  My ears registered confused noises and moving bodies in the office behind me. Bangs and crashes and thuds. General mayhem.

  The guy’s fingers had loosened with the first knee and opened somewhere between the second and third. The gun clattered to the ground as I let go of his neck, took a half step back, straightened the fingers of my right hand, and drove my hand into his throat just below his Adam’s apple. He groaned and collapsed to his knees, both hands clutching his throat and, in that process, unintentionally bringing his unguarded face to foot level just as I swept my left foot around in a short, tight roundhouse kick that slammed my lower shin into his right temple.

  He sprawled forward prone, arms flung akimbo. Out. Gone. Over. Looking like he might think about moving sometime next year. By the next moon landing, as Leo might have said.

  There were thudding and crunching and smashing noises from behind me.

  I picked up his gun, checking the magazine and chamber as I straightened. Some back part of my mind computing the salient facts—Ruger .22, semiautomatic, safety off, full magazine, round chambered—and stepped back into the room in time to see Buster removing a sawed-off shotgun from Devin’s unconscious hands. Devin was unconscious because Buster seemed to have launched his head into the boxy old PC.

  Buster brought the shotgun up toward Big Brad.

  A fraction of a second too late.

  Big Brad got a hand on the barrel and wrenched it away. He grabbed Buster by the throat as the shotgun fell to the floor.

  Whatever the dollar wing nights had done to Big Brad’s stomach, they had yet to adversely affect his grip. Buster looked like he’d been seized by a robotic claw. His hands scrabbled at Big Brad’s wrists. The two of them looked like a pair of grizzly bears locked in combat, straining and grunting with effort. Buster lunged forward and Big Brad crashed into the wall. He pushed hard off it and sent both of them over the desk onto the ground. Big Brad, with the momentum of his rush, landed on top. A superior position. He straddled Buster, raising a huge fist, just as I broke the Four Roses bottle over his head.

  Bourbon and glass splashed as he slumped forward. Somehow still moving.

  Buster found his feet and brought what was left of the PC down over him.

  Big Brad stopped moving.

  Breathing, but not much else. He looked like he’d sleep longer than my guy in the bathroom.

  Buster looked down sadly at the shattered whiskey bottle, rubbing his throat. “You couldn’t have hit him with a table?”

  “I’m so very sorry.” I was going through Devin’s pockets. He had a new iPhone. One of the big, fancy models with multiple camera lenses and facial scanning.

  “Why’d they wait?” asked Buster. “Why not jump us as soon as we walked in?”

  I had been thinking about that. “They couldn’t—they’re not in charge. Neither is Leo. A chain of command. They’re all the way at the bottom. They were waiting for someone else to give the okay. A shot-caller, probably off site. Someone higher up. Maybe that guy was waiting for someone else, too. All the way up the ladder.”

  “Who?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  * * *

  Buster cradled Devin’s chin and placed his big thumbs over Devin’s eyelids as I held the phone to its owner’s face. The screen unlocked and Buster let Devin spill back down. I opened the Messages app. The most recent text chain was with Leo. One unread message. I opened it.

  Tell me when it’s done.

  I found a little yellow emoji of a thumbs-up and sent it.

  Almost instantly I saw the blinking dots indicating a message being typed. I pictured Leo in his office, anxiously checking his phone, maybe ten times a minute, waiting for news. No one liked to be left in the dark.

  The phone beeped.

  Hillman will be

  Leo was eager to see how things had gone. He must have been typing fast and walking faster. He opened the door and stepped into the room less than a minute after he sent the text. By the time he had taken in the scene, he had plenty of time to think about the sawed-off shotgun Buster was pointing at his chest.

  Buster had been getting steadily more upset ever since San Jose. His face, sinister even during his sunniest moments, now conveyed a powerful ill will.

  “You’re going to start talking and stop moving,” Buster told Leo.

  Leo blanched, his adding machine eyes working overtime. Devin was holding his head, moaning in pain. Big Brad was still out cold. Through the bathroom door I had kicked open, a motionless outflung hand and arm were visible on the floor.

  Leo’s alligator smile was gone, replaced by a nervous grimace. “I can explain.”

  “Good,” I said. “You should.�
�

  “We didn’t have a choice. It was nothing personal. Honest.”

  “Who said you didn’t have a choice? Hillman?”

  Leo’s eyes worked around the room.

  “I really can’t tell you that.”

  Then he spun and dove for the door.

  He barely got his hand on the knob before Buster stopped him from leaving.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, when we were back in the Corvette with the wholesale car lot behind us, Buster would apologize for his fraying temper. His contrition, though genuine, didn’t mean much for Leo’s health. Buster had dropped the shotgun, seized Leo by the shoulders, and put his head through the door. The door was cheap painted plywood, but it was still a door. There had been a terrific cracking sound. I needed only to look at the door, now with a ragged head-size hole, to realize that Leo wouldn’t be saying much for a few days.

  “Buster,” I had said, exasperated. “We wanted to talk to him. You knew this.”

  Buster had shaken his head in frustration. “I know, I know! I’m doing better with my anger management skills, I really am. Everyone at work agrees.”

  * * *

  Leo’s iPhone had been an older model than Devin’s. Thumbprint instead of facial scan. Once his phone had been opened, I had changed the Auto-Lock setting to Never. Then I had found Hillman’s number and messaged:

  All set. They had something you’ll want to see.

  Now, back in the Corvette, Leo’s phone chimed with a new message.

  Come by the office. I’m there now.

  Which was a problem.

  I had no idea which office he was talking about. Or where. Leo clearly would have known but I couldn’t ask him. Meaning I couldn’t ask Hillman, either.

  With a mental crossing of my fingers, I went to the phone’s Contacts and pulled up Hillman. We were in luck. There was a phone number and, sure enough, an address: 319 Strawberry Drive, Salinas, CA 93906. I opened Maps on Leo’s phone and typed in the address.

  Maps said we were twenty-three minutes away. The way Buster was driving, I figured it was under twenty.

  “How’d you know?” Buster wondered as aging blacktop fled before the Corvette’s orange prow. “That something was wrong?”

  I watched the little blue dot—us—move smoothly along on the screen toward Hillman. “The whole thing felt off. Too many people were coming in, everyone so accommodating. You saw how busy everyone was, running around like ants with a million things to do. Why be so helpful? They didn’t know us. And then the bathroom.”

  Buster looked puzzled. “The bathroom?”

  “Those guys were slobs—why were they so careful to keep the bathroom door closed? Leo said he was taking a leak, but when he walked in, the seat was down, and it still was when he walked out. He wanted to give the guy in there some kind of here-we-go notice.”

  Buster laughed. “I think I got divorced at least once for not putting the seat down. You’re giving me terrible flashbacks to married life.” Lighting a Camel, he observed, “They weren’t very good at what they were supposed to be doing. Killing us, I mean. Total amateur hour.”

  “True,” I agreed, “but I bet they would have been great at fixing your engine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You see the grease all over their hands? Their clothes? Their line of work isn’t violence—it’s cars. It makes sense that auto thieves would work in groups of three, right? One to drive their car, another to drive the car they steal, and a third as a lookout. The three of them were probably a crew Leo recruited last-minute. Maybe they moonlight as mechanics and happened to be nearby. Remember, he barely had an hour to set this up—from when Mikey and Eddie called from San Jose, to when we arrived in Salinas.”

  Buster’s face darkened ominously. “I’m going to go back up to San Jose and stick that goddamn blowtorch up both their—”

  “I doubt they were in on it. I think they were actually trying to help,” I interjected hastily. Privately I thought there was a decent chance that the brothers had not hated the idea of sending Buster into hot water, but I kept the thought to myself. I didn’t want to rile him up. If he thought he had been sent into an ambush, at some point in the near future Mikey and Eddie wouldn’t be much more than spots on the floor.

  “So why go after us?” Buster wondered.

  I had been thinking about that, too. “It was something about that vehicle. The Mercedes belongs to someone important. Anyone looking for it was a red flag. Us calling around must have tripped some kind of wire, sent some kind of signal. Something that sent reverberations and ripples out through the stolen car world—until the signal reached the wrong person.”

  “You mean the right person.” Buster smiled like a tiger shark.

  “True,” I agreed. “For us, the right person. Whoever Hillman is, when he found out we were looking for the Mercedes, he must have either told Leo to stop us, or, more likely, gone one step up the chain of command and gotten the instructions. Same thing, either way. We need Hillman to keep going up the ladder.”

  Hillman had seemed eager to meet us.

  I was feeling equally eager to meet him.

  29

  Strawberry Drive was a lonely, two-lane road cutting through huge flat expanses of crop fields. It seemed forlorn, a road that didn’t appear to have any real interest in getting anywhere, flat and straight and dusty and unhurried. We passed a large green tractor plodding along the roadside, slow as a beetle. The driver turned to squint down at the low-slung orange rocket passing him, offering a slow wave with his trucker hat. As the road’s name suggested, we were surrounded by what looked like strawberry fields. No berries visible, just rows of leafy, green plants stretching endlessly to the horizon. A hot, arid afternoon. Buster worked the windshield wipers, erasing a layer of brown dust that had accumulated like snow. I saw a low, vague shape ahead of us and wondered if it was a heat mirage. As we approached, the shape came into focus: a pair of black buzzards, dipping their beaks into a red mess of roadkill.

  They eyed us without fear as we drew abreast; then, in the side mirror, I could see them behind us, beaks dipping and rising, rhythmic as oil pumping jacks.

  We almost missed the address. Number 319 was a featureless gravel driveway marked only by a slender numbered post. The driveway curved away, hiding from view. Power lines stretched overhead. A row of perched black crows stared down at us.

  We turned in. The crows watched us.

  When imagining Hillman’s headquarters, I hadn’t known what to picture—maybe some innocuous building in a bland office park. What we found was very different. Hillman’s office consisted of two mobile trailers spaced about thirty feet apart. The trailer farther from us had a jacked-up, tinted-out Ford F-150 parked in front. A dozen moving trucks were flocked off to one side like tired farm animals, painted with the colors and names of the big companies, U-Haul and Penske and Ryder. Some looked dustier than others. None looked new.

  “Wait in the car, okay?” I asked Buster.

  “Not a chance.” Buster didn’t look pleased. “Whoever’s in there just tried to kill us.”

  “And we’re going to find out why.”

  I told him what I was thinking.

  “We don’t even know how many people he’s with. And how will I know when to come in?” Buster wanted to know.

  “Easy. Listen for the gunshot,” I said. “Then give it a couple of minutes.”

  * * *

  I stepped out of the car into the hot sun. I could hear nothing except the whine of insects. Gravel dusted my boots as my feet crunched against the stones. A crow cawed, then another. The area in front of the trailer was set up as a crude outdoor gym. Dumbbells, a bench press, a heavy bag dangling from a tubular stand-alone frame. No sign of any people.

  The trailer door was unlocked. I opened it and walked down a short hallway, seeing a door ajar at the opposite end.

  I knocked on the door. “Hillman?”

  “Who�
��s that?”

  I stepped into the small room and saw Hillman for the first time. He had a shock of red hair and a flat, unfriendly face. I figured him to be about thirty. He sat at a desk covered with a phone and stacks of papers. His feet were up on the desk. He wore jeans and pointed cowboy boots and a black shirt that showed a triangle of hairy chest and a tangle of gold chains.

  He scowled. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Leo sent me.”

  “Leo sent you,” he repeated. His voice was quick and abrasive and there was something jittery in his manner. “Why?”

  “Because he couldn’t make it.”

  “What?” Hillman took a closer look at me. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by joke.”

  “Him sending you over here.” His eyes moved over my body and he suddenly grinned. “Like, are you gonna get in a star-spangled bikini and sing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’?”

  “I really don’t see that happening.”

  “Too bad. Bet you’d look great in a bikini.” He rubbed his nose. “So why are you here, exactly?” When he scratched his nose, I could see a tattoo across the back of his right hand. A fanged snake coiled around a five-pointed star.

  I was already wondering if he’d been doing coke, but Hillman put the question to rest by swinging his feet to the floor, revealing a pocket mirror covered by a pile of white powder. He used a razor blade to parse out two lines, then bent to the mirror with a rolled-up bill held to his nose. He sat up, sniffed, and held the bill to me. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Your loss. I get the best stuff. Straight over the border, totally uncut. Great shit.” He squinted at me. “Where’s Leo? What happened?”

  “Something unexpected came up. Very last-minute.”

  “You could give that lazy pansy a winning Megabucks ticket and he’d bitch about having to drive to the bank to cash it in.” Hillman shook his head in disgust. “He give you a message or something?”