One Got Away

by S. A. Lelchuk

  The startled crows had returned to the power line.

  They watched us in silence.

  “Goddamn Houdini over there.” Buster swore and took a long pull off the vodka bottle. “I thought we tied him up.”

  I saw a glint of metal in the gravel near Hillman’s dangling arms. “He had that razor blade he was doing coke with,” I realized. “He must have palmed it before we grabbed him. And a gun in his boot.”

  One of Hillman’s hands was bleeding, drops spilling onto the gravel. While we’d been talking he must have been hacking away at the tape and his fingers, all in one. No wonder he’d looked unwell.

  “I’ll drive you to a hospital,” I told Buster.

  He didn’t look happy. “No way. Not when things are getting interesting.”

  “Nonnegotiable. You need stitches.”

  “What about him?” Buster’s face showed exactly what he wanted to do about Hillman.

  I followed his gaze to Hillman, who was groaning and rubbing his head. “Leave him here. His two friends will get free eventually.”

  Buster didn’t look delighted but he shrugged in acquiescence. “More than the sneaky bastard deserves, but sure, him staying alive can be my good deed for the year.” Even with one arm I noticed that Buster had managed to light up a Camel. Between that and the vodka, he didn’t seem entirely miserable.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  I was watching the pair of trailers and the group of moving trucks. “Looking for answers.”

  31

  I hadn’t been in the second trailer yet so I started there. It reminded me of a college dorm. Several makeshift bedrooms full of bunk beds, a rec room with a TV and PlayStation, stacks of games and movies, an old refrigerator full of beer and soda. The trailer was rank with stale cigarette smoke. I pictured bored people killing time. Waiting, resting. Ready to get back on the move. Maybe a stopover for whoever drove the moving trucks parked outside.

  Or the kind of place where Coombs could have been.

  Except he wasn’t.

  I walked back to Hillman’s trailer. The two guys we had taped were in the hallway where we had left them, wriggling like fish and mumbling through the tape over their mouths. I ignored them and went back to search Hillman’s office. The office had nothing obviously useful that might lead to Coombs. Which didn’t shock me. Hillman didn’t work in the kind of business where writing things down and keeping careful records was beneficial to health or freedom. No telling when police might show up, waving a warrant. Or a rival organization, without one.

  Lately they’ve been spooked.

  Meaning even less chance he would have left a trail. No bags full of drugs or weapons, no secret compartments stuffed full of incriminating evidence. A corner of his desk held a stack of folders showing logistics routes. Like a trucking operation. Maps squiggled with red lines, following freeways up through California from the border before spreading out into a writhing red Gorgon’s head of tendrils through the southwest and beyond. There were regional maps, too. Smaller roads, smaller scale. More red squiggles, along with blue dots, here and there, over towns and cities, like a scattergram. I held onto the sheaf of maps and kept looking. A television in the corner, a stack of magazines, all porn and sports, a man’s jacket with nothing in the pockets.

  I did find a duffel bag under his desk. Full of cash. Banded stacks of hundreds. Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. I took the bag, unsatisfied.

  Nothing that could lead me to Coombs.

  No mention of Susan Johannessen.

  Nothing telling me what to do next.

  And the sun getting lower in the sky.

  I looked around again. The TV, I realized, was sitting on a black fireproof safe. Just a cube of black metal. Locked. I didn’t see keys anywhere in the office and we had already looked through Hillman’s pockets before we tied him up. But they had to be somewhere. If someone had a safe, they wanted to be able to open it. But no keys in any of the obvious spots—his pockets, the jacket, the desk. So where?

  I thought of something and walked outside to the F-150. Jacked up artificially high on studded tires, windows tinted almost opaque, a row of menacing spotlights on the roll bar. A real cowboy truck, proclaiming itself ready to take on any job, anywhere, anytime.

  The keys were in the ignition.

  A carabiner holding five different keys. One for the truck, another for a motorcycle, two more brass keys that I guessed were for the trailers and wherever Hillman lived, and a fifth, a silver key that was smaller than the others.

  The silver key opened the safe.

  Nothing exciting. A dozen more vehicle keys hung on hooks, each with a remote locking fob. For the moving trucks. I grabbed a few at random and went back out to open the trucks. They were all clean and empty, both cabs and backs. Identical to any rental fleet anywhere. The only other items in the safe were a stack of DVDs, each in a plastic case. Maybe twenty or thirty of them. I flipped through the DVDs. They all seemed to all be ’80s action movies, Willis, Stallone, Schwarzenegger.

  Action movies didn’t belong in a locked safe. I took the whole stack back into the first trailer. The rec room. I turned on the TV and popped a Die Hard disc into the PlayStation. I heard it boot up, start spinning and whirring. A menu appeared onscreen.

  I hit Play.

  I was watching porn. Low-budget amateur porn. Bad lighting, cheap set, no HD, shot from above by a single camera. No cuts or pans or sweeps. Just a motionless downward angle showing a man and a much younger woman, gasping and groaning as they rutted on a cheap-looking flowered bedspread. There was a small time stamp in the upper corner of the screen: 6-2-19.

  I pulled out the DVD and put in Rocky.

  Same thing. Same downward camera angle, same bad lighting, same amateur quality. Only the room and people were different. This time there were three people. An older man and two young women. Very young. I looked closer. The two of them looked like they could be in their teens. The man seemed to be having a great time. The women acted along half-heartedly, tossing their hair and moaning extravagantly. This time stamp showed 1-16-18.

  I tried three more DVDs. All similar variations of the first two, the same amateur camera, poor lighting, unedited production.

  The tapes didn’t feel like porn. Too much of a mismatch in pleasure. And too much physical discrepancy. The women were young and attractive but the men were neither. Not just older. They weren’t in great shape, flabby buttocks, sagging stomachs, their movements lacking even a modicum of grace or sexiness, showing no awareness of the camera. Even with the advent of free streaming, they didn’t appear to be the type that anyone would want to watch.

  There was something here. Just not Coombs.

  Where was he?

  I swept the DVDs into the duffel bag with the money and hauled everything outside. “Hospital time,” I told Buster.

  Hillman seemed to have woken up a bit. Still hanging upside down, between his face and fingers he was looking the worse for wear. “Can I come?” he mumbled. “I think you broke my jaw.” It sounded like, Ahh ffink yuh bruk mah jah.

  “Go call an ambulance.”

  He started to say something but was interrupted by a crow’s caw. Then another.

  I looked up at the row of black birds, comfortably settled on the power line.

  Another crow cawed.

  Buster and I looked at each other. Then we heard the engine. A moment later, tires against gravel. The engine was louder now. The crows watched with interest.

  “Oh, shit,” said Hillman. “Now you’ve done it.” It sounded like, Aahhh, shhhii, nuh yuhv dunneht.

  “Come on,” I said to Buster. We scrambled behind Hillman’s F-150 as a vehicle came into view.

  A black Mercedes G-Class.

  I looked at the duffel bag of cash that sat next to Hillman in the driveway. Neatly packed and zipped up. Not under lock and key, even though there had been room in the safe. As though waiting for som
eone to pick it up. A routine. A regular, appointed time. Like a Friday afternoon. End of the week, get the books clear, count things up, collect the week’s earnings, gear up for next week.

  The Mercedes rolled up the driveway and stopped, engine running. I could see a driver and a passenger. Impossible to tell if anyone was in the back.

  The driver’s door opened.

  A man got out and looked around, confused.

  He was someone I recognized. Big, powerful build, jeans, combat boots, small shark eyes set into a rough face. One of the bodyguards from the Cypress. Not the one with the hatchet, but the other. He took in Hillman, hanging upside down next to the duffel bag, and without a word reached into the vehicle. I could hear Hillman mumbling something unintelligible.

  When the bodyguard turned back he was holding an assault rifle. A 30-round banana clip jutted out like a wasp’s stinger. He started to bring the rifle up in our general direction as Buster kneeled, sighted the stubby sawed-off as best he could, and fired the first barrel.

  From a sufficiently short distance, and from a target’s point of view, shotguns were the absolute worst. Not even a machine gun was so destructive. The bodyguard staggered back as if struck in the chest by a giant fist, the rifle falling to the ground.

  Buster stood and stepped forward, the sawed-off looking like a pistol in his huge hand, and fired the second barrel one-handed before the bodyguard could even fall.

  Most of the man’s head disappeared. There were metallic pings as stray buckshot peppered the Mercedes.

  I saw a flurry of motion from within. The passenger frantically scrambling over the console to the driver’s seat.

  I ran for the open door.

  Whoever was inside was panicking. If he hadn’t been, his first action would have been to get the door shut and locked, and then go for the driver’s seat.

  He saw me coming. Changed his mind. His hand scrabbled at the door.

  A second mistake.

  Now he was trying and failing at two different, contradictory actions.

  I got my hand on the door handle just as he tried to pull it shut from inside. I was on my feet and had leverage. The passenger wasn’t, and didn’t. No contest.

  My other hand held my stun gun.

  I leaned in, jammed the twin pincers into the soft flesh of his hand, and pressed the switch. He screamed in pain and stopped trying to do anything. I got a hand on his collar and jerked him out of the Mercedes and down into the gravel.

  I leaned in and pressed the engine button. The engine died.

  I looked down at the passenger.

  “Hi, Albert,” I said. “It’s good to see you again.”

  32

  Albert didn’t look like it was good to see me again.

  He had a seventy-five-thousand-volt excuse. Hillman’s vodka was really coming in handy. I tilted some into his mouth. The accountant choked and sputtered, vodka dribbling down his chin. He was wearing another one of his boxy, dated suits. This one was herringbone beige with a pistachio green tie squashed into a button-down collar. He looked like he should have retired to Miami by 1970 at the absolute latest.

  “Let’s not give him the whole bottle,” suggested Buster. “Save some for the people who actually appreciate a drink.”

  Albert looked up at us, bewildered and frightened. “Who are you?”

  The afternoon was getting later. I didn’t have time to waste. “You’re going to take me to Coombs. That’s all you need to care about.”

  “He has nothing to do with me. I only handle numbers, that’s my only role.” He blinked owlishly through his glasses, noticing Hillman, then growing paler as he saw his bodyguard lying in a growing pool of blood. High above in the sky several black shapes circled, much higher than the crows flew. Buzzards. They knew what was down here.

  “I don’t want trouble,” Albert said. He licked his lips, eyes darting. “Please.”

  “You’re going to take us to Coombs,” I said. “Or we’ll tape you right next to Hillman, here.”

  Hillman moaned something unintelligible. One of the buzzards swooped lower, still circling. The sun was declining and the huge bird wheeled in stark silhouette against the darkening sky.

  Buster nodded up at it. “I hear that if you’re alive, they go for the eyes first.”

  Albert looked up at the circling bird. He looked at Buster, then Hillman, then his bodyguard, and finally back to me.

  He started to say something.

  I cut him off. “Save it. We’re going to talk in the car.”

  Before we left, we took Hillman down, re-taped his hands, and carried him inside the trailer to join his friends on the floor. He was on the ladder, too. Just like Leo had been. One rung up, but still not calling the shots. Not making the big decisions. Tempting as it was, I didn’t want to leave him dangling for the buzzards.

  I also didn’t want him warning anyone we were on our way.

  Albert and I climbed into the Mercedes. Buster followed in the Corvette. As I closed my door I could hear the crows, agitated by all the commotion. Their cawing sounded urgent and displeased, as if they knew that things in the world were bad, and maybe getting worse.

  * * *

  We stopped just before the entrance to an urgent care clinic that we found back the way we’d come. “You going to be okay?” I asked Buster.

  “Could Elvis sell records?” He had his usual pirate grin, but his eyes showed concern. “I’m not worried about me. Let me come with you. This is a scratch. My cat’s done worse.”

  I squeezed his good shoulder. “Go get stitched up. I’ll be fine.” I could see blood soaking through the makeshift bandage on his arm.

  “You sure?”

  “I’ll call you soon,” I promised.

  “Okay, but I don’t like it,” he grumbled. “Not at all. Can’t you wait until I’m out?”

  I shook my head. “No time. I’ll be okay,” I reassured him.

  He looked past me to Albert. “If you drag her into hot water, I’ll boil you alive.”

  “That’s not fair! She’s dragging me into hot water,” Albert protested.

  Buster didn’t bother to answer. Just gunned the Corvette in the direction of the parking lot. I watched the fierce, loud car with affection. Maybe the doctors would call the police when they saw the gunshot, but even if they did I wasn’t very worried. Buster had been shot before. He had his just-cleaning-my-gun story down pat.

  I turned to Albert. “Let’s go find Coombs before it’s too late.”

  * * *

  From the clinic we got back on a main road. The Mercedes rode high up, giving us a commanding presence. I tried to relax, deep, slow breaths, expelling the stale adrenaline from the afternoon. The human body wasn’t designed to operate at a continuous go-go-go. A Dylan song came on the radio.

  “Please don’t do this,” said Albert. His hands were trembling on the wheel.

  I didn’t answer. The song had opened up a memory. My mother sitting next to me at the breakfast table, strumming an acoustic guitar. That was all. All I could remember. I must have been three or four. I wondered if the rest of the memory was there, somewhere, or gone forever. I turned the moment around in my mind, hungering for more. Had she been singing to me? She had been smiling. Happy. I was sure of that much.

  Albert’s voice wormed into my mind. “Don’t do this. For your own sake.”

  I put the memory away. It was mine. I wouldn’t let this man get near it.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he urged. “You don’t know these people.”

  “Everyone seems to be telling me that.”

  “It’s no joke.” His voice was strained and fearful. “You’ll get us both killed. Forget about Coombs. He is a dead man—but you don’t have to be. Is it money you want? I can give you money. I can give you a lot.”

  “What does Mr. Z do, exactly?” I asked.

  Albert shook his head quickly. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Pull over.” My voice
was sharp. He heard my tone and eased the Mercedes onto the shoulder. Traffic flashed by. I held the stun gun up. “You need to do a better job of answering my questions.”

  There was a small amount of defiance in his voice. “You can’t kill me. Only I can take you to Coombs. You know this is true.”

  I pressed the switch on the stun gun and it came to life, the blue arc of electricity crackling between the scorpion-stinger points. “In case you forgot, there’s a whole lot of room between dead and feeling like a daisy.”

  The stun gun was two inches from his cheek. The electricity crackled and spat.

  He flinched away. “Please!”

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged. “I can’t kill you. In fact, I don’t even want to. But hurt you? That can happen all day long. Tell me about Mr. Z.”

  Albert swallowed, sweat beading his forehead. “He leads an Organization that is involved in various illicit activities.”

  “Don’t get too specific. My God.”

  He answered in little snippets, his sentences shorn of human subjects, as though afraid he was being recorded. “Guns go south over the border. Narcotics come up, north.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Some loans are made within the community, some used goods are resold, some businesses receive protection against threats.”

  Loan-sharking. Fencing. Extortion.

  “Keep driving. What else? How about the women?”

  He cast a nervous glance my way as he picked up speed again. “Women?”

  “Come on.” I turned the radio off. “Your Organization is involved in sex trafficking. What do you have, brothels? Massage parlors? Where?”

  Albert swallowed again. “This is part of the business, yes. There’s a network of places throughout the state.”

  I remembered the wriggling, Gorgon’s head of red lines, radiating across the map of the southwestern U.S. and beyond. The scattergram of blue dots.