by Nick Petrie
Thinking that Lewis was right again.
“Actually,” Peter said, “somebody just stole my truck.”
The man’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t say. I’m sorry to hear that.” He put his hand to his chest. “My name’s Robert Kingston. You don’t sound like you’re from around here. Where’re you from?”
“Wisconsin.”
“You don’t mind my saying, you’re a little pale for the neighborhood.” Kingston slid over to make room on the black leather seat. He wore a stepped-up version of business casual, a maroon polo shirt over dark dress pants and pointy-toed alligator-skin boots. “C’mon up in here. I’ll get you where you need to go.”
Kingston had a half-moon scar on his cheek that got longer as his smile got wider. He wasn’t a big man, but he had a charismatic density that exerted a certain kind of gravitational pull. Like a black hole.
Peter felt the first drops of rain on the back of his neck.
He looked farther into the car. A driver loomed large behind the wheel, facing forward. Another person sat in the front passenger seat, mostly hidden by the door column and the deeply tinted window.
He thought about Wanda, at home, asleep on her couch. He remembered what Gantry, the detective, had said about whoever had driven the dump truck into her living room. That they weren’t going away until they got what they wanted. He felt the static crackle and spark.
He remembered how the Texaco clerk, Fat Rudy, had kept glancing out the window while he talked to Peter. How the black Mercedes had headed right for him, as if it had been aimed.
The rain began to fall harder. Kingston’s smile got wider.
Peter smiled back. Alive, alive, I am alive.
“Thanks,” he said. “I could definitely use a lift.”
And climbed into the car.
* * *
• • •
The interior smelled like leather conditioner and stain remover. When the door closed, the sound of the birds went silent. Rain came down harder on the windshield, but without a sound.
Kingston said, “Brody, park us somewhere legal.”
The big driver had a shaved head that merged seamlessly with the thickest neck Peter had ever seen. He wore a black track jacket. When he reached forward to put the Mercedes into gear, his jacket tightened on his rounded back. Peter saw two crossed straps outlined under the thin fabric.
Without a word, Brody expertly goosed the gas, threaded the big car through the light poles, thumped down the curb, made the tight right turn around the corner, then back into the Texaco, where he pulled beside the little convenience store.
From the way the leading front wheel sank as it turned the corner and the rear springs bounced off the curb, Peter knew the Mercedes was armored, and expensively so. Which was also why it was so quiet inside.
He could only think of one reason Robert Kingston would have an armored SUV.
But Peter had known as much before he’d climbed inside.
The armor just told him how much money Kingston had, and how many enemies.
“Tell me,” said Kingston, tapping his pointed toes on the floor. “What kind of truck was it? Maybe we can get it back for you.”
“A green Chevy pickup,” said Peter. “With a wood cargo box built onto the back.” He figured they’d already have that information from Fat Rudy.
The front passenger turned toward Peter. A woman, mid-thirties, with a narrow, empty face and her hair spiked into sharp twists. Her wrinkled red-and-white seersucker jacket was pale against her brown skin. Where the jacket sagged open, Peter saw a black checkered pistol grip below her arm, snug against her tight white tank top. “What’d he look like, that jacker? How old? What kind of clothes?”
Kingston shot the woman passenger a cautionary look.
“See, this is our neighborhood,” he said. “We take this kind of thing personally. The police don’t do much for us here, so we have to do for ourselves, if you take my meaning. Why we want to find the person who took your truck, keep our neighborhood safe.”
“Is that why your people have guns? You’re the neighborhood watch?”
Kingston flashed his teeth again, this time with genuine humor and a kind of recognition.
“Something like that.” He looked Peter up and down, getting a better look at the faded carpenter pants worn through at the knees, the paint-spattered T-shirt. Peter’s long ropy muscles, big hands on bony wrists. “What are you, exactly?”
“That’s a good question,” Peter said. “I’m kind of between jobs right now.”
Kingston snorted, then took out a purple silk handkerchief and blew his nose. “You got balls.” He tucked the handkerchief away. “You’re not scared of me, even though you should be. So you think you’re a tough guy. You a fighter?”
“Sometimes,” Peter said pleasantly. “When I have to be.”
“Why don’t you tell us about the guy who took your truck?”
“I’ll make you a deal,” said Peter. “You get me where I need to go, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“How do I know you’ll tell me the truth?”
“Why would I lie? The bastard stole my truck. If you want him for some other reason, why would I care? I just want my truck back. Can you promise me that?”
“I make no guarantee you’ll get it back.” Kingston’s toes went tappity-tap. “Jacker’s as likely to wreck it as anything. But if I find it, and it’ll still drive, I’ll leave it here at the Texaco.”
Peter didn’t believe him for a minute. And the static was flaring up inside this padded car with its tinted windows. None of it mattered. What mattered was that they could get him closer to Wanda’s, and what he’d set out to find that morning.
“I can live with that,” he said, and put out his hand. “Drop me on Ayers past Vollintine.”
Kingston shook. “Deal,” he said. “We’ll talk on the way. Brody?”
The armored Mercedes rolled forward.
Before Brody turned left onto the road, Peter saw the kid’s boxy red car, abandoned on the street. Visible from the window of the Texaco.
So they didn’t know the kid, but they knew the car.
Fat Rudy had seen the car and had called Kingston.
Who’d come on the double in his armored SUV.
The kid must have done something pretty bad to have these people coming so hard on his heels.
Peter pictured his face, that sheen of sweat and desperation, but cool despite all that. Calm and capable and even funny. He reminded Peter of somebody.
“Your turn,” said Kingston, still tapping his feet like they had a mind of their own. “Tell me about this jacker.”
Peter thought of what Fat Rudy might have seen on the monitors. “He was black, maybe early twenties. Frameless glasses and a black Detroit Tigers T-shirt. And had some muscle, like he worked out.”
Pretty much the opposite of the kid who’d taken Peter’s truck and phone and wallet.
The woman in the seersucker jacket glanced at Kingston and shook her head. “Light skinned or dark?”
“About like you.”
Kingston frowned. “Hair?”
“Short. Nothing fancy.”
“He had a gun,” the woman said. “What kind?”
“A black revolver, brand-new. He looked pretty comfortable with it. I wasn’t going to argue.”
“But he took his time,” Kingston said. “Maybe he talked to you? What’d he say?”
Now Peter knew Fat Rudy had seen at least some of it on the security cameras. Peter looked out the windshield. He compared the turns the driver had made with the map in his head. They were headed in the right direction. It wouldn’t be far now.
“He asked about the truck,” said Peter. “What kind of shape it was in. How far it would go on a tank of gas. I got the impression he was headed out of
town. He was worried about it breaking down on him.”
“And?”
“All the work I’ve done on it?” Peter shook his head. “That truck will run forever.”
“Something else,” said Kingston. “He was carrying some kind of sack.”
Now he knew what Kingston and his people were chasing. So they knew what it was already.
“A black plastic garbage bag,” he said. “Not very full, but it kind of clanked when he set it down.”
The woman and Kingston looked at each other.
Peter said, “What did he do, anyway?”
Kingston’s face was grim. “Took something didn’t belong to him.”
They turned onto Ayers and passed Vollintine, four and a half blocks from Wanda’s house. It was bad enough that somebody had driven a dump truck into her living room, Peter didn’t want to lead Kingston right to her door, too. He figured these three were more dangerous than the dump truck driver. Kingston wouldn’t deliver any kind of warning. He’d just take what he wanted.
Brody slowed. Kingston said, “Where we dropping you?”
Peter heard a staccato burp. Then another, longer. It was oddly quiet through the heavy armored glass, but Peter would know that sound anywhere. It would be loud as hell once he got out of the car.
He said, “Brody, step on it, now. Then stop hard at the corner of Joseph Place.”
* * *
• • •
Brody rotated his head to catch Kingston’s eye. Kingston nodded, and Brody hit the gas.
The noise got louder. Approaching Joseph, Brody slowed to a crawl. Through the rain-spattered windshield, Peter could see red flashes lancing out of the side of an old station wagon halfway down the block.
Wanda’s block.
The woman peered out the windshield. “What the hell. Is that a machine gun?”
Brody stopped the car.
Kingston opened his mouth to give an order.
Peter reached across the seatback, clamped his big right hand around the woman’s forehead, and yanked her toward him and into the headrest.
She bucked hard, making a sound deep in her throat, but he held her head tight against the cushioned leather while he used his free hand to pull the pistol from the holster under her left arm.
Kingston leaned back against his door. “Brody, deal with this.”
Brody put the Mercedes in park.
With the gun now in his left hand, Peter brought that arm around and trapped her face inside his inner elbow while he dipped his right hand under her right armpit. She clawed at his forearm and tried to bite his bicep. He found a spare magazine in a padded pocket and plucked it free, trying not to touch her breast, but was not entirely successful.
When he released her and reached for the door handle, she turned to come at him over the seatback. “You fuck,” she said, her eyes alive for the first time.
Brody slipped one meaty hand into his track suit and reached his other long arm toward Peter. Who held the woman’s gun up and pushed open the door with his right elbow. “Everybody stop moving. Don’t make me shoot you.”
Kingston’s face was torqued with fury. “In my own damn Mercedes?”
“Sorry,” said Peter, stepping onto the cracked pavement. “Nothing personal. I owe you one.”
Then he sprinted through the rain toward Wanda’s house, thinking as he did that it was probably a mistake to leave Kingston and the others alive.
It would come back to bite him, he knew.
Right now, however, he had a much bigger problem.
14
Outside, the thump thump thump of the machine gun was very loud, even with the dampening quality of the rain. The low, boxy station wagon stood in the street just this side of Wanda’s house, with the barrel resting on the windowsill and the gunner crouched out of sight in the back seat.
He sprayed rounds down the exposed side of the building. Windows shattered and brick shrapnel flew into the air. When he aimed his fire back toward the front of the house, the thumping of the gun was joined by a whangwhangwhang as the bullets hit the back of the dump truck.
Peter had seen sustained machine-gun fire blast holes through cinder block and concrete. Already the brick was shot away entirely in several places.
If Wanda hadn’t jumped out the back window and fled through the yard, Peter hoped she’d thought to run to the living room and slide down into the crawl space. Sheltering in front of the dump truck’s engine block was the smartest thing she could do.
If she was still alive.
If the gunman didn’t get out of his car and go into the house after her.
Peter ran half-bent along the curb strip, using parked cars for concealment. The station wagon was from the late sixties, long and rectangular, painted a faded canary yellow. Heavy Detroit steel, not modern curved plastic. He still couldn’t see the gunner, but now he could see another person in the front passenger seat, gesticulating wildly.
Peter looked back the way he’d come, but the Mercedes was gone.
Probably not for long.
Ten yards away, he stopped beside a little hatchback to check the pistol he’d taken from the woman. It was a black Glock 19, a smaller nine-mil weapon. It definitely wasn’t the M4 carbine he’d carried in Iraq, but she’d picked the larger-capacity magazines, and they were fully loaded.
It would have to do. Thirty rounds against a machine gun that was probably belt-fed, given that the gunner hadn’t seemed to stop to reload yet. It was either a 249 SAW or, from the sound of it, the beefier 240 Bravo, although Peter had no idea how an asshole in a station wagon got hold of a serious weapon used by heavy infantry or mounted on tanks and aircraft. No telling what else they had, either. Hell, if they had a belt-fed machine gun, they could have hand grenades.
Whereas Peter had no armored vest and no cover to speak of. His Dumpster hadn’t showed up yet. That heavy steel box would have been nice. Even the modest pile of lumber he’d ordered would have stopped rounds for a few minutes, unlike the tin-can hatchback he was hiding behind.
He wasn’t going to win a pitched battle against a machine gun. His best hope was to put some rounds through the seatback into that invisible gunner.
Aggression and surprise were his only real assets.
Well, hell. No time like the present.
He took a deep breath, then slipped around the hatchback, the pistol raised in his left hand, the butt cupped in his right. As he approached the station wagon, he began to fire deliberately through its rear window and into the seatback. Just foam and springs and a thin metal frame, no match for the Glock.
The window glass starred and fell, and the seatback puffed with the impacts, but the machine gun didn’t stop firing. Peter adjusted his fire lower, thinking the man was lying flat on the seat, or crouched into the wheel well. But it made no difference. The gunner didn’t even seem to notice him, just kept spraying the house with high-velocity rounds.
The figure in the front passenger seat definitely noticed, however. He rose with some kind of hand cannon and fired wildly in Peter’s direction. Peter dropped down under shards of glass exploding outward. Then the hand cannon went silent and the passenger vanished from sight, but the machine gun kept on with its heavy thump thump thump.
Crouched on the street in the riotous noise, Peter dropped the empty mag and reloaded, then rose and stepped closer, placing his shots more carefully now. He saw something odd. Each round made two puffs in the seatback. He looked over the seatback and saw a rust-red line, then another behind the front seat. He fired high and saw a silver mark in the rusty red behind the front seat. It didn’t make any sense.
He went to his left, toward the driver’s side, and saw another line of rusty red at the door. And he knew what they’d done, whoever they were.
The rusty red was old steel plate, four pieces welded or clamped or wedged
into a rectangular box.
They’d made an armored firing position for the back seat of the old station wagon.
The Glock’s nine-mil rounds weren’t penetrating, they were bouncing off.
Peter circled closer, trying to get an angle at the gunner over the steel plate. He saw a sudden flurry of movement inside the car, then the engine roared.
Peter stepped in, emptying the magazine, the slide locking back.
As the yellow station wagon chunked into gear and lurched forward, the gunner popped his head up above the armor.
Either his face was painted blue, or he wore some kind of skin-tight mask. With pointed teeth.
Then the old car was gone.
PART 3
15
Albert Burkitts had gone to work that morning like nothing had happened.
Like he hadn’t picked up Judah Lee at that biker bar outside Byhalia. Like he hadn’t driven them both into Memphis after midnight, watched his brother climb the fence at a construction yard, and break down the gate with a big black ten-wheel Kenworth.
Albert had followed in his car, then waited at the curb with his lights off and his windows down, and listened to that twelve-cylinder engine wind up high as the truck accelerated through the stop sign and down two city blocks toward the house.
Part of him had been thrilled to death, another part sick to his stomach.
A third part, maybe the biggest part, hoping Judah Lee would never come back.
Because if he did, there was no stopping him, not Judah Lee, not until it was done. Albert was too old and too crippled up. Albert didn’t even know why he’d helped, not really.
There were reasons, but reasons were easy to come by. Albert had known better, or he should have.
The sound of the crash was louder than seemed possible, louder than anything else in that whole big city. Then the wait that seemed longer than it could possibly be, until Judah Lee yanked open the door and pulled himself into the passenger seat. The car settled on its springs, the little Ford Fiesta not designed for the size of Albert’s little brother.