Airbag Scars

by Jim Heskett

  “That sounds kinda familiar,” she said.

  “I had a dream that was almost exactly like that. There’s things coming down a conveyor belt, and I’ve got to do something with them, like put them in a box or something, but it’s all moving too fast and I’m freaking out because I can’t fill up the box quickly enough. What do you think that means?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Dreams don’t mean anything. It’s your brain going to the bathroom. Some people put a lot of stock in interpreting dreams and finding some deep-seeded psychological significance in there, but it’s all make-believe. Your head is like a file cabinet, and while you sleep, your brain moves files around, organizing things, and that’s what makes up your dreams. Just a big mish-mash of memories and made up crap. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Made perfect sense. He liked the no-nonsense way she talked.

  The waitress came by and Donovan ordered his third beer. He glanced at Hayden, but she either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He was so used to the way Caitlin always counted his drinks whenever they went out for a meal.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I live on the other side of a wall from you, but I know so little about you.”

  She smiled. “What do you know about me?”

  “I know that you’re a Case Manager. I know that you apparently hate your job.”

  “I don’t exactly hate it,” she said. “Some of my clients are amazing to work with. It’s all the bureaucratic red tape stuff. That’s what sucks.”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to say,” he said. She gave a little chuckle, and he sensed the conversation beginning to veer back under his control. “I saw those race bibs when I helped you into your apartment that night. So you must be a runner.”

  “I ran almost every night,” she said, “before my stupid ankle injury.”

  Perfect. He was leading her right where he wanted to go. “What happened that night, when you hurt yourself?”

  She wrinkled her nose and drummed her fingers on the patio table for a few seconds before answering. “I was jogging, got spun around, next thing I know, I was on my ass and waking up, and one of my shoes was gone. Maybe it was an unlucky landing off a curb, or maybe some asshole on a bike clipped me. Five minutes or so before and after are total blank spots, so I have no idea.”

  He had to conceal a smile. Unbelievable that she hadn’t put it together it yet. “I’d want to figure out exactly what happened.”

  She shrugged. “What do I care? It’s not like it would change what happened. I still got my ankle messed up and missed two week’s worth of races. I’m only now feeling like I can run again.”

  “So you never did any kind of research about it?”

  She tilted her head, observing him.

  He needed to be careful. She wasn’t stupid, and suspicion might lead to inquiry. Inquiry could lead to discovery, and then all his plans would crumble to dust. He wanted her curious and vulnerable, but not finding answers.

  At least, not until he’d led her on the path he wanted.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” she said. “No, I didn’t do any research. Maybe I should have. Maybe if it was because of a pothole, I could sue the city and take an extended vacation. That would be nice.”

  “Yes,” he said, forking a fresh mouthful of his cilantro-sodden meal. “That would be nice.”

  He checked his watch. He had to run an errand in about two hours, but if this lunch kept progressing well, he had enough time to take Hayden back to his apartment and fuck her silly. But when he looked up, she was clutching her purse to her chest.

  “Sorry, but I have to go,” she said. “My boss is making me go to this meditation class, to calm my nerves or something like that.”

  “Meditation?” he said, and then in a flash of inspiration, he saw a whole new avenue open up that would speed up his timetable from months to weeks. It was almost too perfect. “You don’t need meditation, you need release.”

  “Release?”

  He paused, realizing he may have been too impulsive. He thought it over for a few seconds, but decided it was worth the risk.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Forget all that sitting-on-a-mat stuff. You need to feel powerful. In control. It’s the only thing that helps me.”

  She took off her sunglasses. “Okay, I’ll bite. What are you talking about?”

  “Gun range. I know a great one nearby, and I promise you’ll feel a million times better after you squeeze off a few rounds.”

  While she was considering it, he wrote the address of the range Micah had been going to on his napkin, then slid it across to her. This would be an interesting experiment.

  She took the napkin and slipped it into her purse. “Gun range,” she mused.

  Chapter Seventeen

  MICAH SAT in his car outside Glazer’s Boxing gym in Five Points, a shabby building not far from the industrial area where he’d discovered the site of the telephone pole accident. Only a few blocks from the strip club and the gun range, too.

  He forced himself to reach for the door and open it. His mouth felt dry and sour, and his palms began to sweat. For a moment he wished he’d brought Frank with him, in case he found trouble inside. But a part of him felt dirty for involving Frank in the missing shoe business, even though Micah couldn’t pinpoint why.

  It was time to learn the truth and face the consequences, whatever those may be.

  He walked to the front door, and as he opened it, he was smacked in the face with the odor of sweat and grime. The boxing gym was a dirty warehouse with tall ceilings, yellowing walls, and a cluster of four boxing rings in the center. Around the edges, a few dozen boxers in gear worked pads and heavy bags. The room rumbled with motion and sound, which echoed and amplified across the massive space. That sweat stink brought him right back to a particular gym in Oklahoma City, and those early mornings with his best friend, slamming medicine balls against tattered mats.

  He took the paper from his pocket. Edgar Zimmerle. Tall, buzz-cut hair. About fifty-five years old. Birthmark from his forehead to the middle of his left eyebrow. Can’t miss it.

  On the one hand, maybe he shouldn’t be trusting this note. Who knows where it came from. But, on the other hand, if there was a chance of finding out the truth, he had to take it. That little flicker of possibility was more powerful than anything he’d had so far.

  Micah scanned the people, and there were lots of tall guys with buzzed hair lacing up gloves, running wind sprints, pummeling speed bags, and tossing medicine balls into the air. Much nicer than the ones Micah had ever used. The medicine ball thumps cracked and echoed across the gym, not as loud as gunshots at the range, but a bit unsettling anyway. Too many memories.

  He walked between the rings, and bumped into a guy carrying a bucket of some frothy liquid that splashed onto the floor.

  “Goddamn it,” the guy said. “Watch where you’re going, you clumsy shit.”

  Micah licked his lips. He didn’t know whether to apologize or backhand the guy for calling him clumsy. “Do you know Edgar? Edgar Zimmerle?”

  The liquid carrier jerked his thumb toward the back wall of the room. “Eddie’s back there. I sure hope you ain’t his long-lost kid or something. He ain’t too big on paternity suits.”

  “Nope, just looking for him.”

  “Suit yourself,” the guy said as he walked past Micah, toward the boxing rings.

  Micah squinted to inventory the men along the back wall. There were a few, and one of them fit the description. He was wiping a rag across a patch of wall, pausing every few seconds to spit before scrubbing in a circular pattern.

  Micah’s Adam's apple started to vibrate as he approached the man. The possibility of what he might learn weighed on him. “Excuse me, are you Eddie?”

  Without turning around, the man said, “who wants to know?”

  The man’s tone irritated him, but Micah reminded himself that he needed something from this guy. “My name is Micah Reed.”

  Eddie straight
ened up and turned to face him. He smiled, but only part of his face lifted. The other half stayed neutral, maybe damaged from a stroke. “What of it?”

  This was definitely the guy, just as the note had predicted. The birthmark on his forehead sliced the eyebrow into two round patches of fur. “A few weeks ago, there was an accident. A car crash. I was there, and as I hear it, you saw the whole thing. I wanted to ask you some questions about that night.”

  Eddie wiped his hands on the same rag he’d been using to clean the wall. “Oh yeah, buddy, I seen the whole thing. You drive a black Honda Accord?”

  Micah nodded, suddenly feeling nauseous. He spread his feet apart to maintain his balance.

  “You came tearing up the street, the one by the gas station that ain’t there no more. You were screaming along, swerving all over the place. Then you hopped the curb, slammed into the telephone pole, and that was it. Lights out.”

  “That’s all you saw? You didn’t see anyone else, like maybe a woman standing there?”

  Eddie jerked his head back. “Standing there? You’d have to be a lunatic to hang out in this neighborhood after the sun sets. Even the gang-bangers don’t go walking around here at night.”

  Micah’s face fell. “So, you didn’t see anyone but me.”

  “Look, asshole, I told you what I saw. You want to question me, you’re going to test my patience, and I used all that up already today.”

  Micah didn’t back down from this guy’s show-boating. The old Micah would have given him a quick chop to the left ear to make him turn his head so Micah could jab him with his powerful right. But that violence wouldn’t gain him anything. And if the rest of these boxers took offense to someone breaking Eddie’s face, Micah would be outnumbered.

  “If that’s what you saw, that’s what you saw. I’ll let you get back to… whatever it is you’re doing here, Eddie.”

  Eddie smiled wide enough with half his face to display a set of mostly-missing teeth, and there was something in it that bothered Micah. “You bet, buddy. Anything I can do to help out a man in need. Now leave me alone, cuz I got work to do.”

  Micah reached out to shake and gripped Eddie’s filthy but powerful hand, which was like shaking with a pair of pliers. Micah had to squeeze back at double strength so his knuckles wouldn’t crumble.

  He turned and walked back through the gym, fingering Boba Fett in his pocket and feeling more confused than ever. If it really was a single-car accident and no one else was there, how in the world did that shoe get stuck in his bumper? Did it happen at some other point during the evening? The shoe had been wedged up in there, not like something that could have been on the road and accidentally inserted itself like tires collecting rocks from the pavement.

  Should he trust anything he learned here today?

  None of this made any sense.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MICAH STOOD near the homeless shelter, mixed in with a dozen men and women napping next to shopping carts and rifling through collections of trash on the sidewalk. One or two of his homeless companions said hello and gave him a smile, but most of them tended to their own business.

  And that was fine with Micah, because he wasn’t here to make friends. He was here to watch the bouncer from the Pink Door strip club who’d been skulking up and down the street, looking around, avoiding eye contact and generally acting sketchy. Micah had a suspicion that maybe today was the day they were going to move Roland Templeton from the apartments above to some other safe house. Or, maybe he’d already been moved.

  Micah was also starting to think that some piece of evidence in this area would lead him to the mysterious shoe owner. The Pink Door, the accident site, the boxing gym… they were all too close and too many strange coincidences had happened.

  The bouncer crossed the street and walked toward the gun range, and Micah sunk back to stay hidden. He was wearing a battered leather jacket he’d picked up at an Army Surplus this morning, which made him blend in smoothly with the homeless. His car was parked at the gun range’s parking lot, and he didn’t know if the bouncer would know his car on sight.

  The bouncer dipped in between cars, looking at license plates, checking underneath them. Definitely acting weird, but with no clear goal that Micah could figure.

  The bouncer stopped at Micah’s car, and Micah’s heart leaped into his throat. Maybe they did know his car. He knew that coming back here to the gun range as often as he did was playing with fire, but he liked the adrenaline. Liked knowing that those bouncers would try to kick his ass if they laid eyes on him. And, he got a thrill from the fact that they didn’t seem to have the first clue how often he’d been here.

  But then, after a few seconds, the bouncer moved on to the next car, and he ducked down and took something from inside the exhaust pipe. Micah didn’t get a good look at it, but whatever it was, the bouncer shoved it in his pocket without a second look. Then he strode out of the lot and down the street, walking in the direction of the boxing gym. He didn’t glance around as much as he did before, and kept his eyes forward, trying to seem inconspicuous.

  Micah abandoned his hiding spot at the homeless shelter and started following the bouncer. Doing so without being noticed turned out to be tricky, because the bouncer stopped every couple minutes to look around and retrace his steps. This wasn’t the same guy Micah had fought outside the apartments before, but he supposed they might have all been made aware of Micah’s description.

  So Micah made use of telephone poles and newspaper stands to hide, and he kept his Broncos cap pulled low and his jacket collar up, which worked out fine since the weather today had taken a turn south. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the pregnant clouds looked gray enough to dump at any minute.

  They rounded a street corner and Micah noticed the faded sign for Glazer’s boxing gym up ahead. He already doubted the things punch-drunk Eddie from the gym had told him. If the gym was tied to this bouncer or the Pink Door somehow, that would only confirm his suspicions.

  But the bouncer didn’t go into the boxing gym, he set his sights on a building next to it. Some dilapidated brick shack, three stories tall with bars on the windows, at least the ones that weren’t broken. No sign outside the building, but it looked like apartments.

  The bouncer yanked back a heavy screen door, then threw his shoulder against the front door a few times until it broke in. With one last look around the street, he disappeared inside.

  Micah put a hand in his pocket to feel the tiny plastic severed head of Boba Fett. “Okay, Boba, here’s where you tell me I need to stay away from this guy. Whatever he’s doing in there, tell me it would be a terrible idea for me to follow him in there.”

  And even though Micah commanded Boba Fett to be the voice of reason, his feet kept moving him toward the building. He had no gun, no knife, and no handcuffs. He had no reason to charge blindly into a building that looked like a dangerous place to go.

  But above all, Micah had a thirst for answers, since he’d had none at all yet. Only kept finding more questions, more dead ends, more frustration.

  He pulled on the reinforced screen door, and a massive rusted spring made the door creak and he had to leverage both hands to wrench it open. The door was now unlocked after the bouncer’s violent entrance, so Micah eased it open. Inside, darkness found him. He waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and discovered he was outside a long hallway.

  When he stepped inside, the mixed smells of rancid food and stale air overwhelmed him. Muted sounds carried down from somewhere upstairs. As he pushed on down the hall, his eyes became used to the dim light dribbling through some cracks in the newspaper plastered on the windows at intervals in the hallway.

  After a turn, the hallway opened to a wider area, with a set of grand stairs at one end. Some time ago, this could have been a beautiful building. But years of blatant neglect had turned it into this… what was it?

  A thin and stained mattress butted up against one corner of the room, and Micah started to get a notion o
f where he was. He approached the mattress and noticed a collection of syringes pooled on one side. Matches, some surgical tubing, and a spoon bent back on itself confirmed his suspicions.

  Junkie house. Injection drugs had never been Micah’s style, but he’d been in a house or two like this during his darkest days in Oklahoma, before his name had been Micah Reed.

  But what was the bouncer doing here? Collecting money for boss Tyson Darby?

  Micah pressed up the stairs, and those muted sounds he’d heard earlier became moans. Sexual moans. He rounded the bend in the stairs to find a man sitting on the top stair, holding the bruised forearm of a woman, and he was thumping his palm against her wrist to bring a vein to the surface. The man flicked his head to Micah, hypodermic needle clenched between his teeth. The man wore no expression inside his dead eyes. After looking Micah up and down, he returned to searching for a vein in the woman’s arm.

  Micah stepped by him and his companion without a word, then he paused to take in the room. It was another hallway, but much wider than the one downstairs. Fifteen or twenty people huddled on the floor, some of them nestled along walls, some of them on blankets or lumpy mattresses out in the open. Graffiti covered the walls. Many had needles still dangling from veins on thin arms, and the only way Micah could tell they were alive was by the meek rise and fall of their chests. All of them were nodding off from the drugs they’d injected, and no one paid much attention to him.

  The sexual moans were coming from a room off to the side, but Micah had no interest in exploring.

  He wanted to help these people, but knew he couldn’t. No amount of talking would convince them that they were going to die from this. They probably knew it too, and they couldn’t stop it.

  Micah weaved through the collection of half-dead junkies, then he spotted the bouncer at the far end of the hall, sitting in a wooden chair up against the corner. He’d taken off his suit coat and rolled up one of this sleeves, a bit of surgical tubing wrapped around his exposed arm. His eyes were rolling back in his head, his mouth open and a spot of drool dotting his lower lip.