Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “My guess ain’t no better’n yours. I never saw ’em before tonight.”

  “Shooter, you’re going to die dumb.”

  “As long as I die old.”

  “You didn’t sell them the automatic weapons they’re using, that much I’m sure of. Ma did that. I saw the newspaper piece she cut out for her scrapbook.”

  “Ma pisses all over the lot. She don’t care who she sells to.”

  “You do?”

  “Fucking right. You never know when you might be doing business with a undercover cop.”

  “We’ll ask the Colonel. We’re still heading that way, right?” We had turned north on John R, where here and there a lighted apartment window hung like the last blossom of spring. The truck’s tires sang on the dewy pavement.

  “What you wanted,” he said. “Man, you don’t mind if I let you off early and tell you the way? I got to work in this town.”

  “I’m going in the front door and you’re going with me.”

  “Shit. I had to ask.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Ear-oh-quoyse Heights.” He sang it. “Where the men wear sheets, the women are strong-smelling, and the cops are distinctly below market rate.”

  We skirted the edge of the city, following darkened streets past railroad yards, a string of cut-rate funeral parlors, and an oil refinery smelling thickly of crude, stopping at last near a weedy six-acre parcel enclosed by a chainlink fence. The sign said keep out.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “City fairgrounds. This where they going to build their domed stadium.” Shooter killed the engine.

  We got out. Crickets stitched in the stillness. I put the revolver in my coat pocket with my hand on it. “You first, Kemosabe.”

  The gate was secured with a padlock and chain, but the narrow opening was no problem for a reedy type like the Shooter. For me it was a squeeze. Inside, the weeds were calf-high and wet; we hadn’t gone five yards before our shoes began to squelch. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, a long shape separated itself from the blackness surrounding it, a hangarlike structure with a shed roof and corrugated steel walls, eighty feet by twenty, without windows.

  “Where they store the tents and stuff,” Shooter whispered. “I think we beat ’em here.”

  “Not much of a front.”

  “The Colonel don’t need one.”

  There was a small side door around the corner from the double bays on the north end of the building. Shooter tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. I grasped his wrist as he was pushing it in. “Should it be?”

  He shook his head.

  I took the gun out and motioned him on. He mopped his palms off on his running shorts, set himself, and pushed the door open the rest of the way slowly. It swung silently on well-oiled hinges.

  Nobody shot at us. I motioned again and he went in. I followed.

  The interior smelled overpoweringly of mildewed canvas. I closed the door behind us, found my pocket flashlight, and flicked it on. Tented shapes loomed on the edge of the pencil beam.

  “I think we alone.” Shooter’s voice, raised slightly above a whisper, echoed.

  I said nothing. We were standing on a plywood floor in an aisle between what looked like stacks of crates covered with canvas, the stacks running the length of the building. They made gargoyle shadows on the walls. Once when I moved the flash abruptly, something squeaked and swooped past our faces with a wind of flapping wings.

  “Bela Lugosi.” Shooter covered his hair with both hands.

  I found the edge of a canvas flap and jerked it back. Some dust flew up, not enough for something that hadn’t been disturbed in months. I tested the lid of the crate beneath with my hands. It was nailed shut.

  “Look for something to pry with,” I said.

  “You look. I didn’t come here to do no hard physical labor.” He sat on a covered crate across the aisle.

  After a couple of minutes of poking around with the flash I picked up a three-foot length of broken two-by-four, inserted one end between the slats, and worked one loose with a shrieking of nails. I groped around inside the straw and came up with an olive-drab plastic object the size and shape of a hardcover book, only curved like a roof tile.

  “What’s that?” Shooter asked.

  “Claymore.”

  “What’s a Claymore?”

  “Not your specialty. It’s a portable mine.”

  “Mine!” He leaped up off the crate he’d been sitting on.

  “If you say, ‘Feet, do your stuff,’ I’ll shoot you.”

  “Better’n getting blowed to hell. I get there soon enough walking.”

  I set aside the Claymore and groped further, feeling around the edges of the others in the crate. I counted fifteen in all, enough to take out the building and some of the chainlink fence. Replacing the first mine, I pulled the canvas back farther. The next crate was longer, with coils of the same kind of straw sticking out between the slats. I bent down and sniffed. Then I straightened. “Smell it?”

  Shooter stooped, inhaled. “Cosmoline?”

  “Me too.” Cosmoline is the pink gelatin they store guns in to prevent rust.

  There were two more crates underneath that one. They were stacked three deep the length of the building. I was turning to say as much to Shooter when a shoe scraped the floor behind me and something tapped the mastoid bone behind my right ear. A white-hot bolt of pain shot to the top of my skull, followed by a wave of nausea, and after that nothingness had never seemed so good.

  15

  IT WAS ONE of those nightmares you kept waking up from, only to find yourself in the middle of another one just as bad.

  For a time I floated naked in a sea of grotesque and vaguely erotic images. The stuff I was floating in was as warm as blood and slippery to the touch, but the air on my face was freezing, as if I had raised it from an ice bath and turned it to the wind. I tried to cry out, but my lips were stiff, and the sickly bleat that issued between them embarrassed me. Below the warm, slippery surface, blind sea-creatures slid past and between my legs, tickling the skin. The sky overhead was pink, like light coming through my eyelids.

  Once—maybe more than once—the colors changed, from blood-red and fleshy pink to deep black, agonizingly cold and stinking of mildew, as if I had been swaddled in canvas and dumped into an open grave. This time I did cry out. Then again came the white-hot pain and the nausea, and as I sprawled backward into the bloody sea, two men spoke.

  “Not so hard, Hube.”

  “Sorry, Jer.”

  At length—days or years, I was a man out of time—I emerged again into the mildew-stinking darkness, and this time I stayed. It wasn’t as black as before. Somewhere at the edge of my vision a light glowed, a merciless shaft of naked incandescence I didn’t dare look at because it would dry-cook my eyeballs in their sockets. There was a floor under my back. With the part of my brain that was working logically I knew it was plywood, and that the decaying smell around me was of the old canvas in the storage building on the Iroquois Heights fairgrounds. Deep inside my head a leaky faucet was dripping into an empty basin, the drips echoing hollowly when they landed.

  Somewhere a voice made words that rang around the empty basin that was my brainpan.

  “I suppose we should call an ambulance. His skull might be fractured.”

  “Naw. I got a hunch it’s been cracked open so many times it’s all bone collar, like when you break your leg and it knits stronger than it was.”

  “Well, he can recover in the infirmary in Jackson.”

  I recognized the voices. They didn’t belong to the two men I had overheard earlier, or dreamed I had. Very carefully I moved my eyes. They grated.

  The first man I saw was seated on the crate Shooter had occupied before, a thick man whose undershirt showed through the white shirt he had on over it with a narrow black tie hanging down in front and resting on his belly. A snapbrim hat clung to the back of his big curly head. A Cigarillo teetered on his lo
wer lip.

  When he saw me looking at him, Horace Livingood of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms smiled his rubbery smile. “I bet you got a head the size of a garbage truck.”

  I said nothing. Victor Pardo’s clean-cut face and unfashionably long hair moved into my vision, looking down at me a mile. The naked light was behind his head, one of a row of them strung along the rafters. “Can you hear me, Walker?”

  “Yeah.” My voice creaked.

  “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. If—”

  “Cut the crap,” Livingood said. “We’re just us.” To me: “You up to sitting?”

  “Sure. What am I doing now?”

  He chuckled and got up to give me a hand. I grasped it, took a deep breath, and sat up. Someone swung a trash can into my face, but other than that it didn’t hurt any more than chewing tinfoil. I touched the knot behind my right ear gently. It was sticky.

  Livingood said, “Hit you more than once, from the look of it. To keep you under, probably. Whoever did it had practice. I don’t guess you saw him.”

  I didn’t answer. The place looked different, and it wasn’t just the fact that it was lighted. The canvas on both sides of the narrow aisle lay on the floor, limp and deflated-looking. Except for a few obviously empty crates and one other thing, the building had been cleaned out. The one other thing was Shooter. He lay on his face at my feet with flies clotted on the back of his head. I noticed the sulfur smell then.

  Resuming his seat, Livingood fished a plastic bag out of his coat pocket with my .38 in it.

  “Yours, I guess. It was in your hand when we got here. Vic’s got it all worked out. You shot the sorry son of a bitch, then sapped yourself a couple of times and hid the sap just before you passed out.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said he should be arrested for questioning.”

  “How’d you wind up with it?” I asked Livingood. “This place belongs to the city.”

  “We’ve got someone in Dispatch at the police department. I got the squeal before the cars did. I shook Vic out of bed and we beat the dicks here. They’re outside, limbering up the rubber hoses. I had a hell of a time quirting ’em back till our field men arrived to seal off the place.”

  “All for little me?” I was working on the nausea.

  “I like you, but not that much. We’ve suspected for months that someone’s been dealing weapons out of the fairgrounds. When we tried to set up surveillance, Cecil Fish—you know him? Thought you might—got a court order warning us away. Elections coming up, can’t have federales snooping for contraband on city property. Anyway, when we heard there’d been a killing here, we put on our running shoes.”

  “Who tipped the cops?”

  “Somebody named Anonymous, who else?” He slapped the empty crate he was sitting on. “Looks like we were wrong; no weapons here.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Little after five. Sun’ll be up in an hour.”

  “Five hours ago you could’ve fought a war with Ohio from in here,” I said. “The place was full of Claymores and rifles packed in cosmoline.”

  “You can still smell it. No wonder they had to keep sapping you down; it’s a big operation. Wonder if anybody in the neighborhood heard the trucks.”

  “Who would they report it to, the cops?”

  Livingood was watching me. “I’m not so sure Vic isn’t right—about questioning you, I mean, not the other. You wouldn’t still be breathing if somebody with a lot more imagination than brains didn’t get cute and try to set you up for the Shooter. Thing is, we’ve been on this a year and couldn’t get any farther than the front door, and here you are sitting in the middle of it after only two days.”

  “Lucky me.” I stood up, caught my balance, and swallowed bile. To avoid bending down, I used my foot to nudge a section of canvas over the dead man’s upper half. The flies buzzed around angrily and lit on the canvas.

  “Being a little guy has certain advantages,” I said. “Nobody thinks I’m worth a court order.”

  “Better stretch it some. You’re running short.”

  “It felt short.” I patted my pockets, found the crushed pack of Winstons, and shook one out. I still didn’t have a match, and Livingood wasn’t volunteering. I held the cigarette by its ends with my thumbs and forefingers and looked at it. At least I was still seeing single. “Shooter brought me here to meet someone named the Colonel.”

  “Colonel what?”

  “Seabrook, he said. Ever hear of him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We found the place unlocked with nobody in it. I was just starting to look around when the lights went out. Mine.”

  “Still short.” He was admiring the Smith & Wesson in the clear plastic.

  “That’s as much as I know. The rest is pure guesswork.”

  “Guess.”

  “This Seabrook party thought I was getting close to I don’t know what. He had Shooter bring me here, sapped me down, did him, and tipped the cops so I’d roll over for the kill.”

  “Kind of hard on the Shooter.”

  “Maybe he’d outlived his usefulness.”

  Pardo said, “Why do it here, if it meant giving up safe storage and clearing out the inventory?”

  “It wasn’t safe storage,” I said. “You knew about it. A federal judge might overturn the local court order anytime, and even if he didn’t, the city would pull its support once the elections were over. Now was as good a time to move out as any. Odds are they’ve had another warehouse lined up for some time.”

  “What makes you so dangerous?” asked Livingood.

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t be standing here nursing a headache.”

  “It doesn’t scan.” He rubbed his face for a moment, then reached behind his back and tossed a pair of handcuffs at my feet. “You better put those on.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Mister, I’m holding the murder weapon with your prints on it and those are my bracelets on the floor. When Washington hears about the one they’re going to ask why I didn’t use the other. I don’t hear anyone laughing.”

  “About time,” Pardo said.

  I crushed the cigarette into a ball and threw it away. “Okay.”

  Livingood said, “Okay?”

  “Okay, you win. This one wasn’t planned, at least not by someone with the brains and cash to arrange this whole setup. It was jury-rigged on the spot by a grunt who thought he’d make points with the boss. The real job was supposed to take place last night in the warehouse district in Detroit, where four men with machine guns did some body work on my car. I was supposed to be in it at the time.”

  The senior agent rested his hands on his knees. “You kind of forgot that part.”

  “No law says I have to report an attempted murder on private property to federal authorities. Having fingered me, it was the least Shooter could do to offer me a ride here. The rest you know.”

  “Four men with machine guns.”

  I nodded. “I made the same connection.”

  Pardo said, “What?”

  Livingood ignored him. “Too cheesy. What’s Seabrook doing messing in armed home invasions?”

  “You tell me. I never heard of him before last night.”

  “If you’re lucky you won’t hear of him again. But I doubt it.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Classified,” Pardo snapped.

  “Shut up and listen, Victor. You might learn a thing or two about police work.” Livingood dropped his Cigarillo and squashed it underfoot. He never had lit it. “He’s an honest-to-Christ lieutenant colonel, or was until the marines washed him out after that thing in Grenada. Seems he shot a second lieutenant in the leg when the looey didn’t hit the beach fast enough to suit him. There’d have been a court-martial, only Washington was taking enough heat over the invasion without it, so they let him resign his commission. It was either that or a Section Eight.

  “He turned mercenary after tha
t, which I guess is what you do when you’re born an army brat, graduate West Point, work your way up from first lieutenant, and they take away the uniform. Seems he’d been dealing military ordnance to the private sector for some time before he shot that second looey—the marines unwound that one a little late—and he used the profits to set himself up in business: buy guns here, sell them there, and finance armed expeditions to Africa, Iran, Central America, all those hot places where people got nothing better to do on a Saturday night than put on camouflage and knock over the government. Bureau wants him bad. We were hoping to turn something on him in Doyle Thayer Junior’s basement after the rich little bastard got dead, but the man covers his tracks. Munitions are hard to come by in these numbers. I don’t think he’d be dumb enough to waste any of them on a string of glorified B-and-E’s in his own backyard. What if a gun got left behind and the cops traced it to whatever armory it was stolen from?”

  “Maybe he didn’t use his own guns,” I said.

  He jumped on it. “Is that another guess, or you got something to share?”

  “Just a guess.” I shoved Ma Chaney’s clipping out of my thoughts. Cops like Livingood have been known to read minds. “Say he had something big in the hopper and needed a lot of money in a hurry. He couldn’t sell off some of his weapons without drawing attention to himself, and anyway maybe he needed them for the big thing. He could rob a bank—he’s got the men for it—but that’s daylight work, someone might get caught and blab. Instead he knocks over some well-to-do homes when the residents are in and there’s no chance he’ll trip a silent alarm. It means going in heavy. Any way you read those invasions they sound like a commando raid.”

  “He’d need a fence.”

  “Around here he’d have his choice.” I got rid of Sturdy Stoudenmire as quickly as Ma’s newspaper clipping.