Bernal waited a few moments, then went around the counter and through the door.
_______
He found Patricia in a narrow area surrounded by stainless steel medical refrigerators plastered with biohazard warning signs and yellowing doctor/patient cartoons, many of them featuring large-breasted nurses. The politically incorrect cartoons showed the age of these refrigerators. And the age of the dangerous but still-marketable chlorofluorocarbons inside them.
“Thanks for helping me out last night.” Patricia Foote stacked compressors on something that looked like a golf cart. She clicked something with her toe and the golf cart whizzed off, without driver or other guidance.
Bernal thought he could see where guide wires had been buried in the ground.
“You’re welcome. I hope it worked out.” He thought about Ignacio’s coming back here to have sex with his abused employee.
“Oh, it worked out fine.”
“I have a question for you.”
“What?”
“Yesterday, when you towed that Hummer—”
“Haven’t you already asked me about that?”
Bernal was startled by her sharpness. “I wasn’t going to ask you about that. I just wanted to know, do you guys deliver stuff there?”
“Nah.”
“Oh.”
“That lady there, Ungaro. She comes here to pick up. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He followed her out of the dead end with the medical refrigerators and past a rack of massive pumps, the hex nuts that held their flanges the size of walnuts. The yard was amazingly trim and well-organized. Parts lay on racks, bar codes stenciled on their sides. They passed the dismantling area. Bent, torn, and flame-blackened cars, the gouges of their final accidents still shiny, snuggled against each other with the easy familiarity of the damned. Several had already been eviscerated. Another driverless golf cart scooted by, this one holding a box full of electrical cables.
Patricia sucked a breath through her nose, and Bernal realized that she was crying. “Why? Why all this shit? It’s stressful. I got a spot, you know? A good spot. I’m good at this shit. Learned it from a boyfriend, in high school. Not ... I wasn’t in high school anymore. Should have been, I guess. But after the accident and everything . . . well, no one expected much of me after that, and I don’t guess they got it. Merrick knew cars and shit. Really knew ’em, but he wasn’t one of these guys like around here, it wasn’t like he ran carnival rides in the summer and scared kids. You know?”
“I think so.”
“He, like, knew what things were like, underneath, inside. Why they did the things they did. Not people. No. People were, what did he call them? Dark boxes?”
“Black boxes?”
“Yes. Right!” And in her pleasure at his getting the right answer, a smile almost made it to her face. Almost, but it glanced off some invisible obstruction and sank again. “Like your head is shut in a black box, and it can’t see nothing or hear nothing when you try to think about how people work. I know that. I know that feeling now. I learned how to do all that stuff. Fix cars and computers and lawnmowers and shit. Couldn’t do anything at school, but I had the way for that. So I don’t... I don’t want to lose this place, you know? There’s a lot of shit, sure, but what place in the world doesn’t have a lot of shit? It’s all a matter of how you handle it. How you take it on.”
She led him to a back area, where random gear lay piled on pallets.
“Your friend Muriel came around asking about the woman in that lab where I met you. Ungaro. Her company’s always been a good customer here. Picked up a lot of interesting stuff. Merrick would have loved that stuff she needs.”
“‘Would have’?”
“Merrick’s dead.”
“How?”
“Merrick pulled some leaf springs off an old truck. Those things are whippy. He made ... I don’t know why, it wasn’t like for a history project or anything, he usually didn’t care about stuff like that... a crossbow. Big-ass thing. His parents never seemed to care much, but his mom did say that it made it hard to park the car in the garage. She was always worried about scratching the paint. But they didn’t ask what the thing was for.”
“What did he use for arrows?”
She gave him an appraising look, and he wondered if his choice to be practical rather than sympathetic had been the right one. “Those green fence posts, the kind you string square mesh on. They have flanges, like rockets. Merrick, he... they said suicide. Screwup, is what I think. He cocked the thing, just to see, you know, what tension you need. He went to readjust something at the piece of plywood he used as a target, and some bunch of crap fell down, set the crossbow off. His parents always packed the garage with shit, you know? Magazine, cans—anyway, something dropped. The fence post went. . . right through him. I ran away from home the next day. Maybe they still think I had something to do with it, I don’t know. I had other things to worry about.”
She gestured at a shelf. “Take a look at it. This is Ungaro’s stuff. She’s late getting it. Maybe you’ll learn something. I’ll be right back.”
He watched her swing off. Whatever had happened between her and Ignacio the previous night had increased the confidence of her movement. He didn’t want to think about what that might have been. His own sexual needs were pretty much straight down the middle. He wasn’t embarrassed about that. But sometimes what other people did for pleasure still startled him.
The shelf was loaded with tiny metal nozzles. The tubing that had once connected them lay neatly coiled next to them. At the end of the shelf was a pair of large compressors. From what Bernal could tell, all hooked up, they would have pushed air through the tubes and out of the nozzles. Something from a Jacuzzi? It seemed excessive, though they might have been for a very large one. The compressors were marked Aker Finnyard.
Madeline Ungaro hadn’t picked this stuff up. That was interesting, but didn’t really add much to what he already knew.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mr. Independent Testimony.” Bernal turned to find Ignacio behind him, staring at him with gray-green eyes.
“I came to see if Patricia was all right,” Bernal said.
“Okay. And is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. What would it take for you to know?”
“I don’t—”
“Maybe a few hours with her bare skin and a magnifying glass? Would you like a chance at that, eh?”
“What’s this stuff for?” Bernal pointed at the nozzles and compressors.
“Eh?” Ignacio seemed taken aback by the change of topic. “Looks like icebreaker hull stuff ... hey. Hey. You planning on buying them? No. No, because they’re already under consignment. Never mind what they are.”
Some icebreakers used bubbles to break ice adhesion on their hulls. It looked like Ungaro had been planning some extensions to Hesketh’s body plans. “So, you maintain client confidentiality?”
“Sure do. People got their business and like to deal with those as don’t blab about it. You got any questions I might feel like answering?”
“You ever see a woman named Muriel Inglis around here?”
“I don’t do much direct customer work. I leave that up to my employees. But there are some kinds of stuff I like handling myself.” He stepped a few inches closer.
“Older woman. Nice dresser.” Bernal inclined his head at Ungaro’s icebreaker gear, not wanting to set things off by moving too much. He was terrified of the other man, but he would be damned if he’d show it. He’d never been able to dominate other men physically, though he could give a good account of himself if absolutely necessary.
“More poking around!” Ignacio was outraged. “I know just who you mean. She sauntered in, just like you, and—”
“Ignaz—” Patricia had returned.
“Don’t call me that!” He closed his eyes. “I hate it when you call me that.”
She thrust out her chin. “I’ll call you what I
want.”
“What?”
“Bernal’s here to help me. To get away from your shit. So I can call you what I want, Ignaz.”
“Come here.” Ignacio’s voice was now quiet.
“No .. . I ...”
“Come here.”
Bernal wanted to yell at her to run but wasn’t sure that was quite the right thing to do, and she stepped forward before he could think of what would be better.
Without any windup, Ignacio slapped her. He was standing right next to Bernal, and the rest of his body barely moved. The sound of the slap was loud among the shelves. Her head jerked, but she didn’t put a hand up to her reddening cheek. Instead, she just looked at Ignacio. Just him, past Bernal, as if Bernal was not even there.
Before Bernal could move, Ignacio had shoved him back against the shelves. His arm was like iron.
“Go back to work, Patricia.” Ignacio spoke gently. “I got some things to do. We can talk this over a bit later.”
Patricia turned and walked away.
Bernal stared after her, unable to suppress a feeling of betrayal.
“Not a great idea,” Bernal said.
“Don’t talk to me about my ideas. You broke into a dangerous industrial area. I mean, you could end up in a car that gets picked up by the magnet, dropped in the compactor. And wearing a nicer jacket than when you gave me shit last night. A real pity.”
Bernal tugged at his leather collar. “Jesus. Don’t you think they’d investigate you? Shut this place down? And don’t ask what it would do to your insurance rates.” Bernal tried to play it light. But he knew that people could kill you, even when it didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
“ Yeah. The human body is such an annoyingly physical thing, isn’t it? Just another form of toxic waste, really. And you’re right about those premiums. Eat you alive. Come on. Let me ... escort you out.”
They walked through the narrow aisles between the car parts.
A cell phone played the first few bars of The Flying Dutchman. Ignacio stopped near a stack of wheel rims and pulled it out. He put it between his ear and his shoulder. With his other hand, he pulled out a savage-looking serrated knife and pressed it against Bernal’s throat.
“Yeah?” As he talked, Ignacio looked off down the wide aisle.
“Those things have decent magnets on them.” He was all business. “But, I don’t know, that mercury . . . Look, you know as well as I do that they use security as a way of getting out of taking care of their waste. Look at that crap from Area 51. If they did have aliens there, they’d have died from the PCBs and the heavy metals.” He laughed. “And it’s these bastards from Liverwurstmore ... I mean, they’ll try to sell you a coffee maker and tell you it’s an industrial annealer. Am I right, or am I right? So you got to be careful... look, tell you what. I’ll take four of them for, oh, two thousand each, and check them out. Take ’em apart, run some tests. We’ll spread the risk. Sound good?”
His voice was completely calm, as if Bernal had never been. Bernal shifted his weight. The knife pressed firmly against his throat. He could feel the tips of the serrations pushing through his skin. He barely breathed.
“So, let me know.” Ignacio folded his phone and calmly put it back in his pocket.
Jesus, Bernal thought. This guy could kill me. And he had no idea why. Ignacio was jumpy and paranoid about something. Bernal didn’t think it was just car parts. God only knew what Bernal had been near, there at Ungaro’s stuff.
A golf cart like the one Patricia had been loading things into zipped down the aisle. It slewed sideways suddenly and ran into the bottom of a stack of wheel rims. They toppled over, and Ignacio dodged out of their way, releasing Bernal in the process. The wheel rims hit the concrete in a succession of rings, bounced, and rolled off in all directions.
Bernal took the opportunity and ran. He dodged around struts that stuck out of the shelves at irregular intervals. Behind him he heard footsteps, then a crash and a shout.
He took a chance and turned to look.
Ignacio had struck his head against a strut. Blood poured out between his fingers, and he sank to his knees. “Oh my God. .. . Patricia! Where are you?”
Patricia came up to him and, heedless of the blood, put her arms around him. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to Bernal.
Someone stood next to him. It was the young guy with tattoos. He shook his head at Bernal.
“Don’t ruin the payoff,” he said. “Things only get really bad around here when you ruin the payoff.”
Bernal followed him out of the yard, not daring to glance back again.
_______
Bernal glanced in his rearview mirror as he pulled out of the parking lot, and slammed on the brakes.
A bunny in a bonnet dangled right in his field of view. He pulled off into a rougher parking area, down below the yard, maneuvering carefully between two concrete blocks with rusty tangles of rebar sticking above them like failed comb-overs.
It wasn’t a threat. The thing hadn’t been hung there to scare him.
He instantly recognized a message from Muriel. He yanked the rabbit off the pink ribbon that suspended it from the roof and examined it. There was nothing in the basket of Easter eggs, or under the bonnet, or printed on the linings of its long ears.
How the hell had she gotten the thing into his car? She’d known he would be at the yard, of course—she had sent him there. So she had sent some minion, or just hired some high school kid adept at breaking into cars.
She really was pushing it.
He turned the bunny over again and this time saw the button on its back. He pushed it.
Vaguely, through static, he could hear the tinkle of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Then it cut off, and there was silence.
“Bernal.” The fidelity wasn’t good enough to recognize a voice, but it had to be Muriel. “.. . sorry . . . been out of contact... no chance ...” Then it got clearer. “Talk to Jord. He’s a drug dealer in Creek Hollow. He’s worried about the Easter Bunny . . . someone dumping drugs in abandoned places ... as bait...” More static. “.. . information ... say you talked to me ... pay attention . . ” Then clearer again. “I’ll try to find another way to talk to you. This will be blocked soon. And Charis ...” The static sounded like a waterfall. .. trust her... .”
And that was it. Peter Cottontail finished up.
He listened to the message a couple more times.
Jord the drug dealer, and the Easter Bunny. Was this just another attempt to get him killed?
Ignacio’s Devices & Desires loomed above him like a fortress with walls of rust-streaked corrugated metal. Chunks of concrete littered the steep hillside. New supports had been poured here and there to keep the fence from losing its grip and tumbling down the slope. This last winter had dug a particularly deep gully. Bernal followed it up with his eyes. Water had eroded the earth under the yard’s asphalt, and, unsupported, it had collapsed.
The gap looked at least a couple of feet high.
Well, that was just great, but there was certainly no way he was going in there again. Let those people do to each other whatever they wanted to do.
He had an appointment with a drug dealer.
17
The identical three-story buildings of Creek Hollow stretched along the road in clusters of three and four. Hooded teenagers in doorways watched Bernal’s car as he drove past. A woman pushed a stroller with one malfunctioning wheel up the hill, plastic shopping bags from Food World dangling from the handles.
“Hey,” he said to a couple of teenagers, one black, one white. “Where’s Jord?”
They didn’t say anything, their faces impassive in their hoods.
“He’s, like, a friend of a friend. Um, Muriel Inglis said to talk to him.”
Finally, still not saying anything, one of them jerked a thumb to the left, toward a courtyard.
_______
“That’s really a question, isn’t it?” Jord was thin, lightskinned, and look
ed barely out of high school. He wore a red shirt, open to expose a hairless chest. “Really a question. The Easter Bunny. But, now, I got one for you.”
“Okay.” Bernal couldn’t quite believe he was here, talking to this guy. It was bold and scary, but he was doing it because it made sense to do it.
He’d have to feel impressed with himself later.
“How you hear? Why are you interested in who’s dumping drugs around? I know you guys, I see you. Not your thing. I see you, I be moving you along, you’re nothing but a tourist. No offense.”
“No, of course not. A friend of mine, a woman named Muriel Inglis. She asked me to check up on this for her.”
“Well, hell, aren’t you a nice friend, though.”
The secret to Jord’s success was obviously the fact that he could make any phrase sound pleasant and ominous at the same time. There was no way to tell what was going on behind his smooth face.
“I don’t have any interest in interfering with your operations.”
Jord laughed. “I don’t think you’d be interfering for long. Not scared of that. I’ve run into Muriel. Smart lady. And balls. I seen her poking in boilers in abandoned buildings and shit. The Easter Bunny. Well, and look at that.” He turned to look at something across the parking lot. “Hey. Hey! Spak! Come over here, will you? The gentleman’s got an important question he needs answered.”
It would have been impossible to load any more black garbage bags into the shopping cart. They were piled so high that even a sharp turn would have sent them cascading. A few had ripped, and clothes poked out of the holes. A heavy black man trotted along behind it. It was impossible to tell how old he might have been. He moved with buttock-wiggling vigor but did not make much progress across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot.
For a moment, it looked as if he wasn’t going to react, but finally, he shifted direction and drifted toward them.
The shopping cart was from Caldor’s, a discount chain that had vanished some years before. It was amazing that he’d kept it functional all that time. Jord winced as it seemed to be about to run into the fender of his perfectly polished Lexus, but Spak had more control than it looked and stopped a foot or so short.
Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief Page 10