He didn’t seem to know how to react. At heart, Bic was just another insecure, resentful, self-loathing short guy with an overcompensating ego who took out his miserable life on anyone who was smaller, weaker, and willing to put up with his crap. It was no coincidence three wives had dumped him.
We stared at each other for a long time. He didn’t move and he didn’t say anything, but in his eyes he backed down.
And not one second too soon. I held it together long enough to get out of his face and his bag room, far enough out on the broiling open ramp that if I broke down in tears, which is what I felt like doing, he wouldn’t see me and no one would hear me.
He was right. A man was dead because of me, and lots of people hated me for it. I was right. I had been perfectly justified in what I’d done and the people who hated me for it were morons. And I could still see his bloody, mutilated body lying in a heap in the falling snow every time I closed my eyes. I felt responsible. I felt justified. I felt angry.
I felt responsible.
The pressure of the hot air felt good. It felt right, and as I stood in a sweat feeling sorry for myself, I took a moment to hate everyone back. I hated the weasel who had misdirected my bag. I hated whoever had put the fish in it. I hated Bobby Avidor for the things he had said about John and Terry. I hated him for lying, and if he wasn’t lying, I hated him even more for telling me a truth I didn’t want to hear. I hated Bic for not taking my side, for blaming me, the victim. I hated being the victim. And at the bottom of it all, I hated myself for being so confused and befuddled about what I had done in Boston, for constantly teetering on the fence between guilt and anger, anger and guilt. Pick a side and jump down, for God’s sake. Handle it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t jump down and stay down on one side or the other, and jumping back and forth was wearing me down.
And the sun was wearing me down. If I stood there long enough, I’d simply melt like a candle into a puddle of wax on the concrete. The forklift would roll over me on the way to dispose of my bag, leaving me imprinted with its tire treads.
“You’re right.” I wasn’t sure if the voice had come from inside my head or from the real world. It was Bic. He had followed me out and was standing next to me, looking out of place on the ramp with his loafers and tie. “I’m going to launch an investigation to find out who did this.”
“Good luck.” I tried to sound more sardonic than hopeless and bitter. We had never caught a single soul in Boston for similar fun and games.
“Even if we don’t catch him, it’ll send a message.”
He stared across the field. I looked where he was looking, which was probably at the forklift motoring our way. I looked down at the top of his head. “You know, Bic, you and I have had our differences over the years, but I never would have figured you for being the drinking buddy of someone like Bobby Avidor.”
He whipped around and faced me. “Who told you that I was his buddy? Did he tell you that? Bob Avidor is a piece of crap. I would like nothing better than to kick his ass out of here. But he does his job, and if he’s doing something wrong, I don’t know what it is, and I can’t catch him at it.”
“And you don’t want me to catch him, either?”
He turned and disappeared into the bag room behind the forklift, which had finally rumbled up. I took one last deep breath and followed him in. In the closed space, the diesel fumes mitigated the foul stench, but I still needed my hand as a filter. And I had to lean toward Bic to make sure he could hear me over the grinding of the engine. “Why didn’t you tell me you were Bobby’s alibi?”
“I told the police.”
“Why would you keep that from me?”
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because,” I said, “if he’s running drugs out of here, I would think you’d want to know.”
“He’s not.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“You’re not the only one with sources on the ramp. And I am not his drinking buddy. I’d never been out with him before or since.”
“But you do think he’s up to something. I can tell.”
His lips had tightened. He didn’t look as soft as he usually did, and… Wait a second. “You’ve never been out with him before or since?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
For the first time I started thinking perhaps I wasn’t the sole reason for his perpetually bad mood. Imagine that. It wasn’t all about me. “It was Bobby who asked you to go out drinking with him that night, wasn’t it?”
Bic’s eyes narrowed to a squint even though we were in the deep, cool shade of the bag room, and I knew I was on the right track. He signaled to the driver to drop the fork assembly to the floor and scoop the bag from underneath. The bag was too light and the flat arms too far apart to gain purchase. The driver began a back and forth stuttering dance as he tried to hook some part of the bag on one of the tongs.
“Bobby set you up, didn’t he? He needed an alibi for that night and what better alibi than his boss? He used you.” Bic tried to peel away, but I followed him. The bag room wasn’t that big. “And you don’t want anyone to know. How’s it going to look? The station manager out drinking with the potential suspect.”
“He’s not a suspect. If he was with me all night, then he’s not your guy.”
“No, but if he knew he needed an alibi, it was because he knew something was going to happen to John that night. He set John up and he made you his alibi.”
He took a few steps away, as if he needed to watch the bag lift operation from a different angle. I tried to think about the situation the way Bic would—maximum credit for the least amount of personal risk.
“You’ve got a short list of bad options, Bic.”
“How do you figure?”
“If I come out of here with something on Avidor, it looks as if you’re not doing your job. And if I don’t, I’ve managed to stir up enough shit for people to wonder. There’s no way to defend yourself against rumors. Isn’t that what you said? You should be working with me. That’s the only way you’re coming out of this whole.” Another alternative occurred to me. “Unless you’re involved in what’s going on.”
“I’m not involved.”
“And I’m not going away. You help me, and I promise you I’ll do everything I can to make you look like a star.” The driver had managed to work the tip of one of the tongs inside the bag and raise it. A large, greasy smudge was all that was left on the ground where it had been. A few of my shirts dropped out of the bag as it dangled, along with a couple of fish heads that thudded to the concrete and glared up at me through dead eyes.
The driver leaned out and yelled at Bic. “What do you want me to do with it, chief?”
“Burn it. And get Facilities up here to hose down the floor.”
The sound of the airport, as always, hovered in the background, but when the forklift motored out, a relative peace descended over the bag room, and the air seemed to clear immediately. I could breathe again.
Bic turned and looked at me without a trace of emotion. “Why should I trust you?”
“There’s nothing in it for me to cut you out, Bic.”
I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head. “You keep me informed of everything you’re doing.”
“I will.”
“But nothing that will get me into shit. I’ll leave it to you to know the difference.”
“Plausible deniability. I understand the concept.”
He didn’t offer to shake on the deal. He didn’t even change expression. “What do you want?”
I told him I wanted to know everything he knew about Bobby, and everything he’d done to try to catch him. I wanted to know all about the night John died, and I wanted access to the ramp so Bobby couldn’t hide from me on the field. I had more questions, particularly about anyone he knew who drove a kidney red sedan, but he was late for a meeting. We made plans to meet in a few hours, but I caught him with one more question before he turned to go.
“If you hate him so much, why did you go drinking with him?”
“It was the end of another shitty day with divorce attorneys, I wanted a drink, and he told me he might have information on some gambling that has been going on downstairs on the ramp.”
“Did he?”
“Nope.” He walked into the terminal and let the door slam behind him.
The last time I saw my bag, the forklift driver was scraping it off into the cart that would take it to the furnace to be incinerated.
Chapter Eleven
I couldn’t get the smell off.
I’d showered. I’d showered again. I’d scrubbed my skin raw and rinsed all the essential oils out of my hair. I’d gone to the hotel laundry and washed my running clothes, but they seemed, like me, to be permanently tainted. Almost twelve hours after I’d inhaled the first whiff of dead-fish bouillabaisse, the stink was still with me, sitting like an unwanted guest in the passenger seat of my car.
Bic had come through with some interesting details about Bobby, but the only one that seemed actionable was the rumor that he liked to disappear from the field in the middle of his shift. Guys had disappeared from the midnight shift all the time in Boston, but Bic claimed it was unusual in his city, and I didn’t have much else to go on. So there I sat in the middle of the night in my Lumina outside the maintenance hangar, with my adrenaline-hard stomach and my twitchy muscles, swinging between hoping for Bobby to come out to relieve the unrelenting boredom, and praying he wouldn’t because I wasn’t sure I could tail him without being spotted. I’d never followed anyone before.
He came out at a quarter to two. He wasn’t hard to spot, driving out of the employee lot in the muscle car Bic had described, the black Trans Am with the big bird painted on the hood. I scrunched down in my seat, even though I was across the road parked in a lot with twenty other cars—a good place to hide, but not a good place to be when he took off like a rocket. By the time I’d turned onto the road, his taillights had turned into red pinpricks.
I caught him at a traffic light. Even then it wasn’t easy keeping up. He turned onto LeJeune, a wide, chaotic, congested artery that was as bright as the Las Vegas strip, but sold burgers and gas instead of sex and gambling. Bobby was one of those people whose driving personality matched his car. He liked following closely, darting between lanes, and flashing his brights at anyone who displeased him. But I didn’t have to worry that he would see me. He didn’t seem to have much use for a rear view.
After a few hair-raising blocks on Chaos Street, he cut a woman off, sailed in front of her, and turned sharply. I checked my blind spot and found someone in it. Bobby had caught a green light and was moving away. I had to do a squeeze-in maneuver to stay with him, something I’d learned in Boston, which instantly set horns yowling. I risked the tail end of the yellow light, then had to floor it to keep him in range. Just as I did, a jet flew overhead on approach to the airport, gear down, roaring loudly enough to shake the plaque from my teeth. A few more screamers flew over before even that ear-splitting ruckus began to fade. The road signs began to stretch farther apart and the streetlights became more infrequent. We were on a highway that felt like the only lighted passage through an ocean of darkness.
We went a long way on that road. The bright halfmoon and the stars became more prominent as we distanced ourselves from the city lights, and it occurred to me to pay closer attention when road signs did appear so I could find my way back. I didn’t want to be lost out there. Ft. Lauderdale. Orlando. Florida City. I couldn’t feel the direction we were going. Key West. Tamiami Park.
After another fifteen minutes, we were in a deep, swampy darkness going deeper. The shoulders next to the roads had disappeared. Lit only by the beams of my headlights, the snarled vegetation that had replaced them looked as if it would reclaim the right of way completely if not beaten back with a machete on a regular schedule. The hairs on my arms stiffened, and I felt more and more relieved to be in the company of other cars when they appeared.
Then we were the last two out there, and I wasn’t sure what to do. The only thing I could think of was to keep adjusting my intervals, letting him slide ahead until I could barely pick out his taillights. I would wait until I thought I was about to lose him, then reel him back, usually on the rare occasion when another car showed up and I could tuck in behind it.
Thirty-five minutes out. The thought of turning around came up more and more, but I kept pushing it away, kept thinking we had to be closing in on wherever he was going. But my body was having none of it. The back of my damp T-shirt stuck to the car seat because the instinctive part of me, the part that knew when to flee from danger, understood that I was taking a real risk, that Bobby could be fully aware of my presence and leading me to a place where no one would ever find me. The farther I went, the deeper we drove into the swamp and the less opportunity I had to change my mind.
Then he disappeared. One second he was there, then he was gone. I blinked in the darkness, hoping to see the taillights farther down the road. He wasn’t on the road. I took my foot off the gas and coasted. Had he gone left? Had I seen it or imagined it? I took in a deep breath. I rolled the car forward slowly and scanned the brush and the trees for the place where he must have vanished.
It was there. A narrow gap to my left. Another road, this one the least roadlike of all. From the only light available, my headlights, it looked like a dirt path cut out of dense brush. It was the only place he could have gone. But no taillights. No sound of gravel under tires. Something was there, though, maybe a mile away. Lights in the trees.
I parked the car and got out. I climbed onto the hood, and when that wasn’t high enough, onto the roof of the Lumina. From the higher perch, I could see a dim arc over the trees, a muddy center of light in an endless pool of darkness. Bobby was there. I didn’t know what else was, but I knew that’s where Bobby had gone. I felt it. Nothing else was stirring, at least not human, for as far as I could see.
I climbed down and stood staring at that dark road. I wanted to go down there, but my knees were shaking so much, just staying upright was draining all my energy. The rational me, the parental me was mortified by the idea, stunned by its recklessness, fighting for control and losing because I wanted to go down that road. Yes, I could come back in daylight when the whole situation would be, or at least would feel, less menacing. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted… I didn’t want to be scared. And if I went down that road, it would prove that I wasn’t scared.
I got back in the car, started the engine, turned off the air conditioner, and opened the windows so I could listen as I went. The windshield instantly steamed up. I cleared it with the palm of my hand, put the car in gear, and nosed it into the narrow opening. Room enough for one car only. I thought of going in with the lights off. Impossible. It had looked like a dirt road but now seemed to be composed of nothing but gravel. I felt each ping as if it were bouncing off my rib cage instead of the undercarriage of the car. Then there were the ruts and bone-jarring potholes that snuck up in the dark. And the music. It sounded like… It was mostly the thrum of a bass, but as I kept going I started to hear the grinding of the electric guitars over the beat.
A violent bounce into a crater nearly ripped the steering wheel from my hands and left the car pointed at an odd slant. As I straightened the wheel my headlights fell across a silver mailbox marked JZ SALVAGE. Beneath was a big reflective arrow that pointed to a break in the tree line to my right. Beyond the break, I could see the lighted area I’d spotted from the road.
I killed the headlights and nudged the car forward, close enough to see that the arrow pointed to a long driveway blocked by a wide swinging gate—closed—the kind you’d expect to see on a large corral to keep the horses in. Attached to it was a handmade sign with bold, slashing letters that spelled PRIVATE PROPERTY. UNLESS YOU HAVE BUSINESS HERE KEEP OUT. Beyond the welcome sign, the drive ran across a swath of open field and down to what looked like a residence. It was a stucco cube with a
crown of awnings and a perfectly flat roof. That’s how they built them down here. No need for pitched roofs so the snow would slide off. It was also the source of the music, which was clearly audible now. Behind was a large warehouse, marked with a bigger JZ SALVAGE sign. Reclaiming the entire complex from the darkness was a couple of tall stadium lights with about half the bulbs lit. I couldn’t see clearly what was behind the warehouse. It looked like a field of heavy equipment or even a used car lot. But I could see what was parked out front—a speedboat on a trailer, a couple of SUVs, a motorcycle, what looked like an airboat, a pickup truck, and, toward the back, Bobby’s black Trans Am, which pleased me to no end because it meant he wasn’t lurking behind me.
I sat in the car with the lights off and the windows open, fighting off the urge to be sensible and bail out. There was no way I was going down the front path and through the front door, but if I could get across the entrance without being spotted, I could drive for a ways shielded by the brushy perimeter that seemed to surround the property. I tried to stop breathing so shallowly, wiped the sweat off the steering wheel with my shirttail, and pressed slowly on the gas pedal. I drifted out into the open as quietly as I could. It seemed to take forever to glide past that fifteen-foot opening. When I was safely across, I paused behind a cluster of trees and listened. Nothing but me, the night crawlers, and the sound of heavy metal thumping through the fern and fauna. I rolled on.
My fuzzy intention had been to follow the road around to the back, but the road looped and lapsed and didn’t follow the property line. When I realized the light was behind me, I pulled to the side and killed the engine.
I had to get out. I knew I had to get out of the car and go on foot. I spent a minute gripping the steering wheel and releasing. Gripping and releasing. Gripping. Gripping. My muscles didn’t want to release. I counted to ten. I opened the door. I got out.
The Alex Shanahan Series Page 45