The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  I took out a twenty and put it on the table. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

  “I’m not going home.” He made no move to get up.

  I didn’t want to leave, but I could feel everything in him pushing me out. I hated that he wanted me to leave. “You don’t want me to go with you tonight?”

  “I told you from the start I worked better on my own. I don’t want you worrying about me.” He turned his face away to look through the window to the street. The beer signs cast a neon glow across his face that made him look like an Andy Warhol portrait. “I don’t want anyone worrying about me.”

  I waited, but all he would show me was the side of his face. His jaw was set and his muscles tense. I gathered my things and left him sitting on his bench. In the parking lot, I checked to see if he might come through the restaurant door and perhaps look my way. I only looked once, but I looked for a long time.

  Going back over the causeway to the city, it wasn’t quite dark enough to need headlights. Downtown Miami looked calm and beautiful with the lights just starting to emerge against the gray dusk. The sky above the city was streaked in that stunning array of colors that get left behind when the sun departs—mostly pinks and oranges. It was so beautiful it made me cry.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I woke up all of a sudden, as if someone had reached out of the darkness and tapped me on the shoulder. I rolled over on my back, held still, and listened hard. All I heard was the laboring of the air conditioner. It was pumping fast, like my heart, but it was no match for the humidity that hovered over my bed like the sea of smoke that pressed down on the city outside. It was almost one in the morning.

  It could have been the fajitas that had disturbed my deep sleep. More likely it was the specter of raging wildfires that had been planted in my consciousness by the evening news. Topping the headlines had been an eighteen-vehicle crash in central Florida, attributed to a nearby band of brushfires whose smoke had mingled with fog and drifted across the interstate. As I slept, a blaze was roaring north of 1-75 near the Broward-Palm Beach county line, and had already consumed fifty thousand acres of tall saw grass. Yet another band of fires had threatened a warehouse in Miami-Dade County. The message seemed to be that we were surrounded by fires and they were moving closer.

  I threw back the covers. I flipped my pillow, which was as soaked with perspiration as my hair. The sheets were also damp with the sweat that trickled down my face, under my arms, between my legs. It even seemed that the soles of my feet were sweating. I imagined an imprint of my body on the mattress that looked a lot like a chalk outline.

  It was hard to breathe, harder when I thought about smoke and fumes and fog and fire, so I concentrated on inhaling and exhaling as deeply as I could, forcing air into my lungs and bad thoughts out of my head. But it was no use. When the phone rang, I was almost expecting it.

  I sat in the Lumina, parked roughly where Jack had told me to park. I had followed his directions back to the swamp, driving almost forty-five minutes south and west from the city. It had been a nerve-wracking experience, driving dark and narrow roads, checking the rearview every few minutes along the way. If the kidney car, or any car, had been following me, I wanted to know before I’d gone too far from civilization. I had already worn myself out by the time I found Jack’s rendezvous point.

  According to him, if I was in the right place, I was half a mile from an old airfield and a large abandoned hangar. I was in the vicinity of the swamp I had visited while chasing Bobby, but supposedly a different section. It was hard to tell from the scenery. The roads had been just as black and forbidding with the same tunnel-of-horrors atmosphere that practically guaranteed something would leap out of the darkness at me when I least expected it. Jack had suggested killing my headlights at the final turn, but I had tempted fate, two eerie beams of light cutting through air that was as moist as a limp washrag and smelled like someone’s basement after the flood.

  When I’d reached the meeting place, exactly two miles in, I was supposed to have pulled to the side. There were no sides. I stopped the car and killed the engine. Now I was waiting, listening through closed windows to a darkness that throbbed with the same otherworldly sounds I’d heard the other night. They came from everywhere—from the trees overhead, from the ground underneath, from great distances, and from very close by.

  Jack had been all business on the phone. Nothing about our conversation earlier in the evening, which was probably best given what we were about to do. He’d told me to wear black. I hadn’t purchased any replacement clothes that were black, so I used what I had. New jeans that were as dark as indigo ink and stiff as Styrofoam, and a dark blue T-shirt I’d bought for running. I’d solved the problem of the big, silver Dallas Cowboys logo on the front by turning it inside out, but I couldn’t do anything about the short sleeves. My pale, bare arms felt incandescent in the dark.

  With the windows up and the air conditioner off, it hadn’t taken long for the windows of the Lumina command capsule to steam up, so the sharp, fast knock seemed to come out of nowhere. It ruptured the clammy silence and nearly sent me through the roof. My hand went instinctively to the ignition. Another knock. I saw a flash of light, and heard Jack’s voice. “It’s me. Open up.”

  He slipped in. “Here—” He placed a small flashlight in my hand. “Hold this. And keep it low.”

  The flashlight was damp with what I assumed was his perspiration.

  “You got here fast,” he said.

  It hadn’t felt fast, especially the last ten miles. “Where’s your truck?”

  “Not far. It’s in another clearing.”

  Another clearing? Was this car-sized space in the trees considered a clearing? “I take it you found Ira?”

  “Yeah. He was over on the Gulf Coast fishing.”

  “He doesn’t sound conscientious about his snitching duties. Are you sure we can trust him? What is this place we’re going to?”

  “It’s an old airfield that was used mostly for crop dusters years ago. The people who owned it got sued. I don’t even know who officially has title. It’s been in receivership for years.”

  “What’s so suspicious about it?”

  “There’s an old aircraft hangar on the property. Ira told me there’s been a lot of activity in and out of it recently. Heavy equipment. Flatbed trucks. He said they even had a helicopter land in there. Whatever Jimmy is doing, Ira says this is ground zero.”

  “Is anyone there now?”

  “I’ve been out here for hours. Nothing’s happened except a car comes around every two hours for a drive-by.”

  “Jimmy’s security?”

  “Must be. But they’re not all that serious if it is. All the better for us.”

  Jack must have noticed my glow-in-the-dark arms. He reached into the garment he was wearing—it looked like a fishing vest with numerous pockets and flaps and openings—and pulled out a round, flat can. With benefit of the flashlight, I figured out it was camouflage paint and not chewing tobacco. “Put this on your arms,” he said, “and your face.”

  While I did that, he took the flashlight back and laid it on the seat so the beam caught his hands under the dashboard. And in his hands was a gun, the big automatic I’d seen before. A Glock, he’d told me. A 9 mm. With a few practiced strokes, he released the clip, checked it, and rammed it back in with a loud click. He slid the top back and pushed another small lever that I thought might be the safety. It all seemed terribly complex to me. I finished blackening my arms and started on my face.

  He holstered the automatic, went back into the multifaceted vest, and came out with another gun, this one smaller. “Can you shoot?” he asked.

  This question made my temples pulse as I tightened the lid on the camouflage paint. “And hit anything?”

  “Okay.” He held the gun low so the light would catch it. “This is only a .22. It’s not going to do much, but it’s better than nothing.” He checked the safety, then turned it around and offered it to m
e.

  I hesitated. “I hate guns.”

  “You’d hate worse being dead.”

  “Are those the only two choices?”

  “It would make me feel better if you had a firearm. If something happened to me, or if someone got past me—”

  “Then I’d be in deep shit. Jack, I’d be just as likely to shoot you as anything else.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  He was right. I didn’t really think I’d shoot him. But I didn’t want the gun. It felt wrong. It felt as if I would be playing at something I wasn’t. I was still an average citizen who in less than one week was going back to a life somewhere else. I needed to believe that.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want it.”

  He didn’t respond, but I heard a protracted sigh, one with a hint of “You’re more trouble to me than you’re worth.” It was a legitimate reaction. I felt bad about it, but I couldn’t make myself carry a gun.

  “Do you want me to stay back?”

  “No.” He put the gun back in his pocket. “Take the floor mats.”

  “What?”

  He opened his door, leaned back in, and pulled out the front floor mat. Then he opened the back door and did the same. “We’re going to need these. Roll them together so you can carry them.”

  I opened my door as wide as I could, given the close and steady presence of the surrounding brush. It felt good to unfold from the seat where I’d been crammed. As I labored in the small space to maneuver the floor mats into a manageable bundle, every sweat mechanism in my body proceeded to move into high gear.

  “Let’s go.”

  Jack was off down the road, which was more passable on foot, and I followed. He’d brought an extra flashlight, which I tried to keep pointed at my feet. I didn’t want a replay of the twisted ankle fiasco. Even though the ground was dry, I couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment I would step into quicksand.

  We ran for about five minutes. I didn’t catch up with Jack until he stopped. It was hard to tell, but it felt as though we had emerged on the periphery of a flat, wide-open field. I could feel the openness, especially compared to the thick brush behind us. I crouched next to him.

  “We’re going across that field,” he said, confirming the geography. “It goes right up to a fence that surrounds the hangar. Go as fast as you can, but watch the ground. There’s a lot of junk lying around. Don’t stop until you get to the fence. And don’t lose the mats.” He turned to look at me. All I could see were his eyes, but they were calm and steady enough to make me feel that way, too. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Without the thick cluster of trees around us, the bright moon cast enough light that I could see oilcans, car parts, parts of parts, and garbage bags with contents unknown. I moved quickly, trying to stay close as he ran ahead of me. I hadn’t even noticed the large structure looming ahead until the fence appeared and we had to stop. Up close, the hangar was gigantic—tall enough to block out the moon and wide enough that I couldn’t see either end of the building in the limited light.

  The fence was chain link, topped with a generous twist of razor wire, and went around the outer perimeter of the hangar. We stayed low at the base for a full five minutes and listened. There were no city sounds to be heard, no cars or trains, factories or shopping centers. The sounds were from the swamp. There was no sign of any other humans.

  I had assumed Jack would pull a set of wire cutters out of that hardware store of a vest he was wearing. Instead, he unfurled a car mat, stood back, and tossed it up and over the razor wire. Aha. He did the same with his second mat and with the two I was carrying. With all four spread out side by side, we were able to scramble up and over, although it wasn’t easy. The Cyclone fence was tall and old and sagging. It was like climbing a thick, billowy curtain.

  We dropped down on the other side and waited for the fence to stop shaking. I stared at the structure in front of us. From our location, I couldn’t see any obvious points of entry. The hangar doors on this side were padlocked shut. The walk-in door was most certainly locked. The foundation was solid concrete, so there would be no tunneling in.

  “This way,” Jack whispered.

  “Where?”

  “There’s a window on the other side.”

  Indeed there was. It was around the corner and halfway down the length of the building. The bottom of it was high enough for me to reach, I figured, if Jack lifted me up and I stretched my arms out.

  “Give me a boost,” I said.

  He stuck his flashlight in his belt and offered his two hands as a step. I climbed up and, with my fingers on the sill, crept up enough to see that the window was open a crack. I uncoiled a little more to shine the flashlight and look in. I saw a toilet reflected in a mirror over a sink. I could also see the door was closed. I tried to lift the window with one hand. No dice. I shoved the flashlight into my waistband and tried it with two. It was stuck so tight I had to bang it with the heels of my hands. I did it once. An avalanche of dust, rust, and dried paint flecks fell down and stuck to my damp face and hair. I rubbed my eyes and listened for an answering sound. Nothing. I banged it again, this time with my head down and my eyes closed. It came loose and opened all the way to the top. Without even looking down at Jack, I braced my arms on the sill and climbed through. I knew if I’d waited to think about it I would have stiffened up.

  The whole enclosure wasn’t much more than a toilet surrounded by sheets of plywood paneling. The toilet didn’t have any water in it, so it smelled like a Port-O-Let at Woodstock. The door had a hook-and-eye latch and opened out. I pushed it open a crack, just enough to see and hear that it was quiet in the hangar. And dark. Jack dropped in behind me just as I pushed it open. The hinges squeaked.

  “Let me go first,” he said, plowing ahead. “I am the one with the gun.” He didn’t waste time or a single motion as he slipped out. I tried to move in the same economical fashion, staying low and following the beam of his flashlight, which was woefully inadequate in the vast building. What dim light there was inside the hangar came from moonlight through a high bank of windows and large, intermittent holes in the roof. It came down unobstructed in places, especially from overhead, and created deep shadows in others. It was too diffused to be of much use, but I did have the sense of being closed in and surrounded, much like the swamp outside. It was a creepy sensation in such a big space. There was also a smell—strong and heavy and mostly gasoline or some other fuel. But that wasn’t all. Underneath it was the odor of something dead or decaying.

  “I can’t see a damn thing,” Jack said. “I think…” He held up his flashlight. “Those look like worktables a little closer to the front. Maybe there are some lamps or lights on them.”

  He headed in that direction with me on his tail. I tried to take small, cautious steps. Every time I got overly confident, I ran into a pile of something unidentified on the ground. Whatever it was grabbed at my feet. Cables? Wires?

  And then there was light. Jack had found a lamp. When he turned it on, it made a small pool on a short section of a long workbench. Using his flashlight, he found a second lamp not far away, and I found a third.

  “Okay,” he said, picking up small items around the space and studying them under the flashlight. “Fuses… O-rings… bolts… switches… valves.” He raked the light over the back of the bench and a neat line of cans and bottles. “What have we here?” He picked up a large brown bottle and read the label. Then he leaned down and read the other labels.

  “What is it?”

  “Spray paint, chemicals, soldering materials. All the things you need to cover over half-assed repairs, change serial numbers.”

  “Strip-and-dip?” We were talking quietly, but our voices seemed to echo anyway.

  “Yep. Among other things. I think we’ve found Jimmy’s bogus parts factory.” He ran the light farther down and touched on a neat hutch of drawers, the kind my dad used in his garage to organize his screws and nuts and bolts. Jack opened on
e of the drawers, pulled something out, checked it, and handed it to me. I held it under the light. It was a small metal plate with a series of numbers engraved in it.

  “It’s a data plate,” he said. “Probably stolen.”

  He moved down the table and found another light. When I caught up, he was holding up a component. He turned it one way, then the other. “This is a rotor segment,” he said. “Brakes.” He rubbed over a rough section with his thumb. “This is where they’ve ground down the part number. They’ll stamp a fake one on.” He put it down and picked up another part. “This is the housing for a starter. If you look under the light”—he pointed to a thin, crooked line across the outer casing that looked like a healed scar—“you can see the solder marks. They’ll clean it up, paint over it, throw on one of those data plates, and sell it as new. Or like new.” He put the unit down. “I’ll bet if we look around here, we’ll find some fake packaging. And it will look as good as the real stuff. Also paperwork.” He kept moving along the workbench until he found something and brought it back. “See these?” He showed me a stack of papers. “These are yellow tags.”

  They were single sheets of white paper—8½ by 11 inches. “They’re not yellow. And they’re not tags.”

  “They don’t have yellow tags anymore. But they still use the term. This document, when attached to a part and signed by a licensed mechanic, means it’s been repaired according to all the standards and specs and is ready to go back on the airplane or helicopter. That’s what a yellow tag does. It’s the mechanic’s certification.”

  “So this is all that stands between me and an airplane flying with a car part?”

  “This and the skill and integrity of the mechanic who hangs the part on the airplane.”

  I looked down at the stack. They were blank, and they were all signed. “This is like a stack of blank checks.”

  “Exactly. Jimmy fills them in for every part. He probably paid a hundred dollars each for the signatures.”