Parts Unknown

by Rex Burns

  “You’re dead—you’re fucking dead!”

  “Try and bury me.”

  He did. First he came in with a hard slashing swing across my chest that told me he meant what he said. I could hear in my mind Bunch’s laughing voice telling me that’s what the punching techniques were good for, and why would I persist in using judo? His next swing was a backhand sweep that drove me against the railing and left my stomach open for a quick jab with the cloven end of the shaft. He tried and I parried the side of my hand against his wrist, a test of quickness, and saw in his eyes a tiny quiver of surprise. Behind him, the big one was a shadow beginning to sit up and stare my way without the slightest sign of affection. But the sweep of the pry bar kept him behind the shorter one, and I slid along the guardrail to get a wall at my back and keep them both in sight.

  The shorter shadow drove at me, shoulder dipping to get all his weight behind the swing. I let him get close and, as the shoulder dropped, swiveled aside and grasped his wrist with one hand, slamming the heel of my other hard against the back of his elbow. It gave a very satisfying pop, and the steel spun across the landing as the man doubled in agony and his legs went rubbery. He tried to fall but I didn’t let him. Pulling on the awkwardly bent elbow, I levered his shoulder up and back and turned under the arm to come down hard. I heard the sucking, tearing noise of tendon and gristle just before he drowned it out with his scream.

  The big one’s feet warned me and I spun, ducking low with my wrists crossed to catch whatever was coming. It was a foot—quick estimate, 15 triple E—and it thudded against my forearms and almost lifted me off the floor. I scrabbled at his heel but he drew back quickly and kicked out again, a side kick that had enough grace and aim to tell me it was trained. It also had enough power to land solidly against my ribs and drive my breath out in a wheezing cough that I tried to cover with a scornful laugh. It didn’t fool him and it didn’t help me, but from my bouts with Bunch I guessed what was coming next, and it did—a quick spin and the other leg, gathering leverage like a rock swung at the end of a taut rope, whistled sharply at my head. I dropped beneath it to scissor my legs at his knee and felt my heel hit the soft spot and the big man dropped heavily and rolled away, twisting his neck to keep his eyes on me as he tumbled. Somewhere in the background, the sound of the other’s nasal wail mingled with the clang of staggering heels on the iron stairs, and the man disappeared. I paused, waiting for the big one to push himself onto his feet, cautious about bringing my legs close to those massive hands.

  “I’ll be back, you son of a bitch.”

  “Anytime. It’s been fun.”

  And, I thought with a bit of surprise as he backed down the dark, spiraling stairs, it was. It really was. It might have been different had I been on the short end of things, but the exhilaration, the rush of blood and adrenaline, and the sharpness and edge to life that came in the fight had been fun. The restlessness, the boredom with the cases, the lack of direction, were lost and forgotten—in their place was the deeply satisfying pleasure of using nothing but my hands to conquer another man who had wanted to kill me. There was no other word for it but fun.

  CHAPTER 10

  “YOU SURE IT was the bikers?” Bunch wandered from one corner of the office to the other, stepping over scattered sheets of paper from the file drawers, strewn envelopes with their canceled stamps, detritus from desk drawers that had been tipped upside down. His concern had been first for the electronics gear stowed in the air-conditioned closet that served as his workroom, then for the rest of the office, then for me.

  “I’m sure. And why the hell don’t you help clean up instead of just standing around with your thumb up.”

  “Touchy! For one thing, you said the dudes didn’t have beards. All the bikers I saw looked like bench warmers on the House of David baseball team.”

  “I don’t think they had beards. It was dark.”

  “For another, if it was the bikers, they’d have whacked you. They tried once already. They would have come here with a piece and used it when you showed up.”

  “Maybe they want me alive to tell them where their dog is.” I wrestled a metal drawer back into its slides and gathered up the folders, one emptied, that held past cases and old correspondence. Behind me, the teeth-setting scrape of steel on glass said the glazier was busy replacing the broken window. “They didn’t expect me to show up. And I didn’t expect two of them—the bum only mentioned one.”

  The burglars hadn’t had time to pry open the old Mosler, where the active files were kept along with what little else we thought was confidential. Scratch marks around the hinges and lock showed they had started. But they didn’t have the tools to strip the safe quickly, and most likely the rock coming through the window interrupted them.

  The exhilaration of combat had quickly ebbed the night before, and for some reason I couldn’t remember, my shoulder—the one hurt in the automobile wreck—began to ache. And I didn’t feel like facing a major salvage job that would last until five in the morning. I figured the cleanup could wait, and wait it did. Now we were trying to put the office back in some kind of order and come up with an idea about what the bikers were after.

  “You say they didn’t have anything in their hands when they came out?”

  “One of them had a pry bar.”

  “Important stuff—papers, a folder.”

  “The pry bar was pretty important at the time, Bunch. But no, neither one carried anything from the office that I could see.”

  He ran a finger over the fresh tool marks glinting in the steel of the safe. “Then they must have thought it was in here. They looked through everything else first, found nothing, and tried to peel the safe.”

  “Maybe they weren’t looking for anything specific. Maybe they just wanted to trash the place.”

  Bunch shook his head. “I don’t know. If they wanted to do that, they’d have busted up the electronics gear. I mean, all they had to do was walk in and start shoving things off the shelves. But they didn’t. They went for papers. And the safe,” he added.

  It was possible. We didn’t have a thing on Billy Taylor or the bikers out at the Wilcox farm, but they didn’t know that. And like most guilty people would suspect we were after the very thing they wanted to keep secret. “Maybe they want to find out why we’re poking around their farm.”

  “Yeah.” He scraped some paper together with the tip of his shoe. “Well, they didn’t find anything because we don’t have anything.”

  “They found me.”

  “Yeah, but nothing vital.” Bunch stood in the doorway of his closet to inventory, for the tenth time, his electronics hoard. “If the bastards had any brains, they’d have helped themselves to this stuff when they left.”

  “They were in a hurry. What kind of alarm system can you rig for the office?” Like a lot of people who made their living by providing a service for others, Kirk and Associates hadn’t yet gotten around to serving themselves. Plumbers had leaky faucets at home, carpenters’ houses needed repairs, we needed an alarm system.

  “Good thought. They might want another look.” He frowned and rubbed a large thumb along his jaw. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “Keep the cost down.”

  “Yeah. You and Hally Corp.”

  It gave him something to concentrate on, so I could finish cleaning up the mess. A lot of the papers were as worthless to us as they had been to the burglars, the remains of closed cases and aimless correspondence about the trivia of business life. It was about time the drawers were cleaned anyway, and as I filled another wastebasket with folded and crumpled sheets, Uncle Wyn came in and eyed the remaining litter and the glazier squeezing putty along the window frame.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess: you had a visitor.”

  I explained a little of what happened, leaving out the fight scene.

  “They came in the window? how the hell’d they do that?”

  “Somebody threw a rock in. To warn them.”

 
; “Ah.” He looked down at the street and sniffed. “Didn’t take much of an arm.” He poked his cane against the still-locked safe. “Bunch says they were after what’s in here.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “So what’s in here?”

  “Active cases.” I changed to the singular. “Case, anyway. Tax returns. Some correspondence that shouldn’t be left around.”

  “Well, I been doing some detective reading, you know? What you got to do is look for the unexpected thing. The little thing you’re not thinking about. It’s in all the books—private eye stuff, adventure stuff like this guy Clive Cussler. I like him.”

  “We’re not in a book, Uncle Wyn.”

  “Hey, it’s just a thought.” He rapped the safe. “But there’s some truth to it. You don’t assume, know what I mean? You look at everything, you figure the situation and the odds, you look for what the runner’s going to do.”

  “We’re not in a baseball game, either.”

  He gave the safe a last tap as if to say he could take a hint, and wandered into the storage room to talk with Bunch.

  The glazier finished brushing up the shreds of putty and, wiping his mustache with a wrinkled and scarred forefinger, handed me the bill. I wrote the check, hoping it wouldn’t bounce, and then tidied up the last of the mess before opening the safe to stare at the small piles of documents and photographs.

  The contents remained as placed in the file separators that divided the interior space. In one slot were a few letters from prominent clients that mentioned personal and sensitive issues related to earlier, now-closed cases. I went through them and destroyed as many as practicable. Beside them were the few inconclusive photos of Taylor sitting in the living room of the Wilcox farm. Nestor’s file was there too, with the photographs of Dr. Matheney’s correspondence stacked on a small shelf below the separator.

  I spread the Matheney collection across my now-clean desk; it was as good a time as any to go through it in detail, and a welcome change from housecleaning. A rumble of background voices came from the storage room as Bunch explained the workings of one of his toys to Uncle Wyn, and I half listened as I read.

  Most of the pages cramped onto the glossy prints related to the daily life of the clinic—reports on patients, queries to insurance companies about payment, replies to insurance companies about services provided. More interesting were those letters to professional acquaintances dealing with pending seminars or in-services. Matheney was in demand as a specialist in some aspect of transplant rejection that I couldn’t understand. Something to do with tissue bonding and phrased in technical shorthand that I would need Jerry Kagan’s help with. But I recognized that the subject fit Matheney’s expertise; he was a surgeon and immunologist, and apparently taught courses in immunology at the University Medical Center. It also explained his correspondence with the Cryogenic Biological Laboratories, another file we hadn’t had time to examine completely. That stack of photos seemed to depict mostly purchase requests for parts and equipment, and letters that carried a running dialogue about some project that Matheney was helping with. A separate file of memos rather than letters gave us half of a dialogue with something called Antibodies Research, and this, too, generally involved purchase orders on a project. Whatever it was, Matheney was on a first-name basis—“Dear Morris,” “Dear Mark”—and the memo file was apparently much less important than the meetings which started about a year ago and increased in frequency. In fact, no new additions had come in the last four months, and whatever was being established seemed to be running smoothly or else was finished. Other correspondence included two or three inquiries for assistance in locating donors of one kind or another. One letter, buried down a bit in the stack of glossies, was a copy of an urgent request from Empire State Hospital in New York to the Cryogenic Biological Laboratories. It asked for donors with blood type Rh null. A scrawled note said, “Morris—any possibilities?”

  “Bunch—take a look at this!”

  He came in to peer over my shoulder. Uncle Wyn limped behind.

  “So all those blood tests weren’t just for Nestor’s well-being,” murmured Bunch.

  “You mean they stole this guy’s blood?” asked Uncle Wyn.

  Bunch shook his head.” They’d have a hard time stealing it. Probably talked him into donating a few pints.” He looked up. “Maybe it was direct transfusion. Maybe they talked Nestor into going to the recipient in New York.”

  “He’s been gone a couple months now, Bunch.”

  “A couple pints a week? It’s rare blood—once you get that kind of donor, maybe you don’t let him go. Just keep milking him.”

  “But you’d have to have equally rare recipients. How much of that blood would they need?”

  Uncle Wyn grunted in satisfaction. “So maybe you got somebody who kidnaps this kid for his blood. So maybe now you got somebody else who breaks into your office to see how much you know. What do you think of that, Dev?”

  I said it was an ingenious idea, that he was right all along, and that Bunch and I would be happy to make him a partner in the firm. But he shook his head no, pleading age and arthritis, and said he was content to be an occasional consultant and wouldn’t charge us a dime for it. On the way up to Boulder and the Cryogenic Biological Laboratories, Bunch told me Uncle Wyn’s tongue was wagging like a puppy’s tail at the idea he had helped us out. “The guy’s always been a hard charger, Dev—always competitive. It must be a bitch for a guy like that to be crippled up like he is.”

  “I think he’s sorry we paid off his loan. He can’t come around as much as he used to.”

  “He can come around anytime, as far as I’m concerned. And he’s right about the break-in; it could have been somebody from this cryo-bio outfit.”

  “He’s not as right as he’d like to be, Bunch. Think about it. Neither they nor Matheney know we went into his office and copied his files. Matheney knows we’re looking for Nestor and maybe the women. But as far as we know, he doesn’t have any reason to get uptight. And he doesn’t know what, if anything, we have. Why should he go to the risk of raiding our office when we might have nothing?” I turned the Subaru off the parkway onto Arapahoe and headed east toward a high ridge where prairie could be glimpsed through a scattering of homes, tiny farms, and light-industrial buildings. “Besides, the way those two went through the office was a warning. They were looking, yes—I grant you that. But they were also warning us off. It all points to the bikers.”

  We followed the turns of one of those industrial park roads, the kind that wind like suburban lanes but are too wide and too empty of parked cars to live up to the image. A low aggregate sign sported blue letters—CRYOGENIC BIOLOGICAL LABORATORIES—and clean curbing led a gently rounded drive toward the visitors’ parking lot. It was a one-story cast-concrete building whose stucco facade faced the lot. The side walls were plain slabs of cement, and few windows punctured the sun-glared structure.

  A very attractive woman glanced up from her typewriter as we came in: mid-twenties, red-blond hair piled up in a loose chignon, high cheekbones, and wide lavender eyes that accepted men’s admiration as only natural. Which it was.

  “Is Mr. Amaro in, please?”

  She corrected me. “Dr. Amaro. Do you have an appointment?”

  “We told him we’d be up. He said to just come by.”

  “Oh, you must be the reporters! He’s expecting you.” She pointed to a door. “Turn right—the first office on your left.”

  Bunch, his camera dangling conspicuously over one shoulder and a grimy canvas bag over the other, whispered as he followed me, “You interview Amaro, Dev. I’ll interview her.”

  “Photographers don’t talk, Bunch. They just take pictures.”

  Dr. Amaro was a plump, olive-skinned man with a balding head and starkly black hair raked back over his skull in painted lines. He may have been in his fifties. His handshake, a brief squeeze, was cool and soft, but he was clearly excited about his business. “You’re doing a story on cry
ogenics and medicine?”

  “Medicine and new trends in technology,” I said. “Cryogenics is one of the newer areas, I understand.”

  “Well, somewhat, although it’s the more lurid uses of the field that seem to have captured the popular imagination—freezing heads for transplant in the next century, preserving the bodies of the rich. That sort of thing.”

  “Do you do that here?”

  “Oh goodness, no! Those kinds of things—well, I hesitate to call them the work of charlatans, because we really don’t know what science will come up with in the next hundred years. But they are in the realm of science fiction, as far as I’m concerned. No, here we deal with science reality—the application of cold temperatures to already proven medical practices.”

  We settled into the interview, Bunch gliding around the background to study the doctor through his lens and occasionally click the camera, I writing with professional aplomb in a stenographer’s notebook and asking questions that would lead the doctor through a sketch of the company and its activities.

  Founded in 1975, the laboratories got their start as a subcontractor in a larger Ball Brothers space project, examining the effects of radically low temperatures on various metals, plastics, and moving parts. “We pioneered some of the basic technology for the development of ultra cold environments.” With the gradual decline of space exploration, the company moved into developing technology that would apply to medical purposes. “There’s quite a demand for small, portable cooling units that can be used to transport donor parts and tissue for transplant.”

  It wasn’t as simple as making a small refrigerator, even one that could maintain a constant temperature of zero degrees or one that would go down as low as minus four hundred degrees centigrade for several hours. Temperature control was just one critical aspect; preservation also required the correct oxygen tension, carbon dioxide removal, and acid-base balance. “In many cases, blood flow must be maintained even as the organ is cooled. Livers, for instance. A donor’s liver is immediately placed in cold salt solution and perfused as it’s rapidly cooled to around ten degrees centigrade. The liquid provides a blood substitute that keeps the organ functioning temporarily, and the cold inhibits tissue decay. The result is an ischemic period of up to thirty-six hours. We’re trying to improve on that.” He saw my eyebrows lift. “Ischemic? It means without blood flow. The liver can be preserved for up to thirty-six hours and—if the technology is available—be transported anywhere in the world for use.”