by Buck Sanders
“Funny business inside for two weeks?”
“Right. A more glaring front could not be hoped for.”
“But it’s the sort of thing only a neighborhood type would notice. You’re free to work your way up that leg if you’re so inclined.”
“So,” Slayton said, smoothing the backs of his fingers up and down her calves, “we do a first grade-level stakeout on the warehouse, wherever it is—”
“East L.A., just out of the industrial fringe areas. Ahh—that’s nice. You know, the part of town where none of the buildings seem to have signs telling you what they are.”
“Or if they do, the titles are always cryptic as hell,” Slayton added. “Conservative Rollaways Limited. Turgid-son Extendables. Yeah, I know those.”
“You mean you’re going to—mmmmmmmm, keep doing that—going to watch for low-riders hanging around?”
Slayton nodded. Mercy found herself speechless.
“Broad daylight is too obvious, though,” he said. “We’re going to have to wait until tonight. I have to pick up a few notions from Lucius.”
“What happened to your shower?”
“Postponed.”
“And we’ve got until this evening to wait?”
“Right.”
“Thank god. Get up here.”
The warehouse was a featureless gray shell of corrugated steel that looked like an unused zeppelin hangar. Halfway up its considerable height, row after row of windows denoting floors inside began. They circumscribed the interior without completely spanning the space inside from wall to wall. It would be very simple to lose ten feet of vertical space between the tops of the windows and the ceiling of the whole gargantuan structure.
Like a chrome insect in hiding, the Trans-Am was parked in the shadows nearby, silently watching. Running lights were all that seemed to be on inside.
“There must be a hundred locks between us and where we want to go,” Mercy said, with a tentative air. She did not cherish the idea of infiltrating the building, but had gone as far as to dress for the occasion. Out of Slayton’s petty cash she had picked up a pair of black leather boots, and from the waist down her contours did justice to the lines of the crisp new designer jeans. The Danskin she wore above looked as if it had been painted on. For warmth she had the jacket she had brought with her the night before.
“Lucius has taken care of that problem for us,” Slayton said, patting the inner pocket of his own coat. Lucius was also ready to raid the warehouse as soon as somebody who was obviously at home there flashed a key, and Slayton had persuaded him to hold off until he had searched the place himself. Leads to other Starshine sources and people might be uncovered that way. If Lucius and company burst in and arrested the people they found there, they’d have a handful who would have destroyed evidence as the doors were being kicked down. It would come off even, like a police raid on a bookie joint—you could never get in fast enough to keep receipts from getting flamed. Lucius had agreed to hold off until Slayton okayed him with a phone call.
“You want to drive around again?” she asked.
They had spent two hours in a concentric-circle pattern, using the warehouse as the hub, taking the peripheral roads to eliminate the possibility of second-string sentries watching for them. Slayton was reasonably sure that there was no action to be had inside tonight, but decided to canvas the exterior of the building and the wheatfield-sized parking lot, surrounding it one more time for paranoia’s sake.
Almost silently, the silver car rolled out and began moving. Slayton had webbed himself into the special exploding harness designed to give him maximum draw speed with the bulky .45 automatic, and he was toting the same basic kit he had used to enter the Washington town-house. If he could not dispatch whatever trouble might greet them inside with ten of his special slugs and his wits combined, he deserved to be a bricklayer.
He nodded positively after they had completed the circuit. Mercy tried to blow off some tension by taking several deep breaths, but she was clearly still nervous. That had not caused her even to consider not coming or not helping him, and Slayton admired her for that.
She was a bright young lass, vivacious and intelligent. Her looks put nine out of ten women to shame. And Slayton had to battle hard against the question that would have instantly cheapened their relationship—the one that usually begins what’s a nice girl like you…? He choked it down because he knew she had been asked that hundreds of times by hundreds of men. If he brought it up himself, he would get the same reply they had gotten, she would grow defensive, and they would have lost something that Slayton considered valuable.
They drove in silence, parking the car unobtrusively, yet with easy access to the service-personnel door they planned to use. Slayton left the car unlocked There was nothing important inside, and chance might force them into a hurried exit that locked doors would only complicate.
“Watchdog for me,” was all he said as he knelt in front of the padlock hasped across the seam of the door. She stood rubbing her arms vigorously, playing lookout. It was not that cold.
Slayton left the open lock hanging from the metal staple and pulled the door shut behind them. “Which way?”
Mercy indicated a metal fire stairway at the end of a hallway composed mostly of janitorial clutter. They could both feel the outside breezes rocking the entire structure, from the top down, as they climbed up the rusting and mostly unused stairs. If it was a fake, it was a well-disguised fake. The tiers crosshatched upward for almost fifty feet, and an emergency bridge—a clanking affair much like a drawbridge on steel cables—led down onto the lowest level of offices and cubbyholes that ringed the inside of the building. Slayton glanced briefly over the railing at the drop to the concrete floor below. A fall would mean a messy finish. Far above, he could hear pigeons rustling about in the topmost crannies. Every sound he made echoed back with whisper-softness. Apparently he and Mercy were the only people inside.
“We’ve got to keep going up,” she said, almost inaudibly.
She led the way to the opposite end of the building and a column of utility stairs connecting the peripheral floors. Here and there a catwalk crossed the void. They soon climbed past the level of the first ceiling. When Slayton had noted their passing two more, Mercy tapped his shoulder and pointed into the darkness leading away from the stairs.
“This way.” She took his hand and moved haltingly into the dark corridor. It terminated in a locked door, and she indicated that Slayton should open it. He made quick work of the reflex deadbolt and they were in.
He dug out his penlight and scanned briefly around. He saw broken desk chairs, dilapidated desks, rusting and useless file cabinets—a cobwebbed salvage yard of old and terminal office leavings from the 1940s. Everything he could make out in the feeble light had at least a decade of dust coating it in an undisturbed, uniform layer. This was how he noticed the path on the floor itself, the mark of recent traffic. Mercy followed it, pulling him along. The room was less than ten feet wide, but very long, extending back beyond the range of the light. He was pretty certain that they were now retracing the steps they had taken eastward when they first approached the fire stairs on the bottom floor.
After thirty yards or so of picking and weaving, the room dead-ended against a discard pile of the oldest and most useless of all the unusable garbage in the room—the stuff farthest from the door. Mercy silently pointed upward.
There was a small door in the ceiling, like the hatchway to an attic.
Slayton dragged a rickety chair from the pile and took a wobbly stance on it in order to reach the key-lock on the trapdoor. The awkward and precarious position made picking the lock longer work than it usually was, but after about five minutes of protesting shoulder muscles, compensating for his lack of balance, Slayton had it licked. He pushed the door upward and heard the hissing sound of a hydraulic riser.
He fished the penlight out of his pocket and vaulted up, wedging himself into the rim of the trapdoor frame. The first thin
g he saw was a telescoping aluminum ladder—brand spanking new.
He pulled himself up, and lowered the ladder down to Mercy. It was payoff time.
As she stuck her head through the opening, she said, “There’s a light switch right by your foot. You can use it; there aren’t any windows.”
Slayton pushed the toggle switch and a bank of fluorescent lights blinked crankily to life, glowing purple and blue in the confined space. He could see makeshift electrical systems drifting down from the ceiling network of wires. Commercial-gauge power cords connected up with rows of socket strips. Into the sockets were plugged heating units, refrigerators, filter pumps, desk Tensor lights, a centrifuge like those used in chemistry labs, a coffee pot. Along one wall on metal utility shelves were sealed boxes of chemicals and plastic jugs of liquid. Forty-gallon drums lined the far wall. There was a broad table equipped with surgeon’s sinks and rubber-matted work areas. In the center of the table was a confusing mad-scientist jumble of beakers and glass-tube leads. Beyond the table were two sealed receiving beakers of large capacity; from these to the Frankenstein equipment on the table flowed the spi-raled glass tubing that was the condensation apparatus for the average hillbilly still. The refrigerators buzzed away in the utter silence of the narrow-walled, low-ceilinged compartment. Jammed into the far corner of the room, next to the large drums, was an army cot with a rumpled sleeping bag. Slayton recalled Mercy’s story of the jainas who were brought up to this place for a fast in-and-out, and assumed the cot was not just used by fatigued employees of the Starshine trade.
On another metal shelf, paralleling the doorway, were the boxes and bottles. The chemical analysis and breakdown of Starshine indicated a rudimentary kind of chemical “aging” was inflicted on the product. The action of the catalyst used for the aging process was at once one of the things that gave Starshine its special kick and its private danger. The aging was obviously done either in refrigeration, or in the casks on the bottom-most shelves. Above were cartons identical to the one Slayton had seen in Anna Drake’s subbasement garage. Next to those were row upon row of the crystal decanters, throwing back the artificial and uncomplimentary light with their own peculiar rainbow glow. As with prostitution, the creative packaging. of something essentially simple was important with Starshine, thus this sly, advertising-executive approach to narcotics and bootlegging.
It was not Hollywood. The joke was on the Washington elite who had been snowed—once again—by canny propaganda. Slayton found himself thinking of the honey-voiced Southern senator, Franklin Reed, and realized why he had thought so quickly of “hillbilly” stills. He knew that a number-one priority in any kind of covert operation was misdirection. Certainly if a senator from the South could be linked with an operation like this, by reverse logic he could make himself a prime suspect in any investigation of such a substance. But what if you moved your hardware all the way across the country, and promoted the idea that the stuff was indigenous to another area?
American advertising cliches strike again, Slayton thought. It was an interesting theory—but without evidence implicating Reed, it was nothing more.
“What do we do now?” Mercy asked, distantly.
“We put Lucius’s surveillance dogs on this place. I don’t need spy-camera pictures or a sample as evidence, if that’s what you mean.” He was sure he would find no ledgers here; the place was totally functional and spotless. It was neat enough to betray their intrusion if they jostled anything or fooled around inside too long, and so Slayton motioned Mercy back to the trapdoor.
“How many more of these are there?” he said.
“I’ve seen two others,” she said, preceding him down the ladder. “Like this. One’s in the Pan Nacional building. One’s a little closer to downtown.”
It was a cinch the financial and transaction records, if there was any written documentation at all, were not kept with the hardware facilities. Slayton lightened his gait as they hit the bottom of the fire stairs, back out in the open area of the warehouse’s vast ground floor. Mercy had quickened her pace toward the door; she seemed to want to get away from the place as quickly as she could.
“Mercy,” Slayton said. “What about—”
She lit off for the door at full speed, and the shadows around Slayton agitated to life as he was rushed from seven sides at once. He recognized the click of Beatle boots on pavement, and the crunch of leather surrounding him. Mercy’s single cry sounded desperate, but was not.
“Ortiz!”
A homicidal-looking man well over six feet tall detached himself from the wall and Mercy rushed into his arms.
It was payoff time, alright.
13
Slayton managed to put away the first two cholos unlucky enough to be in the front line of the attack. After that, it was an unfortunate matter of strength and numbers, having very little to do with martial skill.
He straightarmed the first’s ill-timed rush, and broke his nose with the powerful blow. The boy recoiled backward, an expression of surprise hitting his face when he saw the nasal blood that came away in his hands. The guy beside him slowed down to look, and Slayton used the stair rail to put both feet up and over, into chin and groin. The attacker hit the stone floor with a considerable handicap.
Slayton’s immediate plan was to sprint back up the stairs and use the confusion above either to lose them or take them out one at a time. His move was anticipated, and his escape obstructed. They were on him like wasps, battering him to the floor and immobilizing his arms and legs. The one Slayton had bashed used the opportunity to punch Slayton hard in the nose. Slayton grimaced as his head was snapped around. He heard the cartilage in his own nose crackle unpleasantly.
“Córtesela!” barked Ortiz, who moved closer to inspect his prize.
Ortiz was quite a spectacle himself. Handsome in the crudely refined fashion of someone who has spent a lifetime on the streets, the streets had repaid him by inflicting their birthright-marks. He had a twisted and shiny knife scar decorating his left temple from the hairline to the eyebrow. His forearms and hands were stitched with “prison tatoos” made by punching ink under the skin with a heated pin. The resurgence of the pachuco idiom on the West Coast had caused him to get his hair sliced into a severely short version of a DA, but he still affected a black leather jacket and chinos. His nose was twisted sideways, which made his eyes seem unnaturally prominent. A ruthless intelligence radiated from those eyes, the pupils of which were so dilated that Slayton was sure Ortiz ate a steady diet of uppers. No wonder he was so into violence.
“You done fucked up now, man.” He shook his head sadly while his trained apes all laughed on cue. “You surely did. Watch this.” He had walked over with Mercy crushed against him. Her face was neutral. He whirled her by the arm and mashed his lips against hers, prying her mouth open, working at her with his tongue, bruising her mouth. Her arms snaked around his neck. He clenched a hand in her hair. “Fooled you righteous, didn’t she?” He cupped his leather-bound crotch with one hand. “You wanna see her do something more radical?”
Slayton could not stop himself. “She does that for everyone, what does that make you, big man?”
“Aww, man,” Ortiz said, his face screwing into a semblance of annoyance. “That’s just gonna get you hurt.” He broke eye contact with Slayton for only a second, but it was sufficient to earn Slayton a cracked rib as one of Ortiz’s lackeys drove his pointed boot into Slayton’s side. He grunted, writhing against the strong arms holding him, his voice dying in his throat.
“But you’re correct, amigo. I’m the big man.” His hand was still holding his “package”; the cholos laughed again, on cue. “I’m the chingón. You don’t fuck with me. Did you know you’re a trespasser here? You know what we do to trespassers?”
Slayton was sick of everyone whooping it up. “Marry them?”
Ortiz shook his head again, an expression so pleasantly banal that it belonged on a suburban insurance agent. Slayton got a hard slap in the face concurr
ent with a blast in the stomach that stole his wind. Blood began to drip from his nose to his mouth. He was lucky he had not bitten a chunk out of his tongue. It was not a simple matter of a machisimd verbal joust; Slayton knew that such games, for the Chicanos, were taken with pathological seriousness. He had to shut up to live. But Slayton’s own education and experience would not allow him to stand idly and quietly by while such asses pranced and brayed before him. It was a classic Mexican standoff—but it was in Slayton’s own mind, not on the warehouse floor.
“You’re really a punk, Ortiz,” he growled, blood outlining his teeth. “And a coward. You couldn’t stand me one to one, and you know it. What’s better, I know it, you chicken-shit bastard.” Slayton swore he could feel the blood temperature of the cholos restraining him cool off by ten degrees. Nobody ranked Ortiz, not if they wanted to keep their teeth. It was an old story—the biggest-kid-on-the-block syndrome. History would defeat Ortiz in the end. They always forgot that it doesn’t really matter how bad you can be. No matter how frightening you are, there was someone, somewhere, who could reduce you to shivering obeisance. Everyone thought he was immune to the rule. Even Slayton.
The cholos had him spread-eagled on the cold stone of the warehouse floor, on his back. Ortiz shucked Mercy away like empty cellophane, taking steps measured to place his final stride dead-on in the saddle of Slayton’s crotch. He planted a harness boot laced with biker chains there, his stacked heel mashing Slayton’s scrotum, and leaned forward, shifting all of his weight to the foot while his sweating, manic face hovered inches from Slayton’s nose.
The sour agony that lanced up from his groin in nauseating waves pushed Slayton to the very rim of consciousness. Ortiz placed his hand in almost brotherly caress around the back of Slayton’s neck, cupping it, then jamming his thumb savagely into the hard knot of his Adam’s apple, cutting off Slayton’s wind. Ortiz’s childish grin never left him. Slayton crimsoned from lack of air, but never let his eyes break contact with those of the young killer on his windpipe and balls.