by G. M. Ford
I turned the sleeping bag inside out and stood on it. It was hotter standing up. I unzipped my jacket and let the contents of the glove box fall among the feathers. The zipper was hot to the touch. I threw the gym bag on top, bundled up the corners into a makeshift sack, threw it over my shoulder, and stumbled up the driveway. The little house hissed and popped behind me. I kept walking all the way to my car.
The inferno wasn't readily visible from the road. Only the white glow in the distant treetops suggested that something was amiss. It could just as easily have been mercury vapor lights. Occasional cinders, propelled upward by the force of the fire, broke the tree line, burned themselves out, and fell harmlessly back to earth. No sirens split the air.
I sat back on the willow branches that were draped over the hood of the Fiat and dropped the bundle at my feet. The hood clicked shut.
My heart stopped. I slid carefully to my feet again and backpedaled out to the road, dragging the ruined sleeping bag with me. Maybe I'd hit the hood release on my way out. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Maybe.
By the time I'd liberated the clothesline from the front yard, I could smell my own hair burning. The kid wouldn't be needing the clothes. I left them in the yard. The cabin had sunk in upon itself to form a homogenous pile of glowing rubble, fed from somewhere down inside by the same white-hot jet of flame I'd seen earlier. I'd sweated my way through my leather jacket. The heat from outside, the water from the inside. By the time I made it back to the car, I was walking along in my own little steam cloud.
I beat my way through the bushes to the driver's door. I unlocked it. I attached one end of the clothesline to the door handle and carefully popped the latch without moving the door itself. I played the rope out behind me as I groped my way through the underbrush. When I ran out of rope, I stepped behind the largest bush I could find, got down on my face, and pulled on the rope. I heard the door squeak open. Nothing. I pulled harder.
I thrashed my way back down the rope. The door was open. So far so good. I untied the rope from the door handle and repeated the whole process on the hood release. This time from behind the car. I heard it pop.
My thick fingers made it difficult to tie a loop in the end of the rope. I managed on the third or fourth try. I tightened the rope over the edge of the hood onto the locking mechanism. The hood opened backward. There was no second release. I dragged the rope out onto the street and gave a tug. The branches were holding it back. I used two hands, and the hood bulged the willow branches up and out as it snapped up on its springs. Nothing.
I walked tentatively over to the driver's door. Trying not to move the car, I reached in the backseat and extracted the black flashlight from my pack. Careful not to lean on the fender, I played the light over the engine compartment.
I didn't need an expert for this one. Two wires, one red, one black, ran from my battery terminals, over the top of the engine, and on through the firewall. I knelt down by the driver's door and looked beneath the seat. The two wires were imbedded in what looked like an unbaked loaf of sourdough bread that was wedged beneath the front seat. My knees threatened to fail me. I sat down on the cold ground.
Only the thought of having to explain my actions to the local authorities got me going again. I retrieved the rope from the hood. With the care of a brain surgeon, I tied another knot around the two wires just behind where they were alligator-clipped to the terminals. I fed the line around the side of the hood.
Once I was at the end of the rope, I gave it one quick, short tug for all I was worth. Nothing. I walked slowly up to the side of the car.
The alligator clips dangled harmlessly over the side. I was careful not to touch them together when I loosened the slipknot.
I repeated the process under the front seat. I jerked what appeared to be two aluminum test tubes from the spongy mass. Carefully, I worked the substance out from under the seat. It was, as I'd suspected, soft to the touch, like an enormous glob of beige Play-Doh. It smelled like nail-polish remover. I gingerly put it in the trunk. I went back to the front of the car, picked up the sleeping bag, and set it lightly on top. I closed the lid.
Back inside the car, I pulled one wire and then the other back through the firewall. I broke off one of the clips, yanking it through. I wound the wire around the aluminum tubes and put them on the passenger seat. I was breathing like a distance runner. I'd been lucky so far. I needed to get the hell out of here. The Fiat started right up.
I jammed it into first gear and blasted out of the little hiding place. The willow branches tore the antenna loose. It dangled, banging, against the side of the car. I got out, tore the wire off, stuffed the wire back in the hole, and threw the antenna to the ground.
I was off the reservation, through Marysville, and halfway to Everett before I stopped shaking. The moment my sanity returned, I realized that there could well have been another device in the car. The one now in the trunk could have been a decoy. The shaking followed me all the way home.
Chapter 9
"How in hell can anybody lose a Buick station wagon? You can lose your wallet. You can lose your job. Hell, you can even lose your way, but it's not possible to lose a Buick station wagon."
"We didn't lose it, Leo," whined George. "We just don't happen to know where it is at the moment."
"I thought I t old you guys to stay together."
"Jesus, Leo. You look terrible."
For once Ralph had a point. For Ralph, even the most obvious connection to reality was a step in the right direction. Early this morning, I'd had much the same reaction to my face. Something had drawn me directly to the bathroom mirror. I was still wearing my partially fried leather jacket. The stuff I'd collected was down in the Fiat.
I had stood in front of the mirror and run my unsteady fingertips over the collection of scrapes and scratches that criss-crossed my face. Both my eyebrows and the front of my hair were badly singed, the ends rolled up and brown. When I ran my hand over them, small brown whiskerlike ends fell into the sink.
"Never mind how I look. Where's Buddy and the car?"
"He told me to go look for Ralph," said Harold.
"Where in the hell was Ralph?"
"I was looking for George," he answered.
"Where in hell was George?"
"I was in the can." Progress of sorts.
They all began to babble at once. I put a stop to it.
"Cut it out," I said. "Let me see if I've got this straight. After I left, you guys followed her back to the Save the Earth building, right?"
"Right," they said in unison.
"What happened then?"
"Nothing," in unison again.
"She just went inside and waited." George again. I was losing patience.
"Then what?" I growled.
"Then George had to go to the can." Ralph.
"He was gone forever." Harold.
"I had to walk all the way up to the fucking train station."
This started an argument as to other, more convenient venues where George might have been able to meet the call of nature. The guys were experts in this area. I squashed this enlightening discussion in a hurry.
"So, Buddy sent Harold to look for George. Then what?"
"Then he was gone forever too," said Ralph.
"The Mission was closer. I thought George would go over there," said Harold.
"There was a huge line at the Mission," George said, tapping his temple. "Today's Friday, right? Wednesday night's meatloaf night over at the Mission, remember?"
"Oooooh." They all nodded knowingly.
"So he sent Ralph to look for both of you." How desperate, I wondered, did a man have to be to send Ralph looking for somebody? "Then what?"
George took over. "I ran into Harold on my way back from the train station, and then we both ran into Ralph on our way back to the car."
"Then you all headed back to the car?"
They looked from one to another. George started to open his mouth, thought better of it, and stop
ped. Harold studied the carpet. Ralph dug around in his ear.
"You fellas didn't by chance stop off for a short one on the way back to the car, did you?" George and Harold tried hard to look offended.
"Just one," said Ralph. The other two stared at him in disbelief.
"Fuck it," said George with a sigh. "Yeah, we stopped at the Lantern and had a few. We were gone maybe forty minutes, no more. When we got back, Buddy and the car were gone. No more than forty minutes, I swear to God, Leo." He held up his hand like a Boy Scout reciting the oath.
"So where are Buddy and the car now?" I asked.
"He's not at our place." Harold.
"The Zoo neither." Ralph. They didn't need to say more. With Buddy, one you'd looked at the rooming house and the Zoo, that was it.
My guess was that when the crew failed to return, Buddy'd gone looking for them among the neighborhood dives, probably having a little pick-me-up at every place he stopped. He was probably sleeping it off in the Buick.
"Okay," I said. "Back to work. You guys get down there and keep track of things. I'll find Buddy." I stopped them before they could pummel me with questions. "When Buddy shows up, I want one of you to call me. Is that understood?" They said it was. They were so relieved that they didn't even grouse about how they were going to get downtown. I followed them to the hall. As I'd suspected, they turned left.
"Take the stairs," I hollered. They instantly reversed directions and disappeared down the hall.
I stood in the shower for a long while, letting the steam wash the smoke from my pores. It wasn't until I stood naked in front of the mirror that I realized I had been partially cooked. My face was considerably redder than the rest of my body, shiny and stretched like after a day of sailing. I took a pair of nail scissors and clipped the remaining burnt ends from my hair and eyebrows. The eyebrows came out fine. Even wet, the hair looked a little ragged. Dry was worse. I opted for a hat.
After slipping into a fresh pair of jeans, an old Carlos and Charley's T-shirt, and my Nikes, I threw everything I'd been wearing last night in the washer. I couldn't imagine how anyone could connect me with the fire, but better safe than sorry. My face was going to make it hard enough to claim I was home in bed. I didn't need a pile of cooked clothes to help anybody out.
The jacket was another matter. The heat had burned the dye in several places, leaving irregular brown patches all over the front. I threw it to the floor behind the front door. the jacket was history.
I jammed a Mariners cap on my head and took the elevators downstairs. The Fiat looked worse than I did. The branches had left myriad scratches all over the body and had torn a small triangular hole in the convertible top next to the rear window. Willow leaves clung stubbornly to every nook and cranny. A car wash was in the offing.
I pulled the bundled sleeping bag from the car and slung it over my shoulder. Grabbing my gear with the other hand, I went back upstairs. On my way to the kitchen, I deposited the reeking sleeping bag on the living room. I put the remaining food and drink into the refrigerator and left the cooler draining in the sink. Just for drill, I threw the remaining clothes into the washer with the rest. What the hell. I threw the empty pack in too.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I carefully unwrapped the bundle. Everything was covered with feathers. I worked slowly so as not to create any air currents. The loose paperwork I'd yanked from the glove box yielded a name for the kid. Robert Warren was the registered owner. A Marysville address, which I assumed must be the cabin. The rest of it was the usual crap. Old receipts for car parts. A service manual for the truck and a collection of downtown parking receipts. I kept the registration and the receipts and shitcanned the rest. That left the bag.
I hadn't noticed it last night, but the bag was heavy. It was long and narrow, with a zippered compartment for a baseball bat underneath. There seemed to be a bat inside. I fished around. It turned out to be a three-foot metal tube, capped with red plastic on both ends. I pried one of the caps off. The interior was filled with what appeared to be rolled-up posters of some sort. Carefully, I slid them out. Maps.
Unlabeled topographical maps, marked here and there with yellow highlighter. Somebody had neatly snipped the border from each of the five maps, removing the range and section notations in the process. Each of the dozen or so highlighted areas was accompanied by a series of numeric notations, three numbers to each, which made no sense to me. I rolled the maps back up and slid them back in the tube.
A tattered army blanket filled the inside of the bag. The second my hands began to lift it from the bag, I knew what it was. Nothing feels quite as solid and compact as a weapon. I unrolled the blanket. I'd never see this model before. Whatever the hell it was, it was dangerous. It looked like a fancy water gun. Maybe two feet long. Made to use one-handed or two. Fully automatic. Short vented snout. One long banana clip in place, several others folded up carefully in the blanket. They looked to hold about eighty rounds each. The last fold in the blanket turned up an ugly-looking silencer, machined to screw on the front of the little gun. With one of these, Custer could have won the battle by himself.
I rolled and folded it all back the way I'd found it and returned both gun and the maps to he bag. Gently, I lifted the bag from the feathers that now lined the inside of the sleeping bag and brushed off the bottom. Several missed the sleeping bag and latched onto my carpet. I retrieved them. I fetched a roll of duct tape from the kitchen. I threw in the useless paperwork from the truck, laid the leather jacket on top of the pile, bundled it all back up, and taped the corners together.
Before putting the bundled-up sleeping bag into the trunk of the car, I removed the blob of whatever and filled it into the bag with the gun and the maps. The wires and the aluminum test tubes went in last. The whole package rode on the passenger seat. I went back upstairs.
I called the restaurant. If you wanted to talk to Floyd, you called the restaurant. Floyd was never there. They'd never heard of anybody called Floyd. Some things don't change. Somebody answered on the first ring.
"Windjammer."
"I need to talk to Floyd."
"Nobody here by that name, buddy."
"Well, just in case anybody with that name shows up, tell him Leo Waterman needs to talk to him."
"Whatever floats your boat, pal." He hung up.
I vacuumed. I dusted. I did everything I could think of to assure that no remnant of last night's debacle remained in the apartment. I had just discovered a loose feather at large in the cooler strap when the phone rang.
"What?" was all he said.
"I need some help."
"You sure you can afford it?"
"I need mind, not muscle."
"That you might be able to afford."
"I need to now."
"Don't you always? A grand."
"Where?"
"You remember where it went down with the Jamaicans?"
"How could I forget?" In my little world, cleaning brains off my car seats was a memorable event. Probably not in Floyd's.
"With you anything's possible. An hour." He was gone.
I'd have to hustle. Floyd was talking about Lincoln Park in West Seattle. It was ten after eleven, between the rush hours, thirty minutes to Lincoln park. I headed out. I got to the elevator just as the doors were closing. Neither the young couple who lived next to the elevator nor the Pakistani gentleman from the end of the hall made any attempt to reopen the doors. I took the stairs.
Fifteen years ago one of my most prized clients had come to me in a bind. His teenage son Robin, a thoroughly spoiled little boil on the ass of humanity, whom I'd already helped extricate from several minor disasters, had finally gone too far. In a futile attempt to make something of himself, he'd set himself up as the middleman and somehow managed to end up with both the dope and the money after a cocaine deal had been interrupted by the DEA. The other players were not amused.
The mess had come to light when, two mornings later, my client had shuffled out to pick u
p the Sunday Times only to find Chuckles, the family Labrador retriever, eviscerated and nailed to the front door. the handwritten note tucked under Chuckles's studded collar had been quite explicit. Unless the drugs and money were returned posthaste to their respective owners, the rest of the family could expect to meet a similar fate.
My client, having no desire to spend his golden years to Cedar Rapids looking over his shoulder, wanted me to make contact with the aggrieved parties and arrange transfers. I'd refused to have anything to do with the dope. I'd figured this would get me out of it. No such luck.
He wanted me to return the money. Three hundred thousand in large bills. I balked again. Out of the question. Not my style, I said. The client offered a five-percent commission. I did some instant arithmetic and went shopping for professional backup.
I'd heard murmurings about Floyd. Street talk. The kind of larger-than-life stories that tend to circulate about the truly competent. Nothing solid, just a few offhand remarks from the right people to the effect that this guy was the real deal. I'd quietly asked around. Frankie Ortega had told me what number to call.
Two days later, Floyd returned my call. I explained the situation.
"What do you need?" he'd asked.
"I need to get home safe and sound to the wife and kiddies."
"You don't have a wife and kiddies." He'd done some homework.
"Then, who'll feed my cat?"
"You don't have a cat either. Five grand if we can leave them where they fall. Ten if I have to do cleanup."
"I'm hoping we don't have to do either," I said.
"Five grand either way."
We settled on five grand. He was there when I got out of my Mustang in front of Lincoln Park. A big guy, six-four or so, curly hair, little close-set eyes. Big wet lips under a nose that had seen a lot of wear and was flat at the tip. All that was left of his right ear was a withered flap of skin that stuck straight out from his head like a dried apricot. Miss Congeniality this was not.
Without the benefit of an introduction, he started right in.