by G. M. Ford
"She's out in the car," said Daniel.
"I want to meet her," Miriam blurted.
"No, you don't, I said." Daniel gave me silent support "We spoke of voids earlier, Miriam," I said. "This one has a terrible void that she's trying desperately to fill. I'm afraid that Bobby was just one of those things she stuffed in the hole." I let it go at that. She looked back to Daniel. He wagged his head emphatically. She took him at his word.
Latching onto Daniel's arm, she walked us to the door. Hank stood outside the Nova. Caroline was back in the front seat of the truck. The rain had followed us. A wind-driven drizzle angled in at about thirty degrees. The Sound was no longer visible. Miriam turned to Daniel.
"Come back more often, Daniel, won't you please?" Daniel promised he would. He didn't mean it. I could tell. She left us standing on the porch exchanging phone numbers. I gave him Hector's number and wrote his number in my notebook. He felt like he owed an explanation.
"Miriam and I, when we were younger - much younger - " He waved a hand. "We went different ways," he concluded.
"It's never too late."
"What's done is done," he said for the second time today. "Nothing we do is gonna bring Bobby back."
"No, but we can sure fuck up some other folks' day."
"Might be fun," he admitted.
"I'll be in touch. I need to go back to the city. I'll call you on Monday, okay? I'll need till then."
"If I'm not there, you know where to find me." He hesitated, looking over at the truck. "Better not bring that one," he said.
"Have no fear."
Chapter 16
It took the better part of an hour and a half to fight the rush-hour traffic back into the city. Five years ago, the rush hour was both limited and predictable. All a guy had to do was avoid the highways for an hour or so in the morning and an hour or so in the evening, and traffic wasn't a problem.
These days, the rush hour was omnipresent. The surrounding suburban territory had filled up at a rate that had exceeded even the most pessimistic long-range plans. Long the butt of local jokes, a series of phantom freeway ramps had for the last twenty-five years completely surrounded the city. Connecting to the extant highway system, but leading off only into space, they had been built to accommodate the traffic of the future. The future had never come.
By the time the highway department had gotten around to connecting these mystery ramps to the existing road system, the traffic of the future had become the traffic of the past and was now equally horrific in all directions. There were as many people trying to get back into the city at six in the evening as there were people trying to leave. Seemingly overnight, the sticks had become the burbs, and the burbs had filled to the brim.
The situation was further exacerbated by the very nature of the local populace. Northwesterners are a curious lot. Maybe something in the genes. Maybe some compensatory response to all the rain. Nature or nurture? Any diversion, however mundane, is enough to slow the traffic to a crawl.
I was always amused when I read stories about how in New York of L.A. or some other urban jungle, heinous crimes were committed in plain view of passing motorists whose conditioned response was to put the pedal to the metal and the problem in the rearview mirror. Not in Seattle.
An abandoned car, even one pulled well off the roadway, elicited a round of gawking and rubbernecking guaranteed to cause a ten-mile backup. An accident was good for at least twenty miles. If it happened on one of the bridges, forget it. Might as well turn around and go back to work.
A crime? God only knew. One thing was for sure. The perpetrator had best beat a hasty retreat. Dallying would in all likelihood lead to being pummeled mercilessly by a van full of hefty Swedes, the whole sorry scene photographed for posterity by the inevitable busload of Japanese tourists. Film at eleven.
Caroline had mostly been quiet. When her initial attempts at conversation had been greeted with a series of low grunts, she'd given up and had spent the time gazing forlornly out the window at the traffic. She didn't come alive until I nosed the truck out of the flow, up the James Street off-ramp. She broke my concentration.
"They've probably towed my car by now."
"Good," I said. "You'll probably get in less trouble on foot."
"Turn down here," she directed. "It's a straight shot down to - "
"We're not going to your car."
"We most certainly are. Right now."
"I want you to show me this truck depot that you and Bobby followed the trucks to."
"They're closed by now. They close at - "
"Good," I said. This got her attention.
"Are we going to break in?" Crime enthused the girl.
"We" - I hesitated - "are not going to do anything together. You" - another hesitation - "are going to show me this place, and then I'm going to leave you at your car."
"No way."
"Wanna bet?"
She thought about it. "I know your name," she announced out of the blue.
"Yeah, what's my name?" I asked.
"Leo. Your name's Leo." She was snug. "Hank told me."
I silently cursed Hank. Probably not his fault though. She'd probably worked him like a gearshift leaver to get the information. Explained why he'd been standing out in the rain when we came out of Miriam's house.
"Go all the way to the end and then turn down Yesler."
I followed her directions. Ten blocks south of the Dome, she leaned forward with her hands on the dash, squinting out through the filthy windshield. Her jagged nails were bitten to the quick.
"It's right up here somewhere."
We crept along in the right-hand lane, horns voicing their displeasure as we impeded their progress. She pointed. "There."
I pulled to the curb. More angry horns. A little brown two-story, recently repainted, surrounded by a full acre and a half of parking, which in turn was surrounded by a seven-foot chain-link fence. Razor wire on top. No sign or billing. Serious security for a seemingly innocuous truck depot. Advertising was not a high priority.
A picture of the house thirty years ago crept into my mind. It used to be an orchard. I could still see the little red fruit stand they set up out front every fall. This whole area had been essentially agricultural. Small farms and truck gardens, an occasional warehouse, otherwise rural.
My old man and I used to come down here on Saturday afternoons in the fall to get lugs of apples for my mother to can or mash into applesauce. Looking at it now, it was hard to believe my own memory. Wall-to-wall commercial, wholesale, and light manufacturing. Not the slightest hint of its not-so-distant past. I felt ancient. Caroline rescued me.
"Don't get too close," she whispered. "They'll see you."
"Who'll see me?"
"The guards."
"They've got guards?"
"Several. Monsters," she added as an afterthought.
After watching Caroline's performance at the Last Stand, I was immediately wary of anyone who managed to get this much respect from her. "How do you know about the guards?" I asked tentatively.
"They almost caught us."
"When?"
"The night Bobby climbed over the fence." Her attention was still riveted on the truck depot.
"Tell me about it," I said. She turned her attention to me.
"Why?" Nothing was easy with this kid.
"Because it might be important," I sighed. She thought it over.
"Bobby climbed over the fence - "
"Where?" I interrupted.
"Over there in the back, by the shed." She was pointing to an area along the back wall where a hundred-foot-long shed roof ran the full length. Several cabs, two blue, two red, were parked under its protection. At the mercy of the weather, trailers were symmetrically arranged about the lot.
"What happened then?"
"He was supposed to be sneaking in. We wanted to write down the numbers of the trailers." She hesitated. I pushed.
"Well?"
"It was quite disappoin
ting actually." She shook her head disgustedly. "I thought, you know, him being an Indian and everything, that he'd be able to sneak up on them or something. I mean the place isn't exactly Fort Knox or anything, but - "
"But what?"
"But the fool nearly got us both caught."
"How long was he inside?"
"Not long. Maybe two, three minutes. I don't know how they knew, but they knew. Next thing I knew, he was coming back over the fence."
"Where?"
"Right there." She pointed to an area bordering the street, just in front of the truck. If Bobby'd come over there, he'd no longer been interested in being sneaky' he'd been in full retreat.
"You said he was chased."
"A behemoth. He'd only been gone for a second when I saw him coming back over the fence." Her eyes opened wide. "For a second, I didn't think he was going to make it. His shirt got caught in that wire stuff on top. Ruined the shirt. Not that it was much of a loss," she added "those shirts he wore were - "
"What then?"
"Then the front door" - she pointed to the house - "opened, and this huge guy came running after him. He was almost to the truck before we got it started and got away." She was reliving the incident.
"Nobody tried to follow the two of you after that?"
She wagged her head. "He just stood in the street and wrote down the license number. I watched him."
"What were you and Bobby driving?"
"His truck," she answered distractedly. "His truck didn't like to start right away. It was a junker like this one. Anyway, for a second there, I thought the guy was going to catch us."
I'd been assuming that Bobby Warren had taken his suspicions to a third party and had been betrayed. That was no longer necessarily the case. Maybe he didn't put his trust in the wrong hands. Maybe just his license number. Anybody with an IQ over forty and a little cash can almost instantly translate a license number into a name. the guy that chased him had all he needed. They didn't even have to worry that they'd rigged the wrong house. Not with that ripped-up shirt hanging on the clothesline out front. The poor kid might as well have hung out a sign. Caroline interrupted my thoughts.
"Well?" She folded her arms over her chest. "Go do something."
"Like what?"
"You're the thug. You're supposed to know things like that."
"Stay here," I said for the third time today.
"Don't I always?" she purred.
The fence was brand spanking new. No more than six months out in the weather. No rust or oxidation on the cut ends of the wires that held the chain link in place. Very little garbage collected at the bottom of the fence.
As I wandered along it toward the front of the little house, something caught my eye. An aberration in the coils of the razor wire destroyed the symmetrical effect. I stood beneath it. I reached up. Too high.
Putting the toe of my boot into one of the links, I hoisted myself up to where I could see better. Sure enough, the wire had captured a two-inch square of blue-checked flannel. I tried to free it. No go. With only one hand to work with, getting it free took the better part of two minutes and the skin off three knuckles.
As I stepped back down, I smugly waved my prize at the truck. Caroline was not in sight. Cursing my own stupidity, I started back. A ham-size hand appeared on my shoulder, welding me to the sidewalk.
There were two of them. One black, one white. All of my rattling around up on the fence must have covered the sounds of their approach.
The hand on my shoulder belonged to a large black specimen. Six-three or so and heavy around the middle, he kept his free hand resting lightly on the handle of an automatic that was tucked into his belt while he tried to push me through the sidewalk with the other. The oily skin of his face was latticed with a collection of pits and scars. His thick right eyebrow was interrupted twice by little highways of horizontal scar tissue. His ears were folded up like new roses. Either this guy had repeatedly been threshed and baled or he'd been the opponent to be named in a number of wildly unsuccessful prizefights. I was betting on the latter. His hand increased its pressure.
"What you got there, pilgrim?" asked the black guy nodding at the scrap of cloth in the palm of my hand.
When I failed to answer, the other one stepped behind me. He was younger. Under thirty, taller than the black guy but wiry, with the longest arms I'd ever seen on a human being. They hung down six inches past his knees and ended in a pair of knobby hands so large they appeared to be borrowed. Size three head. A face so narrow it was seemingly grafted together from two badly mismatched halves.
From behind me, "Yeah, pal, what you got there? Heeeeeeeeee." His giggled was so high-pitched and manic it sounded like a blender. Without warning, he delivered a shattering blow to my kidneys, doubling me over.
I struggled to catch my breath. My lower back was on fire. I slowly straightened up.
"Is there an echo in here?" I asked.
"Never mind Wesley. Wesley likes to hurt people. Let's have it."
"Yeah, let's have it. Heeeeeeeeee."
"Wesley," the black guy boomed.
"Yeah, Frank."
"Shut the fuck up."
Wesley saluted. The black guy sighed.
"Let's have it." He held out his hand. I put the scrap of material in it. Wesley redoubled his efforts on my kidneys. This time the other one. I gagged from the pain and went to one knee.
"Now you got a matched set, asshole," Wesley cooed. "You'll be pissin' blood for a week. Heeeeeeeeee."
They studied the scrap.
Frank turned it round and round with his fingers, eyeing me occasionally.
"What do we have here?" he said finally.
"Looks like flannel to me," I offered, staying down.
"Me, too," said Wesley, stepping closer.
"We're all agreed then, it's flannel," I said. The big guy ignored me. Wesley kicked me in the back. I bounced off the fence.
"What you want with something like this?" Frank asked.
"I'm making a quilt."
Wesley was quick. "I think he's lying, Frank."
"Shut up, Wesley," he boomed again. He leaned down to me. "You better get straight with me, pilgrim," he whispered, "otherwise we're gonna go inside and let Wesley have his fun with you. Wesley" - he glanced over - "had a very interesting childhood. When Wesley works on people, I leave the room. Ain't got the stomach for it. Trust me, pilgrim, you don't want old Wesley working on you." When I didn't answer, he shook his head sadly.
He used the hand on my shoulder to pick me up and turn me like a handle back toward the house. "Let's go inside," he said.
I ducked out from under the hand and got my back on the fence.
"I don't think so," I said.
He nodded toward his partner. "Hurt him, Wesley," he said offhandedly.
"Heeeeeeeeee." Wesley started for me. There was joy in his rodentlike eyes and a gravity knife in his right hand. I could smell his sexual excitement.
The pickup roared to life behind us. Both men turned instinctively toward the sound. Caroline jammed the rig in gear and shot directly toward us, bouncing up over the sidewalk, seemingly intent on scraping all of us off the fence. I climbed like an orangutan. The right front fender passed directly beneath me as the truck took out the post I'd been leaning on. I vaulted down onto the hood.
Wesley and Frank weren't so lucky. The force of the truck blasted both of them back into the fence, which, without the support from the mangled post, collapsed directly on top of them. A raucous alarm siren bleated out into the night. Automatic floodlights clicked on and lit the street like a sporting event. The truck backed up, throwing me to the ground as it bounced back over the curb. The passenger door flew open. I jumped in.
Without so much as a look, Caroline jammed the truck into drive and wheeled back into the street. My door closed on its own.
"Oh yes," she said. "Very manly. I especially like the way you didn't even know those two goons were there. If it wasn't for me - "
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I was too busy ministering to my badly scraped left knee to pay any attention. A flap of skin hung out from the tear in my jeans. Gingerly, I pushed it back in and folded the ripped fabric over it. It was already beginning to throb. My back was killing me.
Caroline turned left without slowing, throwing me over into her lap.
"Hang on," she grunted and turned left again. I hung on.
When the truck straightened again, I sat up. We were headed back toward Pioneer Square. Caroline was muttering to herself.
"What's your problem?"
"Problem? Why would I have any problems? Just because I hook up with the only guys in the world who couldn't sneak up on Stevie Wonder, why should I have any problems? A simple little thing like - "
I had the urge to make excuses. I had the urge to inform her that I hadn't been making much noise, that I'd been out of sight from the building, that the place had some type of motion or sound detectors or something, but I resisted. "Screw you," I said, probing my knee.
"You wish," she said with a sniff as we cut back under the viaduct and headed uptown toward her car. "I especially liked the way you just stood still while the skinny one was trying to puree your kidneys. Very manly," she repeated, before I could respond. "And you just gave the other one that piece of Bobby's shirt. You just handed it to him. I mean really, couldn't you at least have - "
"Have what?" I growled. "Have gotten myself killed? Those guys were armed. What was I supposed to do?"
She sniffed once and jerked the rig to a stop in front of her car. Leaving the truck running, she hopped out and walked over, leaned in, and pulled the keys from the ignition, bouncing them up and down in her hand. As I slid across the seat, she restarted her monologue.
"If you'd had any balls at all, what you would have done was to - "
She was still talking as I drove off.
Chapter 17
Rebecca Duvall used an oversize slotted spoon to poke gingerly at the rubbery surface of the casserole.
"By the way, Leo, I'm assuming that it wouldn't be news to you were I to tell you that a number of seriously annoyed law enforcement officers have been inquiring as to your whereabouts."