Every Day Above Ground

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “Why do you think I might know your dad?” I felt like a cop, grilling her for answers I already had. But like a cop, it was the easiest way to know whether she was trying to feed me a line of bullshit. She might take after her father in that regard.

  “He looked up directions to your house from the airport, like, on my computer,” Cyndra said. “He tried to erase the history, but I could still find it.” A hint of pride.

  “Doesn’t explain why you followed him,” I said.

  Cyndra hugged Stanley tight enough that he whined a little. “He left for Seattle on Tuesday. He should have come back by now. I have a number, but he doesn’t answer. For like, days.”

  “Left from where?”

  “Reseda. That’s by L.A.”

  Addy had reached the limit of her quietude. “You came here all the way from California? How?”

  “On the bus,” said Cyndra. A frayed Bauer backpack, packed so full it was straining at its loose seams, leaned against the railing within her reach. The pack pinned a skateboard with peeling grip tape to the porch.

  “They let you buy a ticket?” Addy said.

  “Forget how, get to the why,” I said.

  “There was another address he looked at in Seattle. Down south somewhere.”

  Shit. I knew exactly the building Cyndra meant. Or at least the huge charred spot where a building used to be.

  “When Dad didn’t come back, I looked for it,” she continued, “and it was already on videos on YouTube and everywhere. There was a big fire. I thought Dad might come back, after that. But he didn’t. And then—”

  Her voice stopped before it broke. Tears crested like tiny waves and she wiped them away angrily before she buried her face in Stanley’s neck.

  God damn it. The girl thought her father might have died in the inferno. The worst part of it was, that fate might have been more merciful.

  “Oh, honey,” Addy said, and knelt down to hug the girl. Cyndra let her. Stanley looked at me, vibing on the emotions and not knowing what to do. I was no help. I left the females—one weeping, one murmuring softly—and went back inside the house.

  Addy would make tea, or something, in a situation like this. I rooted in the refrigerator for cans of soda.

  Cyndra knew a hell of a lot more about her father’s plans than I liked. If complete ignorance was a zero, I put her loose information to tie me to O’Hasson and to the break-in and fire at somewhere around a six, with ambitions. It might not be legal proof, but it could sure as hell spark the interest of any investigators. My past week would be under the microscope. Hell, the cops might be looking for the kid right now, if her foster family had made enough noise.

  I found two 7-Ups and a Coke that might have been in Addy’s fridge since my homecoming over a year ago, and carried them to the porch. Stanley had freed himself from Cyndra’s grasp and was trotting around the yard. The kid’s face was red enough to match her freckles, but her eyes were dry.

  “They’ll be worried sick for you,” Addy was saying to her.

  Cyndra sniffed through her plugged nose. I took that to mean that her foster parents were something less than involved. I’d been placed in houses like that myself.

  I handed the 7-Ups to Addy and Cyndra and sat down on the steps.

  “I don’t know where your dad is,” I said, “or if I can help you. But I can’t find him unless I have the same facts as you. Yeah?”

  Cyndra nodded cautiously.

  “What did Mick tell you about his trip to Seattle?” I said.

  “Just that he was sorry he had to leave, and that he’d be back in like a couple of days. I could tell it was something about money. He wasn’t lying about being sorry, but he really wanted to get going.” She made a sour face. Maybe Mick’s leaving had turned into a family squabble, so soon after he’d been released. “All excited.”

  “You know what your dad does?”

  “He steals shit.” She said it so matter-of-factly, it startled me a little.

  “Did you always know that?” Addy said.

  “He got out of prison, like, a couple of weeks ago. And—I know that he’s sick. I think he wants money so he can get better.”

  Getting better wasn’t in O’Hasson’s prognosis. The money was all about Cyndra’s future. Not that he would have told her that.

  “What happened in Reseda?” I asked. “Why didn’t you wait for him?”

  Cyndra took a long, shuddery inhale. I thought the tears would come again, but when she spoke, her voice was steady.

  “Two men tried to grab me,” she said.

  Addy and I exchanged glances. My expression couldn’t have been much more dumbfounded than hers.

  Cyndra kept talking, her eyes on Stanley as he sniffed around the fence. “I was walking to Farrah’s. That’s my friend. She called and said could I sleep over, and I said sure, ’cause Tachelle doesn’t give a shit when I come and go.”

  Addy started to ask a question, before I shook my head no. The girl was finally talking.

  “It was nighttime and Farrah only lives a little ways,” Cyndra said. “I took a shortcut down the alleys. This van followed me. Like, I didn’t know it was following me, I thought it was just going the same way I was, you know? But it didn’t pass, and then this big swole-up creepy guy started walking towards me, from the other end. He was staring at me. I heard the van start to go faster.”

  Cyndra took another long inhale. “And I ran. The big fat guy reached out and almost grabbed my bag, but the van got in his way, and then he was chasing me. I can go fast as shit, okay? I climbed a fence and ran across a couple of people’s yards and I hid. I thought they would give up, but they both came after me.”

  “My God,” said Addy.

  “I lay down on the ground, in some bushes. They walked around for a while. I could hear them whispering in the dark. Nobody was home in that house. I could have screamed a whole bunch. But that doesn’t always help, where we live.”

  I nodded. “So you stayed put.”

  “Uh-huh. Like a long time. They knew I hadn’t gone far. Then one of them stopped right near where I was. Really, really close. He was listening, I think.”

  “Did you get a look at him?” asked Addy.

  “No,” Cyndra said. Then she turned to me, and the touch of self-confidence was back. “I got pictures.”

  Addy gasped, distracting Stanley from whatever he was nosing in the dirt. “You took photos?”

  “Well, I thought I would call, like, 911 while I was running, before I had to hide. And then the guy was right there, and I thought, ‘Shit, if I get some photos maybe I can throw the phone where somebody else will find it.’”

  “Damn, kid,” I said, almost reflexively.

  Cyndra took out an older-model iPhone with a crack splitting one corner of the screen and tapped it to bring up the pictures. She swiped to show me there was a whole series.

  The photos weren’t great. They weren’t even good. With no flash at nighttime, half of it obscured by leaves and twigs, the figure was barely identifiable as an actual human and not a lawn statue. Plus, he had been facing away from her. Very wide body. Short matted black hair over an orange sleeveless shirt, showing off arms that had seen a lot of heavy reps. Light brown skin. Those were the clearest features in most of Cyndra’s hasty pics.

  But the final shot caught his face in profile. More outline than details. I enlarged the photo. Low hairline. A nose that had been flattened by more than genetics, and the ear was puffed with cartilage. Maybe Latino. Definitely a fighter.

  “Do you know him?” I asked Cyndra, still peering hard at the dim images.

  “Nuh-uh.” Her face was less buoyant as she looked at the thug in the photo.

  I remembered how she had given me a close examination. “Did you think I might be one of these dudes who came after you?”

  She nodded. “But you aren’t. Not even the other guy from the van. He was a lot shorter, and he was blond. But you’re kinda like—” She stopped, not sure of the
words. Or not sure if she should tell me.

  “He’s the same type,” Addy said. “Tough.”

  Mean, I thought. The dude looked mean. Just the kind of asshole you could picture snatching a young girl out of an alley at night.

  “What did you do then, dear?” Addy said, maybe to get Cyndra’s mind off the man’s face.

  Cyndra shrugged. “Just waited until I heard them drive away. I stayed in the bushes for like an hour. When I got home, I saw their van parked way up on the next block. So I went in through the bedroom window and took my stuff and a bunch of Tachelle’s money—she has all these hiding places she thinks are so smart—and then I got Farrah’s sister to buy me a bus ticket.”

  Addy tsked. “Honey, you should have called the police.”

  That advice received another sniff from Cyndra.

  There was something else in the last picture, something that I had missed in my concentration on the meathead’s face. A tattoo bridging his bicep, half in shadow. Red or orange or brown ink, it was hard to say. The crude illustration looked like an axe or a short sledgehammer. Instead of a maul for a head, the tattoo had a clenched fist.

  “You’ll sleep here,” Addy said. I looked up to catch Cyndra’s head bobbing. Now that she had found me, the fumes she’d been running on were burned clean away.

  The kid didn’t protest as Addy helped her up and into the house. Stanley followed. I stayed on the porch.

  Were the two men in Reseda the same ones who had grabbed O’Hasson? Had they driven all the way from Washington to Southern Cal just to find Cyndra? The creep in the picture didn’t look like the type to set sophisticated traps or use tranquilizer darts on his victims. More like he’d hit them with a steel pipe, and if they didn’t wake up afterward, that was just too damn bad for them.

  Kidnapping Mick O’Hasson might have been a case of mistaken identity. But Cyndra had been the deliberate target of the two lowlifes. She’d just been smarter, or luckier, than her old man.

  Addy came back ten minutes into my musings. “She dropped off immediately, poor child. So much terror.”

  “She’s holding up better than most adults would,” I said.

  Addy made a noise that wasn’t too far from Cyndra’s derisive sniff. “She’s putting on a face, can’t you see that? So exhausted that she forgot to ask you the real question. Her father, Mick, came to see you. Did you meet him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you know what happened to him?”

  “I don’t know where he is now. Dead or alive.”

  “That’s not a direct answer.”

  “No. But it’s already more than you should know.”

  “Don’t even imagine that you’re protecting me, Van Shaw.”

  “Addy,” I said, “I need you to go with me on this. Whatever happened to Cyndra’s dad must have some connection to those thugs showing up in Reseda and going after her. If it goes sour, and I get busted, you could be an accessory after the fact just from whatever I tell you. And for not calling Cyndra’s foster family.”

  Addy’s apple cheeks went pale. “We’re not calling the police?”

  “I can’t stop you if you want to. But if she goes back to Reseda, maybe the goons in the van try to kidnap her again. Even if we tell the cops her story, and they watch her for a day or two, she’s vulnerable the minute they’ve gone.”

  “But surely there’s protective custody.”

  “From what? I could spill everything I know about Mick O’Hasson, it still doesn’t help his kid.”

  “And you would be arrested. Is that accurate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you deserve to be?” Addy’s tone made Stanley whine from inside the screen door. She was angrier than I’d ever seen her, and Addy Proctor was not a woman who hid her temper.

  “Probably,” I said, “but me waiting on a bail hearing isn’t going to do Mick O’Hasson any good. Or his daughter.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Buy some junk food. Convince Cyndra that we’re on her side.” I had to grin, even though it would piss Addy off even more. “And lock up your cash and your silver. The kid inherited more than freckles from her dad.”

  Eleven

  For my midnight return to Pacific Pearl’s freight office, I had brought a few items not normally in my tool kit. A boat hook borrowed from Hollis. Its aluminum pole could telescope from five feet to nearly twelve in length. A handful of rubber bands. And a short tree branch from my own property, its twigs sagging under the green weight of thousands of height-of-summer pine needles.

  I circled the surrounding blocks and stopped up the road, on the far side of the railroad tracks. Spent half an hour scoping out the shipping yard and the street nearby. Except for the occasional train passing on the elevated tracks, nothing had moved. When I was sure I wouldn’t be interrupted, I drove the truck around the block once more to come up behind the camera I had spotted earlier, high up in its nest on the support pillar.

  While sitting in rush hour traffic on my way to Hollis’s, I’d considered what to do about the camera. I didn’t want to simply trash it. That might clue the hunters that their surveillance of Pacific Pearl was blown. They might never come near the place.

  And I wanted them here. Get them close enough for a visual, and follow them. With a little luck, right back to where they were holding O’Hasson.

  So instead of just putting a bullet through the metal box housing the camera, I’d let my tree branch do the dirty work.

  Standing on the canopy of my truck, I could reach the box with the very tip of the extended boat hook. I fixed the branch to the end of the long pole with a few of the rubber bands. The branch drooped heavily, and it took some muscle to lift the hook skyward and drape the branch over the box, its curtain of needles covering the camera lens. A twist or two, and the rubber bands snapped, leaving the branch right where I needed it.

  There weren’t any trees around, but the branch could conceivably have been blown from the tracks above. For good measure, I gave the rubber antenna on the camera box a solid whack with the boat hook, as if the falling branch had struck it.

  I could imagine my grandfather shaking his head in disbelief. Then again, I’d seen Dono shrug and kick open more than one unalarmed door during our time together, so I knew he hadn’t been opposed to a low-tech solution when it presented itself.

  And speaking of breaking and entering, I wanted a closer look at Pacific Pearl, while the hunters wouldn’t be watching. I moved the truck back up the road and put on the thin cotton gloves from my burglar kit.

  The shipping yard looked like strawberry pie and ice cream. A tired Masterlock padlock secured the gate, loose enough to pop open with a twist or two of the tension bar. My careful casing earlier had revealed no motion sensors or security cameras under the rusty doorway awnings. I locked the gate behind me and jogged to the building, slipping between the closest refrigerated truck and the grimy bricks. No entrance on this side. The loading bays were shut tight. I edged around the corner.

  Pacific Pearl held a few surprises. The rear door was a serious step up in security from the gate. Inch-thick steel, with a heavy strike plate protecting the bolt. A Medeco electronic cylinder lock, too. Good choices, but bad placement. The rear door was out of sight from the road, giving me all the time in the world to beat the complex lock. It took four minutes.

  Inside, my eyes slowly adjusted to the tiny bit of light pushing its way through the yellowed windows into the large room. Large, but meager. An office space, not much more than roller chairs and rough tables and steel shelves. The loose carpet smelled of mildew. A doorway in the sheet metal wall directly across from me led to the loading bays.

  I clicked on my penlight and leafed through the handful of papers left on one of the tables. Cargo manifests. A consignment of melons and other produce, received from a distribution center in Spokane and delivered to multiple independent groceries on this side of the mountains. Normal enough for a company with a fleet of refrige
rated trucks.

  The manifests were dated from one week ago. It seemed Pacific Pearl was still operating after Claudette Simms’s death, if not exactly overwhelmed with work.

  I walked through the doorway into the broader expanse of the loading bays. My footsteps, light as they were, seemed to echo off the big steel rolling doors.

  The bay walls were packed close with a jumble of empty plastic crates and more shipping pallets and one plywood workbench with a band saw. A rack of bulbous aluminum tanks dominated the east wall, looking like bluish-white eggs from some big prehistoric bird. The penlight beam revealed their labels: 134a tetrafluoroethane. Refrigerant for the cooling systems on the trucks.

  The surface of the workbench was strewn with metal shavings from the saw. Some of the tiny curls were stuck in patches of dried paint, which matched the color of the coolant tanks. Curious.

  A steel tool cabinet next to the workbench was locked. I opened it with my pick gun. Inside, on a shelf below a few battered tools, I found one of the tanks, cut into two. The top had been sheared off neatly enough that the two pieces would fit back together with only a narrow seam. In a cardboard box I found quick-dry epoxy, spray paint in the same color as the tanks, and warning stickers for toxic contents.

  Hello, Claudette. I was starting to understand how the dead woman made her fortune.

  A smuggling trick. That’s what I was looking at. Put whatever you wanted to transport inside the empty sphere, then glue the pieces back together, apply a coat of paint and stickers to disguise the seam, and scuff some dirt on to look just like the others. Hell, maybe they could even fill the false tank partway with coolant and complete the illusion by hooking it up to the refrigeration system.

  The usable space in the false tanks wouldn’t be enough to hide anything bulky, but I could imagine the trick working over and over for regular runs, making a steady profit off of gallon Ziploc bags stuffed full of meth or prescription Oxy or kilos of heroin.

  Pacific Pearl was a front. And their method was pretty slick. I’d have to ask Hollis if he had seen anything like this before. He knew just about every trick used to move contraband since biblical times.