Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  The hair prickled on my neck. “For ‘Billy-the-Kid-Goat’s Gruff,’ no doubt. Did you tell her about Bron and your dad?”

  He was looking at the linoleum, tracing a circle with his running shoe. “Sort of.”

  “Carnifice could track your blog postings through your laptop, even if you’d used the world’s cleverest nicknames.”

  “But-I told her about Bron through Coach McFarlane’s computer,” he objected.

  I yelped so loudly it sent Scurry running down the hall for cover. “They have your nickname, so they can look for any new postings you make! And now they can trace Mary Ann’s machine. If you’re trying to lay low, you absolutely cannot be in touch with the outside world. Now I need to figure out where to park you two-it’s a question of hours before your dad’s detectives track down Mary Ann’s machine. We may need to move you, too,” I added to my old coach.

  Mary Ann said she wasn’t budging from her home, tonight or any other time; she was staying here until they moved her to a cemetery.

  I didn’t waste time arguing with her or trying to persuade the kids to move; my most urgent task was to find Marcena’s recorder before William’s Dobermans did. Since she seemed to carry it everywhere, she must have had it on Monday. Maybe she’d only read from a transcript because she was recording the meeting, or she was wary enough not to let them see her device.

  Her big Prada bag, which she also took everywhere, hadn’t materialized after the assault, so William must have gotten that. He’d searched the remains of the Miata. If the pen wasn’t there, or at Morrell’s, or the Czernin house, then I was betting she’d lost it either at Fly the Flag or in the truck that took them to the landfill. Or at the landfill itself, I suppose. Since I didn’t know where the truck was and couldn’t look at the landfill until morning, I’d swing by the plant now, before William had the same idea.

  I hoped Billy and Josie would continue to be safe if I left them behind. It was hard to live with so much uncertainty. I’d been trailed yesterday, but not today-as far as I knew. But I’d been using my phone this past hour, and Billy had been using Mary Ann’s computer. I went to the living room and peered through a slit in the drapes. I didn’t think anyone was watching, but you never know.

  Josie had gotten them this far. She was four years younger than Billy, but a harder-headed urban survivor. It was she I coached to put the chain bolts on both doors and not to open them for anyone but me; if I didn’t come back tonight, then tomorrow they had to tell a reliable adult what was going on.

  “You two have been smart about not speaking on Coach McFarlane’s phone, and you need to keep doing that, but you have to promise me that you will call Commander Rawlings in the Fourth District if you don’t hear from me by morning. Don’t talk to anyone but him.”

  “We can’t go to the police,” Billy objected. “Too many of them owe favors to my family, they do what my father or-or grandfather tells them.”

  I was about to say they could trust Conrad the way they trusted me, but how could I be sure of that? It might be true, but Conrad had superiors, he even had patrol officers who could be bribed or threatened. I gave them Morrell’s number instead.

  “When I do come back, I’m going to take you home with me. I don’t like leaving you here with Coach McFarlane-you’re too exposed, and it puts her in danger.”

  “Oh, Victoria, my life is too close to the end to worry about danger,” Mary Ann protested. “I like having young people in the place. It keeps me from brooding over my body. They’re looking after Scurry, and I’m teaching them Latin-we’re having a grand old time.”

  I smiled weakly and said we could figure that part out later. I showed Josie the place in the curtains where she could see the street, and told her if she saw someone follow me she should call me. Otherwise, I’d see her in the morning.

  I zipped up my parka, kissed Mary Ann on both cheeks, and let myself out the door. Billy came behind me and pulled briefly on my arm.

  “I just wanted to say thank you for helping me out when I fell apart just now,” he muttered.

  “Oh, honey, you’ve been carrying way too big a load. You didn’t fall apart-you just felt safe enough to let me know how hard it’s been.”

  “Do you mean that?” His wide eyes studied me for mockery. “In my family, not even my grandma thinks it’s all right to cry.”

  “In my family, we think you shouldn’t wallow in your tears, we think you should act-but we believe that sometimes you can’t act until you’ve cried your heart out.” I put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “Look after Josie and Coach McFarlane. And yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

  The skies had cleared. When I got to my car I could see the Big Dipper low in the northern sky; the moon was almost full. This was both good and bad; I wouldn’t have to use a light to find the factory, but I’d be visible if anyone was watching Fly the Flag.

  I checked my flashlight. The batteries were good, and I had a spare pair in the glove compartment. I put them in my pocket. Checked for my extra clip to the Smith & Wesson. I left my phone on until I was a couple of blocks from Mary Ann’s, heading north, toward Lake Shore Drive and my home. At Seventy-first Street, I switched off my phone, then turned west and looped around the neighborhood until I was sure I was clean. I turned south again and made my way to Fly the Flag.

  Once again, I parked on Yates and walked down to the factory. The Skyway embankment loomed in front of me, its sodium lights forming a halo above the street but not shedding much light below. Most of the streetlamps were out down here at ground level, but the cold silver moon lit the streets, turning the old factories along South Chicago Avenue into chiseled marble. The moonlight cast long narrow shadows; my own figure bobbed along the roadway, like a piece of stretched bubble gum, all skinny lines with little blobs where my joints were.

  The avenue was empty. Not the quiet emptiness of the countryside, but one where urban scavengers moved under cover of the dark: rats, druggies, thugs, all looking for a fix. A South Chicago bus labored up the street. From a distance, it looked like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood-its windows were filled with light, and the headlights looked like a grin underneath the big front window. Get on board, ride home in warmth and comfort.

  I crossed the road and went into the factory yard. It had been over a week since the fire, but a whiff of smoke still hovered faintly in the air, like an elusive perfume.

  Even though the traffic on the Skyway was loud enough to muffle my sounds here, I walked along the edge of the gravel drive so that my running shoes wouldn’t crunch in the loose stones. I went around to the side, to the loading bay.

  I saw at once what had happened to Bron. Just as he had the heavy front load of the forklift suspended beyond the lip of the dock, ready to drop his load in the truck, Grobian had pulled away. The forklift had pitched headfirst off the dock, burying its forks in the ground. The cartons Bron had loaded on the front end were scattered in a wide circle around it. The fall itself must have broken Bron’s neck; the wonder was that Marcena had survived it.

  I shone my flashlight around the ground. Sherlock Holmes would have seen the telltale broken weed, or displaced piece of stone, to say whether Marcena had been in the truck when it went over. I could only guess that her war zone training had given her a sixth sense of the danger, so that she jumped clear of the forklift as it fell.

  I climbed around the machine. I looked underneath it as best I could, but I couldn’t see Marcena’s red pen. Maybe it was buried under the front end, but I’d save that possibility for last-it would mean hiring a tow truck to raise the forklift.

  I moved in a circle around through the weeds and the gravel. This side of the building faced away from the fire, so I didn’t have to contend with the broken glass and charred remnants of fabric I’d found when I searched here last week, but there was still a tiresome amount of debris, jetsam from the Skyway, flotsam from the street. I’d read recently that Chicago ’s landfills were just about at capacity a
nd we were starting to ship our garbage downstate. If all the bags and cans I’d seen on the streets today had been put into the garbage, maybe we’d have filled our landfills even sooner. Maybe litterers were saving taxpayers money.

  After an hour, I was as sure as I could be in the dark that the pen wasn’t out here. I put a foot onto the forklift and climbed up onto the loading dock. I sat on the lip and stared into the tangle of brush, trying to imagine Marcena.

  Now that I wasn’t moving around myself, the night noises started to sound loud. I strained to listen under the whoosh of the cars and grinding gears of the semis overhead. Were those rats and raccoons rustling in the brush, or humans?

  Marcena wanted Grobian and William on tape, or chip. She saw she was onto a much bigger story than she’d thought; she knew the power the Bysens had-if she tried to publish the story, they could squash it, sue the paper, sue her. She needed their voices, saying what they were doing.

  Maybe she’d had her recorder in her hip pocket, but maybe she’d put it where she thought it would pick up any private remarks the two men made. I pushed myself to my feet. Despite my parka, I was cold now, and I didn’t want to go inside the dark, cold building alone.

  Billy and Josie spent a night here, I scolded myself. Be your age, be a detective. I turned on my flashlight again and went into the loading room. Shelves ran along its high walls, filled with flat cartons ready to be made into flag boxes. There were still some bolts of fabric in their plastic sheathing, waiting to be carried to the cutting area. After two weeks, a thick layer of sooty dust covered them, and the edges had been eaten by rodents, charmed to have such soft nest-building material laid out for them. I heard them scuttle away as my light drove them from their work.

  I gave a cursory look around the room, but the floors were bare; I think I would have seen the recorder if she’d dropped it here in the open. I did check walls, and under the shelves, to see if it might have rolled out of sight, but found only rat droppings. I shuddered and moved quickly into the workroom where William found, or claimed he’d found, a load of sheets.

  Here was where the fire damage was obvious. There was a gash in the front wall where the firemen had axed through the entrance. Ash lay on the sewing machines and cutting tables, heavier toward the southwest corner, where the worst of the blaze had been, but sprinkled with a liberal hand where I stood, near the other end of the room. The big windows in the back had broken. Glass lay everywhere, even near the front of the room. How had it traveled so far? Pieces of window frames, chair legs, half-sewn U.S. flags-all these were strewn around, as if some giant playing dollhouse in here had a temper tantrum-she got tired of it, picked up all the pieces and dropped them any old how.

  Marcena would have wanted as much material as she could get for her hot story; she would have tried recording Grobian and Mr. William while Bron loaded the forklift. So maybe she put her pen down near where they were standing.

  And there it was, next to a sewing machine, lying against a pair of shears. I couldn’t believe it, casually set out on a tabletop in plain sight. Of course, if you didn’t know what it was you wouldn’t imagine it was a recorder-it was really quite a clever gadget.

  I picked it up and examined it under my flashlight. It was not much bigger than one of those fat, high-end pens you see in pricey stationery shops. There was a USB port for attaching it to a computer and downloading it, and little buttons, with the universal squares and triangles of recorders-play, forward, reverse. There was also a screen about an inch long and a quarter inch wide; when I pressed the “on” switch, the screen asked if I wanted to play or record. I hit the play button.

  “Her and me, we’re the two best on the team, but Coach, she’s always giving April the breaks.”

  The voice belonged to Celine, my gangbanger. The machine was starting from the beginning of the file, the day Marcena had come with me to basketball practice. I was tempted to eavesdrop more on how the team saw me, but I fast-forwarded. Next, I was startled by my own voice: I was talking to the woman next to me at the By-Smart prayer meeting, asking about William Bysen. I forwarded again.

  This time, Marcena’s clipped tones came tinnily into the room. “Look, put it in your jacket pocket, here. I’ve switched it on, but it won’t record unless people are talking within about six feet of it, so hopefully you won’t pick up a ton of useless background noise.”

  The next noises were smothered scrapings and gruntings, Marcena’s laugh, a slap, mock outrage from Bron. An R-rated recording, oh, well. Then a few starts and stops with Bron maneuvering his truck and cursing at some other driver, and then he was telling Marcena to get behind the seats, to lie down on the mattress back there so the guard at the warehouse gate wouldn’t see her. The guard checked him in; the two knew each other and kidded back and forth. There were similar exchanges all through the warehouse; he was talking to my friend in the Harley jacket about their routes and loads, bragging about April and her ball playing, joining in laments about the Bears and about company management, until Grobian summoned him.

  Grobian went over his route and his load for the day, then said, “That supplier in your neck of the woods, Czernin, that flag maker, I don’t know if it’s his Serbian head, but it seems kind of thick, like he’s not getting the message.”

  “Hey, Grobe, I did my best.”

  “And we showed our gratitude.” That was Aunt Jacqui. “But we-the family-want you to give him another message.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “We want you to give him a message, shut his plant down for a day, but let him know we can put it out of business for good if he doesn’t play ball. A hundred, like before, if you do the job by the end of the week. An extra hundred if you make the message strong enough to force him to come round,” Grobian said.

  “What did you have in mind?” Bron asked.

  “You’re creative, you’re good with your hands,” Aunt Jacqui used a provocative tone, implying that she wouldn’t mind knowing what he did with his hands. “You’ll think of something, I’m sure. I don’t want to hear that kind of detail.”

  Her voice came through more clearly than Grobian’s-she must have been sitting in the chair in front of the desk, while Grobian sat behind it. Was she wearing that black dress whose buttons only came down to her hips? Had she crossed her legs, casually, giving a suggestive flash up the thigh-this could be yours, Bron, if you do what I want?

  All at once, I heard voices coming in through the loading area. I’d been so intent on the recording that I hadn’t heard the truck pull into the yard. What kind of detective was I, sitting there like a turkey waiting to be shot for Thanksgiving dinner?

  “Jacqui, if you wanted to come along you should have worn proper shoes. I don’t care if your damn thousand-dollar boots have a scratch on them. I don’t know why Gary tolerates your spending.”

  Jacqui laughed. “There’s so little you know, William. Daddy Bysen will have six kinds of fits when he learns that you swear.”

  I stuffed the recorder into my hip pocket and ducked under the big cutting table. Red-and-white bunting hung over the sides like a heavy curtain-maybe I’d be safe under here.

  “Maybe he’ll choke on them, then. I am sick, god damn sick of him treating me like I don’t have the wits to run my family, let alone this company.”

  “Willy, Willy, you should have taken your stand years ago, the way I did when Gary and I first married. If you didn’t want Daddy Bysen running your life, you shouldn’t have let him build your house for you out in-what was that?”

  I had tripped on a chair leg and banged into the table as I went under it. I held myself completely still, squatting behind the bunting, barely daring to breathe.

  “A rat, probably.” Grobian spoke for the first time.

  Light flicked around the floor.

  “Someone’s in here,” William said. “There are footprints in the ash in here.”

  I had the Smith & Wesson in my hand, safety off. I slipped through the
bunting on the far side of the cutting table, calculating the distance to the hole in the front wall.

  “Neighborhood is heavy with junkies. They come in here to shoot up.” Grobian’s voice was indifferent, but he up-ended the cutting table so fast I barely had time to move out of the way.

  “There!” Jacqui cried as I stood and started running toward the front.

  She shone her light on me. “Oh! It’s that Polish detective, the one who’s been lecturing us on charity.”

  I didn’t turn to look, just kept going, skidding around the tables, trying to sidestep debris.

  “Get her, Grobian,” William shouted, his voice going up to a squeak.

  I heard the heavy steps behind me but still didn’t turn. I was two strides from the door when I heard the click, the hammer going back. I hit the floor just as he fired. I tried to keep hold of my own gun, but my fall sent it spinning out of my hand. He was on top of me before I could get to my feet.

  I grabbed Grobian’s left leg and jerked upward. He stumbled, and had to twist around to keep from falling. I sprang upright backing away from him. My head was wet. Blood was pouring down my hair and neck, into my shirt. It made me dizzy, but I tried to concentrate on him. Jacqui and William were helping him, shining their lights on me; Grobian was a shape in the dark, two shapes, two fists swinging at me. I ducked under the first one, but not the second.

  45 Down in the Dumps

  My father was cutting the grass. He kept running the mower over me. My eyes were bandaged shut, so I couldn’t see him, but I’d hear the wheels rumbling through the grass. They would hit me, go right over me, and then roll back again. It was so cold, why was he mowing the grass when it was so cold out, and why didn’t he see me? The garden smelled terrible, like pee and vomit and blood.

  I screamed at him to stop.

  “Pepaiola, cara mia.” His only words of Italian, used on my mother and me both, his two pepperpots. “Why are you lying in my path? Get up, get out of my way.”