by Jack Kerley
The van was courtesy of the metal-recycling firm next door. When we showed ID and told them we needed something looking like an abandoned vehicle for surveillance they were happy to oblige, dragging the Caravan to the watch point with a tow truck. It looked at home on the grubby, barren street.
Harry had offered money for the rental.
“You after that guy in that house next door?” Tony, the manager of the scrap yard, nodded toward Baker’s property. “The muscle-bound asshole?”
Harry nodded, pulling a couple twenties from his wallet. “Yep.”
“We keep security dogs here at night. Or did until someone shot ’em dead. Started just after that guy moved in a few months back.” Tony pushed Harry’s money away. “Shit, man, you get rid of that bastard I’ll give you cars all day long.”
We hunched down in the seats and waited. Night started to fall, a few stars pressing against the blue, the moon at the far corner of the sky. The air was still and hot and smelled of the slack-tide on the Intercoastal Waterway four hundred feet distant. A barge tow pushed up the broad canal, the throb of its diesels rattling the loose metal on the Caravan. Two windows were out on the van and we swatted mosquitoes from our faces.
After a few minutes Harry nudged me with his elbow, pointed down the street. I peeped above the dash and saw a blue truck roll by, a loaf of bread painted on the side.
“So?”
“It’s the third time that bread truck’s gone by. Think there’s much need for bread this time of night?”
We watched the truck continue down the street, turn into a stand of trees beside a condemned house half enveloped in kudzu.
“Whoops, lights behind,” Harry said, ducking.
I followed suit, dropping toward the floor. A vehicle rumbled beside us and a flashlight lit the interior of the van.
“Anything?” a voice said.
“Hunh-uh. Dead metal.” A low laugh. “Prob’ly ought to be hauled to the yard over there and ground up.”
“How much longer?” the first voice said.
“Ten minutes, give or take.”
“Let’s book.”
The vehicle rolled away. Harry and I simultaneously let out our breath.
“You recognize the second voice?” I asked Harry.
“Sure enough,” he said. “It’s my old buddy, Sheriff Briscoe.”
We sat up enough to see the taillights of a dark, nondescript sedan of American vintage glide past the house where the bread truck was parked. The brake lights brightened on the car for a few seconds, then it moved on.
“The car stopped for a three-count,” Harry said. “Conversation?”
“Makes sense,” I said. “What you think’s happening?”
“Seems like we’ll know in ten minutes or so.”
It was twelve minutes. We felt the presence before we saw them, ten fat Harley hogs thundering from the main road a half-mile away. We sucked in our breath and slunk low in the van. Their bouncing headlamps shivered through the Caravan and their engines rattled my sternum.
“Sounds like Meltzer’s security detail,” I said. “Wonder if he’s along for the ride?”
Harry peered between the wheel and the dash. “Meltzer like to travel in a white step van? Ladder up the back?”
“Eighty-eight on that.”
“What?”
I chuckled. “I mean, ten-four.” Something felt good inside me; I felt light, happy. It started after we’d spoken with Matthias.
Harry said, “Our band of gypsies rolled up to Baker’s. Someone’s out of the step van, walking into the headlights – Baker. He’s unlocking the gate so the party from hell can drive through. I just had a thought, Cars…”
“Probably the same as mine. Noelle could be there. If it’s Meltzer who sponsored the grab, maybe he’s moving her out of his place and to Baker’s.”
“There’s Meltzer,” Harry said. “He’s barking orders at the bikers, heading toward the house. He’s carrying something, a big-ass satchel. It’s kid-sized.”
“Stay cool,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“Baker’s doing a wide-foot stance like some goddamn cartoon Nazi. He’s wearing a Sam Browne belt, a pair of sidearms. Meltzer’s heading around back, a couple of the bikers flanking him. I think…uh oh.”
“What?”
“The bread truck. It’s backing out, lights off. The contingent at Baker’s can’t see it.”
I sat up, looked down the street. The bread truck was coming at Baker’s house backwards. We heard tires screech from behind us as the sedan from a few minutes back roared past, two others in its wake. Within four seconds there were three cars bouncing into Baker’s front yard. And a bread truck.
We heard yelling. Orders barked. Saw lights from every direction, pouring from the cars, from the truck. Everything turned still for a half-heartbeat. Then the gunfire started.
“It’s a raid,” Harry yelled. “Someone’s attacking Meltzer and the bikers.”
He started to jump from the car. I grabbed his arm, held tight. It was like restraining a buffalo. “Stay down!” I yelled as a stray bullet whanged off the Caravan.
“Noelle’s in all that,” he yelled.
“Let’s go around the side,” I said, jumping out and staying low, Harry following. The melee was in the front and to the side of the house; it looked like the bikers had taken cover inside the house and on the porch. The other side was returning fire as fast as the bikers could pump it out. I heard words yelled through a bullhorn, couldn’t make them out.
We scrambled along the fence line toward the waterway. I heard an explosion, like a grenade. More gunfire, volleys.
“There,” Harry yelled. I spun my head, saw Meltzer and Baker crouched low and moving through the back yard toward the boat, one of the bikers close behind, a shotgun in his hand. Baker had the satchel slung over a thick shoulder.
The fence ended at the waterline. The tide was slack and dropping, giving us a few feet of rip-rap to walk on. We stumbled over the rocks, staying in the shadows of scrub brush at the rear of the fence line, trying to move fast while not stumbling into the canal.
The pier was sixty feet long, eight wide, paralleling the waterway. We clambered on to one end as the trio was coming through the gate. I saw another biker in the distance, near the house, booking toward the boat.
“Freeze,” Harry yelled, a bull elephant on full trumpet.
The biker whipped the shotgun up, but doubletaps from Harry and I hit him at the same time, punching four holes across his chest. The shotgun hit the water a half-second after his body did.
Baker turned and fired and we hit the pier. We rolled off on the side with the rip-rap, sheltered by the dock. I saw Baker jump aboard the boat, the satchel bouncing over his shoulder. I laid out three shots and leapt back on to the dock. Meltzer was frozen in front of us, eyes wide in terror. Up front, on the street, it sounded like the Fourth of July.
I saw Harry pick up the diminutive Meltzer and hurl him into the side of the boat like a rag doll. A biker in the back yard fired at us, the shots thudding into the boat behind me. Harry ducked beside the pier pilings and began returning fire.
I belly-crawled beside the boat, heard a hatch pop open, Baker suddenly above me. I launched up and into him before he could level the pistol. We fell to the dock, tangled together and rolling side to side. He was fiercely strong, pummeling while I tried to keep him clinched. Harry was thirty feet away, pinned behind a piling, firing into the yard, unable to move from his cover. I was fighting from a defensive position, lacking the strength of Baker. He slammed short jabs into my side, jack-hammers against my ribs. I felt my strength fading as his hands found my throat.
My only chance was the water. I bucked, Baker atop me, thumbs trying to crush my windpipe. I wrenched again, found my head and shoulders over the water. I bucked a final time, sucking as much air as my lungs could capture.
We plunged into the murky, deep-dredged channel. Instead of trying to break free of Baker,
I hugged him as tight as a lover, kicking for the bottom.
Hold on.
He pushed, pummeled, wrenched. Hands and legs flailed and grabbed. Blows rained into my sides, thankfully slowed by water. My ears filled with the sound of my heart and lungs screaming for air. Hold on. Baker gave up fighting me to fight for the surface. I felt his terror. Hold on. I heard his scream turn to bubbles. I felt his chest expand as his lungs sucked in water. Baker drew another breath of water. I felt him shudder and the weight in my hands went slack.
I slid upwards over the body and broke the surface, gasping; the oily, fuel-laden air was as sweet as honey. I looked around. Harry was a dozen feet away on the prow of the boat. He let out a long breath. There were no sounds of gunfire.
“Baker?” Harry asked.
“I’m standing on him.”
I dog-paddled to the boat, moss or seaweed on my face. I pushed it away. It kept sticking. No, not seaweed, I noted in the light from the pier lamps. Hundred-dollar bills.
Harry pulled me from the water. Meltzer lay crumpled against a piling, regaining consciousness. I saw the satchel, upside-down, beside it dozens of blocks of banded money, some of which had broken open and tumbled into the water. I also saw several kilo-sized bricks of plastic-encased white powder.
My heart fell. “It wasn’t Noelle.”
Harry shook his head. Meltzer was fully conscious now, cowering on the pier.
“D-d-don’t hurt m-me,” the pink lips said. “Puh-puh-please.”
Harry made a big deal of slamming a new clip in his weapon, racking the slide. He knelt beside Meltzer and pointed the muzzle at his temple.
“Where’s the kid, Arnold? I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me.”
“I d-d-don’t know. I suh-swear. Puh-please don’t k-k-k-k-k- –”
“TELL ME!”
Meltzer pissed himself and began to weep. Hunched shapes moved through the shadowed back yard. A bullhorn voice broke the silence.
“Drop your weapons and lock your fingers behind your necks.”
“We’re cops!” I yelled back. “Detectives Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, Mobile Police. All is secure.”
The shapes moved closer. One of them was wearing a cowboy hat.
“Holy mother of God,” Sheriff Briscoe said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I believe that’s our question,” Harry said.
Briscoe scowled at the cowering Arnold Meltzer, then saw the stash Harry’d dumped from the satchel.
“Got the dope and money,” Briscoe yelled over his shoulder as a tall black man in a suit walked up. The suit had sand along one side, like he’d been firing from the ground.
The black man knelt, pulled a pen from his pocket, poked a hole in one of the bags of white powder. He wet a forefinger, tapped it to the hole, brought it to his lips.
He grinned like tasting the mother lode of Beluga caviar.
Chapter 49
I stood in the front of Baker’s yard and watched three medic vans haul off the causalities: three dead bikers and four gunshot injuries. Five bikers had surrendered. A police boat was in the channel with grappling hooks, fishing for Baker’s body.
I spoke to the cops on the scene and discovered Harry and I had stumbled into a joint jurisdictional action: DEA, ICE, Staties and county force. The lesser players were driving away as the forensics types moved in to document the event.
I found the remaining cast sitting around a table on the patio. Someone had thoughtfully supplied a couple of six-packs of Sam Adams beer.
“So it was all an act for Baker’s benefit?” Harry was saying to Briscoe. “You’re not a cracker asshole.”
The sheriff sighed, took a suck of brew, and pushed back his hat. “I probably am. That’s what my college-girl daughter thinks, anyway. She’s at Radcliffe – scholarship, thank God; I could never afford that shit.” He looked at Harry. “You asked about a kid?”
“I thought it was what Meltzer was carrying.”
“We been watching the little Aryan prick for months, with special emphasis on the last two weeks. We got tipped he was going to get stressed. Maybe enough to move his stash. We knew Meltzer figured big in the H and meth trade – him and his biker yahoos – but he stayed insulated. Turned out our tipster was dead-on and we got Meltzer side by side with about a million bucks of pure smack. But in all that watching we never once saw a baby, Detective Nautilus, I’m sorry to say.”
“This tip was anonymous?” I asked.
Briscoe nodded. “But it had to be someone who really knew Meltzer’s ways.”
“The tip was in future tense?” I asked. “Meltzer was going to get stressed.”
“For sure. I could gauge Meltzer’s activity by Baker’s comings and goings, running off every time his real boss called, the miniature Fuhrer. Baker’d started spending half his time away lately, being Meltzer’s private SS guard-boy.”
“Did you know about Baker before you hired him?”
The tall black federal agent had been leaning against the wall a dozen feet away, hands in his pockets. He stepped forward.
“Yes he did. And I asked Elvin to hire Baker. Sheriff Briscoe and I have worked together before. He was the only guy I knew with the smarts to gain Baker’s trust, allowing Baker just enough leash that, when we pulled, it might drag Meltzer along.”
“And some perceived threat put Meltzer together with the dope?” I asked.
“We knew the stash wasn’t near his house. Turns out dope in Meltzer’s possession gets parked in the basement of a low-life ex-doctor named Fossie. His main clientele is –”
“Whoa up,” I said, startled. “Fossie was a doctor?”
“Not in years. He lost his license for dispensing controlled substances without proper prescriptions. Plus he’d started concocting his own goofy stuff to take people up, down, in between, every which way – a real Dr Feelgood type. The past few years he’s sold himself as a nutrition expert, got an online degree for fifty bucks or whatever. I think he needs to see himself as a doctor type, an authority.”
“He was Patricia Scaler’s buddy,” I said. “He made up herbal concoctions for her.”
“Nice friend to have around if you’ve got a taste for head travel. Fossie would have gladly zoomed the lady wherever she wanted to go. Fossie’s got a grubby little office out on Hodkins Road that’s big with the white-supremacist bikers and similar low-lifes. The asshole’s waiting room looks like a casting call for contract killers. Think he’s handing out nutritional supplements? Plus he runs a kinda Red Cross station at white-power rallies.”
I shook my head. I’d seen Fossie’s back while he stitched up the hapless Spider. It hit me that Fossie’s “nutrition clinic” was two miles from the ambush, probably where the biker I’d shot had shown up. And with all the pure heroin around, it would have been no problem to load a couple of syringes with hotshots for Tut and Chinese Red, then laying a few bags of pure H into the hands of local junkies, making Red’s death one of several OD’s, no big deal. The conspirators dappled a pair of Red’s pants with Scaler’s blood and the seamy headlines were under way.
Fossie also made a perfect fit elsewhere.
“How about Fossie for a case of pancreatic cancer?” I said to Harry. “Picture Fossie – still a real doctor to a poor, dumb SOB like Bailes – putting his hand on Bailes’s shoulder: ‘I hate to have to tell you this, son, but in a few weeks you’re gonna die like flames are eating out your insides. Here’s a few pills, Terry. Go forth and do something to make your mama proud.’”
Harry and I traded cards with the participants, knowing we’d all soon be contributors to endless pages of interlinked reports on the converged cases. We headed off to retrieve our vehicle from the scrap yard. Harry sat in the driver’s seat, but didn’t fire up the engine. We sat quietly for several minutes before he turned to me.
“Uh, Carson.” Harry said. “Fossie was mixing up stuff for you, right?”
I had been staring out into the night and thin
king the same thing. My first freaky incidence was winging the table into the camera equipment at Bailes’s mother’s house. I’d started my day with a few of Fossie’s capsules. The same for everything: the scam at the prison, my fight with the hapless Beefer, my anger at Clair, the gun-blazing march into the bikers…all on days I’d taken Fossie’s vitamin potion. What had Ernie Hemmings said about Stenebrexin?
“…mixed with a cocktail of meth and Prozac, the stuff interacts poorly. It can lead to odd behavior, anxiety, acting out. Doesn’t take much, either.”
“Jesus,” I whispered. “I got doped. Fossie was screwing with my head.”
“Why, you think?”
“Probably thought it would give him more control while he filled me with lies about Scaler, which I expect it did. I also expect that my herbal sleeping pills were the more traditional sort.”
Harry said, “When was the last time you took that shit?”
“I got tired of drinking perfume tea and eating healthy things that tasted like hay two days ago. Dropped the vites, too.”
Harry grinned. “Saved by fried chicken and gravy. That’s my boy. You been feeling any different?”
I looked out the window, saw a gurney being pushed from Baker’s backyard toward the ambulance out front. They’d found the body. It was draped with a sheet, the sheet soaked with sea water dripping from the corpse.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m suddenly feeling a lot better.”
Chapter 50
Harry and I were in the swing state between adrenalin rush and total burnout. We headed homeward to try and bag some recovery time before tomorrow renewed the hunt for Noelle.
I fell asleep without Fossie’s pills, but it only lasted four hours. I was up before dawn, on the deck, drinking coffee and shoveling cheese grits and bacon into my food hole. My mind felt clear and charged full, and I paced the deck for an hour, unraveling a timeline intermingled with the cast of characters. The timeline was almost four decades long.