“Wish I’d never developed them. I used to spend most of my time doing this. Pushing a mouse around a pad is not why I joined the Fourth Estate.”
“Everything gets old, even riding with the U.S. Cavalry.”
It was coming on noon. The business-lunch traffic was heading out of town to where the restaurants were. We turned off Jefferson and crunched to a stop on gravel alongside a strip of bleached asphalt ending in a guardrail. Beyond the rail rolled the river, the color of brushed aluminum under the sun filtering through a scrim of smut from both sides of the international border.
The warehouse district, which used to stretch from the old Stroh’s brewery all the way down to Toledo, Ohio—mile after mile of brick and block storage space stacked to the roofs with steel coils and sacks of grain—hardly qualifies as a district any more. Developers are renovating or knocking down the century-old piles one by one, establishing condominiums and lofts available at tenement rates in order to lure young professionals away from the suburbs. The earth there is corrupt to its center, drenched with toxic waste leeched from car batteries in storage and rusted chemical tanks, but the city issues waivers on a fixed-price menu. Variances are easier to obtain than dog licenses.
Barry got out and stuck the big magnum through his slash pocket into some kind of holster under his coveralls. “I was born way too late. I should’ve been shooting rumrunners with a Speed Graphic. They tied up right there.” He pointed to where the ground sloped down from the guardrail and slid under the river.
“One flash and you’d be doing the tommy gun dance.” I checked the magazine in the Luger and poked it away under the tails of my sport coat.
The warehouse Eugenia Pappas had directed us to was a community affair, a series of leased spaces in a homely barn that looked as if someone had gone over every inch of its brick exterior with a blowtorch; fires had razed generations of wooden buildings that had stood on the spot. Most of the recent maintenance had gone into replacing broken windowpanes. Whole sections were more masonite than glass, and BBs had punched holes in most of the rest. Roman numerals chiseled into a cream-colored cornerstone fixed 1903 as the end of unchecked conflagration. A brick loading dock faced the river, where yard engines had chugged along rails long since torn up and sold for scrap, towing stove parts and lumber from cargo ships anchored off the bank before the coming of the guardrail to prevent wayward drunks from pitching their cars into the river. An iron sliding door designed to open onto the dock was secured with a padlock and chain.
“We could shoot if off,” Barry said.
“We could. Self-inflicted gunshot wounds don’t interest me.”
“How unromantic of you. Well, I left my battering ram in my other pants.”
“Here’s a thought.” I knocked on the door with the meaty part of my fist.
Nothing answered but the wind off the water and the smell of carp. I tried again, then stepped back and kicked at the door, bonging it in its heavy frame.
Barry touched my arm.
I turned and watched a stoop-shouldered figure in a tattered brown Carhartt coat and baggy green work pants coming our way around the corner of the building with his fists stuck deep in his pockets. His chin was plastered to his chest, giving us a view of a head of feathery dirty-gray hair that looked as if it had never been trained, an ambulatory dandelion gone to seed. His steel-toed work boots made twin channels in the gravel, leaving the ground only when he skipped at every fourth shuffle, a hurrying gait in his set. He kept right on coming until the top of the loading dock came flush with his chest, then took his hands out of his pockets and rested them on the dock; twisted, gray-white roots, painful even to look at. He showed his face then, screwed up against the diffused sunlight. It was as brown and wrinkled as a roasted potato.
“Lock’s there for a purpose.” His speech was a shrill twang, packed in from some prairie state, Kansas or Nebraska; some flat place where it cracked like a .22 rifle.
“So’s this.” I got down on one knee and snapped open a folded sheet under his nose. “This is a bill of lading signed by Eugenia Pappas in receipt for merchandise you’re holding.”
He didn’t take it. I doubted his fingers opened far enough. He worked his lips over the syllables. His eyesight seemed sound. The sheet was greenish and nearly transparent, torn from a pad bequeathed by Nick Pappas. The date blank followed 19–. Eugenia had filled it out, substituting the new century with a mark through the old, and signed it in a hand as angular as the rest of her.
He lifted his head from the sheet. “She’s off her rocker. This is the easiest caretaking job I ever had. Nobody tries to bust into a place that’s empty.”
“When’s the last time you looked inside?”
“What for? I got me a little office in the side with an outside door. Sleep there sometimes on this little cot, chase away kids with air pistols. I tell you there’s nothing there.”
“Chase ’em away? I thought you invited them around for variety.” Barry kicked at a squashed copper pellet that had bounced off brick.
The old man tugged aside the collar of his coat to show him an angry red welt on his neck. “Mister, they don’t pay me enough.”
“Let’s take a look anyway,” I said.
He gathered the bones of his shoulders into a steeple behind his head and let them drop, turned, and shuffled back the way he’d come, following the tracks he’d made in the gravel. No skipping now. We hopped down from the dock and followed.
“What do they do, back-order these guys from Dickens?” Barry murmured.
We went in through a brown steel fire door labeled KEEP OUT and waited in a small square architect’s mistake of a room with an army cot and a gray steel desk while the caretaker shook loose a key on a ring and inserted it in a door on the other side. The desk was littered with jointed pieces of plastic, squashed tubes of paint and cement, and what looked like a replica of the Mayflower, as it would have appeared half finished in the shipmaker’s yard in Southampton. The solitary life is stuffed with crosswords and paint-by-numbers sets.
A gust of decayed wood and mildew came out when he opened the door, shredding a webwork as intricate as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Barry and I exchanged a look; steers don’t come any bummer.
The storage area was a vast square space going twenty feet in every direction, including up to the rafters, where dynasties of birds had built nests. Descendants of the early founders fluttered off their perches when the current of air reached them, making new deposits onto the chalky splatter below. The panes that lingered in the windows, dirty and discolored and nearly opaque, cast the huge room in eternal twilight. Our feet scraped the concrete slab, making echoes. My toe collided with the skeleton of a small animal laid out intact on its side, as if in state, and sent it sliding like a shuttle.
“See?” The old man’s voice cracked triumphantly. “When a rat can’t live off what’s here, man, it’s empty.”
As if in confirmation, a blast of wind off the river shook the building, dislodging sawdust and old ash off a wooden framework weakened by the last fire. A termite’s sneezing fit would save some developer the cost of demolition.
“What’s that?” Barry pointed at an uneven shape, vaguely rectangular, covered by a stiff canvas tarpaulin in a far corner.
“Wood pallets. It don’t pay to haul ’em out to the curb.”
“Why cover wood pallets?” I asked.
“If I start to ask why, I’ll end up asking why anybody pays me to look after a great big box of nothing. At my age you don’t have to look far to get depressed.”
I approached the tarp-covered shape, stooped to hook a hand under the hem, and turned it back, taking a step away in case a rat hadn’t gotten the message. Nothing came out, but a puff of gray dust rose from the top and settled back. It didn’t seem nearly enough dust for as much time had passed since a forklift truck had disturbed any of the pallets.
Barry broke the silence. “Never fails. No one ever leaves a place as tidy as he foun
d it.”
The pallets lay end to end and stacked three deep, with square shipping cartons arranged on top in three uneven rows. Each was stamped with the same legend:
MACARTHUR INDUSTRIES
TWENTY-THREE
The caretaker scratched his chin with a gnarled knuckle. For him it was the equivalent of a backflip. I asked him if he was there all the time.
“They don’t chain me to the wall. I go home nights.”
“That cobweb we came through took time to build,” Barry said. “They had to have come in through the bay door. That means a key to the padlock, or they cut it off and replaced it. One pretty much looks like all the rest.”
I said, “They had a key. You might go to that much trouble to take something out and cover your tracks, but not to put something in. Who do you punch in with?” I asked the old man.
“Nobody. It’s just me here, day after day. Every other Friday the mailman comes in with my paycheck, signed by Mrs. Pappas.”
I took the check she’d given me out of my wallet and showed it to him. “That the signature?”
“Can’t say. Can’t make it out.”
“Well, if you can make it out on your paycheck well enough to know it’s Mrs. Pappas’ name, that means it’s different.”
Barry smiled. “Ouida won’t starve.”
I put away the check and lifted a carton off the top of one stack. It was lighter than it looked. I put it down, got out my pocket knife, and slit the sealing tape on the flap. A shallow rectangle made of black plastic slid out of the packing material. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of converter boxes only a couple of days ago. I used the point of the blade to loosen the tiny brass screws on the back panel and removed it. I showed Barry the empty cavity.
“Couple of kilos short,” he said. “Check the rest.”
I didn’t have to open any more cartons. They were all equally lightweight.
“Decoys?” he asked.
“Now, maybe. They didn’t start out that way. No circuit boards or wires. They were never intended to be hooked up. Somebody beat us to them.”
“So what now?”
“Same plan.”
“What about what you said about delivering empty boxes?”
“The directions said only boxes. No mention of heroin.” When he stared I said, “I’m open to alternatives.”
No answer. I lifted three boxes in a stack. He lifted two and we finished packing the trunk of the Cutlass in two trips. We left the caretaker in the little office holding two pieces of plastic together waiting for the cement to dry. With his hands the Mayflower would take as long to complete as the original.
“You haven’t told me when and where’s the drop,” said Barry as I turned the key in the ignition.
“Doesn’t matter to you. They said only one.”
“So I’ll ride on the floor in the backseat.”
“I might risk it if I weren’t already trying to run a bluff.”
“Well, take along your cell. If they don’t take it off you I can trace the signal to your body.”
“Don’t tell anyone I gave my life for better TV reception.”
“It makes as much sense as risking it for a woman you met only once.”
“We didn’t even get along very well. But I get paid to find things.”
“Me, too. You wouldn’t be trying to protect a gimp, would you?”
“I’m a gimp myself.”
“That leg ought to have healed by now.”
“Talk to the leg.”
He leaned back in the seat and took something out of the slash pocket opposite the one where he carried his gun. It was a little yellow plastic pill box he opened with the snap of a thumbnail. I looked at the Vicodin inside. “You too?”
“Headaches.” He touched the place where his skull was patched. “Take some for later while you’re at it. I’ve got unlimited refills.”
I thanked him, put some tablets in my shirt pocket, and crunched down two. Just knowing they were in my system took the edge off.
“You’re in great shape to take on a kung fu killer,” he said.
“I will be when the pills kick in.”
“When you meet him, look at his eyebrows.”
“Don’t tell me they’re lethal too.”
“Paper Dog assassins shave vertical lines in their eyebrows: five in the right, four in the left.” He stroked his own with a forefinger. “It’s how they recognize each other, and they can grow them out when they’re in hiding. It’s a tribute to the Gang of Nine, captured and beheaded in Nanking in 1925. I told you they’ve got a hard-on for those old warlords.”
“Why do I need to know this?”
“In case he leaves enough of you to provide a deathbed identification.”
*
Continuing up Woodward I flipped open my cell one-handed, drew the antenna out with my teeth, and thumbed out the number of Felonious Monk, but I didn’t hit SEND. I’d had my best luck with Gale Kreski, aka Bud Lite, dropping in on him without announcement, and anyway I had nothing better to do to burn daylight until I was expected at Tigers Stadium.
It was one of those gift days we sometimes get well into autumn, not precisely Indian summer because there’s no frost preceding them, but balmy enough to consider taking the Jet Ski out one more time before breaking out the mothballs, if you didn’t mind a slight risk of frostbite. It’s not unusual to see the proud owner of a convertible tooling along with the top down and earmuffs on, or someone sunning himself on a porch roof with goosebumps on his tan. The morning’s rain had only dusted that part of town, leaving behind wet patches in the shade of saloons built like Fort Knox and a peppery smell of ozone.
I parked around the corner, on the side where an apartment house had shared a common wall with the extinct hardware store before it had been eaten by a wrecking ball; halfway up the brick, an old connecting door opened onto a straight twenty-foot drop. Above the trade entrance, the delinquent primate on the sign swung its switchblade, either a broad visual pun or a statement of the owner’s contempt for the cluelessness of his customers.
I found him at the counter, with a faded napless towel spread out on top and a dismembered saxophone littering the towel with valves and stops and cork-ringed components, including a gleaming brass bell that looked like an old-fashioned ear trumpet when not connected with the rest. He was using an oily blue rag to polish a piece the size and shape of a pulled tooth.
“Takes me back to boot camp,” I said. “Nighttime guerrilla training.”
“Let me guess. You had to disassemble and put back together a rifle blindfolded.” The resonant voice was in control, like a powerful engine at idle. He went on polishing without looking up.
“No, a carburetor. I tested negative for mechanical aptitude, so they trained me for the motor pool. Then when I got to Southeast Asia they chucked it. I never saw an undercarriage my whole tour. But I can change your oil if you want.”
Today he had his hair tied up in a red bandanna, a piratic effect, with the sleeves cut off a plain sweatshirt and the riot of tattoos spilling up his arms and under the fabric. He set aside the toothy fragment, picked up the mouthpiece, and blew through it, making a razzy sound with the reed. It might have been commentary.
“What’s happening in Guam?”
“My lawyer got another postponement. Those Chamorro bodyguards I told you about? One of ’em landed in jail for possession for sale of hashish.”
“Think he knows anything?”
“When they weren’t on duty, they were bombed out of their minds on pot in Winfield’s garage. Secrets are the first thing to go in that situation. If somebody reached one of them, paid him to look out at the ocean or cap Winfield himself, he knows. It all depends on how scared he is of being convicted of the other thing.” He shook his head. “Wish it was something more than hashish. In the protectorates, that’s like Starbucks.”
“How’s your defense fund?”
“Just now it’s a race between how l
ong that bodyguard holds out and when it gurgles empty. My credit line kind of fell apart when they booked me for murder.”
I took out Eugenia Pappas’ check and spread it out on a clear space on the towel. “I can endorse this over to you right now, or go to my bank and bring you back the cash. Whatever’s more convenient.”
He glanced at the amount, removed the split reed from the mouthpiece, and dropped the reed in a wastebasket on his side. “Is it legal? Right now I can’t get a parking ticket. They’ll revoke my bail.”
“It’s legal. It’s dangerous. Could be fatal.”
“Mister, you know the life expectancy of a mainlander in jail in Guam?”
“One question. You struck a fighting pose the other day. Was that a bluff or what?”
“I trained in martial arts since I was fourteen. It’s all in the third track on my album: ‘Gale Force.’”
“Should be the title track. When you get clear of this, you ought to consider going by your real name. Bud Lite sounds like the opening act at Soaring Island Casino.”
“Bud Lite was that fucking Winfield’s brainstorm. He’d’ve starved if there weren’t always new talent to screw over.” He started putting the saxophone back together. “What’s the competition?”
“Imported Chinese talent. Two dead, that we know of. He doesn’t open for anyone.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I was giving him the particulars when a customer came in and loitered in the guitar-string section. Vintage Alice Cooper was playing on the store’s sound system. He timed his browsing until the song finished, then selected a package, paid for it, and left without a word. He wore black from neck to heels, dyed his hair too dark for his complexion, and applied mascara with a spray gun.
“Can’t be the real deal,” I said, when the door closed behind him. “This day of all days, the true Goths should dress up as insurance salesmen.”
Kreski made a noise in his throat. “Today’s Halloween. I forgot. It was my favorite day of the year until all this shit came down. Put on fangs and a cape and get all that darkness out of your system just in time for the holidays. I could rent a ninja outfit for tonight.”
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels Page 15