Still River

by Harry Hunsicker

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t go home.” Delmar’s voice sounded tinny.

  “Why?”

  “They found where you live.”

  “Details.” The light changed and I headed toward downtown.

  “Olson had somebody watching your place. The bad guys showed up about half an hour ago. Four of them. They kicked in the door; that fancy alarm you got went ballistic for about ten seconds until they got to it.” Static noises obscured the next few words. “ … had the cell number of the patrol unit for your precinct and called it in, but the heat didn’t get there in time. They were in and out in ninety seconds. Trashed the place, but didn’t get in the safe.”

  “What about the dog?” I hated that mutt, but didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.

  “Rover hightailed it to the neighbor’s, that old Mexican guy next door.” More cell phone noises. “ … police got there right after they drove away. Our guy had the license and they found the car a few blocks away. It’d been stolen.”

  A low-riding Oldsmobile pulled even with me. It had been new back when Reagan still was in the White House. Now it was rusted and ratty-looking, except for the tinted windows and new tires. I sped up and it matched me. Same thing when I slowed down.

  “So why can’t I go home? Bet they don’t come back for a while.” I whipped down a side street. The Olds didn’t follow.

  “You shouldn’t go to your house unless you want to get bogged down in a crime scene.”

  I pulled to the side of the narrow street and flipped the lights off. “What are you talking about?”

  Delmar said, “They left a dead body in the living room.”

  A ripple of emotion caught in my throat. “Nolan?”

  “No. Wasn’t her. A guy. White male. Dead and way messed up. They’d Joe Theismanned him big-time. I do believe it was meant to be a message.”

  Somebody turned on a porch light across the street. I pulled away from the curb and went in search of a main thoroughfare and a way out.

  “The dead guy, what’d he look like?”

  “Hang on.”

  I heard shuffling sounds and then he was talking to someone else on another phone. Voices and mumbling, too indistinct to understand.

  He came back on the line. “The stiff ’s about five-five, chunky, red hair. It’s hard to tell much more about him. They’ve been working on him for a while. Ended it with GSW between the eyes.”

  “That’s Clairol.”

  “He the guy that snatched you the other morning?”

  I got on Hampton, headed north. “Yeah. He’s the only one who knew where I lived. Something must have tipped them off. Then they got the info out of him.” There was silence while both of us tried really hard not to think about Nolan. Delmar asked where I was. I related the events of the evening.

  “Did you tell Aaron Young that Roger Strathmore’s turned up missing?”

  “I left that out.”

  “What are you gonna do next?”

  “Call the nurse’s number. It’s time to get this deal done.”

  Delmar grunted in agreement and ended the call.

  I pulled into a boarded-up Taco Bell, near Singleton Boulevard, only a few blocks from where Charlie Wesson had swallowed a lead sleeping pill. The dome light rattled around in the ashtray. I fished it out and stuck it back in the socket. With the door cracked and the lamp flickering overhead, I squinted at the piece of paper Aaron Young’s mother had given me. Something new and unfamiliar filtered through my mind.

  Reluctance, fear, maybe.

  I was scared to call the number. Not of what might happen to me, but of what might have occurred to Nolan O’Connor because of my actions. A vision of Clairol Johnson, bloody and broken, swam in my head.

  I punched “send” and waited while the phone rang.

  A woman’s voice, sleepy or disoriented, answered. “H-h-hello.”

  “Put Coleman on the phone.” I kept my tone deadpan.

  “W-w-what? Who is this?”

  “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to Coleman. Put him on.”

  “Where’d you get this number?” Her tone was incredulous.

  “Off a bathroom wall, and it said your name was Sally Syphilis. Is your last name really Syphilis?”

  “Who the hell are you?” A tinge of anger crept into her voice.

  “Put Coleman on the phone.” A gun fired not too many blocks away. I put the car in gear and headed north again.

  “He … uh, he can’t come to the phone right now. Tell me wha—”

  “This is the guy who’s got about thirty pounds of what he needs.” I hit the bridge over the Trinity, the river and accompanying floodplain an inky black ribbon in comparison to the lights on either side. “Tell him I’m gonna dump it in the Trinity and whack out a couple thousand alligator gars and turtles.”

  Even with the cell noises and sounds of the car, I heard movement and voices in the background. Finally she said, “He can’t be talking to you right now. No shit, okay. He really can’t. He’ll call you back at this number.”

  “Fifteen minutes. That’s how long he’s got to call back. Then I start feeding the fish.”

  “Look, buddy, you’re making a big mistake, gonna get your ass whipped—”

  I interrupted her. “Fifteen minutes, starting now.” I hung up.

  The darkness of the river gave way to the spotty lights of Industrial Boulevard. Low-end topless bars, massage parlors, and bail bond offices lined the street. I headed south to a little place I knew called Harper’s Bar and Grill. I parked in front, between an Asian modeling studio and a burglar-barred 7-Eleven.

  The grill part had burned about ten years back, along with Harper and a seventeen-year-old hooker named Sarsparilla. They never bothered to replace the sign or Harper. His widow, Selma, ran it now, perched on a stool by the cash register with a never-empty glass of beer sitting next to a pack of Winstons. When she wasn’t smoking, she’d light matches and watch them burn. It gave me the creeps, what with the extra-crispy husband, but we were sort of friends after some stuff a couple of years ago.

  She had a beer waiting for me when I got to the bar. I waved it away and asked for coffee. She raised her eyebrows but poured a cup. I took it to a booth in the back, away from the two greasy bikers talking Harleys, and a skinny guy in a dirty Jiffy Lube shirt, twitching and mumbling to himself.

  In the dim light of the corner, I pulled up my shirt and checked the wound. It didn’t appear to be bleeding but I could feel the Tylenol wearing off. I washed down another half a pill with coffee and placed the cell phone on the table.

  Fourteen and a half minutes after I hung up with the nurse, they called back.

  I answered after two rings. “Yeah.”

  Nolan’s voice came on the line; she talked fast, eager to get the words out. “Don’t give it to them, Hank—”

  As quickly as her voice started, it stopped, replaced by the sounds of a struggle. I could just make out another woman’s voice talking, a funny accent, words too indistinct to understand. Finally there was a slapping sound and then Jack Washington’s monotone. “I wouldn’t listen to her.”

  “Don’t hurt her, Washington.” I kept my voice low. “That would be bad. For you.”

  “You’re not driving the bus right now.” He chuckled into the phone. “The stuff for the girl, or we start messing with her.”

  I made a circular motion on the tabletop with my coffee cup. “One hour from now. The warehouse on Gano Street. You bring the girl and I’ll—”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen. Ain’t no way we’re going there again. You want the ho back, you follow what I say, real close.”

  “How bad do you want the drugs?” I was anxious to get control of the conversation again. Once you start reacting instead of acting, your position is considerably weakened.

  Washington made no reply. Instead I heard what sounded like an open-palm slap followed by a moan.

  “Tomorrow morning, at dawn.” He
came back on the line, voice low. “We’re gonna meet out in the open, away from any buildings where anybody can be hiding. You know where the Continental Street Viaduct is?”

  I said I did, and my mind started to race. The viaduct was one of the bridges crossing the river, connecting north to south. Out in the open, he had said, and it appeared he meant it. On the floodplains of the Trinity River.

  “Good, there’s an old campground just south. Wetbacks run cockfights there on the weekends. You be there, alone, tomorrow at sunrise, with the shit.”

  “Put Nolan on the phone, I need to—”

  “She ain’t talking to you right now. Y’all can be visiting all you want tomorrow. You get her for the shit. And one more thing: stay the fuck away from Aaron Young and the Strathmores. You dig?” He ended the call before I could answer.

  I leaned back into the booth and sipped coffee, trying to formulate a plan. I tried to keep calm but my heart pounded and I felt the blood pulsate in my temples.

  The bikers left the bar. The guy in the Jiffy Lube shirt shuffled over to my table and asked if I had any pot to sell. I stuck the muzzle of the Browning under his nose and told him to get the hell away from me or there’d be an immediate opening on the lube rack tomorrow. He scurried off, toward the jukebox on the other side of the room. Selma grinned at me and shook her head. I threw a couple of dollars on the bar and left as she lit another match and watched it burn.

  In the car, I called Olson and told him about the conversation with Jack Washington. We talked about it for a few minutes and then made plans to meet at the unit. There was much to do before sunrise.

  Once there, we worked and planned until about two in the morning. Delmar made a few calls and arranged for another man to join our team, an ex–marine recon named Cyrus. In spite of the dishonorable discharge for striking an officer, he came highly recommended, someone who would keep his mouth shut. He arrived at midnight and helped with the final preparations. After that we slept, or tried to. At about four, we woke up, ate something, and left.

  The river bottom runs through downtown, a mile-or-more-wide strip of soggy dirt sandwiched between two levees, with the Trinity threading its way down the middle of the track. The river itself is nothing remarkable, a thin trickle of muddy water slowly oozing its way toward the coast. Shallow and narrow, in most other places it would be called a creek. The area between the levees belongs to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who forbid trespassing with signs and locked gates and all sorts of deterrents.

  All the barricades accomplish is to keep out law-abiding citizens, doing nothing to stop the scofflaws who use the land as their in-town recreation area. For years it had been the playground of illegal hunters looking for the out-of-season dove, teenagers looking to party and score, and Mexicans looking to escape the daily grind and violence of life in a foreign land with the things they remember from home.

  Like cockfights.

  It was into one of these illegal sporting areas that we were headed in the cool stillness just before dawn. It was about 4:30 A.M. Olson stopped at a spot along Canada Drive, the potholed street running along the south levee. He left us between a burned-out house and a whitewashed church called the Full Gospel Tabernacle of Christ, the Reverend Delaware Monroe presiding. The Reverend Monroe was nowhere to be seen, so we used the back of his church to shield our activities from the nonexistent traffic. The plan was simple. The other three would cover me while I went and made the deal. My specialty had been CQB, close quarters combat. Room-to-room fighting. This was going to be different, an open fighting arena. Fortunately, all four of us had spent some time in the sandboxes and hot zones of the Middle East, working similar ops. We were better trained and better equipped than a couple of strung-out dope peddlers and their goon squad. The only variable was how many of the bad guys would appear. Lack of intel makes me nervous but you have to play with what you’ve got.

  While Olson headed to a location farther up from the rendezvous point, Delmar, Cyrus, and I huddled behind the church and checked our equipment. We wore black combat fatigues. Cyrus carried a thirty-pound pack on his back, full of you-know-what. Delmar carried extra ammo and some other fun things. I traveled light, due to my wound, only carrying my Browning, and a Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

  The subgun had a silencer and two thirty-round mags, taped opposite each other for a quick reload. It was the Cadillac of machine guns. Never skimp on hardware, that was my motto.

  We checked our comm units, minuscule little things with tiny earpieces and throat-mounted mikes. Everything worked properly, reaching all the way to Olson, who was stationed upriver in an abandoned minivan sitting on top of the south levee. He carried a couple of sidearms and an M-16, along with about eight zillion bullets.

  And Miss Clarita, the .50-caliber sniper rifle from hell.

  After making sure everything worked and was secure, we began the hump over the levee. Cyrus and Delmar went first, spread out about twenty yards apart, with me forming the bottom point of the triangle. The night-vision goggles gave everything a greenish tint. The air was humid and smelled of rain. I started to sweat.

  Once on the bottoms, Delmar took the point, pushing through the knee-high grass with Cyrus and the delivery twenty or thirty yards behind. I rode as tailgunner. My side began to hurt, but I ignored it. After a few hundred yards I took another half a Tylenol.

  The cockfighting place was in a stand of cottonwoods, next to the river. The trees loomed ahead, darker than the night sky. We’d determined the exact location with a couple of calls to some hombres who knew of such matters.

  One lone, sickly mesquite tree stood between us and the meeting point. I spoke a few words, and Cyrus dropped the pack ten paces away from the tree, toward the river. Delmar and I waited for him to finish his tasks. After a few minutes he clicked twice on the comm unit and the three of us continued through the grass to the grove.

  We flanked out and entered the stand of trees from three different directions. It was empty, as I had thought. The meeting time was not for two hours. I suspected they would have people guarding the barricaded entry points to the bottoms, not actually in place at the clearing in the trees.

  Someone had left four or five old lawn chairs scattered around a campfire pit. I pulled one underneath a tree while Delmar got the inflatable dummy out of his pack. He huffed and puffed until the thing began to resemble a human. We dressed it in black fatigues and a matching cap, and sat it in the chair, pulling the whole setup deep into the shadows. To one side, we put a package of wadded-up newspaper, wrapped to look like the missing drug shipment.

  This was the fallback position.

  Delmar and Cyrus melted into the shadows, their mission to hide in the grass surrounding the stand of trees and wait for the bad guys. My position was behind the trunk of a dead or dying elm, near the tree line closest to the Continental Viaduct, presumably the direction from where they would arrive.

  I took another Tylenol, along with one of the white meth tablets, and waited.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The sky had lightened to a pale gray when the first man appeared. Olson, with the fancy rifle scope, saw him first. He radioed the rest of us.

  “Car stopped on the viaduct. One man, getting out. And …” There was a long pause. Even with all the optics, I guessed it was hard to make out details. Finally he clicked back on. “ … and he’s carrying a rifle. Hold on. Another one, I think. Come on, dude. Get out of the car. Oh yeah. Got two now. Second one’s packing a rifle also. And a backpack.”

  Then he was silent. I slipped to the edge of the trees and peered out. It was still too dark to see anything.

  Olson spoke again. “Okay, you’ve got these two moving. Down the levee.” Long pause. “They’re on the ground. Your level. They’re flanking out and heading toward the trees. I’m gonna lose sight of them.”

  I was on the levee side of the trees, farthest from the river. The morning was in that between time, where the night goggles helped as m
uch as they hindered. I took them off, squinted, and finally saw movement, maybe a football field away. “I got the one on the levee side. Designate him Levee Boy, and call it a hundred and fifty meters out.”

  I got back a chorus of acknowledgments.

  Levee Boy walked a few more feet, then evidently hunkered down near a bush because there wasn’t any more movement. Cyrus radioed that he thought he’d sighted the one on the river side, holding steady. We designated him River Boy, except for Delmar, who wanted to call him Soon-to-Be-Dead Guy.

  Nervous laughter. Somebody made gunfire noises. More chuckles at the gallows humor.

  Then, silence. Five minutes stretched to ten, then to thirty, as the sky lightened. Olson came back on. “Different car’s at the same place. Three, no, four guys getting out. All of ’em carrying AKs. They’re moving down the levee.”

  I pulled out a pair of small field glasses and could just make out the activity.

  “Oops, that had to hurt,” Olson said. “These must be city boys. One of ’em just lost his footing and busted his ass.”

  “Any of them look like Nolan?” I said.

  Olson came back, subdued. “Negative.”

  Nobody said anything for a few moments until the cellular vibrated against my leg.

  “Got a call,” I radioed to the others. From the thigh pocket of my fatigues, I pulled out the phone. “Yeah.”

  “You got my shit?” Jack Washington’s voice sounded clear and crisp, as if in the next room.

  “Yeah, I have it. Where’s the girl?”

  “We’ll worry about the bitch later, after I get my product.”

  “No, we’ll worry about her now.”

  Washington ignored me. “Where’re you at?”

  “I’m by the trees. Where’s Nolan?”

  “Step out where I can see you. On the river side.”

  I started that way, talking as I moved. “Put Nolan on the phone.”

  “Shit, motherfucker, ain’t you got it yet? We doing this my way, not yours.”