Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  I was three jellybeans in when I spotted the seat-changer.

  I had wanted to know if I was still hot. The seat-changer told me I was molten.

  He moved from one carriage to the next through the connecting door, and took the first empty seat he came to. He was tall and heavy. He sat upright and got a good bead on the seated passengers. After no more than a minute, he moved off down the cabin, out of sight, and presumably into the next.

  It was then I remembered the boy from Lebanon station’s message post. The one who’d taken off when I asked about Jahan Speigh. He was the forgotten invoice on the spike of my memory.

  Cursing myself, I jammed the jellybeans into my coat and boarded the train.

  I found him three carriages along. He was just rising from his seat to move on when I caught him on the shoulder and forced him back down with my left hand. With my right I dug the muzzle of the Steel Lady under his ribs.

  He didn’t look at me. Sat still, except for a roving right hand. I jabbed the gun into him, and the hand halted and settled back on his lap.

  With my free hand I took his piece and slipped it into my coat.

  He knew the score.

  Better than I did. Because a moment later the pressure of a heavy body fell on my flank.

  “Squeeze up,” said a voice.

  I hazarded a glance to my left and all I saw was blue. Cop.

  “And while you’re at it, give the boy back his gun,” breathed the cop.

  I handed back the gun and in short order I was sitting sandwiched between two guys not much smaller than me, contemplating a pension.

  Without another word the cop took my gun.

  I decided to open up diplomatic talks.

  “Which one of you wants to be Bait, and which Switch?”

  “Heard you were a smart-ass, Mac,” said the cop. And now another piece of my brain ran off trying to match the face to a name. “I don’t give a shit what you call me, so long as you sit tight. Move and I’ll tear you a new one.”

  I felt the steel of a muzzle nestle into my side.

  “Dammit man,” I said. “Bullets don’t tear. They crush. Don’t words mean anything to you?” I crossed my arms. “Barbarian.”

  The cop swept a hand over his face. “Geez. We got ten minutes of this.”

  Ten minutes. That would be Kuzton. Next station.

  I was impatient for the piece of my brain gone fishing for the cop’s name, but needed to know something about the gentleman on my right.

  “What’s your gig?” I said.

  He looked at me, then returned his gaze to the window and the vista of light-spiked sprawl outside.

  I said, “You need to work on your people skills.”

  He turned back to me, raised his fist so I could see it, and said, “I got people skills. When we get out, and before the sarge tears you that new one, I’ll show ‘em to you.”

  “Shut-up,” said the cop absently.

  Sergeant...?

  Dumb budget brain.

  From the bulge in Bait’s coat, I saw he had his piece trained on my gut. I nodded at it. “Does your mother know you carry a Couper?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Shut-up,” said the cop again with equal abstraction.

  “Your piece, the Couper. Copy of a copy of the Heckler USP. Right?”

  “S’right,” he said, and I thought I detected a faint spark of interest beneath his beetled brow. Needed to fan that spark.

  “Lot of things to like about the original,” I said. I nodded at the bulge that betrayed the handgun. “Pity most of it got lost in translation.”

  His lids tightened with irritation. “Like what?”

  I twisted in my seat so I could face him.

  The cop dug the gun into my ribs, and said “Watch it.”

  I ignored him. “The frame, for starters. Heckler & Koch created the original USP, and they pioneered the molded polymer frame. The Couper’s polymer is low-grade. Wears in days.”

  The guy leaned forward and looked at the cop, raised his eyebrows. The cop sighed, and said, “Go ahead. Show the man your gun.”

  I was still covered by the cop. And it wasn’t against the law to carry in the open. The guy uncovered the Couper and laid it on its side on his lap, the epitome of innocence. Its handle remained gripped by his hand, his index finger poised on its trigger.

  I admired the uniform, shiny gloss of the gun’s polymer frame.

  “Seems I was misinformed,” I said.

  Car lights strafed the carriage’s interior as we passed a level crossing.

  I waited for my brain to return some intel on the cop. Nothing doing. I was going to have to send out a search party for that grey matter.

  In the meantime I gnawed on what was obvious. He was a NYC cop of captain’s rank, or at least wore the uniform of one. He knew I was a smart-ass (which narrowed the search none), and he’d been called out to put me away. If he’d moved fast, he could have received orders, or a telegram direct, and caught the outbound train in time to switch over to the inbound on my tail.

  “You got here fast,” I said. “You must have been top dog at obedience training.”

  I didn’t get a rise out of him. He simply smiled and shook his head mildly.

  “I could get you a bigger gold watch,” I tried, but my delivery lacked conviction. Even I would have thrown popcorn at me.

  I turned back to the guy on my right.

  “They buggered the magazine release,” I said, flicking my chin at the Couper again.

  He smiled, all over me. “You think I’m going to demo that?”

  Then I got it, the flash of recall I’d been waiting for, late but welcome: Giannakis.

  Laslo Giannakis, small time mobster from Jervis-Battery, and the last reason I’d had to trade intel with the Organised Crime Bureau.

  The OC chief I’d dealt with was no more, replaced by the MacLure mentioned by Tunney, but the staff turnover is always slower in OC. Digging up snitches from crime networks constructed by intelligent men to resist precisely that threat is always a long ball game―much longer than narcotics―and detectives and undercover cops keep at it a long time, burn-out, or die trying.

  Or switch sides.

  The name of the cop next to me was Peter Gallant. Lieutenant Peter Gallant. He was a dick, no longer a beat cop, but wearing an old uniform. I should have seen the way it was straining over his stomach, and round his thighs.

  When last I saw him, he’d been less than an acquaintance. Merely a body in the background at a briefing on Giannakis given by the then OC chief.

  The fact he was sitting next to me with his police issue tickling my ribs meant he was working for whichever boss I’d ticked off. The same one that was trying to frame me.

  I guess the frame-up was taking too long. Impatient types criminal overlords.

  While I mulled this over, I turned back to the thug on my right and lobbed another pebble into the puddle of his mind: “Couper’s recoil sucks too. Supposed to be short, but the spring is underpowered.” I mimed taking two pot shots into the back of the next seat. “Knocks that second tap, yeah?”

  He looked at the gun as if that was a new one.

  Before he could reply I turned back to the cop.

  “So Gallant,” I said, and saw the faintest twitch of an eyebrow. “How long have you been running interference on the Strawman in the OC? Right from the start, or was it a recent career change?”

  “You’re right, McIlwraith. I won’t tear you a new one. I’m packing hollow tips.”

  So crush and splatter.

  I began feeding both conversations rapid fire, feeling like the mediator between a feuding couple.

  To the thug: “And the blowback. Breathes like an asthmatic. Bit of dust and it sneezes itself to bits.”

  To the cop: “What do you do? Replace the reports wholesale? Or just tamper here and there? A little creative snipping and slipping, a little reticent redaction?”

  To the thug: “They teste
d the original, the USP, by jamming a round in the barrel. One shot cleared it and the next tagged a target at fifty yards.”

  To the cop: “If I were a suspicious Chief of OC, what signs of tampering would I look for? What’s your spore? Did you sign your work―you that sort of cop? Junior reports counter-signed by Detective Peter Gallant? Is that what I’d look for?”

  But both of them had dried up. Nothing but silence answered me on either side.

  Then I felt a tug forward. The train was slowing. Outside, a signal flashed past, a quarter-mile marker. We were closing on Kuzton Station.

  I spoke to the thug. “The Couper did get one thing right.”

  With a judder the train dropped speed again.

  “Want to know what it is?” I said.

  Only a couple of hundred feet remained between us and the station.

  The station, where the mill of passengers coming and going, would offer the best chance to slip my escort.

  That’s what Gallant and his lackey would think.

  And why I made my move now.

  “Largest trigger-guard on a handgun,” I said, and began the sequence I’d mentally rehearsed from the moment Gallant sat.

  My right hand darted to the Couper still gripped in the thug’s lap. He was already moving, and presented the gun to me a few inches above his lap―gripped in his hand. But that didn’t matter.

  I clasped my hand over his as if giving him a lesson. I inserted my index finger into the space between the trigger-guard and his finger, and pulled the gun clear of my gut.

  On my left, Gallant was twisting on his seat. He’d kept his gun in my ribs, beneath my arm. With my elbow I smashed it back into the seat.

  The barrel didn’t quite clear me before it discharged a shot that lanced my hip in a fiery line.

  But I didn’t give him a second chance. I squeezed on the thug’s finger I had trapped in the Couper. The muzzle blast was raw in my ears. The bullet shattered Gallant’s right knee, and he went down gurgling in agony. He would have a lifelong limp.

  The sting in my hip went into the roundhouse I planted on the thug’s chin. His head smashed back into the window and put a cobweb crack in it. His eyes stayed open, but pointing in different directions.

  Someone screamed.

  I reached up and yanked on the emergency brake. Over the squeal of clamping brakes, holding myself upright on the brake cable, I yelled: “He shot a cop!”

  I floundered over the moaning Gallant into the aisle, and flung myself forward, pushed by the inertia the train was shedding.

  I made the door at the head of the carriage, and hurled it open.

  A wall of sound howled at me. The scenery was flying past. Too fast.

  But closing in was the station’s lead-in fence. If I didn’t get off, I’d be hemmed in.

  I waited a beat. Watching the blur of bluestone verge, already feeling its bite on my back. And jumped.

  For a moment of free-fall the world was cool air slipping around me. Then my feet struck the bank of the track, and the cool air became a memory.

  My knees buckled on contact and I tucked into a roll. But the bluestone bit like hell all over my body as I tumbled down.

  I hit the far bank of the trackside drain, winded, and lay sprawled in its muddy bottom until the world gyroscoped rightway up. Above me, the carriages screeched past, wheels alive with sparks. By the time it came to a complete halt, the caboose was only thirty feet away from me.

  I picked myself up, and in a body that felt like a broken toe, waded into the scrub screening the tracks.

  Ten minutes later I was sitting in a warm truck cab, feeling every divot in the road.

  The eyes of the trucker who’d taken pity on me kept sliding my way, until I said: “I know. I look like I jumped from a train.”

  He grunted. It seemed to satisfy his curiosity.

  We hurtled toward New York, past lamp-lit smokestacks venting smog that loomed in the sky like vast yellow ghosts. For my part, I pried my thoughts away from my aching flesh and applied them to the Speigh conundrum.

  Which hurt less was a toss-up.

  That another Speigh was on the chopping block was clear. What I didn’t know was which one.

  But the clock was ticking.

  — 15 —

  “Sanctuary,” I whispered.

  I heard a step, and the metallic snick of the safety on a Stoeger shotgun.

  “Sanctuary?” came the reply. “We do two kinds here: one either side the grave.” The bores of two barrels loomed in the light, pointed at me. They were followed by a face, dark and age-worn. “Which one you want?”

  I reached forward and with a finger pushed the gun away.

  “I liked it better when people were shoving money at me.”

  The dark face was a mask a moment longer, then split into a wide-toothed smile. The sound of Preacher Nate’s laughter was a car starting on a cold morning.

  “You look like what the cat pukes up on my doorstep,” he said, and turned to shuffle back through the wicket gate and into the darkness of the New Metropolitan Methodist Church in Harlem.

  I followed, pausing to shut the door behind me and drop its inch-thick bar.

  We padded along the short, dark hallway―the blind leading the cat puke. Floorboards creaked under foot, and betrayed Nate’s limp with a drag and scrape. The air smelt of disinfectant.

  “Someone give up their dinner in here again?”

  “Lady gave up her soul,” he said.

  He meant ‘Lady of the Night’. The church backed onto a brothel. But Nate only ever said lady.

  We emerged into the sanctuary where at last a little light filtered through its high windows. The light cast a faint glow over ranks of pews, and at the far end, a raised pulpit.

  “Come into the light and let me get a look at you.”

  I waved him off.

  “Just stitches. Antibiotics if you have them.”

  While Nate went to fetch the medicines, I doffed my coat and tucked my shirt up. Blood had stained my shirt and run down the side of my trousers.

  I peered at the bullet wound from Gallant’s gun in the poor light. The bullet’s flight was easy to trace. It had scored a line of puckered flesh through the still festering teethmarks left a few nights earlier by the dog. The blistering bullet wound, fired as it was point blank, seemed to me a cleansing wound―an honest, uncomplicated injury.

  Nate returned with a lamp and the beat-up leather suitcase that served as his war chest. He rummaged through its contents with familiarity and was soon threading stitches through my flesh.

  I endured the prick-and-draw pain of the needle and thread with that sense of sweet loss one finds at the end of a good book.

  Nate was silent until he began twitching the last stitch. “So who is it this time? Who’s the damsel in distress?”

  “They’re all in distress,” I said. “I’ve moved on to damsels in boredom.”

  Nate cut the thread, checked his work, and masked it with gauze and plaster.

  I must’ve pulled my shirt too high, because he planted the end of one of his big, callused fingers right in a divot the bluestone had gouged from my back. It made me hiss with pain.

  “You want me to treat these?”

  I shook my head and tugged my shirt down.

  He said, “One day you’re not going to make it back here.”

  “I certainly hope so,” I said. “Antibiotics?”

  He searched in the suitcase.

  “Meropenem, Tramethycin? Intravenous.”

  “Tramethycin,” I said. “Mero clogs my works.”

  He began to draw it up. “You want to tell me the score?”

  “One dog bite, two concussions, one bullet hole, and a rash of cuts and contusions.”

  He raised a needle, tapped it once.

  “A shrink would have a field day with you. Self-destructive tendencies―”

  “That’s just the warm up,” I said. “Wait’ll I get my trackpants off.”


  “―over-protective, stubborn,” he finished, lifted my shirt and stuck me with the needle as if skewering a chicken.

  “You’d make a good vet,” I said.

  I tucked my shirt back into my trousers while Nate packed up his case. He snapped its clasps shut then straightened to look at me.

  He said, “Now you want to tell me the real score?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, and I followed him down the aisle. I passed the bulk of the raised pulpit, and saw by the angling light of the lamp in Nate’s hand, the dust gathered in its crevices. Nate preached from the floor.

  Through a door in the back wall of the sanctuary and along a short corridor was the room where Nate lived. In barely a hundred square feet was crammed a thin bed, a gas cooker, a card table, two chairs, and a bookshelf. The bookshelf occupied the entire length of one wall and was stuffed to overflowing with books and periodicals.

  Nate hung the lamp on a hook above the table, and tucked the suitcase under his bed. From the space beneath his cooker he retrieved a bottle of Cinzano and two glasses. He poured us each a shot.

  We sat and drank in silence.

  The alcohol hit my gut and began warming me from the inside out. It took the edge from my complaining flesh. My eyelids felt heavy. I knew if I closed them I’d sleep.

  “Janus McIlwraith, no middle name,” said Nate in his voice like gravel, as if he were reading the title of a tome he’d plucked from his shelves.

  I raised my heavy eyes to look at the familiar features of his face. It was a storied face. Even its composition hinted at stories. Its coffee-colored skin spoke of sunblasted land, but further deduction was defied by the mongrel mismatch of the rest. Asia, Europe, America. Some new facet of the world seemed to shine with every motion of his head.

  I called him the United Nations. Nate for short. His real name he’d never told me. I got the feeling whatever it was held too much memory. He’d buried it, mourned for it, and moved on.

  I drained my glass, knit my fingers, and with them cradled the back of my head.

  “So I’m working this case, the Speigh family...” I began, and proceeded to lay it all out for him, everything since Evelyne Speigh had first turned to greet me in my office those three days ago.