Lowball

by George R. R. Martin

  “Can I have another beer please?” And then, to cover up the “please” he added, “I don’t know how many I’ve had.”

  That wasn’t true. He’d nursed that first bottle for an hour and a half. But he wanted the kidnappers to think he’d be easy to grab. He didn’t like to drink alone. But it was important to blend in. All part of being a detective. Still, it was embarrassing, picking up Ghost from school with beer on his breath. Even worse when it was beer from a place where ladies took their clothes off. He was glad his mom and dad couldn’t see him now.

  “Yeah,” said the bartender. “That higher math is hard.”

  The bartender set another bottle in front of him. The crinkled edge of the bottle cap made a screeching sound against the pad of Wally’s thumb as he flicked it off. The cap tinkled on the bar. The bottle foamed up.

  One of the dancers sidled next to him. She leaned on the bar. She had a feline face, and wore a bikini that didn’t cover very much.

  “Neat trick,” she said.

  “Oh, sure. I do that lots. It didn’t hurt or anything—” He looked around the room again to see if anybody was listening, which is how he noticed she had more lady parts than he assumed was normal. The rest came out in an embarrassed cough: “—Because my skin is so tough.”

  The dancer purred. “Really?”

  She ran a finger down his arm; the purring got louder. “Tell me. Is your skin this hard all over?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s—” And then he realized she was doing that thing where somebody appeared to be talking about one thing but was actually talking about a totally different thing. Wally blushed so furiously that it actually hurt his face. She watched him, waiting for an answer, but he focused all of his attention on his beer. He took a swig, clutching the bottle so hard that it cracked. The dancer sighed, rolled her eyes at the bartender, and walked away.

  The beer ran over his fingers. He flicked them dry, earning a dirty look from the guy sitting a couple barstools down. Wally hadn’t seen him come up to the bar. Now his shirt was stippled with dark spots where flecks of foam had soaked into the fabric. Great.

  “Oops. Sorry about that, fella.”

  The guy glared at him with huge iridescent eyes like those of a housefly.

  Wally said, “Here, I’ll buy your next one.”

  The other guy shrugged. “Won’t argue with that.” He took a stool closer to Wally. Wally caught the bartender’s eye and put another bottle on his tab. The dancer lady returned not long after that.

  It was a long, embarrassing afternoon, and by the end of it Wally was no closer to finding the fight club.

  Somebody knocked on their door just as Ghost was nodding off for the night. Wally placed the Dr. Seuss book he’d been reading to her on the bedside table next to the sippy cup of water, tiptoed to the door, and turned off the light. Another knock came while he stood just outside Ghost’s bedroom, listening for the long slow breaths that told him she’d fallen into true sleep. Only when he was certain she’d stay asleep did he go to answer the door.

  Darcy stood in the hallway. He didn’t recognize her right away because she wasn’t dressed like a police officer.

  “Cripes,” he said. “I mean, howdy.”

  She shrugged, more to herself than to him. She said, “Do you have a minute?”

  Wally beckoned her inside. “I just put Ghost to bed,” he said in a half whisper, “but we can talk in the kitchen.”

  Darcy shook her head. “I’m sort of in a hurry here.” Wally paused. She said, in a rush, “I think I’ve found the fight club kidnappers. Do you want to come and help me catch them?”

  Wally straightened up so quickly he nearly ripped the doorknob off the door. “Holy smokes, yes!”

  It took another half hour before they were under way, and Darcy fidgeted the entire time. First, he had to put Ghost back to sleep, and then he had to go across the hall to speak with Miss Holmes. Wally didn’t know what he would have done without her willingness to watch over Ghost. He made a mental note to buy her a cake or maybe cook a casserole for her to say thank you. He wondered if she liked eating Tater Tots. He knew a good recipe for Tater Tot casserole.

  But eventually he and Darcy were under way. They took his car. She directed him west, to the very edge of Manhattan.

  “How’d you find these guys?” he asked.

  “I’ve been spending my off hours reviewing footage from traffic cameras.”

  “Gosh. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

  “It is a thing. But it took about two hundred hours before I found a pattern.”

  Holy cow. Two hundred hours? That was … Wally tried to do the math in his head, but he couldn’t do that and drive at the same time. Anyway, it was a lot of days.

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty neat.”

  “It wasn’t as fun as it sounds,” she said. But she sat a little straighter, puffed up by the fact of his amazement. “You have no idea how many vans drive through this borough every day. But only one that can disappear and reappear. Turn here.”

  He did, saying, “I’m real happy to lend a hand. But I thought you weren’t real keen on my acting like a detective. You had the fancy word for it. Vigil-something.”

  “Vigilantism.” Darcy sighed. “Yeah. Well, once I uncovered a possible lead on the van, I realized I had two problems. I knew I needed help. But maybe you remember what my colleagues said a few days ago: ‘If you see them, call the real cops.’ If I tell anybody about this, I’ll get shoved aside, and if it turns up anything useful they’ll forget I was ever involved.” She practically vibrated with irritation. “The second problem is that this place we’re approaching is, technically, outside of my precinct’s jurisdiction. The right way to do this would be for me to notify Detective Black, but that would kill hours because he insists on doing everything by the book.” Wally remembered the detective. He seemed pretty nice, all things considered. Darcy continued, “Franny would contact the other precinct, and explain the situation, and then they’d have to come to some agreement. And maybe the captains would have to talk. They’d have to do some handshake deal to let us come in and do a bust inside their precinct, or more likely they’d insist on having their own guys do it. But you can imagine how much enthusiasm this case receives outside of Jokertown. Missing jokers? Ha.”

  Wally said, “So you called me instead.”

  “I’m bending the rules a little, yes.” She paused. Fidgeted again. “I’ve never done that before.”

  Wally smiled to himself. “How does that feel?”

  “Like I want to write myself a ticket with a big fine.”

  Wally stopped smiling. “You, uh … I guess you must really want to catch these guys.”

  “Yes.”

  Darcy directed him to a junkyard situated partially beneath a section of the old elevated West Side Highway, right on the Hudson. West Side Auto and Scrap, according to the sign over the entrance to the yard. The sun had just set past the New Jersey refineries when Wally parked his car outside the tall fence surrounding the property. The residual glow of sunset turned the underside of a low cloudbank pink and orange, casting enough ruddy light to turn Wally’s iron skin the color of rust, and to show him that the junkyard was quiet.

  A breeze whistled through the Slinky-curls of barbed wire atop the fence. Much of the yard inside was given over to stacks of smashed-up old cars, some of which were five or even six high in places. The ones at the bottom were a little older, and more pancaked than the ones on top. Few were car-shaped; many had been crushed into squares. Once in a while a stack creaked, or groaned, or rattled. Wally chalked that up to wind, or maybe rats. But aside from the wind, and the constant thrum of traffic along the highway, the yard was still. The dying firelight of sunset silhouetted a tall crane deeper in the yard. The front offices of the junkyard appeared to be housed in an old double-wide mobile-home trailer. Nobody came or went. And as the salmon-colored glow of sunset faded from the clouds, turning the sky a mottled violet gray
, no lights came on in the trailer.

  The shadows felt heavy. The weight of Darcy’s focus gave everything a hard edge.

  Wally wasn’t sure how big the yard was. Maybe the secret club was deeper inside. Or maybe there was a secret entrance, like a trapdoor, and it was underground. The junkyard would be a swell place to hide something like that. The entrance could even be in one of the cars, maybe the trunk. That’s what he would do. He decided to keep an eye open for big cars that hadn’t been squeezed into boxes.

  They eased out of Wally’s car. Wally threw the driver’s-side door closed a half second before noticing Darcy had been careful not to make any noise with her door. She winced at the noise.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  They tiptoed to the gate, which was chained and padlocked. Wally pinched a chain link in both hands and gently twisted it open. But the squeal of tortured metal wasn’t much quieter than it might have been had he simply snapped the chain apart. Darcy winced again.

  The gate creaked. Wally tiptoed into the deepening shadows of the junkyard with Darcy right behind him.

  Within the warren of crushed cars and scrap metal, the sporadic breeze smelled like gasoline, mud, and the river. His feet clumped against the earth where the passage of heavy machinery had compacted bare soil. They kept to the shadows, slowly circling behind the trailer until he could approach it from the side with the fewest windows. Along the way, he did see a number of cars that hadn’t yet been crushed into boxes, but they were so banged-up anyway that the doors and trunks didn’t want to open unless he heaved on them or rusted out the hinges. He found no secret passages.

  Darcy was light on her feet. He couldn’t even hear her footsteps and she was right next to him. She whispered something about misguided chivalry, but he still insisted she stay behind him. Wally figured he made a pretty good shield for her.

  They crept up to the trailer and crouched beneath a window. Darcy was too short to see over the sill. The pane was too grimy and the interior too dark for him to see anything when he peeked inside. But if there was any evidence connecting the junkyard to the joker kidnappings, surely it would be in the office. Wouldn’t it?

  Darcy whispered, “Wait!”

  But the lock was flimsy, and Wally had already twisted the handle right off the door. Darcy crept back, pressed herself against the trailer. Wally eased inside.

  It was even darker here than outside. A flashlight, he realized, would have been a very good idea. He was debating whether to go back for the one in the glove compartment of his car—did it have batteries?—when the click of a desk lamp replaced darkness with sterile white light. In the moment before Wally tumbled from the trailer, squeezing shut his dark-adapted eyes, he glimpsed a few cots.

  Darcy had disappeared.

  Wally tripped. There was a thud as somebody leapt on him and smeared Wally’s face with goo.

  The darkness that swallowed him smelled like cough medicine.

  He awoke outside. He knew he was outside, and not still in the trailer, because his face was coated with slime and dirt. His arms didn’t work right when he tried to roll over; he flopped around like a walleye gasping for air on the bottom of a canoe. Everything tasted like an overdose of cough drops. He almost managed to sit up, but then the ground shook with the rumble and rattle of heavy machinery starting up, so he toppled over again, head spinning.

  Spotlights, like big construction lamps, now flooded the junkyard with silvery light. More dirt, he noticed, was caked into greasy handprints on his lower legs and ankles.

  “Can’t believe he’s already getting up,” somebody said. “That dose would’ve put a rhino into a coma.”

  “Yeah, well, better luck next time,” said a woman’s voice. “Let’s just get—” She was interrupted by the sound of sporadic gunfire. Wally knew that sound.

  “Shit,” she said. “The Iron Giant brought friends. Screw this noise.”

  Wally managed to lever himself up to his knees, swaying like a ship on high seas. He glimpsed a short woman with curly auburn hair sprinting toward a white van. But then a slippery foot on his back shoved him down again. A cloud of dust went down his throat. He coughed.

  “Hey!” the other guy called after her. “You can’t take off until I’ve taken care of this.”

  Somebody else was yelling now, too. It sounded like Darcy’s voice. She had a pretty voice.

  The rumble of machinery grew louder. Shadows slid across the ground, dark tendrils skimming across oil puddles and weedy slabs of broken concrete. Then there was a clink, and the rattle of chains. The crane, Wally realized.

  A weird but somehow familiar tingly sensation took root in his belly, spreading through his chest to his arms, legs, and head. It differed from the medicinal wooziness; this felt like somebody had pressed a tuning fork to the roof of his mouth and it was vibrating his brain to pudding. He tried to roll over to see what was happening, but his arms and legs refused him. He couldn’t think straight.

  He’d felt this sensation before. Where?

  For a moment he felt lighter … almost like he was floating. But then the ground fell away, all in a rush, and somehow he was falling up until his head and back and arms clanged against something large and flat. His body rang like a gong. Then he remembered.

  Oh, yeah. When the kids stuck those magnets to my head. This felt the same, only times a million. Probably because they used this magnet to pick up cars. It made his brain feel cottony, like he had a bad fever.

  The crane whined and whirred as the magnet retracted. Wally dangled high above the junkyard, splayed against the magnet like a fly on flypaper. His view of the yard bobbed back and forth, like the carnival rides he and his brother used to take on the midway at the Minnesota State Fair. Back before Wally’s card turned.

  It took most of his strength merely to bend his elbow, straining and contorting just enough to press his fingertips to the surface of the electromagnet. But he didn’t touch metal. The working surface was laminated with a thin plastic coating. He couldn’t make it rust. His arm slammed back against the magnet.

  Oh, crud.

  The crane arm lurched. Wally left his stomach behind. And then he was soaring across the yard: over Darcy, who crouched behind a car, reloading her gun; over a half-naked man with a towel around his waist, running away from her; past the trailer and the van parked behind it. He remembered there was something important about a van … But the magnet scrambled his brain and made everything feel gauzy and surreal, like dream logic.

  The woman he’d glimpsed on the ground leaped into the driver’s seat of the van. A cloud of exhaust coughed from the tailpipe. She must have floored it because the tires kicked up large clods of mud. The van spun around the trailer.

  “You bastards!” screamed the little Gandhi guy.

  Wally watched helplessly while somebody pulled him through the van’s open side panel.

  Wally became aware of a new sound, a thrum and a whine, like the groaning of a giant hydraulic press. Wally wondered where they were taking him. The crane swept him past more stacks of crushed cars.

  Crushed cars.

  Oh.

  But he couldn’t get smushed. Who would take care of Ghost?

  The fright and worry hurt worse than any punch, any gunshot, any crocodile bite.

  His struggles caused the magnet to swing like a pendulum. But each time he managed to wrench one arm or leg free of the magnet, it banged back when he went to work on another limb. He didn’t have any leverage.

  The crane pivoted. The maw of a giant press came into view. It was large enough to hold a big car, like Wally’s Impala. The lid was a thick slab of steel on massive hinges, and the sides of the empty crusher comprised thick steel plates on massive hydraulic arms. That steel had been laminated, too. The whole thing stood on a pair of retractable legs, so that it could rock back like a dump truck to tip out the crushed cars. A generator rumbled off to the side. Wally caught a whiff of diesel fuel.

  Another gunshot crack ec
hoed through the junkyard. The crane jerked to a stop, which sent the magnet rocking wildly on its chain. Wally’s head spun. Between the magnet, the spinning, and the diesel fumes, he felt like he might puke.

  The van picked up speed. But it wasn’t heading for the gate. Instead, it was barreling straight toward a wall of cubed cars. The magnet spun. Wally glimpsed Darcy again, now creeping to the other side of the crane. When his vantage spun around again, the van had almost reached the wall, but … Wally wasn’t sure because the magnet made his brain all fizzy and he really wanted to puke and also he was dizzy. But he watched while something that sure looked like a tunnel or hole opened up to swallow the van. He expected a big crash, but instead the van just disappeared as though the wall of cars was fake, like a hologram in a movie. The magnet spun. He blinked. When he opened his eyes again, the van was gone.

  Somebody shouted. The crane lurched back into motion, once again leaving Wally’s stomach behind. The press drew closer. There was another crack, closer this time, followed by the ping of ricochet.

  The crane stopped again. Somewhere, a distant voice said, “Wally!”

  He thought about that. Oh. That’s me.

  “Uh, hello?” His voice sounded weird, like it was full of marbles. The magnet tugged on his jaw, making it hard to shout. “Up here.”

  The tingly sensation stopped as abruptly as somebody turning off a light switch. But before he had time to think about what that meant, the ground leaped up to hit him in the face. He belly flopped on the edge of the compactor. He bounced, crashed against a car cube, and skidded to a stop with one arm wrenched under his back.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  It took a bit of work but eventually he managed to lever himself into a sitting position propped against one of the car cubes. The metal felt sticky, somehow, which was a little weird. The residual effects of the magnet and the goo crammed up his nose left him woozy. His eyelids made a weird clicking sound when he blinked. He was still sitting there, trying to clear his head, when Darcy walked up a few minutes later. She knelt beside him.