Spare Parts: A Ted Mitchell Detective Novel (Ted Mitchell Detective Novels Book 4)

by Jeffrey Kinghorn

  Seldeen bent a little during this. He knew the family. But it was the demonstration of their devotion to imperfect parents that hit him the hardest. Bereft now of his own family, it seemed likely there would be no such demonstration of devotion for him when such an occasion would arise. Aditya (Adam) Seldeen’s sense of grief in the moment was multi-layered, no doubt cultural, and painful to watch.

  Wisely, the family chose to make the graveside service a private affair. The logistics of moving that turn-out to another part of town would have been ill-considered. I’d had my fill of cemeteries and open graves. Were I to live and work another fifty years, I wondered if I would ever take on another case that accumulated the bodies that this one had. The unanswerable question remained: would there have been so many were I not involved? Perhaps unanswerable is a bit convenient. Unaddressed might be more correct.

  After the service, and after we at long last broke free of the impeded traffic surrounding The Church of Reconciliation, Seldeen was not willing to use the balance of the day for hanging crepe. He wanted action, even if we had to manufacture it ourselves. In truth, what I really think he wanted was to collide with something, anything, so long as breakage ensued. It took next to nothing to get me to sign on.

  We were in my Chrysler which, of its own seeming volition, steered for I-45 North and the 1960 area, where the fortress of trailers and mobile homes among the pines, behind razor-wire-topped fencing, promised to unleash a response not unlike a violently throttled hornet’s nest. Adrenaline fueled the forty minute drive and upon arrival the rolling gate across the street from which Adrienne and I had previously sat and had observed was not going to stand in our way. There was a video camera mounted high on an aluminum pole on the left side of the structure that supported the roll-back mechanism.

  Seldeen hopped out of the car and used a single round from his weapon to neutralize the camera. He then studied what we were up against through slats in the gate. He stepped back and assessed the most advantageous point to breach the compound. His recognition of good fortune seeded mine. Where the fencing was thick with razor wire for as far as we could see, the gate itself had none. It looked as if the housing through which, or into which, the part of the gate that actually rolled prevented that extra layer of deterrent on top.

  Seldeen pulled himself up and over the gate as if he were a high school track and field athlete, with ease. Evidently he was not going to open the gate for me, and upon a moment’s consideration of that, it seemed a wise choice. No doubt the video camera’s having taken a bullet would likely have alerted someone. The opening of the gate would potentially further alert and unleash a violent response if, luck having been miraculously on our side, whatever initial reaction there was, had been hesitant or awkwardly off-guard.

  I backed the Chrysler up and parked it under a stand of pines, parallel to 1960 headed back toward I-45, should we make it out of there alive and need to get rolling with dispatch. I managed to get over the gate, but with something less than with the ease that Seldeen had displayed. The first thing I noticed was that all the mobile structures had bars on the windows, some slatted, others looking like woven webs of rebar.

  Seldeen had not waited for me and was already advancing into the center of the compound, crouching and lurching from building to building. I immediately became respectful of the likely presence of freely roaming vicious dogs. They were already onto Seldeen who found a way to vault on top of the mobile home against which he had flattened himself. The dogs went berserk jumping up and pushing off the sides of the structure, snapping and howling, as if the taste of his blood was, by rights, theirs. The various breeds occupied thus, gave me a small window to out-flank them and move from structure to structure the way Seldeen had done before the dogs had driven him topside.

  It was still broad daylight, but the density of pines and the helter-skelter arrangement of the mobile structures under their thick umbrella had turned the area on the inside of the fortress to dusk. Lights shone from many of the units.

  I heard Seldeen’s automatic weapon and moved to where I could see him on top of a rusted mobile unit. He was picking off the dogs one at a time and, again, with impressive efficiency. Adrenaline can do that. Time had done its contorting of perception that such moments tend to invoke and, while it was likely not yet minutes that we had actually been inside, it seemed an eternity. I wondered that no human response had yet been made.

  A light beckoned from a window surrounded by brush two units away. Getting around and between the structures took care, as the area between the buildings was strewn with refuse and debris, furniture, appliances, trash of all kinds. I pressed my back against the unit from which the light shone and could hear commotion from inside, violence. I inched closer and ventured a look and saw a woman using her fists like a man on a young girl. The girl offered no defense and the punishment she endured was fierce.

  The battering involved a slamming about the entire space of that small room. Eventually they pivoted and came into view where I could see that the female perpetrating the assault was familiar. It took a minute to identify her as Rain, the hustler to whom I had given my card at the cemetery at Allison’s funeral. It instantly closed for me that Rain had obtained to the highest station among those forced into service, with the ironic title of Bottom Bitch. Had the girl being beaten put up any kind of defense, I might have wondered if Rain was making a bold challenge for status. That the bloodied victim did not strengthened my first conclusion.

  Rain grabbed at the girl’s jersey top and yanked it part of the way off over her head. There were contusions all over her torso. She then used both hands to fashion the opportune garment into a garrote with which to strangle the young victim. Her strength was impressive as the girl became dead weight which Rain managed to brace against her own body in order to sustain the brutish strangulation.

  I fitted my gun between the bars and took my time before squeezing the trigger. I did not want to err and hit anyone. I fired warning shots into the wall and ceiling of the unit, and one into the table lamp standing on the seat of a folding chair. It exploded.

  Rain’s head canted sharply toward the exploded lamp, and then toward the window where I stood. The strangulation was interrupted, hopefully before it was complete, and I rolled out of sight before a clear sighting could be made of me. In the heat of that moment, it occurred to me that Rain may have willingly surrendered my business card at an early opportunity, which might have been what gave Reznikov, via his underlings, a head start on who and what I was, along with the convenience of contact information. It might also have boosted Rain’s status within her indentured world.

  Not another moment available to give to that situation. I could still hear Seldeen picking off dogs from several units away. The canine snapping, snarling, and the long-clawed leaping up against and pushing off of siding had diminished but had not yet ceased. I continued toward the sound of it.

  Movement, now, on the order of bees swarming out of what had to be a main building back toward the direction of the gate. It was not a mobile structure, but a single-storied, ranch house barricaded behind slatted windows and doors. The roof was covered with a carpet of pine nettles, thick algae, and moss. It softened the roof line and made the structure look almost thatched and something out of a fairy tale. The men, all crouched and spreading out silently, in the manner of Navy Seals on a mission of stealth, homed in on and meant to encircle Seldeen’s position in the middle of the yard.

  I countered wide around the flank to put as many of them between us as possible. Were it to come to a shoot-out, better they would have to attend to two fronts instead of a consolidated target of two at their center. I picked one off who had fired at Seldeen, then rolled with my back against a unit to its other corner and picked off two more. Seldeen had dropped out of sight. I banked on the notion that he had flattened himself against the roof top and had not been hit. It generated fiercer determination to take on all comers, no matter how many.

  Perhap
s a scant advantage for us was that we’d already had several moments to orient ourselves, while the defenders were assessing what they were up against. Never mind that it was their domain. In a gunfight tables can turn on the microscopic. They started taking shots at Seldeen’s position.

  I had not yet heard Seldeen fire in return. I continued to circle wide while keeping an eye peeled for dogs, though I no longer heard dog sounds. Luck was with me in yet another way. The defenders of the trafficking fortress had spread out such that they each occupied positions unseen by others of their force. I was able to move from unit to unit and pick them off from a direction in which they had not yet needed to look. And none of their compatriots were any the wiser, yet. My kill-rate was approaching the outrageous scores obtained in video games. I did what I could about keeping my cool, but I must admit to an exhilaration that approached what must take hold of those who develop obsessive compulsion for blood sport.

  Seldeen re-entered the fight.

  I was far enough away from the unit he was on to where I could see him rolling from corner to corner, then lying as flat against the roof as he could to obtain the accuracy of an expert sniper whenever he found a target and fired. Arrogance is prelude to hubris; and hubris can terminate a good run. Still, there are precious few moments in life where a couple of guys can do no wrong. And fate had given us our turn to send some corpse-heavy messages back to Reznikov. The deaths of these individuals, as with the undocumented and the untraceable upon whom Reznikov fed, would likely never be reported, or grieved for, or missed. And more, if Reznikov had gone into hiding from his own people because of the way he had bungled operations, our ill-considered insurgency might just be the ticket to accelerate his descent into like prey upon which he had grown accustomed to preying.

  I had Seldeen’s back and remained on the move. God help me, I did not want the spree to end. Bless me, Father, for I had sinned, and here was the worst of it: I breathed evenly and observed myself smiling. Penance? No problem, but forget about contrition. Comeuppance arrived with an airborne Doberman whose approach I had not heard, nor had I seen, as it leapt on me from behind. It felt like it had separated my ear from my head. Stalked and surprised, the forearm of my gun hand was punctured to bone and held fast in a canine’s jaws as the animal tried to pull the flesh it had in its mouth away from the rest of my arm.

  I lost the gun.

  The dog pulled me to the ground as I squirmed and rolled in wild defensive moves that exposed my extremities to its blood thirsty teeth. It wanted my throat. I was all about protecting my head with my arms. No barking, the creature tended toward quiet. But the low continuous growl arising from deep inside the thing was gruesome. More, terrifying. The dogs, all of them, from a dim distance, had looked lean and hungry. The exquisite adrenal rush and consequent exhilaration that moments before had been mine, now became the dog’s. There was no stopping it.

  In what had to have been mere moments that were a lifetime, Seldeen came out of nowhere and put a bullet into the Doberman. The animal yelped and crawled away on its belly toward the brush at the base of the mobile unit I had used for cover. Seldeen put another round into it at which point it stopped moving. He gave it one more in the skull to ensure that it was now dead.

  I was pretty chewed up.

  Seldeen spotted my weapon on the ground and slipped it into my waistband. His own weapon was now in his left hand, as he reached down and used his right to grasp me by the shirt-front and bring me to my feet. Without missing a beat, he raised the gun on his less dominant side and fired at a figure moving toward us along the back of one of the mobile structures. Seldeen, it seemed, was ambidextrous. Deadly so. And far stronger than his appearance would indicate.

  The refrain I so often sang out of tune to myself about needing and wanting to only work alone? It no longer seemed to be the case. I could definitely work with Adam Seldeen.

  He half carried me and half propelled me around the end of the unit, and together we slalomed through the detritus in the brush back toward the gate. How I was going to get back over it was going to be beyond the heroics Seldeen had displayed. He again examined the mechanism that made it roll; it was sprocket and chain driven. He shot out the chain, left me leaning against the fence, and manually forced the gate open just far enough for both of us to slither through. “Keys!” he demanded.

  I dug in my pocket and was grateful to find that I still had them. I hobbled to the car and got myself into the passenger seat. Seldeen started the engine and got us out of there with screaming acceleration and some fish-tailing that he instantly had under control. “If I live,” I said, “I’m buying.”

  Twenty-two

  Not yet ready to cry uncle, I suggested we forget about a hospital emergency room and head straight for south of downtown to the Bayou Urgent Care Clinic off of Old Spanish Trail. Business was not brisk, but neither was the parking lot empty. I did not see the Cadillac I had followed there on my previous visit.

  The shotgun seat in which I sat was smeared with blood. All mine. I didn’t so much lift myself off the leather upholstery as I peeled myself away from it. I was able to walk into the clinic unassisted. I handed my gun to Seldeen before we got to the door. He stowed it under his shirt in his own waistband. Always a dicey move, that. I noted he shifted it to either side, off a hip, and smartly away from his genitals, which would have been the default target straight down the front.

  The waiting room was empty. So, too, was the reception area on the other side of a sliding glass window. Seldeen walked through an open doorway along which ran a counter that was serviced by the same reception area. “Need a little help out here,” he called.

  From one of the rooms farther down the hallway came a fleshy man in blue scrubs that were at least one size too small. They made him look more corpulent than he was. He closed the door of the room behind him. “Yes?” he said. “I’m afraid we are not open for service at the moment.”

  “Is that why the door was open?” said Seldeen. “My friend’s in need of immediate attention.”

  Blue scrubs craned to look over the counter through the sliding glass window at me as I continued to bleed in the waiting area; he pulled back wide-eyed. “That man needs a hospital,” he said. “We are not equipped.”

  “Guess we’ll have to call an ambulance, then,” said Seldeen. “I don’t think he’d make the drive through rush hour traffic to a hospital.”

  The notion of more people barging through the front door appeared in what rolled over the pudgy man’s face as not to be desired. He said, “What happened to him?”

  “A dog,” said Seldeen.

  “Just one?” he asked.

  “A Doberman,” said Seldeen.

  Blue Scrubs thought about it some more, finally relented, and said, “Well, bring him back this way.” He turned and led the way to a room farther back in the building than the one he had come out of.

  Seldeen followed me after waiting to see that I was going to follow the man in blue. As I passed the door he had come out of and had closed after him, I hesitated and listened but heard nothing. Once inside the examining room further down, I was instructed to sit on an examination table lined with fresh paper. Seldeen came inside, as well, but stationed himself at the door.

  “Why don’t we close that door?” said Scrubs.”

  Seldeen looked up and down the hall before closing the door as requested. “You a doctor?” he said.

  The pudgy man said, “Yes.” The first thing he looked at was my ear. “Head wounds always bleed heavily,” he said. “Blood vessels are all near the surface.” My shirt and trousers had to come off so that he could examine the bite and puncture wounds elsewhere. “What happened to the dog?” he said.

  “I shot it,” said Seldeen.

  The doctor turned away from me and studied Seldeen. “Then it can be tested for rabies,” he said.

  Seldeen said, “I doubt that.”

  “But if you subdued it,” he said.

  “I shot it three
times,” said Seldeen, “the last time in the head.”

  Scrubs said, “Where is it?”

  “Up in a skanky mobile home compound under a bunch of pines,” said Seldeen, “behind razor wire topped chain link fence. 1960 area. Satellite location. Part of a huge prostitution and trafficking network.”

  The room chilled. When the doctor next spoke, I expected we might see his breath. “Why would you drive all the way down here,” he said, “with a man in this condition?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do,” said Seldeen.

  The doctor was visibly cornered. Seldeen stood in front of the closed door. Silence anointed all three of us. Could it be that the room chilled even more? The doctor pushed past alarm dead into fear. “What do you want?” he said.

  Seldeen said, “Medical attention for my friend.”

  Blue Scrubs turned back to me and asked, “You don’t have a primary care physician?”

  “I never get sick,” I said.

  “”You’re going to need a lot of suturing, he said. “We are not really set up for surgical procedures.”

  “That’s not what Reznikov told me,” I said.

  In his eyes, expanding panic. He said, “I think you two had better leave.”

  “Bet you could snatch out a kidney or two,” I said, “right quick, it came to that, couldn’t you?” The pudgy, alleged doctor had nowhere to go. “Look,” I continued, “you are obviously of no real consequence in all of this. You get to practice some of your healing art. We leave real nice. And you get to tell whoever might want to know what happened. We’ll take it from there.”