Wrong Place, Wrong Time

by W. Glenn Duncan

  Eddie mumbled and stared at his feet, but it seemed obvious he would be joining us.

  I smiled at them again. “Aren’t team spirit and loyalty wonderful things?” I waved them ahead of me. They shuffled and they dogged it but they slowly moved toward Thorney’s house.

  Jerry Gortner looked back at me furtively a couple of times, then squared his shoulders, and tried to sound self-confident. “I bet he’s one of those perverts you hear about, Eddie.”

  Eddie mumbled something disgusted-sounding.

  “Yeah,” Jerry said even more loudly. “Betcha he’s gonna take us somewhere and try to do something awful. Probably gonna take out his wanger and want us to play with it. Filthy old pervert.” He looked at Eddie. “We could run, Eddie.” Eddie shook his head.

  Jerry went on, “If my dad heard from us, from both of us, what this guy did and … and how he, uh …” Eddie kept shaking his head. Jerry persisted. “How he grabbed us, Eddie, I mean grabbed us, right, then nobody would believe what he said about—”

  “That’s them!” Thorney roared from his porch.

  Both boys stopped short. I poked them between the shoulder blades, and they reluctantly shuffled up Thorney’s sidewalk.

  The old man had moved the cane chair so that it sat squarely at the top of the four steps up onto the porch. He sat there now with his huge hands splayed on the arms of the chair, his face set like old rock. He glowered at them. The old guy did a terrific glower.

  Jerry Gortner and his friend stopped at the bottom of the steps. It didn’t seem likely they’d go any farther.

  I took out my notebook, flipped to a fresh page, checked the time, and pointedly wrote it down. “Now, Mr Thorneycroft, can you identify either of these suspects as the person who assaulted you this morning?” It was all bullshit, of course, but I figured Jerry and Eddie probably flunked Civic Studies and wouldn’t know the difference.

  Thorney picked up on it right away. He peered at each of them in turn and said formally, “I do so identify these boys as the ones who—”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” the Gortner kid said. “This old man is … is senile. He’s crazy, everybody knows that. He doesn’t know what he saw or anything.” He frowned for a second, then delivered his ace in the hole. “He’s got old-timer’s disease,” he said smugly.

  Eddie rolled his eyes and softly hissed, “Alzheimer’s.”

  Jerry looked confused for a moment, then pointed to Eddie. “Yeah, that’s right. He’s got … uh, what Eddie said.”

  “Charming pair, aren’t they?” I said to Thorney. I squatted down to open Gortner’s bag. He spluttered and reached out to stop me.

  Gortner was a social retard, but he got the idea fast enough when I looked up at him. His hand stopped six inches short of the bag; he slowly straightened and stood there, head down, looking at his shoes.

  Down in the bottom of the bag, under the textbooks and loose-leaf folders and other school junk, there was a slingshot. And it was one helluva slingshot, too.

  It was black metal and carbon fiber with round, surgical rubber tubing that led to the leather pouch for the projectile. The handle had a grip with finger notches, and then the handle continued down the back to form a padded bar designed to rest on the top of your forearm. Presumably the surgical tubing was too powerful to be countered with only the strength in your wrist.

  I’d seen these things advertised as hunting weapons, but I’d ever examined one up close. The workmanship was good and the components seemed rugged. I picked it up—I put it on, would be a better description—grabbed the empty pouch, and drew it back; the slingshot version of dry-firing a handgun.

  There was an impressive amount of energy stored in those stretched rubber tubes. Thorney was very lucky he’d caught only a glancing blow.

  I let the stretched tubing relax and handed the slingshot to Thorney. I pawed through Gortner’s bag again.

  “Now what are you looking for?” he said sullenly.

  “Little-bitty buddy, if I find any ball bearings in here, you’re going into a cell so far back they’ll have to pipe in the daylight.”

  Gortner broke then. He gave an agonized howl, turned, and ran. He wasn’t too coordinated and he ran clumsily, but he covered ground at a respectable rate. He ducked around the end of Thorney’s hedge, we heard his feet slapping concrete for another ten seconds or so, then he was completely gone.

  Eddie didn’t run. He watched his pal Jerry Gortner abandon him, and he stood there with a resigned look on his face. Then he made a noise that was half sigh and half sob. He knelt and took a similar slingshot out of his book bag. He handed it to me without a word.

  I stopped searching Gortner’s bag; there weren’t any ball bearings in there, anyway.

  “Let’s see some ID, Eddie.”

  Wearily, he dug a wallet out of his pocket and showed me a school pass. His last name was Wisermann. I wrote his name, the school, and the home address he told me in my notebook, then handed him Gortner’s bag.

  “Listen to me very carefully,” I said, “and tell Gortner this, word for word.”

  Eddie Wisermann nodded dumbly.

  “I’m going to give you two clowns a break,” I said. “One break. This time only.” Eddie looked up with a mixture of wonder and awe and surprise on his face. People who win state lotteries have expressions like that.

  “I expect you and Gortner to pass the word to the other jerkoffs, but I’m holding you two responsible for the assault on Mr Thorneycroft today. And that is absolutely the end of it! I know who you are, I know where to find you, and if this trouble doesn’t stop, I’m coming after you.”

  Coming after you? What was I saying? To a pimply-faced adolescent, for Christ’s sake.

  “You got that, Wisermann?” I growled.

  Cheap shot, Rafferty. A very cheap shot.

  Wisermann nodded so rapidly I thought he might hurt his neck.

  “Get outta here,” I said with a disgusted tone. John Wayne, from any of a dozen movies. At least I didn’t say “pilgrim.”

  Wisermann took off with more grace than Gortner, even though he carried both bags and they whumped the hell out of his kidneys

  I felt vaguely schizo. They could have badly hurt Thorney in the slingshot attack. And they did cost him a bundle for new windows. But they were still only kids and … aw, the hell with it.

  I said to Thorney, “Maybe tomorrow I’ll take a flamethrower down to the grade school and really have some fun.”

  He was made of sterner stuff. He harrumphed. “I thought you were pretty easy on ’em.”

  “How about next time I shoot them on sight? So you can dance on the bodies. What the hell is the matter with you?”

  He went sullen on me. He flicked one hand toward the slingshots lying on the porch beside his chair. “Bastard kids could kill somebody with those things,” he said. “And you want give ’em another sugar titty, I suppose.”

  “Thorney, come on. You know, and I know, that no-one’s going to do anything about it. You’d better face that. We can’t prove it was them.”

  “When I give my word—”

  “It would be your word against theirs, with no independent witnesses. They might get a lecture, but that’s it. This way, maybe we scared them enough to make them lay off.”

  “Cops used to know how to handle kids like that,” Thorney said. “A good clip on the ear, that’s what they need.”

  “Cops can’t do that anymore, remember? And neither can we or we’ll be ass-deep in juvenile cops and ACLU lawyers.” I shook my head. “Thorney, let’s give it a day or two and see if it worked, all right?”

  “A load of birdshot in the backside used to work pretty well, too.” He looked at the slingshots thoughtfully. “Do you suppose we could rig those to shoot—”

  “No, I don’t.” I remembered Thorney’s routine with the rifle that had gotten me involved in this mess in the first place. I took out my pocket knife and cut the rubber tubing off both slingshots.

  I s
aid, “None of the clichés fit you, do they, Thorney? Sunset years, golden age, peaceful retirement. Does any of that ring a bell?”

  Thorney snorted. “Maybe later on. When I get old.”

  Chapter 16

  The next day was Friday. As Fridays go, it wasn’t much.

  Admittedly that Friday started out nicely; Hilda had spent Thursday night at my place. On such occasions we usually don’t make it a point to get up too early. That’s why I decided to check for messages before I went to the office. And maybe I did have a fleeting thought about taking the day off, if Hilda could do the same. So what?

  There was a message for me, though. Phone Don Sweetham soonest. Damn!

  Don Sweetham was Sweetham Finance, a small loan company occupying an obscure strata somewhere in the lower middle of the financial industry. It was a step up from the down-market places with their three-hundred-dollar loan limits, but it was a big step down from Republic Bank. Correction, make that: several flights of big steps down from Republic.

  Sweetham Finance Company made cash loans to a typically unsophisticated clientele. How unsophisticated? Well, most of Don’s customers would have guessed that Standard & Poor’s was a street intersection in Houston. Let’s face it, Don worked the rough end of the market. Which meant he occasionally needed someone like me.

  In the past I had done periodic escort work for Don; cash doesn’t walk itself to and from the bank. I don’t mind baby-sitting cash.

  I once did a month-long bodyguard gig, after a disgruntled customer threatened to remove Don’s heart and hold it front of Don’s face so he could see the icicles on it. I don’t mind baby-sitting Don, either.

  And occasionally—only rarely, thank god—Don asked me to do a repo. I hate repo work.

  Most of Don’s repossession work was done by a scrabbler called Ten Foot the Pole. I don’t think Ten Foot was actually Polish, but his name had several w’s and y’s and a z in it, and he was tall enough to stare down a college basketball center so the poor guy never had a chance.

  “I know you don’t like repos, Rafferty,” Don said when I phoned him, “but you gotta help me out. Ten Foot’s got the flu or the clap, I don’t know what he’s got, but he sounds like he’s dying, believe me.”

  “Yeah, well …” I couldn’t help thinking that I could use the money. You think of things like that when you’re independently poor.

  “Rafferty, Rafferty, this is a class job I’m offering. A Porsche, for crying out loud. Most guys would pay me to let them snatch back a Porsche, right?”

  “Since when do you make that size loan, Don? I thought you were more into eight hundred bucks on a rusty Citation.”

  “Be nice,” Don said. "Okay, it’s not what you’d call my normal loan. But the guy was hurting for cash; had to have it that afternoon. Besides, it’s only two thou and do you know how much a year-old 928 is worth? No, you don’t. Not you. Anyway my problem is, this guy is late—on his third payment, can you believe that?—and now I find out there’s another lender in line. Look, I got the papers, this repo is as legal as getting married in church, and I gotta have that Porsche locked up in my yard right now, if not sooner. So when I found out Ten Foot was sick, I thought—”

  “Don, I’ll do it.” I’d caught Don’s routine before; the next stage was outraged indignation, closely followed by sorrowful disillusionment. It was easier to give in now and chalk it up to customer relations. “I’ll pick up the papers and the gadget in a half hour.”

  And so Friday began in earnest. I went straight from home to Sweetham Finance, and from there directly to the deadbeat’s business address.

  And a very classy address it was, too; one of those architectural erections full of companies where they’re smugly confident that the cleaning staff are the only ones who have their cars repossessed. Which shows how much they know.

  I found the Porsche I wanted tucked in a parking bay two levels deep in the underground parking garage. The Porsche was beautiful; it was bright red and it seemed to be doing eighty-five just sitting there.

  The parking-garage attendant came around to chase me away. I gave him a big smile, a peek at the repossession order, and twenty bucks to not call upstairs. He went back to his office cage.

  I stuck the business end of Don’s key gizmo into the Porsche’s door lock and listened while it worked its magic. Incredible. How could it do that?

  There should have been a burglar alarm fitted to the Porsche somewhere, but I didn’t see any winking lights inside. Maybe I’d be lucky; maybe it wasn’t turned on. That’s one of the things I hate about modern repo jobs. They can be so damned noisy.

  Hot damn; the door came open without setting off World War III. I got in and worked on the ignition. Eventually, I got the motor fired up and drove the Porsche around to the attendant’s cage. He thought I was going to pay the parking fee, the silly bastard, but instead I handed him the personal junk from the back. There was no reason why the guy should give up his fancy hat, driving gloves, and copy of Forbes just because he couldn’t make the payments on the car.

  Then I found out the attendant had stiffed me for the twenty. Two young hotshots burst out of the elevator and ran toward the car. They looked like an ad for the Gordon Gecko School of Business Dress Sense: baggy pants, embroidered suspenders, hair slicked back. One of them threw himself headlong onto the Porsche’s hood. He started crying and screaming. “My car is my life” seemed to sum it up.

  The other guy wanted to argue about the legality of the repo. He calmed down after I showed him the paperwork. “Poor Ernie,” he said. “First the Austin account, now this.”

  “Hell of a shame,” I said. “Would you like to help me, uh …”

  We cajoled and tugged poor Ernie off the Porsche, and I tried to leave. But then the cops arrived. Ernie’s barracks-lawyer buddy had phoned them from upstairs.

  So then I had to walk the uniform guys through the whole song and dance, and that got Ernie going again. This time, he threw himself down in front of the Porsche.

  The cops moved him for me but they started out by asking, not dragging, so it was another ten minutes before I finally got away from there.

  And then the goddamned Porsche had a flat tire halfway to Don Sweetham’s office. I had to change it under the watchful eye of a traffic cop—after which she sauntered over to take me through the entire repo paperwork again—and while all that was going on, I kept expecting the emotional borrower to show up one more time.

  To repeat myself, I hate repo jobs.

  Eventually, after taking the Porsche to Don and cabbing back to the Mustang, I drove to my office on Jackson Street, seeking solace and peace.

  ’Twas not to be.

  The instant I sat down in my office chair, Beth Woodland looked up from her desk in the insurance office, leaped to her feet, and set a new world land-speed record for appearing in my doorway.

  “Why didn’t you stop them?” she said angrily.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “The borax hasn’t worked too well, but I picked up some new stuff at the hardware store and I—”

  “What are you talking about?” Her voice got a little shriekish in the middle there.

  “The ants under my kitchen sink,” I said, “but that’s not fair. I apologize. You’re talking about Thorney and so will I.” I shrugged and immediately felt foolish. When someone is worried about a loved one, you shouldn’t shrug. “What can I say, Beth? Even if I’d been there with him, he probably would have still run out and gotten that clout on the head. You can’t slow the old fart down without nailing his shoes to the floor. Did he phone you?”

  Beth shook her head and dropped into the client chair. “No. I stopped at his house on my way to work. He wouldn’t tell me much about it, except that he thinks you’re pretty good.”

  “Jeez, Beth, you should have seen me. I knocked out the eight-year-old with a right cross and—sorry, I have a bad case of the Rafferty blues.”

  I got up, offered Beth coffee or beer, and thoug
ht about which one I wanted. She didn’t want anything; I took the fourth last Shiner bottle out of the refrigerator and made a mental note to decide on the next brand of beer to buy. Then I told her what had happened to Thorney.

  She listened intently. Afterward she said, “You’re probably right, but … Wouldn’t it be better if someone was there with him all the time? I’d feel better.”

  I said, “If that’s what you want, it can be arranged. There are a dozen rent-a-cop outfits in town. But they don’t come cheap. You’d better be ready for that.”

  She nodded and tapped her lower lip with her forefinger. “I’m probably overreacting. If it’s only kids …”

  I finished my Shiner. “It is only kids. I hope I’ve scared them off. Note, however, my use of the word hope. Note also how carefully I avoid terms like predict and guarantee.”

  I shrugged again. “Frankly, Beth, the best thing you could do is convince Thorney to use a little common sense. Being angry about having his windows broken is logical enough; rushing out into a barrage of these things is not.” I took one of the ball bearings out of my pocket. I had taken it to browbeat the Gortner and Wisermann kids the day before, then forgotten I had it.

  Beth looked at it closely. “That’s what they were throwing or slinging, or whatever you call it? They could have killed him!”

  “I know,” I said as patiently as I could. “See why I want you to hose the old guy down?”

  She stayed for a while longer, indecisive about what to do or not do for Thorney. Finally, she decided not to decide and she left. I drank another beer. As an appetizer. While I decided where to lunch today.

  I settled on a barbecue place not far away and left the office a little after one. As I stepped out onto the street, a man leaning on a black Continental levered himself upright and stepped over to me. He was big, about my size, and he had done enough boxing to break his nose and thicken his ears and brows.

  “You Rafferty?” he said in a wheezy voice. He’d been punched in the throat a few times, too.

  “Actually, I’m his appointments secretary,” I said. “Who shall I say is inquiring?”