Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  I couldn’t tell if my eyes were adjusting to the dark or light was coming in from somewhere. I could see my hand holding the pistol and the pale outlines of the timbers against the black earth. The air seemed to be freshening. Maybe my system was learning to get along with less oxygen. Then I saw a sliver of light lying across the path a dozen feet ahead.

  When I got to the spot I looked up. The light was coming through a crack in the ceiling that extended from one wall to the other. I reached up with my free hand and felt boards. I pushed. They gave slightly. I told Matthew to stand back, stuck the automatic under my waistband, and pushed with both hands. A wooden hatch of some kind lifted out of a frame and light—or rather the absence of complete dark—hit me full in the face. I eased the hatch over to one side, sliding it against something that was not earth. The breaded edges of six inches of concrete formed a square around me. I took out the gun. It made gripping the concrete difficult, but I didn’t know who or what might be waiting for me at ground level. I tightened my grasp and lifted myself high enough to peer over the edge. I looked around a large room with bulky objects studded about, lit only by a night that was not quite as black as the passage I’d come through. What light there was entered by way of a gridded window, with black squares checkering it where missing panes had been replaced with plywood or sheets of tin. It was the abandoned building I’d driven around to park in the employee lot.

  Just then a shaft of white light swept across the window, pulling shadows around the room from great inert blocks of iron, decorated with massive flywheels and leather belts hanging in loose coils like lariats. Gears crashed and something as big and heavy as a brontosaurus rumbled on past outside, shaking the floor. Then darkness again. If anyone was in the room, he was hiding behind machinery. The air smelled of rust and rat musk and old oil.

  I lowered myself back into the hole and leaned down to whisper in Matthew’s ear. “Stay here. I’ll come back for you. I need to check the place out.”

  “No!” He flung his arms around my neck. A bolt of pure pain shot straight up a tendon.

  I laughed. After shotguns and pitched fights and raw terror, whiplash just wasn’t in it. I put away the gun, took hold of him, and shifted him around so that he was straddling my back. “Okay, tiger, we go up together.” I reached up and pulled us both out of the hole and into the sweet stale air of dead industry.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  I kept the boy behind me as I probed the shadows of that petrified forest. The floor was a litter of broken pulleys and levers and bolts the size of toadstools, sheared off and rusted to the concrete. Except for a couple of hundred spiders dozing in webs as thick as bridal veils and a bat that took off straight at my head when I startled it from its perch, making me duck and Matthew yell, the place was uninhabited. I stubbed a toe on a fallen gear as big as a manhole cover.

  The window was no exit. It was too high to reach and the drop was too steep on the other side. The door was made of oak planks two inches thick, with crossbars at top and bottom. It was locked from the outside. Thorpe would have arranged another way out, but I was tired of poking around in the dark. I found a steam piston-arm cloaked with dust on the floor, about two feet long and as heavy as a sledgehammer, and had Matthew stand clear as I swung it. The socket-end struck one of the planks with a dull clang I felt to the shoulders. The plank moved out an eighth of an inch and sprang back into place. When oak decides not to rot, it turns to iron.

  On the fourth swing an eight-inch sliver separated itself grudgingly from the door. I took a breather, then went at it again. At this rate I would have us out in time for Bastille Day.

  Light raked the window again. I felt a stinging vibration in the soles of my feet, an angry diesel drumroll rattled the panes in the window, air brakes chuffed as it slowed for the turn. The floor was shaking so hard I could barely keep my balance. I let go of the piston-arm, scooped Matthew off his feet on the run, and crouched with him behind a mammoth generator, Thorpe’s ugly black automatic in my hand. It was as good against what was coming as a Popsicle stick.

  The same crew that had installed the door had laid the bricks that made up that wall. The impact was as loud as a case of dynamite going off. The floor moved and I had to clap a hand against the generator to keep from falling over. The bricks started about an inch out of their courses, but they held. Mortar dust rained down.

  There was a snort on the other side; a comment from a frustrated rhino. Gears groaned, the rumbling and vibration started up again as the thing backed away for another pass. I figured it went back twenty or thirty feet. A pause, then a couple of gunning snorts while the thing pawed the ground. Gears again, and then the high-pitched whine of the second charge. I hung on to Matthew with one hand and the generator with the other, the pistol pinned beneath my palm. Another case of dynamite went off, the wall fell down in a sheet, and the great square-gridded maw of a Freightliner cab came howling through, ten feet high and shedding whole bricks and pieces as if it were spitting them out. The wall, built as they hadn’t built them for sixty years, had put a bad scratch in its bumper.

  It didn’t slow as it kept on coming. I wanted to move, but my feet were sealed to the floor. I might have been rusted down as solidly as the old machinery. I pointed the automatic at the radiator. It could have eaten the entire clip and still been hungry. Matthew was as frozen as I was.

  Then the air brakes blasted, metal shrieked against metal, and the big front tires rolled to a crunching halt five feet short of where we were waiting to be punched through the brick wall at our backs. The smoke from the twin stacks rolled forward, mingling with the clouds of dust. I made out a head behind the divided windshield, but I couldn’t see the expression on its face. It would have been comical. The driver had voided his insurance destroying an abandoned building. We waited, breathing shallowly and in unison, while the gears meshed again and then the truck backed out, sloughing more bricks as it unplugged a hole as big as a barn door.

  I let another minute pass while the rig wheeled around, jackknifing its long silver trailer with THERMO KING block-lettered on the section that stuck up above the cab, then slid past the hole and out of sight. Then I straightened, holding Matthew’s slick hand. The trucks were all on our side, but in a war without uniforms, friendly stragglers died as easily as the enemy.

  There was a pile of jagged debris nearly as tall as the thing that had made it. I lifted the boy onto my back and climbed over the rubble, testing each piece before trusting my weight to it to avoid re-twisting my ankle.

  Jurassic Park awaited us outside. Boxy vans, submarine-shaped tankers, flatbeds loaded with Earthmovers and coils of steel and concrete septic tanks, dirty orange dump trucks, and cabs without trailers streaked past under the floodlights and turned around and stood in place like wounded animals, panting smoke and steam with smashed windshields and dented grilles and headlamps broken out, one-eyed and deadly, like all casualties in the wild. A Mack Bulldog cabover swung past us belching blue flame from its stacks, its driver cranking the level steering wheel in both hands and letting it whirl the other way as he straightened out for another assault on the main building. Diesels whined, gears stripped, backup beepers played the shower theme from Psycho. The earth had cracked open and hell had butted its smoking brimstone spires up through the fissure.

  The foundry, the only part of Leland Stutch’s heart that had continued to beat in the new century, was no more. The left side of the building had collapsed. Two of its three smokestacks no longer towered above the skyline of Iroquois Heights. One lay stretched out full length atop a pile of blasted bricks, one hundred feet of black iron pipe, still lisping smoke out one end. A stream of molten steel—dregs from the blast furnace—had carved a tunnel through the dust and rubble and eddied into a smoking quicksilver pool. Flames rose and fell wherever it had come into contact with something combustible. Insects clad in hardhats and filthy coveralls crawled over the piles and scampered for cover on the flat. The fire alarms,
at least, had fallen silent, probably choked with dust or buried under wreckage. I wondered if anything was left of Connor Thorpe’s underground bunker, or if it had caved in on him and his man Andy.

  “Holy shit!” said Matthew. He’d been exposed too long to his father’s trucker friends.

  “Yeah.” I hiked him higher on my back and loped off toward where I’d parked the Ram.

  Matthew recognized his father’s pickup. “Where’s my daddy?”

  I told him I didn’t know, and strapped him snugly in the passenger’s seat. Say what you like about what had happened that night. I was yellow after all.

  The truckers were concentrating on buildings, ignoring vehicles and pedestrians, who nevertheless had to leg it to keep from being run down. I drove through the smashed gate and had to go up on the grass to make way for an International that needed both lanes of the drive to make up for lost time. Down the hill a scarlet Peterbilt 359 with yellow flames painted on its hood rested against a floodlight pole whose concrete base had proven more than equal to the blow. Steam gushed from the smashed radiator. I stopped the pickup in the middle of the lane and got out to check on the driver. When I climbed up and opened the door on the passenger’s side, he lifted his bloody face from the steering wheel and stuck a squat-barreled revolver at me.

  Thorpe’s pistol was in my pocket. I left it there and raised my hands. “I’m not with the plant,” I said. “You all of a piece?”

  He laid the revolver in his lap, put his hand to the gash in his forehead, and took it away to look at it. He was a redheaded cowboy with freckles the size of silver dollars in a yoke-front shirt, skintight Wranglers, and lizardskin boots that came to lethal points. “I been worse in Juarez. How’s my rig?” He wiped the blood on his pants.

  “If it were a horse I’d shoot it.”

  “I knew it. It ain’t paid off yet.”

  “Better get a tow down to Detroit and find a bridge abutment to lean it against. State Farm won’t pay off on any claim within a mile of here tonight.”

  “I’m Triple-A.”

  “Same story. Did you know Dave Glendowning well?”

  “Never heard of him before this morning.”

  I left him smacking his CB mike against his palm to get a crackle out of it and went back to the pickup.

  Ray Montana’s big Oldsmobile was parked around from the concrete pillars at the base of the hill a few feet from where I’d sat in the pickup an hour before, when I was twenty years younger. I pulled up onto the berm next to the car and got out and unstrapped Matthew and lifted him down. I brought him over to the driver’s side and introduced him. Montana struck a grave hand out of the open window and shook his. “Good to meet you. I was a friend of your dad’s.”

  “Where’s my daddy?”

  Montana looked at me. I shook my head minutely.

  He said, “You look like you’ve been digging a mine.”

  “I missed the lode. Are there any trucks left on the freeway?”

  “I know a hundred that aren’t. I only put out a call for twenty. Truckers talk to each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them aren’t even union. They’ve all heard stories about how Stutch treated Steelhaulers in the old days.”

  “Some of them probably just wanted to cut loose.”

  “You know it.” The bodyguard on the passenger’s side showed white teeth. “Couple of ’em couldn’t wait till they got to the plant. Took out one whole side of Main Street.”

  “They’re going to haul me on the floor of Congress over this.” Montana sounded unconcerned.

  “I want Mommy!”

  All three of us looked at Matthew, thinking the same thing.

  Montana opened his door. “Grandy, you’re good with kids.”

  “Sure. Come on in, little fella. I’ll teach you how to palm a jack.” The bodyguard took a deck of cards out of an inside pocket.

  Matthew squeezed my hand. I told him it was all right. Montana got out and held the door while the boy climbed under the wheel.

  We turned our backs to the car. The labor leader handed me the pint of Bushmills. I unscrewed the cap and swigged. The whiskey lit up all the hot points, including the shotgun pellets I was going to have to have cut out. I felt like a subway map. I recapped the bottle and started to give it back. He held up a flat palm. I put the cap in my pocket and took another drink.

  Montana’s silence was a question.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “I got shot. Thorpe wanted ten million for the boy. I didn’t have it on me so I caved in his head a couple of times and broke his arm. Things got various after that. Did I mention getting shot?”

  “I take back what I said. You don’t look so bad. What’s the damage?”

  “Not serious. Not funny, either; at least I’m not laughing. I picked up some strays from a twelve-gauge. I was going off at the same angle as the gun. If I were double-jointed I’d pry them out myself.”

  “I mean how much? Thorpe was an enemy of the union.”

  “I’m not a hitter. Anyway he’s not dead, or he wasn’t when I left him. I’m not so sure about the shotgunner. The point is I wasn’t acting on your behalf. I never will, if you’re the kind that tags a price on mayhem.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Of course you didn’t, Mr. Montana. The day started too early for all of us. It’s not through yet.”

  “If you mean the boy, I’ll see he has someone to take care of him until his mother gets out of the hospital. Unless he has other relatives?”

  “A grandmother. She lives in Melvindale.” I gave him Carla Witowski’s number. He got out a pocket memorandum book with folded scraps of paper sticking out of it and a ballpoint pen and wrote it down. “I’ll deliver him tonight.”

  “She might be at Henry Ford Hospital.”

  He put it together then. I couldn’t remember if I’d given him Carla’s name earlier. Four hours of sleep was not enough. “Think he’s the old man’s great-grandson?” he asked.

  “He didn’t fall apart when everything around him was. I wouldn’t make book against it.” I drank. “Thanks for taking him. It wasn’t the only thing I still have to do tonight.”

  A black-and-chrome Kenworth hauling a Roadway box approached, down-shifting to make the turn into the driveway. Behind the windshield a face under an Aussie bushman’s hat glowed greenly in the reflection from the dash lights. Montana took a step into the beam of the headlamps, stuck up a palm, then curled in the fingers and jerked the thumb back over his shoulder. The driver recognized the president of the Steelhaulers. He released his brakes with a whoosh. His engine bawled, accelerating. He shifted shudderingly into second and thundered on past without turning.

  “I don’t know what else there is.” Montana’s voice sounded muffled after the racket. “You said Thorpe confessed.”

  “Thorpe’s a company man. He hasn’t done a thing on his own since he went to work for Old Man Stutch.”

  “Who gave him his orders?”

  “That’s the thing I was talking about. I have to find out.”

  “Where?”

  “Where else? Iroquois Heights.” I twisted on the cap and gave him back his bottle.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  A line of city squad cars passed me speeding toward the Stutch plant, followed by three hook-and-ladders and an acid-green emergency van, flashing their lights and yowling and blatting their assortment of sirens, the later the louder and more conspicuous. I didn’t pull over for them and I didn’t worry that they’d recognize the Ram from the daily BOL sheet. The hot pain from the pellets in my back and left hip had spread, connecting the dots. I was wondering how much time I had before the infection put me out for the quarter. Also I missed Matthew’s company. He’d been good about saying goodbye at Montana’s car, had understood, and had even given me a quick hug. I’d felt like a weekend father going back to his divorced digs.

  I made one stop, at a Shell station, and placed a call. While it was ringing
I played detective, eavesdropping on the locals gathered near the counter of the convenience section.

  “… right through the 7-Eleven and out the other side. Never stopped, just kept on rolling. Looked like they dropped a bomb on the joint.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “I heard somebody yelling inside. I don’t speak the language so I don’t know.”

  “Someone said they tore up the lawn at the Civic Center, ran over the sculpture in front.”

  “Good. I never could make head or tail of the thing. I don’t know what was wrong with the fish fountain they had before.”

  “What I can’t figure out is if these truckers got a beef with Stutch, why they took it out on the town. This is a nice place to live, got us a new school going in for three million, mandatory alcohol testing for convicted drunk drivers. We even charge ’em ten bucks a pop, so it’s free to us taxpayers. Nice safe community.”

  “Hopped up would be my guess. All them long-haulers are on pills and shit.”

  Mrs. Campbell came on the line. She said Mrs. Stutch had gone to bed.

  “Don’t wake her,” I said. “Can you have the garage door open for me? I have to get the pickup out of sight.”

  “Of course.”

  I reached for a cigarette. My pack was missing. I must have dropped it dodging scatterguns. “I guess Mrs. Stutch told you all about the pickup.”

  “As I said, we don’t have any secrets.” She put her chin in her tone. Then she took it out. “Can you tell me what’s going on? I’ve been watching news bulletins all night. No one seems to know anything.”

  “Look out a window.”

  “There are red and yellow lights flashing on the hill. I heard sirens, and I thought I saw flames earlier. Is there a fire?”