Alien Nation #5 - Slag Like Me

by Barry B. Longyear

  “I believe he would,” answered Paul.

  “I’ll call it in,” said George. He turned and walked back to his car.

  “They have a police band scanner in their truck,” said Jessup. “It’s on all the time.”

  George nodded. “I’ll keep it in mind.” He continued toward his car.

  “What about my minivan?” Li Sinritu demanded. “Where is it?”

  Matt noticed he had something clutched in his right hand. He opened his fingers and looked. In the center of his palm were the keys to the van. He held them out, shrugged, and smiled. “Sorry, Li.”

  “Sorry? Sorry?”

  He pointed toward the fire. She turned her head and looked. She caught a glimpse of the van past the flames just before it plunged through the floor of the structure into minihell.

  C H A P T E R 2 7

  MT. ANDARKO’S HOSPITAL. The Tenctonese physician’s assistant deposited the syringe in the hazardous medical waste container mounted on the wall and turned to face those standing around Matt’s bed. “He’ll be going down to surgery in about twenty minutes and he needs to relax, so start saying good-bye and making your way out of here.” When he left he closed the door behind him.

  Matt lifted his hand and pointed at George. “When they recover that VCR in my head, George, I want you to make sure that tape doesn’t get lost. I haven’t figured out yet what to do with it. Until I do, don’t turn it over to anyone. Understand?”

  George sat in a chair next to the bed while Dobbs and Kirk stood at the foot of the bed looking down at Matt. “I’ll take care of it, Matt.”

  “The all-points is out,” said Dobbs, “and the roadblocks have sealed the city for the past three days. Nobody’s leaving town without running a roadblock. We’ve got every place in the city either one of the Lee brothers has ever been seen staked out. Sooner or later, we’ll get ’em.”

  Kirk shook his head. “Don’t bet on it. Things are supposed to be so quiet the roadblocks might be lifted day after tomorrow.”

  “What?” Dobbs shook his head and folded his arms. “Man, I do not believe this. There’s a war going on out there, and they think it’ll just go away by saying it’s over?”

  “It was all there right in front of me,” said Matt as he fought against the anesthetic. “From that time I visited Tian Apehna and saw their truck at the turn-off, I had it all. I just wouldn’t let myself see it: the bumper sticker, the mud flaps, the metal in the bed of the truck.”

  “I understand where the bumper sticker fits in, but what about the mud flaps?” asked George.

  “Recycle for tomorrow,” said Matt. “It’s the slogan for that shithole, the Sierra Environmental Center. We see the billboard every morning.”

  “That’s where Harry Lee works,” said Kirk. “So what?”

  “And what does the scrap metal have to do with it?” asked Dobbs.

  “Galvanized iron and steel.”

  “What about it?”

  “Dobbs, they recover zinc from galvanized iron and steel at that fifty-acre junkyard, the Sierra Environmental Center.”

  Dobbs held out his hands. “And so?”

  “Hydrochloric acid,” answered George. “It’s done with baths of hydrochloric acid. You knew that, Matt?”

  As his head swam, Matt shrugged and held up his hands. “Hell, yes. It’s the only thing about hydrochloric acid I remembered from high school chemistry. That and you don’t want to use it for gargle. I’ve known that since I was sixteen, yet I couldn’t see it.”

  Matt lifted his head and looked at the fuzzy images of his fellow detectives. “You know, I never thought of myself as a racist.” The room was spinning and he placed his head back on the pillow. “Jesus H. Christ. I heard about two gardeners named Lee and assumed they were Chinese-Americans.”

  “When I questioned them,” said George, “I knew they weren’t Chinese. They’re from Maryland.”

  “I only glanced over your report,” said Matt. “I’d already eliminated them in my mind.”

  “They aren’t Chinese?” asked Dobbs, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

  “They’re about as Chinese as Spike Lee and Robert E. Lee.” Matt rocked his head back and forth. “I made myself blind. Figured they were Chinese-American gardeners, hence, very law-abiding and incapable of doing what was done to Cass, and no motive at all. I never even looked at ’em past that. Sorry. So stupid. So blind. So sorry. Hell.” He swallowed and attempted to shake his head. “I still don’t know why they did it.”

  In the ensuing silence, Matt slipped into unconsciousness, still cursing the wrong kind of blindness. After a minute, Kirk turned to his partner and said, “Dobbs?”

  “What?”

  “You know that junkyard?”

  “What about it?”

  Kirk folded his arms and bit at the inside of his lower lip. He thought for a moment, nodded once, and said, “I’ve been there a few times getting parts for my car. There must be twenty thousand abandoned heaps in the place. It would make a great spot to lay low until the roadblocks are pulled.” He raised his eyebrows at his partner. “How about it?”

  “Grazer already has it staked out.”

  “What did Grazer do? Peel off one or two bodies? The city’s still on fire and shooting the hell out of itself. A couple of blues catching Zs at the front gate aren’t going to be able to cover that yard. That’s fifty acres of scrap metal jungle in there and a fence with more holes in it than your head.”

  Dobbs pursed his lips. “Think we ought to take a run out to the Sierra Environmental Center and see if we can find a couple of bushings to shaft?”

  “Just my thought.”

  “Remember the police scanners,” George reminded. “Use a security channel.”

  “Good thinking,” said Dobbs.

  “Iniko and I’ll follow along in a bit.”

  Kirk faced the door, and he and Dobbs left the room as Matt fought his way up from his drugged sleep. “Geor—” he mumbled. “Geor—”

  “What is it, Matt?”

  “I know. I know why the Lees did it. Ohmigod. His picture on the book. Tian. The balcony, George. They were on the balcony.”

  “Why, Matt? Why did they do it?” He shook Matt’s arm. “Matt?” His partner was in absolute elsewhere.

  The physician’s assistant entered the room, walked over to Matt, and said to George, “You have to go now. You can wait in the visitors’ lounge if you want, but he won’t be able to see anyone until much later, possibly tomorrow.”

  George grimaced, got to his feet, and said, “No, thank you. I have to see a man about a bath. Did you see my companion?”

  “Mr. Iniko?”

  “Yes.”

  “He just came down from the ninth floor. I believe he’s at the nurses’ station.”

  “About the tape unit and the pictures of Matt, do everything exactly by the book. Two reliable witnesses, property bags sealed and tagged, the works. No mistakes.”

  “I understand, Sergeant. The photographer is standing by, and we’ll take care of everything.”

  George took one last look at Matt, turned, and left the room.

  C H A P T E R 2 8

  NERATI AVENUE, NORTH of the most devastated area of the Chay. Detective Jerry Kirk stood back and watched as Rick Dobbs talked to the two uniforms in the black-and-white. The overweight officer in the shotgun seat dribbled doughnut crumbs onto his tie and cocked his head toward the main gate of the Sierra Environmental Center. On the stylish sign flanked by rhododendrons, beneath the business name, was the slogan Recycle For Tomorrow. The place looked like a junkyard and smelled vaguely like sauerkraut.

  “Nobody’s gone in or out for two days,” the officer said to Dobbs. “The bangers are trashin’ the whole city. I guess that’s why the bottom’s fallen out of the junk market.” The officer chuckled at his joke. His partner behind the steering wheel yawned, shook his head, covered his eyes with his cap’s visor, and shuffled his ample ass into a more comfortable position.


  “Enjoying the riot?” Dobbs asked the pair, the hostility radiating from his face.

  Kirk turned away as he felt it again, this embarrassment, this need to explain to the uniforms that being hooked up with Dobbs hadn’t been his choice.

  Rasher, the fat cop with the doughnut crumbs, narrowed his eyes and squinted up at Dobbs. “As riots go, it’s okay. The coffee’s hot. The pastries could be a bit better, though.”

  “Next riot,” said his partner, “Pizza Hut’s promised to deliver.”

  Dobbs turned, poked Kirk in the shoulder, and stormed back to their car. “God damned blue frat lazy-assed bastards! A goddamned herd of dinosaurs farting through tubas could be camping out in there and they wouldn’t know it. Ninety-five percent of the whole damned department ought to be run in for obstruction and as goddamned accessories!”

  “Take it easy,” said Kirk. “They’re not bad cops. It’s been a rough bunch of days, and Cass’s murder is just one out of a hundred or more this week. You know how it is.”

  “How it is?” Dobbs stopped dead, faced his partner, and jabbed him in the chest. “How it is? No, partner. I don’t know how it is. Why don’t you tell me how it is.”

  Kirk held up his hands. “Look, Dobbs, you got that face on and there’s no point in talking to you when you’re like this. You’re upset right now, and—”

  “Upset? Upset? Is that some kind of word substitution for rip-shit pissed angry? Man, I am a shitstorm shot from guns! I am not upset!”

  Kirk’s face flushed red. “I guess what I meant to say was, those two cops are on our side, Dobbs.”

  “And just what in the hell is our side concerned with that we recruited two damned compulsive overeaters to deal with it? A movement to wipe out the doughnut?”

  Kirk felt the anger rising in his chest. “Dobbs, you ever think that maybe you’re just a little too sensitive?”

  “Too sensitive?”

  “Yeah. Too sensitive. Half of you people walk around just looking for something to take offense at!”

  “You people? You people?”

  “Oh, shit,” answered Kirk sarcastically. “I did a Perot. How politically incorrect can I get?”

  Dobbs grabbed his partner’s arm, swung him around, and pointed a shaking hand south toward the black clouds on the skyline. “Look there! There! And there! You see it?”

  “Yeah, I see it,” Kirk answered, pulling his arm free. “The world’s had its face rubbed in it for a week.”

  “You got a clue, partner? You have any idea what’s happening out there?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Yeah, right. You go ask Matt what’s going on now that some cop ground his face into a filthy street and stuck a rib through his lung.” Dobbs lifted his arm and stabbed a finger toward the south. “That isn’t just a bunch of homeboys taking advantage of an opportunity to upgrade their entertainment centers looting the local Radio Shack. That’s a lot of pissed-off people who’re so goddamned outraged they just don’t give a shit anymore—not about the law, not about what’s right, not about what makes sense, not about anything. Unless we want to spend the rest of our miserable lives watching them burn down this damned city again and again until no one wants to rebuild, somebody had better start getting sensitive, Kirk. It’s one of those decision times, partner. Somebody had better start getting sensitive real quick!”

  Kirk, to his great relief, saw a gray car that he recognized approaching them from the direction of Huntz Street. He pointed and nodded. “Francisco and the FBI.”

  Dobbs turned and wrestled down his anger as George’s car pulled up beside them. Francisco and Iniko got out and walked over. George studied both Kirk’s and Dobbs’s faces. “Are you two all right?”

  “We’re goddamned terrific,” answered Dobbs.

  Iniko pointed his thumb back toward the black-and-white. “Didn’t you call for more help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, is that all the task force could spare to put on this place? Are there more units inside and on the other gates?”

  “Let me be the first to welcome you back from Disneyland, Iniko.” Dobbs pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb. “Nobody inside, two uniforms out front in full view zoning out on sugar. On Huntz and Gorcey there’re two other chain-locked gates the Lees could’ve gotten a truck through if Harry has a key. If they went in on foot, there are a dozen ways they could’ve gotten through the fence. To contain this place properly we’d need at least thirty bodies.”

  “On top of that,” Kirk joined in, “that yard is fifty acres of nooks and crannies: junk cars, old appliances, military surplus, shipping containers, old boxcars, heaps of scrap, sorting sheds, warehouses—”

  “So,” said George, “we’re shorthanded.”

  Dobbs thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and glowered at the ground. “Man, George, I’m back in that poker game again, and the blue frat is dealing Micky Cass out.”

  “Jessup said they have a police-band scanner in their truck,” interrupted Iniko.

  “So?” said Kirk.

  “If I were in the Lee brothers’ shoes, and if I had a scanner, I’d keep that scanner very, very close right about now. I’d want to know where the police thought I was, and what they were planning on doing about it. I’d also want to listen to find out when the roadblocks get pulled so we can make good our escape. That’s what I’d do.”

  Jerry Kirk thought for a moment and looked at Dobbs. “They’re keeping the truck with them.”

  “So, if they’re there, they either went in on Huntz or Gorcey. That truck’s probably all they got for wheels, too. If we plug up the gates and go in, maybe we’ll have ’em. We’ll at least put ’em on foot.”

  “Not with the size of that place,” answered Kirk. “They could hide out in the trunk of some old wreck for days.” He frowned and pursed his lips.

  “What is it?” asked Dobbs.

  “Partner, what if we got in there without being noticed, first, and then put on some radio traffic that sounded like three divisions of cops descending on the yard? Think they might rabbit?”

  “Like Roger on Jessica.” Dobbs nodded slowly. “Well done, Kirk. Sometimes you people aren’t a complete disgrace to the department.”

  “I don’t know, Dobbs. If I look real hard at that, it just might be a compliment.”

  “Fie, fie, my boy. It’s only your weeks at the master’s knee beginning to pay off.” He looked across the street from the junkyard. “Over there in the liquor store. If the phone lines are still open, I’ll call it in to Grazer and get the okay. Then Kirk will take our unit and plug the gate on Gorcey and go in from that direction. I’ll get the doughnut debs on the front to plug that gate, play along with their radio, and come in from that direction.” He looked at Iniko. “Can you take George’s car, plug the gate on Huntz, and work the mike while George and I go in on foot?”

  “If the Lee brothers are in the habit of listening to police calls, they’ll be able to pick out someone unfamiliar with the codes and slang. If whoever drives is going to need to do that One-Adam-Twelve stuff over the net, George should do it. I’m not familiar with the vernacular.” He smiled at Dobbs. “If you could let me carry your shotgun for you, however, I could accompany you into the yard while George works the radio from the gate on Huntz Street.”

  “Of course you’d be sure not to get involved or expose yourself to any risk or danger, civilian that you are.”

  “Naturally.”

  Dobbs looked at Francisco. “That’s it, then, George. As soon as I talk to the sugar twins over there and arrange everything with Grazer, you and Kirk take your units, plug those gates, and move in. Then we’ll see if we can get the Lee brothers to tell us why in the hell they killed Micky Cass.”

  C H A P T E R 2 9

  WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES of Dobbs’s call to Grazer, enough trash had been put on the net to convince a pine post that the entire weight of the LAPD was about to land on the junkyard. At the little-used Gorc
ey Street entrance on the opposite side of the yard from the main gate on Nerati, Jerry Kirk hung up the mike and stepped out of the car, leaving the door open.

  He walked around the front of the car and checked the lock on the chain across the gate. The combination of the car and the heavy chain made a formidable obstacle. No one was going to drive any pickup through there any time soon. He looked around until he found a sliver of metal. He tried it in the padlock and jammed it in the keyhole. Taking a rock, he smashed the metal into the keyhole making it impossible to open the lock with anything less than a pair of bolt cutters.

  He tossed the rock to the ground and stooped beneath the chain. As he straightened up on the other side, he entered the yard. On his left was the concrete bed of a weigh station, the missing glass in the windows of the tiny operator’s shack shattered out years before. On his right was a mountain range of military surplus items: stacks of crates, bins and piles of ducts, cables, wheels, tank parts, electrical components, and the flotsam from almost a century of military misspending. Crooked paths and roads separated the piles, making the yard a giant maze.

  Straight ahead past a dirt crossroads was a two-story structure with a conveyor belt to its left leading from its squat tower to a peak of shredded galvanized metal. Behind the shredded metal was a block-long wall of galvanized scrap. The yard was closed, nothing moving that Kirk could see save the uniformed officer who was quietly advancing toward the center of the yard from the main entrance. Kirk looked around but couldn’t see Iniko, Francisco, or Dobbs. More important, there was no sign of Jimmy or Harry Lee. The uniformed officer waved at him and Kirk nodded back.

  Squatting down, Kirk allowed his gaze to explore everything he could see from right to left and back again. He listened as his eyes searched. The only sounds were the eternal sirens marking the city under destruction to the south. Inside the yard there was nothing. The strategy wasn’t working.

  His gaze moved again to the rust-colored building with its squat tower. It was easily the tallest structure within the yard. From there, he thought, the view might be more revealing. Since they had all agreed to maintain radio silence until the quarry was spotted, he left the handy talkie attached to his belt. Instead he withdrew his weapon and ran toward the structure, taking what cover he could on the way.