Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

“Could we ask Andy?”

  “Sure. Come on in.”

  I’d like to tell you that the interior of Pacific Flying Service belied its humble exterior, but that wouldn’t be true. It was a dump inside too. Most of the wall space was covered by yellowing charts and colorful travel posters. See Victoria! B.C. Place is the Place! Half a dozen blue plastic chairs were spread around the floor.

  Scoured by countless forgotten cigarettes, a battered counter divided the spare space approximately in half, its worn top chipped and pulled loose from the metal edgemolding. Behind the counter, the cramped office area was barely able to accommodate the two desks, butted nose to nose. Not only that but…

  Andy was an Andi. About Rick’s age, a thinning head of salt-and-pepper hair worn very short. Not “I reject the concept of beauty and repudiate the penis oppressor” short, but short.

  “Hi,” she said.

  For a moment, before she could get her smile fixed in place, I saw the young girl in her. As I swallowed my greeting, her half-formed smile slid off. We stood, tilting our heads and scowling at each other. I could feel Rick getting antsy, over on my right.

  “We know each other, don’t we?” she said.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  It took us five minutes, but we finally got it sorted out. Turned out she’d dated my ex-wife’s older brother Tom while I was in high school, and that we’d suffered through a couple of parentally mandated double dates together back in the heyday of the accursed panty girdle.

  “You ever talk to Tom?” I asked.

  “Not in years. You married what’s-her-name, didn’t you?”

  “Annette, and yeah…briefly.”

  I changed the subject. “How long you guys been in the flying business?”

  She looked to Rick. “What is it, honey? Two years this April.”

  “April sixth.”

  I got the whole story. They took turns telling it. She’d been the assistant superintendent in the Lake Washington school district for twenty-two years when she found herself suddenly burned out by the politics and pointlessness of public education and in dire need of something new.

  Rick had been on the original marketing team for Microsoft’s first commercially available version of MS-DOS and, like so many thousands of the MS-faithful before him, had found himself, as a relatively young man, with more money than he was ever likely to be able to spend.

  The timing had been perfect. They both retired, took flying lessons until they were both fully rated float plane instructors—Andi had turned out to be a far more natural pilot than Rick—then sold the house in Redmond and bought themselves a business.

  “I feel twenty years younger,” Andi said.

  Then I had to tell my story. I kept it short, which wasn’t hard. My life story is in no danger of going multivolume. The only two paid jobs I’ve ever had were bag boy at the Queen Anne QFC and freelance private eye. Which turned out to be a clean segue into what I’d come here for in the first place.

  I smoothed the paper over the counter. “Know him?”

  “The cow?”

  Rick burst out laughing.

  “I see why you two get along,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s the guy who hired Mike for Friday,” she said.

  “Who’s Mike?”

  Andi reached to her left and jerked up the Levolor blind. A gray primered helicopter squatted atop a floating dock, its still rotors sagging low over the water like the wilted petals of a techno-flower.

  “Mike Bales,” Rick said.

  “Mike around?”

  Andi shook her head. “Mike only comes down when he’s got a charter.”

  “Any idea what he was hired to do?”

  “None.”

  “Whatever it is, it must be risky, though,” said Rick.

  “How come?”

  Andi pointed her finger at her temple and made a swirling motion. “One too many combat missions in ’Nam.”

  Rick explained. “That’s his specialty. He’s the one puts the geologists up on the rim of Saint Helens for their tests. You got some place where nobody else is willing to fly, Mike is your man.”

  “He isn’t the maniac who put the base jumpers on top of the Space Needle, is he?”

  “You bet he is,” said Rick. “The FAA pulled his ticket for six months over that one. He was only legal again this week.”

  My mind could still recall the picture of the guy with the leather football helmet and the protruding Marty Feldman eyes being led to the cruiser. It was worse than I’d thought.

  “You want his number?” Andi asked.

  I took the number down, swore oaths about keeping in touch, most of which I probably wasn’t going to keep, and made my way back to the car. As I walked, I wondered whether everyone homogenizes his life story when he finds himself compelled to tell it. I am always overcome with the desire to hurry up and get it over with, as if talking about myself is somehow in questionable taste. I seem to grind off the highs and lows in an odd desire to appear terse and conventional. Or maybe it’s because, after a certain age, we all know the pain, and by then most of us have sense enough not to pass it around unnecessarily.

  Wagner’s Feed and Garden was all the way to hell and gone. Twenty miles north of downtown, damn near to Everett, but I was as close now as I was going to get. I made a mental note to give Flounder and Hot Shot Scott some extra cash. They must have had to dip into their own money to take a cab this far and back in the name of surveillance.

  I was on a roll today. The old man’s name was Orville Whitney. He gave me his card. I didn’t even have the newspaper all the way spread out when the old guy said, “Jack Del Fuego, the barbecue king.” The rest was easy. Jack had come in just before closing time, maybe five to six on Monday evening. I stopped the proceedings right there and went back over the time.

  “I know, ’cause he come in cussing his cabdriver. Said the…” He hesitated.

  “The what?” I prodded.

  He looked embarrassed. “He said the dumb camel jockey didn’t know his way around the city and didn’t speak English. Said they’d been driving around for an hour. I told him it was a good thing they didn’t drive for another five minutes, or I’da been closed and gone.”

  Jack had wanted a dozen bales of straw, six of an alfalfatimothy mix, and a hundred pounds of Steer Manna delivered to the restaurant.

  “Wanted it right then too,” Orville said. “Slipped me a fifty to have the boy run it up and then give the boy a twenty of his own.”

  I tried to pump the old guy about what Jack had in mind with animal feed, but he was dry. I’d gotten all I was going to get out of him.

  I took the interstate back to the city, rode Fiftieth up and over Phinney Ridge, and dropped down into Ballard.

  Brenner Brothers Cold Storage was way down on Western, almost to Ballard. The big green building was memorable because it was nearly the last of the old wooden buildings that used to line the shores of Elliot Bay for five miles north of downtown. Brown and green and red, some four stories tall, all covered with miles of wavy shiplap siding. Hardware companies, wholesale lumber, shipbuilders, marine engine repair, tugboat companies all marinating in a pungent blend of creosote and salt water.

  While their neighbors were being eaten alive by taxes and assessments, the Brenners had correctly read the entrails of the situation. Seattle was about to become the gateway to the Pacific Rim. Other than airplanes, fruits were our most lucrative export. Cold storage was going to be the deal.

  The parking lot was full, so, despite stern warning signs to the contrary, I was forced to entrust the Fiat to the Evergreen Credit Union next door. Even here, in an area set back from the water, the breeze had considerably freshened, trembling even the sturdy ornamental cypress trees in the property divider as I stepped over and through the boundary.

  The green frame house out front was still the office, but they didn’t use the big wooden hangar for storage anymore. It stood open at the front, its roll-up doors gone n
ow, stacked floor to ceiling with wooden pallets. Out back, they’d erected six or eight concrete tilt-ups, each probably fifty by a hundred feet, their flat, rectangular faces broken only by massive red garage doors and loading docks, two to a side.

  The sign on the door said, COME ON IN, so I did. The door gave a cheery tinkle as I pushed it open. I immediately recognized the decor. Early Knotty Pine. During my late formative years, in what I like to call my psychedelic cowboy phase, I’d spent a winter in the mountains looking for God, holed up in a tight little cabin up by Index, every square inch of which was covered with this identical tongue-and-groove pattern. I’d never felt the same about the stuff since. In the right frame of mind, staring at a wall of knotty pine, I can still make out the faces of the evil, big-faced girls, coming and going among the blots and swirls of the grain. My jaw muscles ached. I repressed a shudder.

  The man had a brown leather jacket thrown over one arm and a battered briefcase jammed under the other. “Sixty-nine fifty per month,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Due the first. First and last. Yes. Yes.” He listened at length. “If I’m not here, you tell them Paul Brenner quoted you sixty-nine fifty. Okay?”

  He set the receiver on the counter without hanging up, pulled the briefcase out from under his arm, and set it on the floor.

  “Help you?”

  He was built like a college wrestler. One of those low-center-of-gravity guys whom you never want to get down on the floor with. He kept his hair cropped down to the skin, and from the look of him, spent a fair bit of time in the gym.

  “I was hoping you could help me with some information.”

  “What’s that?” he said, slipping into the jacket.

  I pulled the newspaper from my pocket and turned it his way.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  I could see it in his eyes. I’d just struck out. I’d had such a swell time back at Pacific Skyways and at Wagner’s, I’d forgotten I was supposed to be a private detective. I should have run a number on him. In my business, honesty is very seldom the best policy. It’s what I like about the job.

  He picked up the briefcase. “What we sell here, Mr.—”

  “Waterman.”

  “What we sell here, Mr. Waterman, is security and confidentiality. Do you understand? I haven’t even looked at it and I don’t know the man. So if you don’t mind…”

  He waited. So did I. He gestured toward the door with the case.

  “I can get people to remove you,” he said, putting his left hand on the counter.

  I started to speak, changed my mind, and let myself out. On the way out, the tinkle sounded more like a squeak.

  I kicked my own butt all the way across the parking lot, parted a pair of scrawny trees like Samson destroying the temple, and stepped through. I was still mumbling when I had an unexpected spasm of lucidity and skidded to a halt. I walked back the way I’d come, leaned across the oxidized top of an ancient Ford Fairlane, and waited.

  It was about ten minutes before Paul Brenner came out the front door, settled himself behind the wheel of a Britishracing-green Cadillac Allante convertible, and buckled up. Once he’d gone by, I stepped out into the street and watched until I lost sight of him up by the third light.

  The office was empty. As I neared the counter, I saw the red button and the card that read, RING FOR SERVICE, so I rang. Out in the yard, several buzzers with a variety of voices raked the air. The phone began to ring but quit after a single jingle. The door at the rear opened.

  His face had seen a lot of weather. It was a Western face with narrow eyes. Folded and seamed like a favorite tobacco pouch, it spoke of distant horizons and hard times.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Paul Brenner?”

  “Oh, no. Not me. That’s the boss.”

  “Would you tell him I’m here?”

  “Just left. Something I can help you with?”

  It was now or never.

  “Mr. Del Fuego sent me down to make sure everything was copacetic for tomorrow. Told me to see Mr. Brenner for a report.”

  “He’d just have to come out and ask me, anyway,” the guy said.

  “Well, I guess I’m talking to the right guy, then. Everything ready for the big day?”

  “It’s a bear cat, is what it is,” he said. “Young Paul hadda freeze his ass off, he’d think twice about agreeing to harassed shit like this. But he’s just like his old man. Neither of ’em can be pushed, but both can sure as hell be bought.” He gave a dry hack and covered his mouth with his hand.

  “You wanna see?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  His name was Cecil McKonkey. He was a retired tugboat engineer who managed the yard and the cold storage for the Brenners. He’d known Paul’s father for forty years. Paul was the nominal head of the company now, but according to Cecil, not only did he have no interest in the business, he couldn’t find his own ass in the dark, either. I gave him my real name. What the hell.

  “You got a coat, Leo?”

  For the first time, I noticed he was wearing a ski parka.

  “Nope,” I said tentatively.

  He shrugged. “It’s not that bad, I guess.”

  It was every damn bit that bad and then some. He led me around the counter and out the back door. The rental meat lockers fronted the side street, so the citizens could park and pick up that Sunday chuck roast from their locker and be on their way. The back half of the building was a single large refrigerated room.

  It looked like the slaughterhouse scene in Rocky. I shuddered violently in the freezing air. A forest of split carcasses hung from hooks. Beef, swine, a sheep or two, and here and there an animal whose mute remains I didn’t recognize. The air smelled of fat and flesh and seemed to stick to the skin. It was cold as hell, and somewhere in the room, somebody was, of all things, welding. The leaping sparks traced shadow comets on the ceiling and walls as we pushed our way through the carcasses and out into the middle of the floor. My teeth chattered and then behaved.

  The action was down at the far end of the room, directly in front of the insulated garage door. The flat back of a green Hyster forklift faced our way. Poor old Bunky was laid out on a double wood pallet, like the ones they use for heavy machinery. I stepped to the left as the green welding arc started up again, putting Cecil between me and the blinding light, walking the length of the room in his shadow.

  It was positively medieval. They’d fabricated a steel rotisserie spit in and around the massive carcass, designed, as far as I could see, to simultaneously pry the body cavity open and support the weight evenly. The contraption culminated at the top center of the backbone, where a large steel eye hook was presently being welded to the frame. They’d draped a green dropcloth over the area directly under the hook so as not to burn the skin. My teeth beat a rhythm to “The Flight of the Bumblebee.”

  It could have been government work, except that there were only two guys watching the welder. All wore the same gray-striped coveralls and old-fashioned welding hoods. The backs of the coveralls read, “Nance Fabrication.” I hugged myself. A thick steel rod protruded about four feet from each end of the carcass. It was a pitiful sight to behold. Poor old Bunky had gotten his kishkes bobbed after all.

  Cecil reached out and tapped the nearest guy on the shoulder. He pulled up the hood to reveal a jowly, middle-aged face, badly in need of a shave. His teeth were oddly spaced, as if he were missing every other one. “Just about there,” he said to Cecil. “We’ll finish up the weld and scope it good, ’cause it’s gonna hold the whole thing. Then you can have your boys wrap it up in Visqueen. Way I see it, there’s no sense in banding it to the pallet till morning.”

  Cecil agreed with the man and then introduced him as Cal.

  “It’s only Wednesday. You tell your boss we’ll be ready. Come eleven-thirty on Friday, we’ll have our end together.”

  “He’ll be pleased.”

  A flaming trail of sparks rocketed by my face. I was so cold I was
tempted to step forward and let them catch my shirt on fire.

  “I’m just hopin’, after the pickup, we can get cleaned up here in time to get down there for the shindig.”

  “Oh, you’re going, are you?”

  Cal reached into his pocket. It was one of Jack’s business cards. On the back, he’d signed his name and written, “This man and his guests, on the house.”

  “Gave each of us one.”

  “That just shows you the kind of guy he is,” I said.

  The welder pulled back the hissing rod and flipped up his visor.

  On our way back to the office, I asked Cecil, “You going?”

  “Too much Chinese fire drill for me, Leo.”

  “You really ought to make it,” I said.

  He squinted at me. “Why’s that?”

  “Just a feeling,” I said. “I’ve got a funny feeling that this whole circus is going to be one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that a man takes with him to the grave.”

  “Got ‘boondoggle’ written all over it,” he agreed.

  The house was ablaze with lights. I checked my watch and then scanned the street. Ten-fifteen and no necklace of sleek Caddies adorned the roadway tonight. No loud voices or soft music, only the drone of distant traffic rasping from the trees like throat-sore cicadas. Behind my eyes, a sense impression of those long-ago nights flashed on my inner screen, and I suddenly realized how much quieter and darker it used to be at this time of night on this particular street. I wondered how I’d gotten to be so old so quickly, and as usual, came up empty.

  I parked the Fiat in the street. Rebecca refused to drive it, so if I parked her in, she’d wake me up to move it. I reached down behind the seat, grabbed the bottle by the neck, and got out of the car.

  I began to pat my pockets with my free hand before remembering that I didn’t have a key. The second time I knocked, I heard the floor squeak and saw the light change in the peephole.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “I gave at the office.”

  I must have been slow on the uptake. Before I could come up with anything pithy to say, Rebecca opened the door with a chorus of jingling chains and slapping bolts.