Burning Midnight (12 page)

“I told him it would just make the situation worse. He said he'd hold off, but he didn't say for how long. Could you talk to Jerry when he comes home? You may be the only person he can trust at this point, a disinterested third party.”

“It might be late. I don't have much control over the angle I'm working.”

She said she understood, although of course she couldn't. We agreed to call each other when something was definite. My low battery indicator came on when I hit End. I didn't have a dashboard charger, but I'd been in worse places before I had a cell. The damn things start out as a convenience and before you know it they're a vital organ.

I hadn't eaten since breakfast, and come to think of it I hadn't eaten that, so I tore open the package of figs. I had no idea if I'd guessed right about Nesto taking cover among the fighting fowl. He must've known about the place, the time he'd spent in Mexicantown, or else drawn the obvious conclusion from the smell. Calling from just outside the building couldn't have been a coincidence. But Jed Clampett and Django weren't the innkeeping type, so he might have slipped past them and gone up the back stairs to a higher floor where they stored the feed and veterinary supplies. He'd wait for nightfall to slip back out.

I hoped I was wrong, even if it meant a long wait for nothing. If he knew well enough to be cagey it meant he knew something most of the world had yet to hear about.

*   *   *

In the afternoon the air got warm enough to open a window. We were working on one of those false springs that make you want to break out the backyard grill just in time for another blizzard. Whoever said April was the cruelest month never saw a Michigan March.

Nobody went into or came out of the former apartment house. They don't throw out the first cock of the season until after Easter—for considerations of climate, not religion—so there was no reason for anyone in the game to risk arrest by coming around to inspect the stables. If the Zorborón investigation turned that direction I'd have to break off the stakeout. I had a hunch it wouldn't that day, despite what I'd told the caretaker or whatever he was; the number of blocks separating the old part of the Hispanic inner city from the new, where the murder had taken place, removed it from the high-priority list. The caretaker or whatever he was thought the same thing, apparently, because he didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave either. What Django thought was open to interpretation. At his level of civilization most of his decisions would be organic.

Either that, or he was busy working out the fifth proposition of Euclid. For all I knew he was there on sabbatical.

I was thinking along these lines, and about how many things about them were probably wrong, when a shotgun went off inside the building. The deep unmistakable bellow made me choke on a fig.

 

ELEVEN

I coughed it loose finally, spat it into my handkerchief, and paused with my hand on the door handle; but nobody came running from any direction. Activity at the parking garage had gone flat in the middle of the business day, and no train had come by in a while, not that anyone inside would have heard even so loud a report over the rattle of wheels and blast of the courtesy whistle while passing the old station, or cared if he did. Pedestrian traffic there was thin at the busiest of times; at the moment it was nonexistent.

The revolver went into my right side pocket with my hand on it. I got out, leaned on the door until it shut without much noise, and went up to a window for a peek. That got me nothing, because someone had masked it with brown paper, just like all the others at ground level, to disappoint busybodies like me or just to cut down on bright lights from outside and untimely crowing from inside. On the front stoop I turned the doorknob without rattling it, then swung the door open and leapt inside all in one movement, ducking around the wall to avoid being outlined in the doorway. I had the gun out now.

Nobody appreciated the acrobatics, not even the chickens. The ones that were awake glanced my way, then returned to their scratching and grooming.

The first thing I noticed was there weren't nearly as many as there had been. All the lower shelves had been cleared of their portable pens up to the level where a man could comfortably stand and remove them without using a stepladder. That made it a hurry-up operation, or else the shotgun blast had brought it to an abrupt end. They'd concentrated their efforts on the roosters, which represented most of the investment. How it had been done without my suspecting stopped being a mystery when I looked in the direction of the fire door. Its chain hung loose, the padlock open and dangling at the end. They'd simply driven a truck or a van into the alley in back and loaded it from there. The hillbilly must have called to say the cops were coming, and whoever was on the other end hadn't let any grass grow when it came to salvaging most of the merchandise. One of the caretakers would have unlocked the door for the cleanup crew. I hadn't thought about any of that, because I'd been too busy thinking about Nesto Pasada.

Just to be thorough I went to the door and opened it and looked out. The alley was empty now, with the blank wall of another building staring at me from the other side. There were no surveillance cameras.

I closed the door and went back to look at the rest.

The second thing I'd noticed, after the missing roosters, was the old hillbilly lying on the floor with most of his middle torn away. His pale blue eyes were open, but they weren't doing him any good. His entrails and what they'd contained trumped the animal waste and disinfectant for stench. Under that I caught a whiff of roast pork; the shotgun had gone off close enough to scorch flesh. That closeness had prevented the pellets from spreading. A pattern the size and density of a baseball had plowed into his solar plexus, obliterating it and throwing him three feet from the point of impact.

His knife, a stag-handled Buck with the blade open, lay in his calloused palm, stained red back to the hinge.

Django was sitting on the metal folding chair where I'd left him. The shotgun was on the floor between his outward-turning feet in their pinch-toe boots and his chin rested on his chest. His shirt wasn't pink anymore. It was drenched with blood all the way down to the waistband of his jeans. His throat had been cut clear across.

I excused myself to visit an uninhabited corner, but all I managed to bring up were the dry heaves. The tragic fate of Wally the mouse had put me off breakfast, a favor I would never be able to return.

After that ritual came the heavy thinking.

The knife attack had to have come first. Even when the jugular is severed, it takes a man a few seconds longer to bleed out than when most of his digestive system has been destroyed by a shotgun at close range, and then there was the shock of the sudden impact that paralyzes the muscles; in any case the impact itself had driven him out of swinging reach. So Grandpa Duke had slit Django's throat and the Yaqui had reacted from animal instinct. His reflexes were better than his attacker had anticipated, catching him before he could duck out of the line of fire.

That's what someone wanted me to think, anyway.

*   *   *

I stood there for a little while with the Smith dangling at the end of my arm, then got to work. It was still a missing-person case, for all the fancy trappings.

There was no place to hide on the ground floor, with all the partitions gone and the steel shelves against the walls. I took the stairs and checked out all the rooms on the next floor and the one after that.

Nothing was locked, not with a couple of highly capable watchdogs like Django and his friend from Dixie on guard. The place smelled musty here, like damp canvas stored in a boathouse, and the air was dank and not as warm as outside. Wayne County had ordered the building to be demolished, but it was a long way down on a very long list. Narrow hallways with spongy boards under moldy bits of carpet runner separated the old rental rooms, some of which had been opened up for storage by tearing down the walls between. Doors were missing, electrical wiring and copper plumbing scavenged for scrap, leaving jagged black holes in the plaster, none big enough for even a slender boy to crawl into and hide. I saw stacks of cracked corn in sacks, more sacks of high-quality feed for mixing in, cartons containing antibiotics, wormers, and other pharmaceuticals whose labels didn't carry the name of the vet who'd prescribed them, a cot where the two men who'd looked after the place had slept in shifts. A flat pint three-quarters full of Southern Comfort stood on the floor beside the cot and an antique portable black-and-white TV and converter were set up on an upended rooster pen at the foot. Empty fast-food containers waited to welcome the first ants of spring. A flat can of Copenhagen and a pasteboard box held some cigars that looked like twists of black rope. Popocatepetl—I was pretty sure it wasn't Mt. St. Helens—smoldered in a painting reproduced on the lid.

No photographs or documents, no doodles, nothing personal to identify the occupants. They would wash and relieve themselves in the men's room in the parking garage. A camping-out affair, to be left behind at the first sound of a siren swooping into the block.
Una casa de salir,
the Spanish call it: A place to bolt from.

I holstered the gun, untwisted the cap from the bottle, and sniffed at the mouth. No smell of bitter almonds, which was as far as my toxicology training went. Poison would be redundant in that scenario. I rubbed the mouth with the heel of my hand and took a swig. It tasted normal, like peaches fermented in hydrochloric acid, with a kick like rubbing alcohol. The label isn't even classified as whiskey. But it improved my mood. I wiped the mouth again, this time with my sleeve, sealed it back up, rubbed both sides against the gray pillowcase on the cot, and put it back where I'd found it. I unleathered the revolver again.

The last flight of steps led to a narrow kiosk with a door that opened out onto the roof. A gust of icy antiseptic air from the river numbed my face and brightened my outlook further. It smelled of a change in atmospheric pressure, and with it either an early taste of spring or another hefty helping of winter. Either one was an improvement over what I'd left on the ground floor.

Here a litter of Marlboro butts had been smashed underfoot on the gravel and tar. The management would have been sticklers about not lighting up inside and breaking the fighters' training with secondhand smoke. Farmer Zeke—it would be his brand—would stand there burning tobacco, stropping his blade on his old suit pants, and looking out at the sprawl of low buildings and spray of skyscrapers glowering under the smoke from the stacks of the River Rouge plant, where his daddy had riveted M4 tanks for Mr. Ford. He'd belong to that generation. When the time came for his watch, he'd go downstairs and chew snuff when the habit gnawed at him and spit in a can. When Django spelled him he'd watch rolling billboards buzzing around an oval track at the end of the cot, mouth Bible verses along with a character in a twenty-dollar hairpiece and a thousand-dollar suit, and rock himself to sleep with Southern Comfort, dreaming of Jim Crow. I knew everything about him except his name.

Django was harder to peg. A compost heap of dead black cigar butts spoke of a man who preferred to stand still in one spot, maybe comparing the spectacular sunsets in Baja to the sooty glow of Detroit at dusk, but apart from that there was nothing to tell me what he did when he wasn't minding the store. No books or magazines or newspapers suggested one man who didn't like to read and another who'd never learned how. That was a bald guess and probably racist, but there wasn't much demand for literature in the Sierra Madres, and I had no reason to rule out what his partner had told me about his origins. Nothing about the man was remotely Hispanic or Caucasian. That rugged, sinister range contained the last pure races on earth—if your definition of “pure” stood up to their part in feeding America's dope habit. They packed the stuff over the mountains on the backs of mules and burros, sometimes on their own in rucksacks, and guarded it with AK-47s. If his compadre hadn't been kidding me about Django's hatred for gangs, that would be one reason why he'd
salir
ed north.

Why that mattered at all was anybody's guess. I hadn't a crossword puzzle handy to order my thoughts.

No Nesto. I even rapped on walls and stamped on floors, listening for hollows, but the no-nonsense builders who had thrown the place together for what a lot of experts had predicted would be a short war couldn't spare the time or material to make priest holes.

Back on the crime scene I put the gun away, for good this time, I hoped; I was wearing off the plate just taking it out and putting it back.

Anything I did after that would be busywork. A really dedicated detective, of course, would frisk the bodies for ID. I didn't fit that description. Blood's bad enough, but continence is largely a matter of concentration, something the dead aren't known for. Anyway that was a job for specialists. I didn't need trouble with the union.

I looked at the beige rotary phone on the floor in a corner, patently an illegal hookup—mobiles and cordlesses were out in that racket, with any scanner capable of picking up a conversation over the air—but I let what prints might be on it stay where they were and used my cell. It might have been the same 911 dispatcher I got before, but this time I didn't play with her. I knew, when the location was reported, who would respond.

 

TWELVE

“Seventy by the end of the week, the weather wizards say.” John Alderdyce took a deep drag and blew smoke at the windshield. It flattened out against the glass and drifted toward the open window on my side of the car. “Snow Monday. Believe it?”

“Where do we live?” I sat with one hand resting on the wheel. I wasn't smoking. I'd burned a quarter of a pack answering questions for the first cops on the scene and my throat felt like an uncured hide. When he'd asked to bum a butt I'd tossed the rest of it into his lap.