Burning Midnight (23 page)

In fact the only new thing in that fetid room was a pair of ordinary brown beer bottles standing on the floor at the foot of the bed, neatly bound together with silver duct tape.

I went into a dive, hitting the floor on my left shoulder, and in the same motion scooped up the bottles with one hand and lobbed them toward the window. It should have been overhand, but the logistics were awkward. There was an even chance the bottles would strike the frame and bounce back into the room, jostling the contents and bringing about just the thing I was hoping to avoid. As it was, sloshing the stuff around probably did speed up the timetable.

Whatever. The pane gave way and then there was a flash and a
crump
that shook the floor and stained the air bright orange. But I didn't get an opportunity to appreciate the fireworks because the wall hit me in the face and I went to sleep.

 

TWENTY-TWO

I woke up burning.

I couldn't have been out more than a few seconds. My coat sleeve was on fire—some of the flaming liquid must have slopped in through the broken window—but it hadn't burned through. I slapped at it energetically and rolled to my feet with smoke pouring from the ruined material. I'd had the suit almost a year, a record.

Through the window I looked down at the burning weedy lawn and flecks of yellow and orange trying to gain a purchase on the house's siding. When the bottle bomb had exploded, it had launched the accelerant toward the street, where the fire was already dying, having consumed the fuel and found nothing underneath but concrete and asphalt. I didn't see any burning pedestrians, so the timing had been lucky.

No sirens yet, but a crowd was getting a toehold on the sidewalk. I turned to rouse Domingo Siete. He'd slept right through the blast, but that was nothing unusual for a deep-sea doper like him.

He lay on his back, his favorite position, on the filthy mattress. He had on the same green army undershirt and boxer briefs, a few days dirtier and more pungent than when I'd seen them last, and you could scrape your boots on his chin. His face was bloated and plum-colored under the eyes. I reached down and shook him by the shoulder. I took my hand away fast. His skin was cool to the touch.

I looked him over. No wounds or blood showing, but I wasn't about to turn him over for a thorough check without surgical gloves; when a body's had time to cool the microscopic horrors come out to play. I walked around the bed. Something crunched under my shoe; I thought at first it was a cockroach, but when I lifted my foot I saw the plastic syringe and, poking out from under the bed, the curled end of the latex rubber hose he'd used to pop the vein. He hadn't even had time to put the syringe on the nightstand.

Black tar heroin. A Mexican export, many times more potent than the Old World variety, and a bargain at only ten dollars a bag. If you weren't familiar with it and measured it the same way as always, it tore through your circulatory system like fifty thousand volts of electricity and stopped your heart in seconds, if you were lucky. I'd heard tales of nightmares Poe couldn't dream up on his worst day, and I was superstitious enough to think they carried through to the next life.

Eighteen years old. A hell of a waste of youth. A tragedy, if you believed in accidents.

*   *   *

“Who won the scrimmage?” Alderdyce asked.

The firefighters had come and gone. It had taken only a few short blasts from an extinguisher to put out the flames, but getting rid of the spectators was taking longer. DPD uniforms were sticking up barricades and unspooling yellow tape to keep them out of the hair of the Arson Squad combing the charred grass for glass fragments and the investigating team working in Seventh Sunday's bedroom. No sign of Ray Charla yet. He was probably still raking up Sister Delia's life and depositing the results in neat piles.

I glanced down at the syringe I'd crushed underfoot and moved a shoulder. “I was a little rattled. It's been weeks since the last time I was on fire.”

He pointed at the rubber tube on the floor for the benefit of a CSI man, a tub with gold rings in both ears who said, “Thanks, Inspector. What should I look for on it?”

“Fuck you.” To me: “We've been tracking black tar for a couple of years. I thought we might have a little more time. It was in Toledo last month, but Detroit's a depressed market; a dime bag of pot is primo stuff here, so why waste dynamite? In Chicago the junkies are dropping like turds. Who do you like for it?”

I said, “Who's to like? There's the paraphernalia, all inside his reach.”

“Go ahead, play dumb. Waste my time.”

I put a cigarette in my mouth, then peeled it off my dry lip and stuck it back in the pack. I couldn't seem to work up a mouthful of saliva. “Okay. The fire makes it not accidental. Whoever shot him up planted the bomb to cheat the coroner out of his autopsy fee and make it look like Siete miscalculated his own Roman candle. That would get the firebug off the hook for Sister Delia. Lucky I came along, huh?”

“You're going to charge me for that suit, aren't you?”

“I haven't decided. I go through them like Kleenex.”

“Just what brought you here?”

“I was hoping for Luís Guerrera. If it was old-school Zaps who torched Delia's, he might've had a line on them, if only to keep his gang from another police sweep.”

Alderdyce peeled a braid of cobweb clinging to the lapel of his gray worsted and flicked it to the floor. The maid hadn't been around for a couple of decades. “I like Guerrera. I like him a lot. With Domingo out of the picture, the Maldados are all his.”

“They were his anyway. The piece of meat on the bed lost interest when he found dope. If anything,
El Hermano
preferred to drive from the passenger's side and let Siete take the heat. As it were.”

“He wasn't fooling us.”

“These boys aren't afraid of cops. They just don't like interruptions.”

“I think I'll let the APB on him ride just the same. If it's okay with you.”

“Okay, grouch.”

“I'm a little out of sorts. The chief wants Mexicantown out of the headlines, and I'm spending more time here than the locals. I don't even like burritos. What'd you get from Charla?”

“Turns out anyone with a semester in chemistry can mix up the kind of accelerant that's been going around. That narrows down the suspects to every high school and college yearbook in three counties.”

“Why stop at three? Gimme one of those plant spikes you smoke.”

I found a fresh one and lit him up.

“Inspector, you mind? I'd like the use of my lungs another forty years.” The CSI scowled up at him from his tackle box.

Alderdyce blew a bitter stream at the missing window and led the way out. On the front porch he said, “Jesus, I hate those twits and their 'tude. When are they going to cancel those TV shows?”

I dragged in secondhand smoke from his cigarette and coughed. My throat was as dry as my lips, with tremors in my hands to boot. Near-death experiences are always worse after the thrill is over. “I'm hoping they bring one to Detroit so I can play a cadaver.”

“You almost got your wish. Those bottle bombs aren't kid stuff. Nothing like making demolition easy for anyone with a Kroger card.”

“They take a lot of the grunt work out of Molotov cocktails. You don't even have to throw them, or be around when they go off.”

Right away I regretted saying it; but he wasn't paying attention, watching crowd control and looking for something else to criticize. The unworthy thought was still in my head, and I wasn't going to get rid of it until I did something about it all by myself.

*   *   *

That could wait. I couldn't remember when I'd eaten last, but my stomach was keeping track of the time.

My car was hemmed in by police cruisers and lab vans, so I walked to
La Riata.
I took off my coat, inspected my shirtsleeve for burns and didn't find any. I carried the coat and when I got a table I folded and stashed it on the chair opposite to keep the smell of char from interfering with my meal. It was too early for the Anglo crowd in Zorborón's restaurant, but half the tables were occupied by locals, some of them discussing the rumor of Domingo Siete's death in English and Spanish. Nolo Suiz,
El Tigre
's surly cousin, was nowhere in sight. I remembered Zorborón was being buried that day. A pretty Hispanic waitress with red eyes and nose brought me a sizzling plate of fajitas with a hill of rice and a bottle of Dos Equis. I guessed she was in mourning and that Suiz had been too cheap to give her time off to attend the funeral.

The piped-in music was syrupy with strings and the male vocalist sounded like his heart was breaking. I could take the CD home if I asked the waitress to add it to my bill.

I ate too fast. I was more tired than I was hungry and wanted to be home. I left a fat tip, feeling like a sucker; for all I knew she was crying over the death of a treasured cat. With a full belly and the beginnings of a four-alarm case of heartburn I went back to the car, found it free of obstacles, and drove home, belching into the slipstream. The house smelled musty from being closed up in high humidity and the air was hotter inside than out. I opened windows and set a fan in one to move the atmosphere around.

I drank another beer to tamp down the heat in my chest and watched a news report of the funeral at Holy Redeemer. A monster chain of limos and low-riders followed the casket to the Catholic cemetery, with here and there an unmarked Crown Victoria full of plainclothes police officers taking pictures of the attendees. I couldn't pick out Emiliano Zorborón's daughter among the mourners, but she'd be a woman now with kids in tow, and there were plenty of those present, draped in heavy black veils with diaper bags slung from their shoulders, Dora the Explorer adrift among the weeds. Half the Mexican underworld had turned out to pay respect, but the youngest of them was middle-aged, and the oldest were on oxygen and casting their sad black-olive eyes around for comfortable-looking plots. I could feel the world beginning to turn under their feet; mine too. I looked for Luis Guerrera, not expecting to see him and not disappointed when I didn't. By now he'd know what took place at the old mission and was smart enough to guess the dragnet was out. The reporter the station had sent—one of those pretty quasi-masculine faces Louis Pearman found no use for—had a lot to say about the passing of the old guard.

Back at the station, the first official reports of Siete's death and the fire were just coming in; there was nothing I didn't already know and very little that I did. The funeral reporter was in for overtime. He was in the neighborhood, and even the media was feeling the crunch from Wall Street and the rising price of fuel.

The mood in the newsroom lightened considerably when the meteorologist started monkeying with his maps. An amorphous green cold front was locked in deadly combat with a globular red cold front from Alberta, whatever that meant; the explanation left me more ignorant than I had been at the start, and I had serious problems with the color coding. The official thermometer at Metro Airport had climbed to eighty-one, not quite the record but making it the warmest March in a couple of years.

Next morning it snowed.

 

TWENTY-THREE

I remembered something from a long time ago. At first I thought it was a dream, because I was in bed and hadn't been thinking of anything remotely connected when it came hurtling back in vivid detail. But it was too linear. You always have to rearrange the parts of a dream in order to take it in later, like cards in a hand of poker.

It was one of those episodes you knew were important for some reason, but stored away for another time, like a book that needed concentration or a movie you stopped watching halfway through the first scene, not because it was bad but because you weren't in a frame of mind to get everything out of it that went into it.

Anyway I knew I was awake to the point of awareness but not action. The sheet I'd barely tolerated in last night's heat was no cover at all now that the bottom had fallen out of false spring, but I couldn't summon the effort to reach down and pull the cotton blanket over me. So I lay there feeling the chill and thought of something that had happened in Emiliano Zorborón's garage.

At the time he'd happened to be committing a misdemeanor, but it had nothing to do with me and by then I had a free pass anywhere in Mexicantown because of a favor I'd done him in connection with another visit. This trip I was just there for local information.

He nodded at me politely and returned to what he was doing.
“Quántos años?”

It wasn't my age he was asking. He was examining the rooster on his desk, a cruelly handsome specimen of fighting cock with a comb like a Prussian helmet and the glitter of the undefeated in its eye. It was red and teal and tawny and blue-black, glossy as a showroom Cadillac, and its spurs were as long as switchblades. That last part was breeding, and evidence of possession for illegal purposes. He was holding the bird firmly by the legs.

“Dos, jefe.”
The obvious owner, a sad-faced
mestizo
with hair sprouting from his ears and the rusty black coat he saved for funerals hanging off his bony shoulders, wore the expression of the born penitent. He wore his hair combed straight down onto his forehead and the calluses on his red raw hands sizzled against one another as he wrung them at his waist.

“A little more, I think.”

“Qué?”

El Tigre
smoothed the rooster's feathers; immediately they sprang forward, forming a ruff around its muscular neck. It tried to peck at his hand, but by then he was gripping it by that neck tightly. He glanced up at the owner wearing the look of Lear in the last act. “Such beauty. What a waste.”

“Qué?”
The owner reversed the positions of his hands and the sizzling resumed.