The Baby Blue Rip-Off (14 page)

I heard a door slam, and the other two guys started in grumbling. I strained to make it out, finally caught a piece of
what the authoritative guy was saying—“Let’s go talk to the stupid bastard”—and heard the door slam again.

I cracked the door of the can. Peeked out.

They were gone.

Gone back inside the house, I guessed.

I put the lid down on the toilet and sat, tried to get my heart working again, ran my fingers across my scalp to see if my hair was standing on end. Then I rose, ran some water in the sink, and splashed some on my face. It was good to be alive. It was good not to have any more cracked ribs than I already had; it was good not being kicked in the nuts.

I opened the lavatory door and walked back like a ballerina into the garage. My top priority was now to get the hell out of here and call Brennan. Obviously, going by what these guys had been saying, there was something on for tonight. Actually, a couple of somethings. It plainly sounded like they planned to get out of Port City by next morning, pack up and clear out.

But something else was up, too.

One last job, maybe? Groundwork was laid, the one guy had said, a pity to waste it. That had to be it, then: one last job, tonight.

On my way back over to the window, I stopped at the van. Out of almost idle curiosity, I tried the back doors of the van. Unlocked. I swung them open and looked in.

Empty.

That cinched it. Since they were planning to clear out of town by dawn, you would think the van would be loaded full of goodies. But no. Totally empty. Which meant one thing: there
was
one final farewell job planned for tonight. This van
would
be filled, but at some victim’s house. By nightfall this vehicle would be crammed full of possessions and valuables earned
and collected by somebody in a life of hard and probably honest work, only to be ripped off by some punks with a collective IQ in the neighborhood of Lee Trevino’s average golf score.

I started closing the van doors, then stopped short.

Voices.

Voices outside the building, right outside the building, and the door was opening.

Damn! They were back already.

I ducked inside the van and closed the rear doors. Not all the way, but gently, so I could eventually nudge them open and hop out again when all was clear.

Sure.

“Well,” the authoritative voice was saying, “screw him then. The two of us can do it.”

“Hell, yes,” Hulk said, uncertain.

And I heard a sound that had to be the garage door going up.

And another sound that had to be the rear doors of the van being pushed tight-shut.

And another that had to be the van’s motor starting up.

We were moving.

It was dark in there. Not a trace of light was coming in around the edges of the double doors. No air, either. A hot, stuffy box; not an oven, but a damn close second; not a coffin, but just as disquieting. It was almost enough to make me homesick for that john back at the garage.

One thing kept me from tumbling into depression’s abyss, and that thing was the pair of scissors. I sat clutching them as if they were a crucifix and I was expecting vampires.

Because it seemed inevitable that before long I’d be confronting those two guys driving the van, and if it hadn’t been for those scissors, even
my
money would be on the van drivers. But having a weapon of sorts, and having the element of surprise on my side, gave me decent odds... though stabbing somebody with a pair of scissors wasn’t something I was looking forward to. After all, stabbing people with scissors was for psychos, and I was supposed to be one of the good guys.

However, at times one can’t be too choosy about one’s options, and I was lucky to have any option at all, and
damn
lucky to have something sharp and lethal with which to do battle against those dull and lethal boys up front in the van.

The shocks on the vehicle were all but nonexistent, and I’ve had smoother rides falling down a flight of stairs. But that too was a lucky break—and to hell with comfort—as since the
ride was jostling and the vehicle naturally noisy, I didn’t have to worry much about keeping down my own level of sound. Although when we went over those railroad tracks just three blocks from Tony’s, I bounced around like a sack of grain and must’ve come within a hair of alerting my unknowing captors of my presence.

I examined the interior of the van and found nothing, not one thing, except some loose dirt on the slightly rusted-out floor. I went over the walls slowly, carefully, like a blind man reading braille—but not getting nearly as much out of it. A close check of the doors proved equally futile. The one on the right did have a square maintenance port near the latching mechanism, but feeling my fingers around in the hole told me nothing; perhaps if I had some slight mechanical know-how, it would’ve been different, but all I could get out of it was grease on my fingers. I considered prying the blades of the scissors around in there, but decided not to risk breaking them. I waited till we were going over a particularly bumpy stretch of road and, under cover of vehicle noise, laid my shoulder into the twin doors, hard. Nothing gave, except my shoulder. Some vans have doors that can be sprung open from within if you give ’em a shot right in the middle where they join; it’s a very weak spot, from a structural point of view. But these doors—even though the van wasn’t a recent model—were rugged and didn’t budge. So I gave up.

I sat and let the rough-riding van knock my butt around, let it jounce me till my ribs hurt past pain. I deserved it for being idiotic enough to hide in a van in the first place. This is not to say that I was going to capitulate. I had given up on beating the van, but not on beating the van drivers. Those scissors were so tight in my fist, they could’ve been some strange, deadly
deformity. I was tense with the knowledge of what was ahead of me. I was resolved to violence in a detached way like nothing I’d felt since Vietnam.

At first it was no trouble keeping track of where we were going. Even when my attention was focused on exploring my cell, I could perceive from the sounds of traffic that we were headed out of South End and into town. I felt the sway of the right turn past the pump factory and knew we’d be rolling down Mississippi Drive, and after maybe half a mile we turned again, left, into the downtown.

Then I got lost. Traffic sounds petered out, and several consecutive turns conspired to make me lose all sense of direction. We were, I supposed, winding through some residential area, God knew where. All I knew for sure was we weren’t driving around on the bottom of the river.

And then we veered sharp to the right, and I could hear rocks spitting up against the underside of the vehicle, tickling the van’s belly, and we came to a stop.

An alley, then. We’d stopped in an alley, probably in a residential area.

I heard the front van doors open, slam shut. No pretense at stealth. Had my presence been detected? I held the scissors ready, bayonetlike.

“What’s going on up there?” I heard the authoritative voice say.

“Don’t know,” Hulk said. “Hell. Something.”

“Something is right. I thought Frank said the college kids were gone on weekends.”

“He did. He did say that.”

“Well, they sure as hell aren’t gone
this
weekend.”

Silence.

Somebody put his hand on the handle that would open the rear van doors. From the positioning of the voices, I figured it was Hulk. I was ready. The scissors and I, we were ready.

He pushed down the handle with a click and began to pull open the doors.

“Wait,” the authoritative voice said. “Hold it; somebody’s coming.”

I placed my foot against the right rear door along the bottom and put my hand inside the square opening. When Hulk pushed the doors shut, I kept the one door from latching by stopping it with my foot and bracing with my hand.

“How’s it going, man?” A new voice. A young voice. And, I thought, a drunken voice. Or maybe stoned. You don’t call two men “man” when your head is totally right.

“Fine,” they said together.

“Going to do some gardening, man?”

“Yeah,” they said.

“Well, uh... don’t cut the grass
too
short, you know what I mean?” Laughter. His, not theirs. Silly laughter at that.

“Say,” Authoritative Voice said, “what’s going on anyway?”

“Party, man. Bash. Midsummer bash. Not many of us stuck around here for summer school, but whoever
is
around is upstairs, man. Hey, you want some beer or something?”

“No thanks,” they said.

“Well, listen, if people start roamin’ around outside while you’re doing your work, man, don’t mind ’em. Things aren’t too hairy yet, but they’re gettin’ there. Party just got started last night. By tonight it really oughta be goin’ good. Well, I gotta split.”

“Good-bye,” they said.

I heard his footsteps paddle away. A door yawned open, and I heard the sound of rock music blare out. Then it slammed and cut the music off.

“Damn,” Hulk said.

“Goddamn,” the other one said.

“What we going to do?”

“Scratch it.”

“But....”

“No way we’re going to get it done with all those kids wandering around, drunk on their butts, stoned out of their skulls. We were counting on it being the way Frank laid it out.”

“Those goddamn college kids aren’t supposed to be here on the weekend.”

“Yeah. But they are. Let’s go.”

I heard their footsteps stirring up gravel and then the twin slams of the front van doors. The motor started up and, as they got moving again, I rolled out of the back of the van.

I hit hard, rolling off the alleyway into some bushes to my left. They hadn’t seen or heard me.

They coasted away in the van, turning right at the mouth of the alley, and were gone.

I got to my feet, brushed myself off, and looked around.

Across the alley from where I stood was a two-story yellow clapboard house. It was set up a slight incline to a basement garage. Upstairs was where the party was going on. In the second-story windows I could see the young bodies moving around; and now the sound of rock music, inaudible in the van except when that door had opened, was easy to hear. And strangely out of place in this sleepy residential area full of sedate old two-story houses like this one.

Which was, by the way, a house I recognized.

It was where the Cooper sisters lived.

As quietly as possible, I brushed aside the questions of the Cooper sisters, and got their permission to use the phone, and dialed the sheriff’s office. Lou Brown answered.

“How’s it going, Mal? Can I help?”

“It’s gone past that point, Lou. I’m ready to bring Brennan in.”

“You been moving fast, then. I thought you were going to keep me up on what you were doing.”

“Well, I hadn’t done a damn thing till this afternoon, and now it’s broken loose all at once. Is Brennan around?”

“He’s sacked out upstairs. He was out till all hours on an accident call last night.”

“Bother him.”

“That important, huh?”

“That important.”

“Okay.”

I heard the click of the extension button being punched in, and it took ten rings to get Brennan to answer. Good thing he wasn’t a fireman.

“What is it?” he said, very groggy.

“It’s Mallory. Wake up.”

“Oh, Jesus. I was out late, Mallory, have a heart. Trying to catch some sleep, damn it; can’t you talk to Lou or somebody about whatever it is—”

“Brennan, wake up. I got your break-ins solved for you.”

“You what?”

“Know a place called Tony’s Used Auto Parts?”

He sighed. “Down in South End, sure.”

“Well, the garage part of Tony’s is a warehouse for the hot goods these guys rip off. It’s where they keep the stuff till they can get it fenced.”

“Mallory, I don’t know how to tell you this, but we’ve heard the same rumors about Tony’s that you have, and on my say-so the cops used two John Does on that place in the last five weeks, and they never found a damn thing. We’ve pushed our luck on that one about as far as we can. So no matter what you heard about Tony’s, forget it.”

“I didn’t
hear
anything about Tony’s, Brennan... I
saw
it.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. I busted in there this afternoon and had a look around.”

“Goddamnit, Mallory! You can’t—”

“Can’t, hell. I did. Now do you want to tell me how you’re going to toss me in the can and so on, or do you want to hear what I found out?”

Another sigh. “Go on.”

“I only saw one of them. A big guy, with a blond crew cut and a broken nose. He’s the one that clobbered me at Mrs. Jonsen’s when I interrupted him loading up that green van. His name is P. J., I think, and I believe he lives above the auto parts shop with some woman, who’s probably in on it, too. The others I
didn’t see, but I heard ’em talking. The main guy wasn’t around, but they referred to him as Frank.”

“You’re out of your mind, Mallory. Breaking in there, eavesdropping,
damn
—”

“Shut up and listen. They’ve got all the stuff they stole from Mrs. Jonsen’s, everything from her color television to her antiques, still stored away in that garage. But from what they were saying, I gather they’re going to skip town tonight, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re loading that stuff into that green van I told you about right this minute, so move it, will you?”

“Well... it’s within the city limits, so I’ll have to call the chief of police and have him get some men down there straight away. If they use another warrant on that place and don’t find anything, the chief’ll have my ass and I’ll have yours.”

“Just do it.”

“Where are you now?”

I gave him the number.

“Well, sit tight there, Mallory. I’ll get back to you in a minute.”

I hung up.

And as I did, Miss Viola Cooper handed me a crystal glass filled with that delicious homemade dandelion wine, and Miss Gladys Cooper said, “Now come into the living room and tell us what this is all about.”