Burning Midnight (11 page)

 

TEN

The Pacman dozers and earthmovers that are eating up the cityscape and dropping rubble haven't gotten to the Michigan Central Depot yet, but it's on the list. For a while the police department had considered moving from the elegant Deco rot of l300, a 1922 construction, into the decaying pile at Fourteenth and Vernor, erected in l9l3; but then it had taken a deep breath and abandoned that plan in favor of parting out its divisions into old precinct buildings. That placed them outside the chief's supervision. The department was returning to its feudal origins, with each squad self-contained and answering to no one but the inspector on the premises.

The depot's an echoing hangar built of brick and girders and native granite, with stained-glass windows and most of the other doodads of Edwardian architecture prominently in place. Pigeons, sparrows, and jays roost in the rafters, using nests built by earlier generations and interrupting their songs of truculence to listen to the hooting of Amtrak whistles as the cars chuckle past; their splatter had formed stalactites under the roof and stalagmites on the floor at the base of the walls. It's a long haul down Vernor from the part of Mexicantown where he'd been hanging out, almost in the heart of Corktown, where the migration had begun; but a kid like Ernesto Pasada, who didn't know the neighborhood so well, would be likely to run in a straight line rather than risk getting lost in a zigzag.

That was the working theory. The train sounds and automobile noises on Chata's voice mail bore it out, but only on a contingency basis. Cars turned into the parking garage entrance through the Fourteenth Street entrance, paused to take their tickets, and climbed the spiraling ramp to the higher levels, the sound of their motors thundering off reinforced concrete and spilling out the open sides louder than they had been going in. I found a spot near the roof and rode down in an elevator that smelled like an overheated radiator and wheezed and rattled like loose particles in an old lung.

A pay phone stood across from the garage on a post with a metal cowl that protected the instrument while leaving the user to the mercy of our weather. No one was using it. I laid a hand on the receiver for a few seconds, trolling for psychic vibes left behind by Nesto when he'd called his sister. But the place was fished out. Or just possibly I'm not psychic.

The place I'd thought of when I figured out where he'd called from was an old frame apartment building that belonged to no particular school of architecture. Some opportunistic realtor had slapped it together in l942 to shelter some of the horde of crackers, Tarheels, Kentucks, and Mississippi blacks who had swarmed north to build ships and planes and tanks to hammer Europe and the South Pacific. More lately it had been a hippie commune and a hotel for transients, with a combination meth lab and crack emporium overlapping that and its current incarnation. It had actually come up in the world, if you considered the cockfight trade less harmful than dope. The cops had to have known what was going on there, but likely had left it for seed so they knew where to go when it came time to arrest someone for questioning. The stink came out the front door and through the broken windows and squatted in the middle of the block like a broken-down honey wagon.

On the way there I'd stopped at a CVS and hit the expense account for a jar of Vicks. In the car I'd smeared a handkerchief with some of the contents and just before I went inside I ringed my nostrils with the strong eucalyptus mixture. It burned the membranes, but it beat what came out from under the tail feathers of chickens.

In the residency days a shoebox-size foyer had contained a counter where the clerk collected and gave out the keys, sorted mail into cubbyholes, misdirected the police, and escorted junkies into the street. The desk was gone and so were the interior partitions, making room for steel utility shelves on all sides, stacked with crate-size cages sided with chicken wire, each containing a haughty-looking rooster or a fat brood hen pecking lice from its feathers and scratching at the floor of its cell. The stench of droppings inserted a lever under my stomach and tried to roll it over. I wasn't sure the Vicks could hold it off for long. I heard clucking and avian sneezing. The neighbors said when the sun came up or a car swept around the corner at night raking the place with its lights, the crowing could be heard clear to the river.

The place was the champion cock capital of the Midwest. All the best scrappers were bred there, the Seabiscuits of fighting fowl, and if it looked sordid at first glance—it certainly smelled that way—the animals were well fed, the cages cleaned regularly, and all their medical needs attended to by a veterinarian in the breeders' employ. Ventilation fans whirred in all the windows, a good circulating system kept the residents warm, and a crew scrubbed the floors with industrial-strength disinfectant on a regular basis. The organic odor belonged to generations of evacuated bird colons. It went clear down to bedrock.

It all had nothing to do with me. I'd seen a cockfight and didn't want to see another, but there are people who feel the same way about prizefights and baseball. Whether the birds died in combat or had their beaks blunted and their bodies pumped full of growth hormones and their heads and feet chopped off and the rest sold in supermarkets was probably all the same to someone.

The keeper of the zoo stood up from a metal folding chair and came over, legs bent, feet pointing sideways, back rounded in a permanent stoop. His hair hung in black strings to his collar and on either side of his forehead. A gold tooth winked in an idiot's smile. He carried a shotgun nearly as short as a pistol, his finger curled around the trigger and his other hand holding the barrels steady. He stopped well inside range; I'd stopped the moment the weapon made its appearance. A scattergun sawed off that far back would open me up like a
piñata
.

“Cuidado, amigo,”
I said. “Some of the shot might hit the merchandise.”

I couldn't tell if I'd gotten through in either language. The whites of his eyes between creased lids were startling against the deep red-brown skin. It went like hell with his outfit: pink polyester shirt with pearl snaps, stiff blue jeans, and lizard boots with pointed toes. In certain nameless villages well below the border, that was formal attire. He might have been a full-blooded Yaqui, unversed in any lingo not used in the mines.

Boards squeaked under the linoleum behind me. I didn't want to turn away from the shotgun, pointless caution; did I care to see what a charge of buckshot looked like as it cut me in half? Anyway I hesitated long enough for someone to yank my right arm behind my back and up between my shoulder blades by the wrist and prick the side of my neck under my left ear with a point that broke the skin on contact. Blood raced down inside my collar.

“Any more guns, son?” asked a voice in my ear; a high-pitched twang. He might have been left over from the northern exodus.

He had me pressed up against him and would have felt the revolver behind my hip. “Just the one, Dad.”

He withdrew the knife. The blade folded back into the handle with a click and in another second I was lighter by a pound and a half. That piece was harder to hold onto than a good pair of sunglasses. He let go of my arm and stepped back. I unbent it and shook circulation back into my fingers. He didn't tell me to stay still, so I took a step that would keep them both in my sight and turned. He was sixty, lean and rangy in a green work shirt tucked into an old pair of suit pants held up with dingy gray suspenders. His face was a skull with the skin sprayed on, with wattles on his neck that made him look as if whatever flesh the face had had once had melted. There was a scabrous patch on his left temple where the skin had been gouged out as with a router. A man with skin burned as brown as a brogan was a prime candidate for a melanoma. He was bald, but he'd solved that problem by smearing fifteen or sixteen white hairs across the scalp and tying them around his left ear. He'd pocketed his knife and was admiring the stainless steel Smith & Wesson in his left hand.

“Nice,” he said. “I like the four-inch barrel better.”

“You wouldn't if you had to carry it around all day. I'm going for my wallet.”

“Turn a little that way before you do. I don't want to take a chance on Django missing you with some pellets and hitting livestock.”

“Django?”

“What he calls himself, if I make it out right. He watches the birds, I watch him, make sure he don't sacrifice any of 'em to some one-eyed jasper in spic-injun heaven.”

I put a vacant corner at my back and got out my ID folder, watching the Yaqui watching me with the shotgun motionless in his hands. I flipped it toward the hillbilly, who caught it in his right hand. His lips sounded out my name and occupation, showing plenty of long yellow tooth and black gum. He glanced at the sheriff's star without interest and flipped the folder back my way. He pointed a chin as prickly as cactus toward the folding metal chair and Django lowered his street sweeper and went back and sat down. The shotgun rested across his lap and he stared off into nothing as if his shift hadn't been interrupted.

“We got to be careful,” his partner said. “You'd be surprised how much jack we got tied up in these birds.”

“I'm not here for the birds. I'm tracking a runaway kid. He called his family from that phone outside a while ago and this is just the kind of place he might burrow into.”

“Why's that, son?”

“He's a Maldado. Brand new.”

“One of them spiders shows his face in here, Django'd shoot him low. He left the Sierras because the gangs down there tried to draft him into the dope trade. The gangs up here are a joke next to them, but Django don't like dope and he don't like gangs. Here you go, son. I got to be careful. I'm on parole.” He offered me the handle of the Chief's Special.

I took it and put it back. “What's your p.o. say about your hanging out here?”

“Strictly speaking he'd be agin it. He thinks the chicken farm where I'm working is down by Toledo. That's what my pay stubs say.”

“This is a Zorborón operation, isn't it?”

He poked at a cheek with his tongue, making it bulge. Said nothing.

“I don't care myself,” I said. “You might want to be a little closer to Toledo when the cops come.”

“You fixing to call 'em?”

“They don't need the invitation.
El Tigre
got dead this morning and I figure they'll be shaking all the trees in his orchard.”

He scratched the top of his head, used the same finger to replace the hair he'd disturbed. That would be a hysterical fit for him. “Who done it, your runaway?”

“He's on the list. I'm not sure he belongs there. I'd like to ask him.”

“What's he look like?”

I handed him Nesto's picture. He looked at it about as long as he'd looked at my prop badge, handed it back. “Ain't seen him.”

“Okay if I show it to Django?”

“If you can make him understand. He speaks only heathen, and ten words of it's all's I ever heard from him.”

I went over to where the Indian was sitting and held the picture in front of his blank gaze. Light glimmered in it, then died. He went back to contemplating the cosmos.

“I think that means no. I ain't just sure.”

An empty crate stood next to the metal chair holding up a squat brown bottle of Dos Equis. I laid the picture on the crate. “I'll just leave it here. There's cash in it if you see him and call me.” I put my card on top of the picture.

“It better cover the toll from Toledo.” The old hillbilly sounded bitter for the first time. “You wasn't just funning me about that.”

“It'll be on the news. You might not want to wait around for it.”

“Wonder what's to become of the birds.”

“Destroyed, probably. What about Django?”

“Him, too, if I can't get through to him not to be here with that stumpy shotgun when they show up.”

I left the building and mopped the sweat off the back of my neck with a handkerchief, getting a little blood on it from the nick I'd forgotten about; they close quickly when the blade's ground to a finer point than comes from the factory. I used a dry corner to scrape the Vicks from my nostrils. It would take half a pack of Winstons to burn off the rest of it.

I got the car out of the parking garage, drove clear around the block, and found a spot on the street where I could keep an eye on the entrance of the rooster mill. The only other way in from the street was a steel fire door, chained and padlocked from inside. If Nesto came out, it would have to be through the front.

The 1970 Cutlass is a smorgasbord on wheels. I never know at the beginning of a job how long I might be living in it, so it's stocked with survival food: jerky, dried figs, tins of this and that, and Twinkies, which will give the roaches something to munch on after the rest of us are extinct. Bottles of water, to be used sparingly. The big empty coffee can eliminates most rest stops, but you can be arrested for exposure if you aren't careful.

Chata answered on the first ring. I asked if her brother had come home or called again.

“No. I was hoping you had news.”

“Not yet. Talk to Jerry?”

“I called him at work. I hope never to have that kind of conversation again. He blew up. He told me to call the whole thing off, just as I said he would. It didn't make him any happier when I said that decision belonged to his father.”

“What did he say about Zorborón?”

“He agrees with me that Ernesto had nothing to do with that. He said the best way to bring him home was to make it official: Report him as a runaway and let the police take care of it.”

“Alderdyce is already on it. The way he's doing it breaks rules, so any conflict in the story would snarl things up big-time. He'll survive the heat, but anything can happen when cops become confused.”