Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (18 page)

Red nodded. “Yeah, that’s a pain in the ass. The chicken shit. That’s why I like this. I don’t like the chicken shit, I quit. Move on. Fuck it.” He drank his whiskey. “And the guys, man. I love soldiering with the guys, you know?”

I nodded. “I know,” I said.

“So what do you do for a living,” Red said.

I shrugged. “Little of this, little of that.”

“Mostly we scuffle,” Hawk said.

Red tipped his head. “Scuffle?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re good with guns, we got quick hands.”

“Shit,” Red said, “that ain’t bad. You working now?”

“No. We’re sort of looking.”

Red turned toward the bartender and gestured. “Man die of fucking thirst around here,” he said.

“What kind of soldiering you do around here,” I said.

“We’re training right now.”

“Giving or receiving,” I said.

Red frowned. “Huh?”

“Are you training people or being trained.”

“Being trained,” Red said. “Counterinsurgency.”

“Figured you might already know that,” Hawk said.

“Oh man, shit,” Red said. “Course I know that. I been an insurgent and a counterinsurgent and an imperialist fucking warmonger and fifty-three other things. But they pay me and they want to train me and I get trained.”

“How come a weapons manufacturer is training troops?” I said.

Red shrugged. “Supposed to familiarize us with some new-generation weapons. So’s we can go train customers. But I know counterinsurgency training when I take it.”

“We were out past there yesterday,” I said. “Just cruising around and the security people told us to screw.”

“Yeah. Security’s real tight.”

“Don’t want people slipping in and scooping samples,” I said.

Red grinned. “Ain’t people slipping in,” he said. “They don’t want people slipping out.” His face had reddened and for the first time his speech began to slur a little. If I’d had that many boiler-makers they could iron clothes on me.

“You’re out,” I said.

“Sure, they don’t worry about us. They worry about the workers.”

“The workers don’t get out?”

Red shook his head. He drank. Looked around the room. His eyes picked up the thin waitress and followed her across the room. “Getting drunk,” Red said. “Always tell when Doreen starts looking better.”

“How come the workers don’t get out?” I said.

“Got me,” Red said, his eyes still on Doreen. “Probably paying them shit and afraid one of them will complain to somebody. Most of them are foreign, probably illegal.”

“Complain about pay and get deported,” I said.

Red shrugged. “Company gets its ass burned too, though.”

Doreen hurried past, frowning with concentration.
Red patted her backside as she passed. She neither slowed nor looked at him.

“They hiring out there,” I said to Red.

“Don’t think so. You guys know weapons?”

“Up to mortars,” I said. “For sure. After that, maybe.”

Red nodded. “Anything else? Sometimes they need instructors.”

“Hand-to-hand,” Hawk said. “PT. Arm wrestling.”

Red grinned, “Yeah, too bad we ain’t looking for arm wrestlers. We got a PT and unarmed combat guy. Big old buck name of Elson.”

“Billy Elson?” I said.

“Naw, Lionel Elson from Hamtramck, Michigan.”

“Don’t know him,” I said. “How about PT?”

Red laughed. “I look like a guy does a lot of PT. Lionel does the PT but most of us don’t pay much attention. Him and Teddy Bright.”

“Well, ask around, will you? We’re looking for work and we’d rather work in some out-of-the-way place, you know?”

“Where there ain’t a lot of cops,” Red said.

“Where it’s quiet,” Hawk said.

Red winked and finished his drink. “I can dig it, babe. Lot of us got places we better not go back to.”

Hawk smiled pleasantly.

Red rocked slightly against the bar. “I’ll ask the cadre chief,” he said. “You never know.”

“Hardly ever,” I said.

“Man got himself a private army,” Hawk said, “like a Chinese warlord.”

I nodded. We were driving toward Hartford, east, directly into the morning sun. The road was curvy and not wide.

“We could kick the shit out of Lionel and Teddy,” Hawk said. “Maybe persuade folks we could do their job better.”

“That’s always an option,” I said. “Let’s try this way first.”

Hawk shrugged. “Hate getting tied in to those government assholes,” Hawk said. “They could fuck up a square knot.”

We found a diner in West Hartford with an outside pay phone. Hawk went to order breakfast and I called Ives on the number he’d said was always manned. He’d misstated slightly. This morning it was womaned. She said a noncommittal hello. I said I wanted to talk with Ives and she said could he call me back. I gave her the pay phone number and hung up and waited.

Ives called back in five minutes. “Good to see you early-birding it,” he said. “Caught any worms yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Here’s what we need. We need two guys that work at the Transpan weapons facility in Pequod, Connecticut, to disappear.”

“Permanently?” Ives said.

“A month ought to be plenty,” I said.

“What are their names?”

“Lionel Elson and Teddy Bright.”

“Teddy Bright?”

“Would I make it up,” I said.

“What else can you tell me?”

“They are instructors in hand-to-hand combat and physical training at the Transpan test range.”

“Why does a manufacturer have a hand-to-hand combat instructor?”

“We’ll find that out,” I said. “After you scoop Lionel and Teddy.”

“Do you care how we do it?”

“No. We’re angling to get hired in their place and so it shouldn’t look rigged and it shouldn’t connect us.”

“Hurry?”

Behind me a big ten-wheeler ground past, down-shifting as it slowed for a stoplight in the next block.

“Ives,” I said. “You need to remember why I’m in this?”

“Ah yes, the maiden in the tower.”

“After this is over, Ives, you and I may have to discuss your tone. But right now I want her out of
that tower,” I said. “And every day she’s not out of it is a long and wearing day.”

“We’ll move with judicious speed, young Lochinvar. Sit tight.”

“Do it in the evening when Hawk and I are sitting around the bar in the Pequod House.”

“We know our business,” Ives said. “We don’t need too much advice.”

“Didn’t you guys engineer the Bay of Pigs.”

“Before my time, laddie buck. I’ll call you at the Pequod House when it’s done and tell you your order has been delayed.”

I hung up and went into the diner. Hawk was on a stool eating steak and eggs. There was a teen-age girl behind the counter wearing cutoff jeans and rubber shower clogs. She looked at me when I sat down.

“Coffee,” I said. “Cream and sugar.”

She brought it black in a thick diner mug and pushed the cream pitcher and the sugar shaker at me.

“Ives gonna do it?” Hawk said.

“Yeah.”

“He gonna fuck it up?”

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Folk at Transpan might think it funny that these guys disappear right when we come on the scene.”

“Maybe, but if they do what have we lost. We’re outside looking in now.”

“They get suspicious,” Hawk said, “maybe they decide to clip us.”

“They’ll decide to try that sooner or later,” I said. “I still don’t see us being any worse off for trying.”

Hawk wiped up some egg yolk with his toast. He put the piece of toast in his mouth and wiped his fingers on a napkin.

“And it might work,” he said.

“We never lost money yet,” I said, “underestimating the intelligence of the Costigans.”

Hawk put the last piece of steak in his mouth and chewed carefully. He wiped his mouth with the napkin. “Good point,” he said.

Hawk and I hung around Pequod, Connecticut, for the next twelve days. During that time I ran about seventy-five miles, did more than a thousand push-ups, the same number of sit-ups, ate badly, drank thirty-four long-neck bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, read
The March of Folly
and
One Writer’s Beginnings
, reread
The Road Less Traveled
, studied 203 box scores in
The Hartford Courant
, and discussed with Hawk whether there was a difference between good sex and bad.

On the thirteenth day, Hawk said, “I think I in love with Doreen.”

“Don’t blame you,” I said.

“How you feel about interracial marriage,” Hawk said.

“Against the law of God,” I said.

“You sure?” Hawk said.

“Says right in the Bible,” I said. “Thou shalt not marry a spook.”

“Shit,” Hawk said, “you right. I remember that part. How ’bout I just fuck her?”

“Far as I know that’s okay,” I said.

We were at the bar. Red came in wearing fatigue clothes and a John Deere hat. The shirt hung
out over his belt and he looked like an ambulatory mess tent coming toward us.

“Might have a job for you guys,” Red said. “Cadre chief wants to see you.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

We went in a Transpan Jeep driven by one of the security people in blue coveralls. At the gate the driver said something to the gate man and we went on through and into the compound. To the right was a square-frame one-story building. We stopped in front of it and got out. The Jeep pulled away. A black lettered sign over the door said
ADMINISTRATION
.

“You guys wait here,” Red said and went into the building. The frame building was central to the layout of the place. The metal Quonsets ranged along the far line of fence, and the manufacturing plant itself loomed directly behind the administration building. Past the factory and to the right of it was a white colonial house, partially concealed by trees. A white picket fence separated it from the rest of the compound.

Red came out of the administration building. With him was Chico, with his hat on backward, and a tall angular man wearing starched fatigues and gleaming engineer’s boots.

“This here’s Mr. Plante,” Red said. “He’s the cadre chief.”

Plante nodded. “Red tells me you gentlemen are hand-to-hand combat experts.”

I said, “Un huh.”

“We have an opening for two men, to instruct in that area. Are you interested.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Very well,” Plante said. He nodded at Chico and Chico produced a hunting knife with a six-inch blade from behind his back. He held it with the flat of the blade parallel to the ground and the cutting edge turned in. “Take the knife away from Chico.”

Chico grinned a little and crouched slightly and I kicked him in the groin. Chico gasped, doubled up, fell forward on the ground, the knife dropped from his limp hand, and I leaned over and picked it up by the blade. I handed it to Plante.

“We get the job?” I said.

Chico was moaning on the ground. Plante looked a little startled.

“He wasn’t ready,” said Plante.

“It’s mostly being ready,” Hawk said.

“You want to give him another chance,” I said. “You want another go, Cheeks?”

“No
mas,
” Chico gasped.

I said to Plante, “You want to trot out another one, or do we get the job?”

“What about him,” Plante said, nodding at Hawk.

“You got the knife,” I said. “Give him a try.”

Hawk grinned a friendly neutral grin. Plante leaned back slightly, caught himself, frowned and dropped the knife beside Chico on the ground.

“No need,” he said. “If he can’t cut it we’ll know soon enough.”

“I told you they’d be good, Mr. Plante,” Red said.

“Maybe you were right,” Plante said. “Get Chico squared away.” He looked at us. “You men come this way, we’ll sign you on.” We followed him into the administration building.

We gave Plante phony names, and when he asked for ID we smiled enigmatically and he nodded. We signed contracts including the pledge never to discuss the operations of Transpan. Plante walked over to one of the near barracks with us and showed us our quarters. Then a driver took us back to town where we picked up our stuff and checked out of the Pequod House. By ten that night we were in the employ of Jerry Costigan, and, if we were right, I was about two hundred yards from Susan.

The work was easy. We did four training sessions a day, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. We wore our Transpan fatigues. We ate lunch in the cadre dining room in the administration building where the help was Filipino men in white mess jackets.

Most of the training force were mercenaries like Red who already knew all they wanted to learn about hand-to-hand combat, and walked through the practice routines in good-natured boredom. Some of the kids were a pain in the ass. There was a straw-blond kid from Georgia who went at the training with the single-minded intensity of a Hindu penitent. His goal in life was to beat one of the instructors. Each time he failed only increased his determination in the next exercise. He volunteered for every demonstration.

“Tate,” I said to him on our third day in camp, “there’s a time to quit.”

“Quitters never win,” he said. “And winners never quit.”

I shook my head. “Life’s going to be hard for you,” I said.

There was also a squat moon-faced kid from
Brooklyn named Russo who was so intent on proving how bad he was that Hawk finally broke his arm on the fourth day of training.

It had a calming effect on Tate.

Each evening after supper we strolled the grounds, circling past the big white colonial with its screen of forsythia and lilacs. On the second night we heard sounds of splashing from the pool. Security people in blue jump suits patrolled the picket fence, and nearer the house occasionally we could see men in civilian clothes strolling about wearing side arms.

The workers’ compound was next to the factory. There were six Quonset huts, three on each side of a dirt strip that in the army would have been called the company street. At the head of the street was a seventh Quonset with a sign over the door that said
COMMISSARY.
Past that a common latrine made of unpainted pine boards. There were tarpaulins stretched between the Quonsets, and shelter tops made of plywood. Small cook fires flickered at all hours of day or night. Most of the workers were Vietnamese, and when they weren’t on shift they squatted flatfooted beside the cook fires and played cards for cigarettes and whiskey. A small contingent of Latin workers kept an area near the last Quonset and intermingled not at all with the Asians. In the Hispanic section someone had fashioned a weight bench out of two-by-fours,
and several men worked out regularly with an old set of barbells and cast-iron plates.