Silent Thunder (11 page)

“Where we going?”

“We’re paying a visit to the Colonel.”

He gave me a sideways look. His right eye had swollen almost shut. “Colonel who?”

“My line. That was who you were going to introduce me to tonight, wasn’t it? The man to see about a fifty-caliber machine gun or a Polaris missile? Pesky private eyes disposed of while you wait?”

“Man, you must of hit me
hard.
I don’t understand a word.”

I grabbed a fistful of his shirt—another tank top—and rammed the muzzle under his chin. “Not as hard as if I use it the way it was designed. Drive.”

He started the engine. I let go of him, pulled my door shut, and rested back against it with the gun propped on my knee while he swung the pickup back into the lane and headed deeper into the neighborhoods.

I said, “That was a military operation. Military operations mean commanders. What’d you tell him that made him put the bee on me?”

“Snuffings ain’t my scene, man. What happened back there was a surprise.”

“It was supposed to be. What’d you tell him?”

“What you said. You was a customer looking for heavy shit.”

“A man who does business like that runs out of customers in a hurry. What else did you tell him?”

“Nothing.”

“Shooter . . .”

“Okay, okay. He a man likes to axe questions. I said you a P.I. named Walker.”

“Is that when he asked you to finger me, or did he do some checking and get back to you?”

“I didn’t finger you, man.”

“Shooter, Shooter,” I said. “I won’t cap you for setting me up. You get stuck in the middle, you take sides to live. Just don’t insult me by denying it. That makes me angry. An angry man with a gun.”

A blue-and-white passed us heading in the opposite direction, its lights and siren going. Its slipstream shook the pickup’s rusty sheet metal.

“He called me back,” Shooter said then.

“He say why he was taking me out?”

“Man, he didn’t
say
he was taking you out. I just sell guns.”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s his name?”

He licked his lips. “Seabrook.”

“Never heard of him. What’s he colonel of?”

“I never axed him. He buys and sells.”

“Did he do business with Doyle Thayer Junior?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about Waldo Stoudenmire?”

“Sturdy?” He grinned lopsidedly, favoring the right side of his face. “Sturdy don’t know a butt from a trigger.”

“Somebody taught him. Just before he died.”

“Sturdy’s dead?”

“That’s what Ma Chaney said. Know anything about it?”

“Man, I hardly knowed Sturdy. We didn’t have the same clientele.”

“Sure you did. Doyle Thayer Junior.”

“I don’t know no juniors.”

“Too fast, Shooter.” A fire truck wailed past, one of the new ugly yellow-green jobs. “I don’t care what business you had with him. I don’t even know if Sturdy getting dead, if he’s dead, has anything to do with anything. What I want to find out is what the Colonel thinks I know that’s worth calling out the militia. Speaking of which, would they be the same four that’s been knocking over houses in this area over the past couple of weeks?”

“My guess ain’t no better’n yours. I never saw ’em before tonight.”

“Shooter, you’re going to die dumb.”

“As long as I die old.”

“You didn’t sell them the automatic weapons they’re using, that much I’m sure of. Ma did that. I saw the newspaper piece she cut out for her scrapbook.”

“Ma pisses all over the lot. She don’t care who she sells to.”

“You do?”

“Fucking right. You never know when you might be doing business with a undercover cop.”

“We’ll ask the Colonel. We’re still heading that way, right?” We had turned north on John R, where here and there a lighted apartment window hung like the last blossom of spring. The truck’s tires sang on the dewy pavement.

“What you wanted,” he said. “Man, you don’t mind if I let you off early and tell you the way? I got to work in this town.”

“I’m going in the front door and you’re going with me.”

“Shit. I had to ask.”

“Where we going?”

“Ear-oh-quoyse Heights.” He sang it. “Where the men wear sheets, the women are strong-smelling, and the cops are distinctly below market rate.”

We skirted the edge of the city, following darkened streets past railroad yards, a string of cut-rate funeral parlors, and an oil refinery smelling thickly of crude, stopping at last near a weedy six-acre parcel enclosed by a chainlink fence. The sign said keep out.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“City fairgrounds. This where they going to build their domed stadium.” Shooter killed the engine.

We got out. Crickets stitched in the stillness. I put the revolver in my coat pocket with my hand on it. “You first, Kemosabe.”

The gate was secured with a padlock and chain, but the narrow opening was no problem for a reedy type like the Shooter. For me it was a squeeze. Inside, the weeds were calf-high and wet; we hadn’t gone five yards before our shoes began to squelch. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, a long shape separated itself from the blackness surrounding it, a hangarlike structure with a shed roof and corrugated steel walls, eighty feet by twenty, without windows.

“Where they store the tents and stuff,” Shooter whispered. “I think we beat ’em here.”

“Not much of a front.”

“The Colonel don’t need one.”

There was a small side door around the corner from the double bays on the north end of the building. Shooter tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. I grasped his wrist as he was pushing it in. “Should it be?”

He shook his head.

I took the gun out and motioned him on. He mopped his palms off on his running shorts, set himself, and pushed the door open the rest of the way slowly. It swung silently on well-oiled hinges.

Nobody shot at us. I motioned again and he went in. I followed.

The interior smelled overpoweringly of mildewed canvas. I closed the door behind us, found my pocket flashlight, and flicked it on. Tented shapes loomed on the edge of the pencil beam.

“I think we alone.” Shooter’s voice, raised slightly above a whisper, echoed.

I said nothing. We were standing on a plywood floor in an aisle between what looked like stacks of crates covered with canvas, the stacks running the length of the building. They made gargoyle shadows on the walls. Once when I moved the flash abruptly, something squeaked and swooped past our faces with a wind of flapping wings.

“Bela Lugosi.” Shooter covered his hair with both hands.

I found the edge of a canvas flap and jerked it back. Some dust flew up, not enough for something that hadn’t been disturbed in months. I tested the lid of the crate beneath with my hands. It was nailed shut.

“Look for something to pry with,” I said.

“You
look. I didn’t come here to do no hard physical labor.” He sat on a covered crate across the aisle.

After a couple of minutes of poking around with the flash I picked up a three-foot length of broken two-by-four, inserted one end between the slats, and worked one loose with a shrieking of nails. I groped around inside the straw and came up with an olive-drab plastic object the size and shape of a hardcover book, only curved like a roof tile.

“What’s that?” Shooter asked.

“Claymore.”

“What’s a Claymore?”

“Not your specialty. It’s a portable mine.”

“Mine!” He leaped up off the crate he’d been sitting on.

“If you say, ‘Feet, do your stuff,’ I’ll shoot you.”

“Better’n getting blowed to hell. I get there soon enough walking.”

I set aside the Claymore and groped further, feeling around the edges of the others in the crate. I counted fifteen in all, enough to take out the building and some of the chainlink fence. Replacing the first mine, I pulled the canvas back farther. The next crate was longer, with coils of the same kind of straw sticking out between the slats. I bent down and sniffed. Then I straightened. “Smell it?”

Shooter stooped, inhaled. “Cosmoline?”

“Me too.” Cosmoline is the pink gelatin they store guns in to prevent rust.

There were two more crates underneath that one. They were stacked three deep the length of the building. I was turning to say as much to Shooter when a shoe scraped the floor behind me and something tapped the mastoid bone behind my right ear. A white-hot bolt of pain shot to the top of my skull, followed by a wave of nausea, and after that nothingness had never seemed so good.

I
T WAS ONE
of those nightmares you kept waking up from, only to find yourself in the middle of another one just as bad.

For a time I floated naked in a sea of grotesque and vaguely erotic images. The stuff I was floating in was as warm as blood and slippery to the touch, but the air on my face was freezing, as if I had raised it from an ice bath and turned it to the wind. I tried to cry out, but my lips were stiff, and the sickly bleat that issued between them embarrassed me. Below the warm, slippery surface, blind sea-creatures slid past and between my legs, tickling the skin. The sky overhead was pink, like light coming through my eyelids.

Once—maybe more than once—the colors changed, from blood-red and fleshy pink to deep black, agonizingly cold and stinking of mildew, as if I had been swaddled in canvas and dumped into an open grave. This time I did cry out. Then again came the white-hot pain and the nausea, and as I sprawled backward into the bloody sea, two men spoke.

“Not so hard, Hube.”

“Sorry, Jer.”

At length—days or years, I was a man out of time—I emerged again into the mildew-stinking darkness, and this time I stayed. It wasn’t as black as before. Somewhere at the edge of my vision a light glowed, a merciless shaft of naked incandescence I didn’t dare look at because it would dry-cook my eyeballs in their sockets. There was a floor under my back. With the part of my brain that was working logically I knew it was plywood, and that the decaying smell around me was of the old canvas in the storage building on the Iroquois Heights fairgrounds. Deep inside my head a leaky faucet was dripping into an empty basin, the drips echoing hollowly when they landed.

Somewhere a voice made words that rang around the empty basin that was my brainpan.

“I suppose we should call an ambulance. His skull might be fractured.”

“Naw. I got a hunch it’s been cracked open so many times it’s all bone collar, like when you break your leg and it knits stronger than it was.”

“Well, he can recover in the infirmary in Jackson.”

I recognized the voices. They didn’t belong to the two men I had overheard earlier, or dreamed I had. Very carefully I moved my eyes. They grated.

The first man I saw was seated on the crate Shooter had occupied before, a thick man whose undershirt showed through the white shirt he had on over it with a narrow black tie hanging down in front and resting on his belly. A snapbrim hat clung to the back of his big curly head. A Cigarillo teetered on his lower lip.

When he saw me looking at him, Horace Livingood of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms smiled his rubbery smile. “I bet you got a head the size of a garbage truck.”

I said nothing. Victor Pardo’s clean-cut face and unfashionably long hair moved into my vision, looking down at me a mile. The naked light was behind his head, one of a row of them strung along the rafters. “Can you hear me, Walker?”

“Yeah.” My voice creaked.

“You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. If—”

“Cut the crap,” Livingood said. “We’re just us.” To me: “You up to sitting?”

“Sure. What am I doing now?”

He chuckled and got up to give me a hand. I grasped it, took a deep breath, and sat up. Someone swung a trash can into my face, but other than that it didn’t hurt any more than chewing tinfoil. I touched the knot behind my right ear gently. It was sticky.

Livingood said, “Hit you more than once, from the look of it. To keep you under, probably. Whoever did it had practice. I don’t guess you saw him.”

I didn’t answer. The place looked different, and it wasn’t just the fact that it was lighted. The canvas on both sides of the narrow aisle lay on the floor, limp and deflated-looking. Except for a few obviously empty crates and one other thing, the building had been cleaned out. The one other thing was Shooter. He lay on his face at my feet with flies clotted on the back of his head. I noticed the sulfur smell then.

Resuming his seat, Livingood fished a plastic bag out of his coat pocket with my .38 in it.

“Yours, I guess. It was in your hand when we got here. Vic’s got it all worked out. You shot the sorry son of a bitch, then sapped yourself a couple of times and hid the sap just before you passed out.”

“I didn’t say that. I said he should be arrested for questioning.”

“How’d you wind up with it?” I asked Livingood. “This place belongs to the city.”

“We’ve got someone in Dispatch at the police department. I got the squeal before the cars did. I shook Vic out of bed and we beat the dicks here. They’re outside, limbering up the rubber hoses. I had a hell of a time quirting ’em back till our field men arrived to seal off the place.”

“All for little me?” I was working on the nausea.

“I like you, but not that much. We’ve suspected for months that someone’s been dealing weapons out of the fairgrounds. When we tried to set up surveillance, Cecil Fish—you know him? Thought you might—got a court order warning us away. Elections coming up, can’t have
federales
snooping for contraband on city property. Anyway, when we heard there’d been a killing here, we put on our running shoes.”

“Who tipped the cops?”

“Somebody named Anonymous, who else?” He slapped the empty crate he was sitting on. “Looks like we were wrong; no weapons here.”

“What time is it?”

“Little after five. Sun’ll be up in an hour.”

“Five hours ago you could’ve fought a war with Ohio from in here,” I said. “The place was full of Claymores and rifles packed in cosmoline.”

“You can still smell it. No wonder they had to keep sapping you down; it’s a big operation. Wonder if anybody in the neighborhood heard the trucks.”