Authors: Rex Burns
“No!” The bartender’s head wagged. “No—I don’t see him!”
“The police, Nguyen. Sooner or later, the police find things out. And I’ll find out if you’re lying to me.”
“No! It’s true—I don’t see him!”
“If you lie to me,” Wager folded the sketch away, “I’ll remember you. You and every one of your family, Nguyen.”
He gave the man another moment to say something, but the Vietnamese, mouth puckered with worry, only stared at him like a bird at a snake. Wager handed him a business card with his home telephone number penciled on the back. “If your memory gets better, give me a call.”
The man stood mute and rigid, and the business card lay untouched on the bar, a smudge of white.
It was still early, but Wager called anyway. Fat Willy’s answering service, a bartender whose voice was now familiar, said the usual, “I see if he’s here.” A couple minutes later Fat Willy’s lurching breath sounded at Wager’s ear.
“We got to stop meeting like this, Wager. And I mean it, man.”
“How’d things go last night? What’d you find out?”
“You know,” he sighed, “some of the bro’s swear you ain’t a man until you had some white pussy. But it don’t do a thing for me. Funny, a foxy mama—now that turns me on. But that white meat, it’s just like looking at a dog or a horse, you know? Nothing.”
“Did you hear anything about Annette Sheldon? Or Doc?”
“They’s some deals going down. Shit, where ain’t they? Your good friend Little Ray was twitching around worse than them honky asses on stage. But I didn’t get a whisper about that Doc.”
“What about a blond-haired man—almost an albino. He left the club with Doc the night he was killed.”
“A real whitey?” From behind Willy came the clack of a cue ball breaking rack, followed by a squeal of high-pitched laughter.
“Have you run across him?”
“No. … I ain’t seen him.”
“But you’ve heard something about him? Come on, Willy!”
“I hear about a lot of people, Wager. My business is hearing.” In the silence between the big man’s slow, heavy breathing, a background voice wailed, “Shit, man, you call that a shot?”
“If you’re thinking price, Willy, this isn’t the time. I want that man.”
The figure on the other end of the line made up his mind about something, and it wasn’t in Wager’s favor. “I’ll let you know if I run across him.”
Sure he would—after whatever deal he was thinking about went down. “I want that man, Willy. No shuckin’, no jivin’—I want him.”
Heartiness came back to the rumbling voice. “Whoo! You talking like a real bro’! Everybody got their want, and some people even get their gets—I’ll tell you if I see him.”
Wager cruised the Trans Am in that almost peaceful time that comes just before dusk, even along the strip. He went all the way out beyond the city-county line and past used-car lots, furniture stores, gas stations, quick-print shops—the increasing number of businesses that had nothing to do with nightlife or sex. Dotted farther apart and growing brighter as the sky darkened over Colfax, the signs for bars and discos and clubs kept the strip alive. But this far out, the johns had to drive from one beckoning glow to the next, and this early the empty curbs and gravel parking lots at the buildings’ sides were marked only by occasional cars left like driftwood from last night’s flood.
He was looking for the blond man, Wager explained to himself. But he knew that his chances of spotting the suspect were worse than bad. The real truth was, he just wanted to drive, to feel his mind sink into the comfortable mental cushion that steady driving offered. There was not one thing he could do, but it felt better just to be in motion. Not a very different feeling, he smiled, from his fourteenth year, when the older kids in his gang began to get their driver’s licenses. Then, the world’s possibilities suddenly expanded as far beyond the barrio as two dollars’ worth of gas could take them. Looking not for trouble, just for the new horizon, for the excitement that always lay just beyond it. And with that expansion came a loss of detail. When you were a kid and you had to walk everywhere, you couldn’t go as far, but you saw a lot of things up close. Like this low sunlight that made telephone poles look almost furry with their brown color. It was an image that brought back that long-dead time and place of the barrio: a telephone pole tan and splintered by the spikes of pole-climbers, and Wager, maybe nine or ten, throwing dirt clods at it in the quiet of an evening. The hollow pop of a hit was pleasing, and he liked the way a freckle of clay clung to the dark wood after the dusty explosion. You knew the fences and the yards and the names of dogs, and where paths cut into the high weeds of empty lots and where somebody had started digging a fort. You knew it all, so that by the time you were in your teens you hungered to see something new, to shake off that familiar dust, not caring that it would be blown away forever. He wondered if Doc had felt that kind of nostalgia for things so lightly held and so easily given up. Yes—everybody felt it at one time or another. Doc, like Wager, wouldn’t admit it aloud; but he had felt it because he, too, had been a child and somehow had become the man he was, and then had been killed. By someone else who had once been a child, too.
A car swung past him, its exhaust a loud rip of sound through the light traffic. A few minutes later, Wager saw it in the parking lot beside a small nondescript tavern, the dust of its sudden stop still hanging in the fading sunlight. A handful of young men, laughing and shoving at each other’s shoulders, spilled out of the car toward the building.
A few drinks, a round or two of quick jokes and loud laughter, and they’d be back in the car, feeling the motion pull them toward new adventures. Things weren’t that different, and that knowledge added to Wager’s melancholy, a feeling that seemed to seep from the trash-littered curbs and empty sidewalks, the vacant concrete, and the almost-empty shops turning mauve and purple with the fading heat of another summer day.
All the people who made the strip work—the pimps, the whores, the pushers and dancers, the hustlers and hustled—had once been children. They had gotten their first car, and spun their wheels in idle, joyous motion. What had happened? How had their motion led them here, while others—their friends, kids who shared the same cars and aimless drives—were now in expensive houses, had their own businesses, were lawyers, maybe, or teachers? Was it that, like Wager, these people had never stopped moving on? Was their taste for excitement always stronger than the appeal of settling down to a constructive if boring life? Had they swung in orbit until their chance to anchor themselves had blown away like the dust they stirred? The strip brought that type of life: a kind of weightlessness that was guided in one direction after another by the whisper of promise—for some, money; for others, friendship or love; for many, just continual change. It was an appeal Wager could understand because he shared it; and especially on quiet evenings like this, when movement seemed both empty and fulfilling, an odd feeling of yearning mixed with satisfaction, and, amid all the motion, a softening of one’s sharp edges of suspicion and awareness.
He angled the Trans Am to the curb just across from the Turkish Delights and sat, motor idling, to gaze at the fretwork that formed a mock-oriental entry to the bar. The rest of the building was black cinderblock that faded to charcoal gray, but the onion-shaped basket stood out like a giant red-and-gold wart at the corner. It had to look better at night; with the right lights and the throb of drums and laughter wafting out the door, the entry made promises to men who came seeking. For a fee—always for a fee. Because there was no sense fooling himself, Wager knew. The people who worked the strip were no longer children, no matter what their age. There was freedom perhaps, but even that was found only by a few. The other part of that life, maybe the biggest part, was the unending struggle to find the dollar that would buy that freedom. Money flowed like a river down this strip, and if you were in the right spot at the right time, you could siphon off enough to keep you warm and happy for the rest of your life. Annette Sheldon had found one of those spots. But if the current shifted? If you became one of those who were fed upon rather than feeding? Then your value was your use to someone else—in whatever way they chose to use you. And if you were more valuable dead than alive, that, too, could be arranged. It wasn’t that life was necessarily cheap along the strip—it was just relative to the cost of other things, and you had to keep struggling to stop somebody else from putting a price on your life.
Waiting for a break in the increasing traffic, Wager dropped his car into gear and swung around to head back toward downtown. The lights now outshone the darkening sky and the street took on its tunnel effect, as if the glare was both walls and ceiling that could keep out not just the rain and wind, but tomorrow’s pitiless sun as well. Moffett and Nolan should be on duty by now, and maybe they could dig up something about the blond-haired man.
The telephone bell was felt before it was heard, a pecking in the brain that sent a spasm through sleep and then blended with the clattering sound to pull his gummy eyelids into slowly blinking awareness. He dragged himself, boneless as a wet towel, across the bed and groped for the phone, knocking it off the nightstand but able to hang onto the receiver long enough to flop back and press it to his ear. “Yeah?”
“Is this Detective Wager?” The female voice sounded hushed and nervous.
“Who’s this?”
“I know about the blond man. The one who was with Doc.”
“Who is this?” His vision cleared. In the dark, the red figures of the digital clock said 1:42.
“Can you meet me in forty-five minutes?”
“Why don’t you tell me now?”
“I can’t. Meet me—please!”
“Where?”
“Twenty-third and Blake. Under the viaduct.”
That should be private all right—and dark as an outhouse at midnight. “At two-thirty?”
“Yes.” The line clicked into a buzz.
The taste of a hurried cup of coffee was still tart on the back of his tongue as he eased the Trans Am across the eroded railroad tracks and lumpy tar of the streets that formed old downtown. Here and there a streetlight glowed dully, its glare fading before it struck the pavement, and the shadows of the warehouses loomed as thick and vague as bales of wool. He was twenty minutes early. Two blocks from the viaduct, he turned onto that section of Wazee which ran parallel to Blake, and flicked off his headlights as he came within a block of the viaduct. Coasting to the curb, he closed the door softly, moved across the empty street in the hollow light of the city’s glow, and paused at the corner to study the viaduct and the area around it. Like much of lower downtown, many of the brick buildings were designed as factories and warehouses. They had tall, windowless walls that boxed the broken sidewalks, and here and there worn spur lines from the nearby railroad yards glinted like narrow puddles in the black streets. The viaduct’s ramp lifted somewhere down the block so that by the time it crossed Blake it was high on its square metal legs. A band of concrete overhead, it rumbled dully from an occasional set of wheels. In the shadows between the piers, old Twenty-third Street was still surfaced with paving blocks—large, slightly rounded stones polished by heavy tires and showing as dim streaks that rippled from the occasional distant light. Wager saw nothing move—not a human figure, not an unlit car, not even a warehouse cat. And in the total deadness of the place, he felt the back of his neck tickle as the hairs rose: it was a trap.
Slowly, keeping to the darker shadow of the building walls, he worked his way in a circle around the unlit corner. Once, lights wagged stiffly over the bumpy pavement as an automobile cruised toward him, tires loud in the quiet night. He slipped into the deep recess of a delivery entrance and watched the vehicle’s outline hiss past. The box of emergency lights on the car’s roof showed it was a police cruiser, and it moved with the steady pace of a routine patrol on a dull night. The ruby taillights bounced down the block, flashed once, and then turned out of sight toward the Denargo area.
Waiting for his night vision to return, he checked the time and began to angle toward the pool of shadow that was the viaduct. He was still ten minutes early. If it was a trap—if his spasm of fear was right and, for some reason, he was being set up, then he still seemed ahead of whoever it was. The whoever that knew he was looking for the white-haired man. The whoever that got his telephone number from the card he left in front of Nguyen.
Wager paused at the shadowed corner one last time and strained to see into a dark that thickened as the viaduct pinched toward the pavement below. Still nothing moved. Not a sound. No vague darker shape that could be an automobile or a figure waiting against the paler gray of a pier.
Unconsciously, like a man entering icy water, he took a deep breath and started walking across the intersection toward the viaduct. The pavement’s grit was loud under his shoes and he could picture the clear silhouette he made in the open street. He crossed the midpoint of the intersection, where a manhole cover caught a steely gleam from the sky; then he was into the shadow and squinting down the row of piers whose grayness receded into a blur. The oddly bright numbers on his watch said 2:28, and he paused, stilling his breath to listen for a whisper of movement or the far-off whine of an approaching car. Nothing. He walked slowly toward the next pier, eyes shifting from one point to another to use the off-center night vision that had been part of his life in Vietnam. Then he heard it, the flat rustle of tires moving slowly, and a moment later the muffled sound of a car engine almost at idle as it quietly approached.
The faint noise echoed from the surrounding brick walls and the concrete sky above, blurring its direction. Wager stepped close against a pier, turning his head this way and that, but it came before he could spot it: a dark sedan in the narrow lane beside the rising bed of the viaduct. Lightless, it turned between the steel legs, then suddenly flashed on its high beams, pinning him in their glare. The headlights bobbed with a jerk of brakes and, as his watering eyes strained past the barrier of light, he heard a door quickly open. He spun around and found narrow shelter behind one of the thin piers whose stark shadow leaned sharply away from the lights. His own twisting shadow was split by the beam as he heard the first shot, a muffled, soft thump that said Silencer, and saw a flash struck from a steel piling in the dark to his left. Pulling his pistol as he sprinted wildly for the next pier, he dodged, keeping the row of steel beams flickering between him and the killer. He may have heard a second shot; he definitely had heard the engine rev sharply. The black shadows of the steel legs began to sway back and forth and whip across his running form as he desperately tried to keep the killer off balance behind him. To each side of the viaduct, the street widened into one-way avenues, and down the center, between the steel pilings, stretched an endless alley of open space. Behind him, he heard the fat tires squeal rhythmically on the stones; now the shadows hung momentarily still on one side as the motor raced and Wager, seeing them slip past faster, reached a hand to the cold, gritty flange of a pier and flung himself in a tight arc as the glinting fender lurched for him, brushed his hip, and threw him heavily against the steel. Behind the speeding glare of the headlights a rapid flicker of orange sparks sprayed toward him, a hot breath across his wincing face. He felt the punch and smell as bullets, muffled by the silencer, sizzled into the night, and then the car was gone. Its taillights swerved from under the viaduct in a squeal of melting rubber as it sped beyond a building’s solid black corner.