Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? (21 page)

"No, you don't, I said." Daniel gave me silent support "We
spoke of voids earlier, Miriam," I said. "This one has a terrible
void that she's trying desperately to fill. I'm afraid that Bobby was just one
of those things she stuffed in the hole." I let it go at that. She looked
back to Daniel. He wagged his head emphatically. She took him at his word.

Latching onto Daniel's arm, she walked us to the door. Hank stood outside
the Nova. Caroline was back in the front seat of the truck. The rain had
followed us. A wind-driven drizzle angled in at about thirty degrees. The Sound
was no longer visible. Miriam turned to Daniel.

"Come back more often, Daniel, won't you please?" Daniel promised
he would. He didn't mean it. I could tell. She left us standing on the porch
exchanging phone numbers. I gave him Hector's number and wrote his number in my
notebook. He felt like he owed an explanation.

"Miriam and I, when we were younger - much younger - " He waved a
hand. "We went different ways," he concluded.

"It's never too late."

"What's done is done," he said for the second time today.
"Nothing we do is gonna bring Bobby back."

"No, but we can sure fuck up some other folks' day."

"Might be fun," he admitted.

"I'll be in touch. I need to go back to the city. I'll call you on
Monday, okay? I'll need till then."

"If I'm not there, you know where to find me." He hesitated,
looking over at the truck. "Better not bring that one," he said.

"Have no fear."

It took the better part of an hour and a half to fight the rush-hour traffic
back into the city. Five years ago, the rush hour was both limited and
predictable. All a guy had to do was avoid the highways for an hour or so in
the morning and an hour or so in the evening, and traffic wasn't a problem.

These days, the rush hour was omnipresent. The surrounding suburban
territory had filled up at a rate that had exceeded even the most pessimistic
long-range plans. Long the butt of local jokes, a series of phantom freeway
ramps had for the last twenty-five years completely surrounded the city.
Connecting to the extant highway system, but leading off only into space, they
had been built to accommodate the traffic of the future. The future had never
come.

By the time the highway department had gotten around to connecting these
mystery ramps to the existing road system, the traffic of the future had become
the traffic of the past and was now equally horrific in all directions. There
were as many people trying to get back into the city at six in the evening as
there were people trying to leave. Seemingly overnight, the sticks had become
the burbs, and the burbs had filled to the brim.

The situation was further exacerbated by the very nature of the local populace.
Northwesterners are a curious lot. Maybe something in the genes. Maybe some
compensatory response to all the rain. Nature or nurture? Any diversion,
however mundane, is enough to slow the traffic to a crawl.

I was always amused when I read stories about how in New York of L.A. or
some other urban jungle, heinous crimes were committed in plain view of passing
motorists whose conditioned response was to put the pedal to the metal and the
problem in the rearview mirror. Not in Seattle.

An abandoned car, even one pulled well off the roadway, elicited a round of
gawking and rubbernecking guaranteed to cause a ten-mile backup. An accident
was good for at least twenty miles. If it happened on one of the bridges,
forget it. Might as well turn around and go back to work.

A crime? God only knew. One thing was for sure. The perpetrator had best
beat a hasty retreat. Dallying would in all likelihood lead to being pummeled
mercilessly by a van full of hefty Swedes, the whole sorry scene photographed
for posterity by the inevitable busload of Japanese tourists. Film at eleven.

Caroline had mostly been quiet. When her initial attempts at conversation
had been greeted with a series of low grunts, she'd given up and had spent the
time gazing forlornly out the window at the traffic. She didn't come alive
until I nosed the truck out of the flow, up the James Street off-ramp. She
broke my concentration.

"They've probably towed my car by now."

"Good," I said. "You'll probably get in less trouble on
foot."

"Turn down here," she directed. "It's a straight shot down to
- "

"We're not going to your car."

"We most certainly are. Right now."

"I want you to show me this truck depot that you and Bobby followed the
trucks to."

"They're closed by now. They close at - "

"Good," I said. This got her attention.

"Are we going to break in?" Crime enthused the girl.

"We" - I hesitated - "are not going to do anything together.
You" - another hesitation - "are going to show me this place, and
then I'm going to leave you at your car."

"No way."

"Wanna bet?"

She thought about it. "I know your name," she announced out of the
blue.

"Yeah, what's my name?" I asked.

"Leo. Your name's Leo." She was snug. "Hank told me."

I silently cursed Hank. Probably not his fault though. She'd probably worked
him like a gearshift leaver to get the information. Explained why he'd been
standing out in the rain when we came out of Miriam's house.

"Go all the way to the end and then turn down Yesler."

I followed her directions. Ten blocks south of the Dome, she leaned forward
with her hands on the dash, squinting out through the filthy windshield. Her
jagged nails were bitten to the quick.

"It's right up here somewhere."

We crept along in the right-hand lane, horns voicing their displeasure as we
impeded their progress. She pointed. "There."

I pulled to the curb. More angry horns. A little brown two-story, recently
repainted, surrounded by a full acre and a half of parking, which in turn was
surrounded by a seven-foot chain-link fence. Razor wire on top. No sign or
billing. Serious security for a seemingly innocuous truck depot. Advertising
was not a high priority.

A picture of the house thirty years ago crept into my mind. It used to be an
orchard. I could still see the little red fruit stand they set up out front
every fall. This whole area had been essentially agricultural. Small farms and
truck gardens, an occasional warehouse, otherwise rural.

My old man and I used to come down here on Saturday afternoons in the fall
to get lugs of apples for my mother to can or mash into applesauce. Looking at
it now, it was hard to believe my own memory. Wall-to-wall commercial,
wholesale, and light manufacturing. Not the slightest hint of its
not-so-distant past. I felt ancient. Caroline rescued me.

"Don't get too close," she whispered. "They'll see you."

"Who'll see me?"

"The guards."

"They've got guards?"

"Several. Monsters," she added as an afterthought.

After watching Caroline's performance at the Last Stand, I was immediately
wary of anyone who managed to get this much respect from her. "How do you
know about the guards?" I asked tentatively.

"They almost caught us."

"When?"

"The night Bobby climbed over the fence." Her attention was still
riveted on the truck depot.

"Tell me about it," I said. She turned her attention to me.

"Why?" Nothing was easy with this kid.

"Because it might be important," I sighed. She thought it over.

"Bobby climbed over the fence - "

"Where?" I interrupted.

"Over there in the back, by the shed." She was pointing to an area
along the back wall where a hundred-foot-long shed roof ran the full length.
Several cabs, two blue, two red, were parked under its protection. At the mercy
of the weather, trailers were symmetrically arranged about the lot.

"What happened then?"

"He was supposed to be sneaking in. We wanted to write down the numbers
of the trailers." She hesitated. I pushed.

"Well?"

"It was quite disappointing actually." She shook her head
disgustedly. "I thought, you know, him being an Indian and everything, that
he'd be able to sneak up on them or something. I mean the place isn't exactly
Fort Knox or anything, but - "

"But what?"

"But the fool nearly got us both caught."

"How long was he inside?"

"Not long. Maybe two, three minutes. I don't know how they knew, but
they knew. Next thing I knew, he was coming back over the fence."

"Where?"

"Right there." She pointed to an area bordering the street, just
in front of the truck. If Bobby'd come over there, he'd no longer been
interested in being sneaky' he'd been in full retreat.

"You said he was chased."

"A behemoth. He'd only been gone for a second when I saw him coming
back over the fence." Her eyes opened wide. "For a second, I didn't
think he was going to make it. His shirt got caught in that wire stuff on top.
Ruined the shirt. Not that it was much of a loss," she added "those
shirts he wore were - "

"What then?"

"Then the front door" - she pointed to the house - "opened,
and this huge guy came running after him. He was almost to the truck before we
got it started and got away." She was reliving the incident.

"Nobody tried to follow the two of you after that?"

She wagged her head. "He just stood in the street and wrote down the
license number. I watched him."

"What were you and Bobby driving?"

"His truck," she answered distractedly. "His truck didn't
like to start right away. It was a junker like this one. Anyway, for a second
there, I thought the guy was going to catch us."

I'd been assuming that Bobby Warren had taken his suspicions to a third
party and had been betrayed. That was no longer necessarily the case. Maybe he
didn't put his trust in the wrong hands. Maybe just his license number. Anybody
with an IQ over forty and a little cash can almost instantly translate a
license number into a name. the guy that chased him had all he needed. They
didn't even have to worry that they'd rigged the wrong house. Not with that
ripped-up shirt hanging on the clothesline out front. The poor kid might as
well have hung out a sign. Caroline interrupted my thoughts.

"Well?" She folded her arms over her chest. "Go do
something."

"Like what?"

"You're the thug. You're supposed to know things like that."

"Stay here," I said for the third time today.

"Don't I always?" she purred.

The fence was brand spanking new. No more than six months out in the
weather. No rust or oxidation on the cut ends of the wires that held the chain
link in place. Very little garbage collected at the bottom of the fence.

As I wandered along it toward the front of the little house, something
caught my eye. An aberration in the coils of the razor wire destroyed the
symmetrical effect. I stood beneath it. I reached up. Too high.

Putting the toe of my boot into one of the links, I hoisted myself up to
where I could see better. Sure enough, the wire had captured a two-inch square
of blue-checked flannel. I tried to free it. No go. With only one hand to work
with, getting it free took the better part of two minutes and the skin off
three knuckles.

As I stepped back down, I smugly waved my prize at the truck. Caroline was
not in sight. Cursing my own stupidity, I started back. A ham-size hand
appeared on my shoulder, welding me to the sidewalk.

There were two of them. One black, one white. All of my rattling around up
on the fence must have covered the sounds of their approach.

The hand on my shoulder belonged to a large black specimen. Six-three or so
and heavy around the middle, he kept his free hand resting lightly on the
handle of an automatic that was tucked into his belt while he tried to push me
through the sidewalk with the other. The oily skin of his face was latticed
with a collection of pits and scars. His thick right eyebrow was interrupted
twice by little highways of horizontal scar tissue. His ears were folded up
like new roses. Either this guy had repeatedly been threshed and baled or he'd
been the opponent to be named in a number of wildly unsuccessful prizefights. I
was betting on the latter. His hand increased its pressure.

"What you got there, pilgrim?" asked the black guy nodding at the
scrap of cloth in the palm of my hand.

When I failed to answer, the other one stepped behind me. He was younger.
Under thirty, taller than the black guy but wiry, with the longest arms I'd
ever seen on a human being. They hung down six inches past his knees and ended
in a pair of knobby hands so large they appeared to be borrowed. Size three
head. A face so narrow it was seemingly grafted together from two badly
mismatched halves.

From behind me, "Yeah, pal, what you got there? Heeeeeeeeee." His
giggled was so high-pitched and manic it sounded like a blender. Without
warning, he delivered a shattering blow to my kidneys, doubling me over.

I struggled to catch my breath. My lower back was on fire. I slowly
straightened up.

"Is there an echo in here?" I asked.

"Never mind Wesley. Wesley likes to hurt people. Let's have it."

"Yeah, let's have it. Heeeeeeeeee."

"Wesley," the black guy boomed.

"Yeah, Frank."

"Shut the fuck up."

Wesley saluted. The black guy sighed.

"Let's have it." He held out his hand. I put the scrap of material
in it. Wesley redoubled his efforts on my kidneys. This time the other one. I
gagged from the pain and went to one knee.

"Now you got a matched set, asshole," Wesley cooed. "You'll
be pissin' blood for a week. Heeeeeeeeee."

They studied the scrap.

Frank turned it round and round with his fingers, eyeing me occasionally.

"What do we have here?" he said finally.

"Looks like flannel to me," I offered, staying down.