Fire Sale (40 page)

And there it was, next to a sewing machine, lying against a pair of shears. I couldn’t believe it, casually set out on a tabletop in plain sight. Of course, if you didn’t know what it was you wouldn’t imagine it was a recorder—it was really quite a clever gadget.

I picked it up and examined it under my flashlight. It was not much bigger than one of those fat, high-end pens you see in pricey stationery shops. There was a USB port for attaching it to a computer and downloading it, and little buttons, with the universal squares and triangles of recorders—play, forward, reverse. There was also a screen about an inch long and a quarter inch wide; when I pressed the “on” switch, the screen asked if I wanted to play or record. I hit the play button.

“Her and me, we’re the two best on the team, but Coach, she’s always giving April the breaks.”

The voice belonged to Celine, my gangbanger. The machine was starting from the beginning of the file, the day Marcena had come with me to basketball practice. I was tempted to eavesdrop more on how the team saw me, but I fast-forwarded. Next, I was startled by my own voice: I was talking to the woman next to me at the By-Smart prayer meeting, asking about William Bysen. I forwarded again.

This time, Marcena’s clipped tones came tinnily into the room. “Look, put it in your jacket pocket, here. I’ve switched it on, but it won’t record unless people are talking within about six feet of it, so hopefully you won’t pick up a ton of useless background noise.”

The next noises were smothered scrapings and gruntings, Marcena’s laugh, a slap, mock outrage from Bron. An R-rated recording, oh, well. Then a few starts and stops with Bron maneuvering his truck and cursing at some other driver, and then he was telling Marcena to get behind the seats, to lie down on the mattress back there so the guard at the warehouse gate wouldn’t see her. The guard checked him in; the two knew each other and kidded back and forth. There were similar exchanges all through the warehouse; he was talking to my friend in the Harley jacket about their routes and loads, bragging about April and her ball playing, joining in laments about the Bears and about company management, until Grobian summoned him.

Grobian went over his route and his load for the day, then said, “That supplier in your neck of the woods, Czernin, that flag maker, I don’t know if it’s his Serbian head, but it seems kind of thick, like he’s not getting the message.”

“Hey, Grobe, I did my best.”

“And we showed our gratitude.” That was Aunt Jacqui. “But we—the family—want you to give him another message.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“We want you to give him a message, shut his plant down for a day, but let him know we can put it out of business for good if he doesn’t play ball. A hundred, like before, if you do the job by the end of the week. An extra hundred if you make the message strong enough to force him to come round,” Grobian said.

“What did you have in mind?” Bron asked.

“You’re creative, you’re good with your hands,” Aunt Jacqui used a provocative tone, implying that she wouldn’t mind knowing what he did with his hands. “You’ll think of something, I’m sure. I don’t want to hear that kind of detail.”

Her voice came through more clearly than Grobian’s—she must have been sitting in the chair in front of the desk, while Grobian sat behind it. Was she wearing that black dress whose buttons only came down to her hips? Had she crossed her legs, casually, giving a suggestive flash up the thigh—this could be yours, Bron, if you do what I want?

All at once, I heard voices coming in through the loading area. I’d been so intent on the recording that I hadn’t heard the truck pull into the yard. What kind of detective was I, sitting there like a turkey waiting to be shot for Thanksgiving dinner?

“Jacqui, if you wanted to come along you should have worn proper shoes. I don’t care if your damn thousand-dollar boots have a scratch on them. I don’t know why Gary tolerates your spending.”

Jacqui laughed. “There’s so little you know, William. Daddy Bysen will have six kinds of fits when he learns that you swear.”

I stuffed the recorder into my hip pocket and ducked under the big cutting table. Red-and-white bunting hung over the sides like a heavy curtain—maybe I’d be safe under here.

“Maybe he’ll choke on them, then. I am sick,
god
damn sick of him treating me like I don’t have the wits to run my family, let alone this company.”

“Willy, Willy, you should have taken your stand years ago, the way I did when Gary and I first married. If you didn’t want Daddy Bysen running your life, you shouldn’t have let him build your house for you out in—what was that?”

I had tripped on a chair leg and banged into the table as I went under it. I held myself completely still, squatting behind the bunting, barely daring to breathe.

“A rat, probably.” Grobian spoke for the first time.

Light flicked around the floor.

“Someone’s in here,” William said. “There are footprints in the ash in here.”

I had the Smith & Wesson in my hand, safety off. I slipped through the bunting on the far side of the cutting table, calculating the distance to the hole in the front wall.

“Neighborhood is heavy with junkies. They come in here to shoot up.” Grobian’s voice was indifferent, but he up-ended the cutting table so fast I barely had time to move out of the way.

“There!” Jacqui cried as I stood and started running toward the front.

She shone her light on me. “Oh! It’s that Polish detective, the one who’s been lecturing us on charity.”

I didn’t turn to look, just kept going, skidding around the tables, trying to sidestep debris.

“Get her, Grobian,” William shouted, his voice going up to a squeak.

I heard the heavy steps behind me but still didn’t turn. I was two strides from the door when I heard the click, the hammer going back. I hit the floor just as he fired. I tried to keep hold of my own gun, but my fall sent it spinning out of my hand. He was on top of me before I could get to my feet.

I grabbed Grobian’s left leg and jerked upward. He stumbled, and had to twist around to keep from falling. I sprang upright backing away from him. My head was wet. Blood was pouring down my hair and neck, into my shirt. It made me dizzy, but I tried to concentrate on him. Jacqui and William were helping him, shining their lights on me; Grobian was a shape in the dark, two shapes, two fists swinging at me. I ducked under the first one, but not the second.

45

Down in the Dumps

M
y father was cutting the grass. He kept running the mower over me. My eyes were bandaged shut, so I couldn’t see him, but I’d hear the wheels rumbling through the grass. They would hit me, go right over me, and then roll back again. It was so cold, why was he mowing the grass when it was so cold out, and why didn’t he see me? The garden smelled terrible, like pee and vomit and blood.

I screamed at him to stop.

“Pepaiola, cara mia.”
His only words of Italian, used on my mother and me both, his two pepperpots. “Why are you lying in my path? Get up, get out of my way.”

I tried to stand, but the long grass had wrapped itself around me and tied me, and then he was running the lawn mower over me again. He adored me, why was he tormenting me like this?

“Papa, stop!” I screamed again. He halted briefly, and I tried to sit up. My hands were tied behind me. I rubbed my face against my shoulder, trying to push up the bandages on my eyes. I couldn’t budge them, and I kept rubbing, until I realized that I was rubbing my eyes. I wasn’t bandaged; I was in a black space, so dark I couldn’t even see the gleam of my parka.

I heard a roar, felt a horrible jerk, and then the mower rolled over me again, knocking the breath out of me, so I couldn’t scream. My mind shrank to a pinprick in its retreat from pain. Another halt, and this time I forced myself to think.

I was in a truck. I was in the back of a semi, and something on wheels was rolling back and forth with the jolting of the truck. I remembered Marcena, with the skin missing from a quarter of her body, and tried to shift myself, but the motion of the truck and the assaults from the handcart, or conveyor belt, or whatever it was, made it impossible for me to move.

My hands were tied behind me and my legs were strapped together. I smelled, too, smelled the way Freddy Pacheco did when I attacked him. A hundred years ago, that had been. The vomit and blood and pee, they were all mine. My head ached, and blood had dried in my nose. I needed water desperately. I stuck my tongue up and licked the blood. AB negative, a good vintage, hard to find, don’t lose too much of it.

I didn’t want to be here, I wanted to be back in my other world, where my father was with me, even if he was hurting me. I wanted my mother on the other side of the door, making cocoa for me.

The detective who feels sorry for herself might as well write her own funeral oration. The next time the truck halted, I made a ferocious effort and sat up. I twisted so my feet were at right angles to where they’d been. Now I was leaning with my back against the back of the truck. The next time the wheeled thing came at me, it rammed into the soles of my boots. I felt the jolt all the way up my spine. No good, V. I., no good, a few more hits like that and you’ll be paralyzed.

We stopped again. Wherever we were going, we were on city streets, I guessed, with a lot of stop signs, and my captors were obeying traffic laws—they weren’t going to risk ticketing for running a red light.

I fell forward onto my knees and managed to move them, just a little, just enough to crawl forward until I ran into the wheeled thing. The top was about thigh high, and I flung myself onto it as the truck rocked forward again.

It felt like a victory, a triumph as big as scaling Everest. Yes, I was Junko Tabei; what she’d done, scaling the big mountain, didn’t compare with this scrabbling with bound hands and feet on top of something I couldn’t see. I lay across the wheeled thing, my head throbbing, but the pleasure of getting away from the rollers kept me from losing consciousness again.

We made an abrupt hard turn and the truck bounced. The trailer went up and down on its eighteen wheels and then rocked from side to side. I rolled helplessly up and down with the cart, slamming crazily from one end of the truck to the other, trying to hold my head so it wouldn’t bang up and down with the motion.

I knew where we were going. The knocked-over fence, the track through the marsh, I could picture our route, the gray sky and grass and the end, the end in a pit. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the darkness, not wanting to see the end.

When we halted, I lay on my face panting shallowly, feeling the motor rumbling underneath me, too exhausted to brace myself against the next jolt forward. I heard a crash to my right and slowly moved my head to look. The doors to the truck swung open and I was dazzled by light. I thought it was daytime, thought it was the sun, thought I’d go blind.

Grobian strode along the back of the truck. Close your eyes, V. I.; blunk them up: you’re unconscious, the eyes blunk up when you’re unconscious. Grobian thrust a lid up with a rough thumb; he seemed satisfied. He grabbed me around the waist and slung me over his shoulder and thumped back out. I opened my eyes again. It was still night—being locked in total blackness had made even the night sky look bright at first.

“This time we’re in the right spot,” Grobian said. “Jeesh—suburban prick like you, dumping Czernin and the Love woman on the golf course instead of the landfill. This Polish cunt will be under ten feet of garbage by the time the sun comes up.”

“You don’t talk to me like that, Grobian,” Mr. William said.

“Bysen, from now on I talk to you however I please. I want that job in Singapore, running the Asian operations for By-Smart, but I’d consider South America. One of those or I’m talking to the old man. If Buffalo Bill finds out what you’ve been up to with his precious company—”

“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral,” William said. “I’m not worried about anything you say to him.”

“Big talk, big talk, Bysen. But if you acted as big as you talk—you’d never have gotten involved in crap like this. Men like your father, if they can’t do their dirty work themselves they’re smart enough to have friends of friends of friends figure it out so no finger ever points to them. You want to know why Buffalo Bill won’t trust you with more of his company? Not because you’re a lying, cheating SOB—he respects lying, cheating SOBs. It’s because you’re a lying, useless weasel, Bysen. If you hadn’t been Buffalo Bill’s son, you’d be lucky to have a job typing figures in your own warehouse.”

Grobian swung me like a hammock and flung me from him. I landed facedown in muck. I heard him dust his hands and then heard him and William head back to the truck, bickering the whole way, not looking back at me, not even talking about me.

I lifted my head just as the truck jerked into gear again. The headlights flooded me for a moment, showing me where I was, the side of one of the giant mounds of earth where Chicago buries its trash. Beyond the By-Smart semi, I could see lights from other trucks, city trucks, a line of beetles moving toward me. Every day, another ten thousand tons comes in, gets emptied, and covered again with more dirt. The city trucks work round the clock, hauling away our refuse.

My stomach was frozen from fear. Grobian was backing the By-Smart semi, starting to turn it in a wide, clumsy circle. When he got out of the way, the line of beetles would crawl on up the hillside and dump their loads on me. I frantically pushed my left foot against my right, bending my toes inside my boot, bracing myself by putting my head into the sludge. I couldn’t waste time watching the semi’s progress. I pushed so hard I screamed from the pain shooting up my spine.

My right foot came out of my running shoe. I pulled my foot free of the fabric tying my legs together. Drew my knees under me and pushed myself standing. I was free, I could jump up and down, the drivers would see me. My thighs wobbled with fatigue, my arms were pinned behind me so that my shoulders felt they might burst in their sockets, but I wanted to sing and dance and turn cartwheels.

The garbage trucks weren’t on me yet: the By-Smart semi was still blocking the track, lurching in a circle. I stopped jumping. Save your energy, Warshawski, save it for when you need it. The semi kept turning, not straightening out for the outbound road. The line of beetles had stopped and was honking at the semi. It seemed as though Grobian had forgotten how to drive. Or was William trying to prove he wasn’t a completely useless weasel by taking the wheel himself? The tractor made too wide a turn and brought the trailer over the side of the hill. The trailer teetered for a minute on its inside wheels and toppled over. The tractor fell back on its hind wheels, hung for a second, and then collapsed on its side.