Bingo Barge Murder (12 page)

I flashed back to Rita’s house and the lack of furniture. Maybe it hadn’t all been packed away in preparation for a move but had been sold instead. “Coop, what kind of a gambler was Rita?”

Coop paused in his paperwork perusal. “What do you mean?”

“Was she a high roller, or a conservative spender? Did she cough up a lot of money when she came in to play?”

He blew air out between pursed lips. “She always spent seventy-five or a hundred bucks on bingo every session she was there, but that was beans compared to the amount of money she threw at pulltabs. A couple thousand a crack wasn’t unusual.”

“And how often did she play?”

“I’d say she was in maybe five or six times a week.”

I did some fast calculations in my head. “She was probably dropping somewhere in the area of ten grand a week. Even with the occasional win, she had to be leaking money like a sieve.”

“Yeah. Something to think about.” He returned his attention to the papers in his hands. I stood up, pressing my fists against my now-aching lower back. I took a step toward the desk to help Coop, and then backtracked and retrieved the overdue bills, spread them on the floor, and took a photograph of each. I carefully replaced the bills in the folders and the folders in the cabinet. Gotta love digital cameras.

Coop finished going through the loose papers. I carefully pulled the ledger off the desktop and tilted it to drain off the spilled coffee. I watched the familiar sight of coffee drops splattering on a floor, and my brain squeezed tight within my skull. We had to be in some kind of alternate universe. Everything was completely unreal. We were making a guest appearance in the middle of someone else’s night terrors. Or we were stoned on ’shrooms and having a horrible trip. I clenched my teeth and turned my attention to the ledger.

Each entry included a concise list of shipments coming in, what was going out, storage charges, and additional fees. The initial entry at the front of the book was dated three years prior. I paged through to the end, and the last line was filled in the day before yesterday for a Con-Rail shipment consisting of two containers that were bound for Pennsylvania.

I flipped the beige pages with their precise blue lines to the date the nuts should have arrived, the 17th. Four entries were neatly printed in a row. The first was the arrival of a Priority Express truck dropping off three pallets of something for some company I’d never heard of. The second entry was the departure of three containers headed for the Minneapolis Railway Loading Facility.

The third entry in the log was the arrival of a truck with an unidentified load, slated to be stored until Monday, November 22nd, the same date from the business card from Kinky’s office. That had to be it! The fourth logged shipment was the arrival of two pallets for F&D Linen.

I was about to tell Coop what I found when he yelped, and I just about shot out of my shoes.

“Shay—I’ve got it!” He waved a sheet of paper at me. I stuck a finger in the ledger to keep my place as I walked over to him.

“This is a bill of lading for the transfer of a truck loaded with perishable dry goods to,” he squinted at the cramped printing. “Brooklyn Park. There’s no business name, only an address: 7765 Wyland Avenue.”

“What’s the date?”

“Friday—the nineteenth.”

I gently set the ledger on the edge of the desk and tried to ignore Lazar’s one-eyed stare as I opened it. “Coop, it fits. Is there some kind of a logging, or tracking number …” I trailed off as I scanned the suspect ledger entry from the 17th. “1274—”

“682,” Coop finished. Our gaze’s locked. We’d found where the truck was taken. Now we could only hope it was still there.

We digitally documented our
finds and gave Luther our last respects. After a brief argument about who would call the cops and tell them a very dead man waited patiently for the undertaker, I gave in and called 911 anonymously from one of the few remaining payphones on the planet. The criminal counts against us were steadily rising.

Once we were back on the road, Coop said, “Poor Luther. I know we had to leave him, but he’s sitting there all stiff and alone in the cold. I feel terrible saying this, but I’m actually starving. And I need a smoke so bad I could cry.”

My barely tamped-down guilt rose again like thick fog. We’d broken into another business. We’d fled the scene of another crime we’d messed with. We were felons. With great effort, I poked the fog of guilt back into its proverbial bottle and stuck a figurative cork in it. There’d be time for self-flagellation later. I opened my mouth, shut it, and then said, “Coop. We didn’t kill him. We happened to find him. We did him a favor by calling the police. As for your other two issues, I can help you out with one of those requests.”

Coop vetoed my vote for McDonalds on moral grounds. I found a Subway and pulled in. While I ordered a veggie sub for Coop and a ham and cheese on honey-wheat for me, he dallied outside, feeding his nicotine addiction. As I paid the way-too-young-to-be-working, acne-faced Sandwich Artist for our subs, Coop came inside. His face was bright red, probably from sucking so hard on his cigarette.

We snarfed our sandwiches in record time, and Coop ordered another to go for later. I never understood how he managed to pack away the food he ate and still remain as thin as he did. Must be the vegetarian thing.

“Tell me the address again,” I said to Coop. We exited off 94 to 694 and headed north to Brooklyn Park.

“7765 Wyland Avenue.”

Neither of us was familiar with the area, so I pulled off the highway and into a Wendy’s parking lot and hauled out my Hudson’s map book. After some discussion, we were back on the road.

The place was located in a northern suburb of Minneapolis. The area transitioned from residential housing to industrial, with many businesses behind chainlink fences. I tried to help Coop watch for building numbers, which were always hard to find, and doubly so when it was dark. I was about to give up when we spotted a two-story building set back from the road, its roof peaking above a weathered, wooden privacy fence. Isolated, with no close neighbors on either side, the gate bore a rusting sign with the number 7765. Nothing identified the business within.

“Where do you think I should park?” I asked.

“We just passed a parking lot that wrapped behind the building. Head back there.”

I flipped a U-turn and slowly passed 7765 Wyland again. A grove of trees stood between it and the parking lot we were headed for about a half mile away. I was happy to see the micro forest, thinking it would give us a bit of cover.

On foot, we dodged through the trees to the long fence bordering the property. At this point I felt a little like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich for the benefit of the poor—or in our case for the benefit of Eddy’s life. The tree line stopped twenty feet from the fence. I panted from attempting to keep up with Coop’s long legs and had given up badgering him to slow down for me. Chalk up another one for the vegetarians, I guess.

We checked the gate, and after finding it locked tight, headed around the corner of the wood-plank fence, away from the road.

The fence was a good three feet over Coop’s head. “Boost me up, and I’ll hop over,” I told him. “If the coast is clear, you can climb over after me.” Coop cupped his hands and heaved me skyward. My fingers caught the top of the barrier, and I was glad it was solid wood and not barbed wire. With some effort I hauled myself to the top and scoped the grounds.

Cars in various states of disrepair lined the enclosure of a massive junkyard. Thanks to the metal corpses, my drop would be cut by almost half. I swung one leg over, and then the other, hanging by my arms as the aroma of old junkers tickled my nostrils. The smell reminded me of a car my parents had when I was a kid, an old Ford Falcon many years past its prime. I paused, surprised at the visceral recollection from before I even knew how to tie my own shoes.

Coop gave me the thumbs up and flashed me a lopsided, encouraging smile. I landed on the roof of the car below me with a soft thud. My feet dented the roof ever so slightly as I wobbled, caught my balance, and then held as still as I could, my senses on high alert. One unlit light post leaned at a cockeyed angle in the front of a long, corrugated metal building at the center of the junkyard.

The building was long and narrow. Two garage doors on the far end of the structure probably led into automotive bays of some kind. Three beat-up demolition derby cars, numbers painted on their dented sides, were parked in front of the building. The building’s windows were black, and I hoped that meant the place was devoid of human life.

I was about to hop to the ground when I heard the faint sound of metal clinking. My already-galloping heart shifted into high gear. The sound definitely wasn’t the wind. The jingle stopped, and then almost before I could blink, a gargantuan hound dog came loping across the compound straight toward me.

Dogs don’t usually scare me, but this one was the size of a miniature horse, with the head of a Boxer and the body of bulldozer. Its cheeks jounced up and down as it bounded toward me. The owner of the mutt had clipped its tail but left its ears uncropped, and they bounced in tandem with the flapping lips.

I froze on the roof of the car, automobile-surfing, my arms outstretched. “Nice doggy,” I whispered. “Nice doggy.”

The dog came to a screeching halt directly below me, eyes never leaving my face. I expected voluminous barking to pierce the air. “COOP,” I tried to yell in a whisper.

Coop’s voice filtered over the fence, “What’s up?”

“DOG!”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

I tried again, louder this time, in a low voice instead of a whisper. “BIG DOG!”

“Hang on. The sub … I’ll throw it over.”

“Coop,” I hissed, “dogs aren’t vegetarians!”

“Don’t worry, dogs aren’t picky. Here it comes.”

I dragged my eyes from the huge pooch in time to see the ghostly apparition of a Subway sandwich sailing over the fence. I managed to dart a hand out and grab the plastic bag before it hit the car roof and bounced to the hard-packed dirt below. My eyes returned to the dog, who now sat on gigantic haunches, the floppy lip on one side of its mouth hooked on a bottom tooth, head tilted curiously at me. I couldn’t tell if the fang was bared in a growl I couldn’t hear, or if the dog’s loose lip was simply snagged on it.

“Good puppy,” I said hopefully. I slowly crouched low on the roof of the car, my eyes never leaving the dog, which observed everything I did but didn’t move. In fact, the animal still hadn’t uttered a peep. I slowly opened the plastic and with trembling fingers ripped at the paper around the sub. Thank God Coop wasn’t vegan, or there’d be no cheese to tempt the mutt with. Even if Coop figured the dog would chow down on whatever I offered, I wasn’t too sure it would like jalapeños, pickles, and olives.

I pulled off a healthy hunk of bread and withdrew it from the bag. The dog hadn’t budged, it simply sat there waiting. “Good dog,” I said to it again, and tossed the bread. The mutt leaped into the air in a burst of coiled muscle, nabbed the bread, and landed gracefully. It rolled over onto its back, and waved its paws at me. From that position I ascertained that it was actually a he.

Geez, the only thing scary about this dog was his size. I tossed him another chunk of bread, which he scrambled up to get. He returned and sat in front of me again, lower tooth hanging out, and softly whined. I gingerly slid off the car. The animal made no move toward me. He sat there waiting, his butt shaking as he wagged his invisible tail.

Bending down again, I extended my hand with another hunk of the sandwich. “Easy boy,” I whispered, and moved close enough so he could take the food from my fingers. He delicately accepted it, his eyes glued to me as he appeared to roll the bread around his mouth before swallowing it. Then he bent his head and something hit the hard-packed dirt. At first I thought he was going to throw up, and then I flashed the light at his head. He’d spit out a pickle. He raised his big head and gazed at me with pleading eyes.

“Coop,” I called out in a low voice.

“Yeah, you okay?”

“Fine. This dog is not a fan of pickles.” I proceeded to rip the rest of the sandwich into bite-size pieces and set them on the ground. The mutt leaned his great big head over the offering. I reached out and stroked his ears, and then slid my hand up his warm, soft neck. When I reached his back I felt the bones of his spine. This pooch wasn’t getting nearly enough to eat. I ran my hands down his sides and over ribs that jutted through taut skin.

When he’d finished the sandwich chunks, the dog sat again, and I laughed aloud when I saw a mound of green on the ground. I peered closer. It was all pickles, not a single jalapeño in the pile.

I stood up, and the dog shifted his butt over to lean against me. His bones pressed against my leg right through my pants. He gazed up at me with big Boxer eyes and whined softly. He was clearly neglected and starved for food and attention. It infuriated me when people abused animals that couldn’t fight back. I put my hand on the top of his broad head and he pushed against me.

Suddenly both of us were startled by a loud thunk on the fence. The dog yipped and ducked behind me at the sound and movement, but not before I saw the whites of his eyes almost glowing in the dark. Coop seemed to sail over the top of the fence like a pole vaulter gone mad. His long legs gave him so much momentum that he skimmed the top of the car I’d landed on and crashed onto the ground in a heap. He didn’t move and didn’t utter a sound. For a moment, I was afraid he’d killed himself.

Before I made a move toward him, the dog slunk around me and warily scooted on stiff legs toward my fallen comrade. I reached out to restrain the animal, but he was too fast. He straddled Coop and let loose with his big tongue, slurping Coop’s face from chin to forehead. That was enough to rouse Coop from his lack-of-air stupor. He flailed his arms wildly, choking. “Get this thing off me! He’s killing me!” I dragged the dog off so Coop could sit up, swearing and spitting and wiping away slobber.

As Coop tried to catch his breath, I felt around the pooch’s leather collar. A name tag hung on a metal loop. In the beam of my flashlight one side read
Dawg
. The other side was imprinted with the name
Buzz Riley
, and this Brooklyn Park address.

“Coop,” I said, “I think this is Buzz Riley’s place.”

“What?”

“Yeah, that’s the name on the dog’s tag. And who would name a dog Dawg? D-A-W-G. That’s plain wrong. And Buzz is starving and probably beating this dog too.” Dawg wagged his butt and pushed himself against my leg again.

“Riley’s a real ass. He gets into arguments with the Bingo Barge staff and the customers. Rumor has it he ran someone over on purpose during one of those hick county fair shows where they bash each other’s cars apart trying to knock them out of the competition.”

“I think you mean a demolition derby.”

“Whatever. He’s big and mean. Doesn’t surprise me he’d name a dog Dawg and not take care of him.” Coop made it to his feet and dusted himself off. “Okay, let’s take a poke around this joint and get out. I don’t want to be here if Buzz decides to make an appearance.”

We headed toward the building, our progress less difficult because the clouds cleared away and the stars and moon had appeared, giving us enough illumination to safely pick our way to the main door.

The door was unlocked and opened with a resounding screech. I ducked and Coop flattened himself against the outside wall. Even Dawg bounced back a couple of feet. Apparently Buzz felt secure enough with his fence and his bulky guard dog that he didn’t think locking up his shop was necessary. When no threat presented itself, I tentatively stepped across the threshold.

The smell of oil, gas, and burned rubber permeated the room. I scanned the area with my flashlight. We were in what once had been some kind of show room that had deteriorated into an ungodly mess. Filthy car parts in various states of assembly rested on every available surface as well as on the concrete floor. Toward the rear of the room, double doors stood open into a black, cavernous space.