Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  But the cleanup had been unnerving. At a younger age, Kaipo had lost two important people in her life, each from a different side of the organ-transplant equation. Her mother, when Kaipo was a teen, needed a heart transplant that never came. And Kaipo’s drug-addicted lover sold his own body parts to stay high, then committed suicide when he ran out of parts to sell. Ka Hui’s new black-market endeavor was a problem for her.

  7

  Philo parallel-parked his Jeep on the street in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia. Diffused, yellow-hued lighting from two spotlights on motion sensors bathed the front steps leading to his row house plus the house’s microscopic front lawn. He humped his plastic bag of groceries up the gray steps to his front door.

  He’d gotten lucky. When he’d moved back to Philly, the two-story row home where he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life was for sale. He closed on the house, moved in, then emptied out his long-term storage unit and hauled its contents over to the house: family items, pictures of his deceased mother when she was healthy, other keepsakes, specifically his father’s massive WWII leather-bound steamer trunk with its wood struts and brass appointments, covered with decals and stencils from the USN’s Pacific war theater. Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Hawaii, the Philippines. He made the mistake of telling his VA shrink how fortunate he thought all this was, being able to live in his boyhood home, surrounding himself with family memorabilia. His shrink pronounced these feelings abnormal, citing textbook “needing to return to the womb” bullshit. Philo fired his shrink.

  He’d had little idea what was in his dad’s trunk beyond a US flag and the old man’s naval officer’s uniform, but he was correcting this oversight in small doses. Absorbing it all at once, that his father’s honorable military life could be stuffed into the drawers of a four-by-two-by-two-foot box, would have been too painful otherwise.

  The house was three resales removed from his time there as a kid, in a section of the city that was “changing,” which was white-people speak for turning nonwhite. Hearing neighbors whisper this pissed him off. Not willing to embrace diversity? Then move the fuck out. Many had done just that, in mass quantities, and the ongoing exodus had made the house a steal.

  He pulled open the tan aluminum storm door. Loose mail sitting short of the brass mail slot at the door’s base slid out underfoot, onto his welcome mat. He gathered it up. Soon as he inserted his key, the mail slot cover popped up to bang his ankle, shielding a cat paw strike not visible to the naked eye. Lucky for him the strike contained no exposed claws, this because he wasn’t the mailman. He jammed his shoe against the brass cover to keep it from flipping up a second time, felt additional strikes against it from one pissed-off cat.

  “Step away from the door, Six.”

  Meow.

  “Cut the shit, sweetie. Do it. Now.”

  Meow.

  Philo pushed through, letting the storm door snap shut behind him. Six the Cat clawed her way into his bag-filled arms, cuddled his neck, then purred in Calico ecstasy. She moved onto his shoulder while Philo punched in a few numbers on a security system keypad. “Good to see you too, sweetie,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  It would be dinner in the living room in front of the flat screen. For Philo, a pint of freshly cooked spicy corn chowder and a takeout Caesar salad with grilled chicken. For Six, canned tuna and all the salad croutons she could guilt Philo into giving her.

  He sipped a scotch for dessert, found and neutralized his snail mail, then policed the litter box in the basement. Cat shit in the trash, it was time to hit the equipment. In gym trunks and a light T-shirt, he fired up the space heater, else his middle-aged bones would catch a chill. Six skittered down the steps to join him, got in some reps at her cat scratching post, then sat back in awe and purred in time to Philo’s grunts as he attacked the heavy bag with fists and feet.

  He toweled himself off. Tonight was laundry night, or so he’d told his attorney girlfriend, Lola, which was the reason she wasn’t here. Doing laundry tired him, and she was okay with this as an excuse; she wanted him at peak performance when they slept together.

  LAUNDRY was stenciled in small black letters on the tiny door to a squat locker-styled cabinet, a piece of white basement furniture that sat between the washer and the dryer. He snapped the door open and lifted a pimpled plastic container the size of a toolbox from the middle shelf, bypassing the liquid Tide and Downy. He humped the kit to a workbench, flipped open the lid, turned on a TV for company. Inside the kit, carbon cleaner, bore polish, solvent degreaser, brushes, gun oil.

  “Doing laundry” would take him three hours, all of which would be spent watching cable news while he worked. His row house had six rooms plus a bath and a half, a finished basement, and a garage. Ten places where he could park his ass at different times during the day or night. Ten places that each needed a gun. The handgun he carried and his sometimes ankle-holstered derringer brought his total pieces owned to twelve firearms. He’d start with cleaning the shotgun he kept in the basement.

  Another unsettling news story on the TV screen: discovery of a homeland terrorist plot, this one in Michigan, its tentacles reaching north into Canada, east into Pennsylvania and New England. All bad actors, part of a radical Islamist group, including some who were homegrown. Vengeful fucks just like Al Qaeda overseas, terrorizing the infidels. Common, maybe even ignorable, abstractions nowadays. Except for the ones that weren’t. The ones out there with long memories who maybe disliked him and his military brethren personally. The ones with grudges that had merit, fueled by his past deeds and one very visible, successful mission.

  Twelve guns. Not too many. Maybe not enough.

  Lights out, bedtime. Philo louvered the slats to the living room window shutters open enough to watch the night, empty and cold, outside his front window. Snowflakes swirled around the tops of streetlights, blowing haphazardly as they feathered Unruh Avenue ahead of a light snowstorm moving in. A few sober souls bundled against the brutally frigid night braved the weather on foot and pushed up the sidewalk from the bus stop. A few others with only a vague notion of where they were going did likewise, fortified for their trip home by last call at a pub around the corner.

  Aside from the windows, there were three ways into his house: the first-floor front door, an aluminum jalousie door off the basement that opened to a short alley, and the door from the garage, his driveway and backyard the size of a storage pod. While in the house, he kept the security system off. He was a light sleeper. He’d know sooner than any security company if there were a breach, and an alarm scaring off someone wanting to make a name for himself was not the preferred option; the asshole would only come back. If Philo weren’t quick enough to stay ahead of a law enforcement response, the response wouldn’t matter; he’d be dead by the time they arrived.

  He removed his finger from between the window shutter slats. The love seat reclined, and he settled in so he could give his eyes and head a rest. The La-Z-Boy faced the picture window, front row seating situated for exterior viewing, not for living room conversation. He unfolded his long body, spread himself out across the open recliner, and pulled the wool blanket up to his waist. A loaded Sig Sauer went to his lap.

  This double recliner was more comfortable than the one in the basement facing the back door, so tonight’s four-plus-or-minus hours of sleep might be sounder. Six hopped onto his chest and balanced herself on her way down his reclining body until she reached his feet, then she dropped back onto the floor. She’d go through this routine in reverse in the morning, parking on his face until he woke up. When he slept in the living room, she occupied the cat bed next to the mail slot, unless she whined to go out.

  Meow. MEOW…

  Philo let her out the front door. An outdoor cat was an independent cat. Better she learned now, just in case.

  8

  The Blessid Trauma truck hit a highway pothole that made the four of them bounce in their seats. I-95 in Philadelphia was perpetually under construction, with uneven pavemen
ts, zigzagging tight lanes, and stretches without shoulders, terrorizing its everyday travelers with white-knuckle moments and frayed nerves.

  Once inside Northeast Philadelphia they abandoned the interstate in favor of Route 13, Frankford Avenue, two lanes of worn blacktop made claustrophobic by narrow sidewalks and storefronts close to the street on both sides; their destination would keep them just inside the city limits. Philo shared a breakfast story about today’s bowl of Frosted Flakes and the hairball garnish his cat had added to it, soon realizing that, shit-God-almighty, he’d fucked up by mentioning that he had a cat.

  “Cats,” Grace said, then mimicked a gag. “For people who like open boxes of shit in their kitchen.”

  “Basement.”

  “Whatever. You stay in this business long enough, you’ll smell enough cat lady homes that you’ll lose the cat.”

  “Copy that, Grace.”

  Cats topic dead. Good.

  Patrick murmured something from the jump seat, into his filtered mask. Philo checked him in the rearview, didn’t pursue it, but Hank did, speaking loud enough to better the road whine. “You say something, Patrick?”

  Patrick stopped tapping at the games on his phone to lower his mask. “Yup. What’s the cat’s name, Philo sir?”

  Philo pretended he hadn’t heard him.

  “Philo,” Hank said, louder than Patrick, “your cat. What’s his name?”

  “It’s a she. She’s a Calico. Six. Six the Cat.”

  “Odd name for a cat,” Hank said.

  “Guess I’m just not a Tigger or a Garfield kind of guy.”

  A quarter-mile farther along the blacktop, an excited Patrick pointed at a tandem bus approaching a bus stop. He pulled off his mask as they drove past. “That’s the Sixty-six. A SEPTA trackless trolley. Double sixes, Philo, sir. Ha!”

  Patrick had a keen interest in Philadelphia’s public transit system, the cheapest way he had to get around the city by himself. He’d memorized all the routes, and on their trips to jobs they would often hear in detail how public transport could do just as good a job getting him there as their van.

  Patrick spoke louder, this time more insistent. “I think it means something else, sir.”

  Philo didn’t follow. “What means something else, Patrick?”

  “Your cat’s name. It means something else.”

  “Yeah, well, the names people give their cats don’t much matter, bud. It’s not like they answer to them.”

  “They mean something to their owners, sir.”

  Too close for Philo’s comfort; he needed to end this conversation. He flipped on the radio, hummed along to some Neil Young, and paid special attention to the traffic. Patrick lifted his mask back onto his nose and mouth and found his earbuds, shutting himself down. He connected one earbud, raised the other, was snugging it into place until—

  Mask off again. “I know what the name means, sir,” Patrick said.

  A millimeter from a clean getaway. “You do, do you?” Philo nonchalanted a wink at Grace, dismissing the question.

  “Yeah. It’s to make people think there’s a one through five.”

  Philo forced a patronizing nod and a chuckle, like this was a cute comment. Problem was, in one regard it was true; a regard he didn’t want to have to explain. Time to shut the topic down tight.

  “That’s, ah, pretty good, Patrick. But the reason for the name is top secret. If I told you”—he smiled back at him in the mirror—“I’d have to kill you, bud.”

  “Then don’t tell me, sir.”

  Another day, another biohazard job, with Blessid Trauma on their way to an abandoned car dealership dormant for decades until it was resurrected in the nineties as a chop shop, where stolen cars went to become black market car parts. Philadelphia’s Northeast Detectives unit had put the chop shop out of business almost as soon as it opened. The dealership’s three-acre parking lot, a dismal piece of real estate, its blacktop buckled, the lot’s cracks and craters claimed by ambitious winter-hearty weeds, was empty behind an ancient For Sale or Lease sign. They drifted past the dealership’s former showroom, worn, gray plywood covering its tall windows. Philo guided the van around back of the building and shut the engine down next to a metal door with the word PARTS stenciled above it. Inside, Philo knew from the call, promised to give new meaning to chop shop and PARTS as identifiers. “How appropriate,” he said. “We enter here.”

  Grace eased herself out of the step van, a bit shakier today, Hank by her side. Philo exited and stretched, his eyes taking in the exterior of the building. Its painted white cinder block construction stopped above the second story just short of the roof, where corrugated metal began and continued north to the roof’s overhang, rusted over and stuffed with leaves and twigs in nooks that would become bird nests in the spring. Behind the short strip of parking spaces facing the overhead doors was farmland that extended multiple acres, the churned earth frozen, fettered with the remains of threshed cornstalks. Farther yet in the distance, at least two football fields away, was a housing subdivision.

  It was private back here. A good place for people to enter and leave a building to do things they didn’t want other people to see behind a number of closed garage doors, their plastic window construction painted black from the inside.

  Bio-suited up, Philo and Patrick led the way. They shouldered the stodgy PARTS door open. A bright shaft of natural sunlight blinded them once inside, angled from a skylight two stories above the empty auto parts counter. They shaded their eyes, kept them lowered while they traversed a dusty floor toward a metal interior door painted in caution-tape yellow. Above the door, a rectangular plate in the same yellow carried the black-lettered message that belonged with the cautionary color: Service area – No customers allowed.

  Philo grabbed the door handle, needing two hands to get it to budge. Once inside, another blinding skylight. Their hands shielded their eyes. A few steps past the intense shaft of sunlight, they lowered their arms.

  Ten service bays in total, the first eight empty of anything they’d need to remedy, the space tidier than the area fronting the PARTS counter. The service area’s walls, a dingy paper-bag brown, did not impress. The hydraulic car lifts had all been engaged, all raised by their single silvery pistons a foot or so off the floor. Other ceiling skylights lit the long room, dusty specks swirling in their shafts, the morning sun casting everything outside them in featureless shadows, their footsteps echoing. They approached the ninth and tenth car bays because this was where the action was.

  Two metal single-bed frames with chipped white paint were centered on the last two car lifts and raised off the floor the same height as the other lifts, their mattresses waist-high. Blood-spattered sheets, latex gloves, bloodied gauze and gauze sponges lay on the first mattress. On the second, a dark-skinned body lay splayed under similar blood-soaked debris. The body had gaping holes, the head no eyes. Disgusting to see, it was worse to smell. Patrick checked his pockets for his Tiger Balm, started working it under his nose before handing the jar to Philo. Philo applied a generous dip above his lip until—

  A hand, attached to a large man, dropped onto Patrick’s shoulder from behind.

  Philo wheeled, his greasy fingers ripping the offending arm away from Patrick and twisting it, a chicken-wing, bent-thumb combination that forced its owner to take one knee then two when Philo applied more leverage. The man’s head was now inches from the floor. Philo reached under the man’s dangling suit jacket, removed a gun from a shoulder holster and pointed it at the back of his head. “Don’t even breathe.”

  The former owner of the gun groaned. “Badge, wallet, coat pocket. Cop. Live crime scene. You can’t—be in here…”

  Dark suit, white shirt, red tie, heavyset, and from as unflattering a position as this, his upside-down jowls looked flabby enough to choke off his air if Philo were to lower him any farther. Philo drew the gun back, slid it out of reach. He found the guy’s wallet and flipped it open. Inside, a detective’s badge; the shield ap
peared legit. A friendly, with accessories and a coat sleeve now smudged with Tiger Balm.

  “Sorry, Detective. Philo Trout, Blessid Trauma Services.” He wiped his greasy fingers on his uniform pants, offered his hand. The detective begrudgingly used it to help himself up. Philo returned the badge and let the detective retrieve his gun.

  Patrick was beside himself, his mask off, his face lit up bright as a kid at a magic show.

  “That was some move, Philo sir!”

  Philo’s victim caught his breath, coughing until his throat cleared. “I thought…you two heard me behind you. Lorne Montgomery, Northeast Detectives, Philly police. It was a slick move, cowboy, I’ll give you that. No accounting for”—his head swiveled, checking the rear of the shop, his voice rising—“my missing goddamn partner, goddamn it.”

  The shop area was empty of cop partners, goddamned or otherwise. The detective narrowed his eyes, sizing Philo up. “Where the hell did you (cough) learn that?”

  Patrick answered before Philo could, grinning. “If he told you, sir, he’d have to kill you.”

  “Patrick”—Philo gave him a look—“you need to relax, buddy. Don’t pay any attention to my friend here, Detective. You rattled him.”

  Less wary now, Detective Montgomery turned sheepish, using a hanky to rid his person of Philo’s greasy grip. “Look, my partner doesn’t need to know what just happened, okay, Trout?”

  “Fine with me.”

  The detective gestured. “What about Happy the Clown?” He eyed Patrick’s blubbery, giddy face. “Doesn’t look like he’s from around here.”

  “From Alaska; a long story. His name is Patrick,” Philo said. “He sees you’re a cop. He’ll behave.”

  “Fine. My friggin’ partner is, is…Hell, I still don’t have a clue where the hell she is, damn it.”

  A door slammed, followed by a raised, condescending female voice. “Use your words, Lorne,” echoed across the shop area. A woman in a smart skirt suit and pumps approached them, Grace and Hank trailing her, Grace panting while she walked.