Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  “Ouch,” Tonka said, smiling, and spit out some blood. He moved back in front of Philo.

  Fuck, Philo thought, that shot—it could have dropped a hippo…

  Then, three minutes into the bout, after a flurry of heavy hands by them both, Philo’s breath suddenly left him, his chest air emptied by a Tonka punch to the solar plexus, followed by an overhand right he never saw. Philo kissed the cold, hard, cement floor.

  Hank, behind glass, keyed on Grace’s breathing while watching the doctors put her under. Her next shallow breath didn’t come, was replaced by a shudder; Hank lurched at the window. The anesthesiologist gestured for him to settle down. He focused on his patient again then gave Hank a thumbs-up: you wife’s fine, she’s now in dreamland.

  A first time for everything: the shot to the chest stole Philo’s breath, a phantom right hand had dropped him. The partisan crowd erupted, bouncing, hooting, and pumping their fists. From Philo’s vantage point, his cheek against the cold floor, the spectator pandemonium was of little consequence save for puffs of dust coaxed from the pit underneath by the weight of maybe sixty bouncing, boisterous fight fans, the particles rising through a seam in the concrete.

  “…six, seven, EIGHT,” the ref called. Philo got to a knee then to his feet, the ref moving into his face, finishing the count with “and…up at nine. What’s your name, son?”

  His breath was back but he was light-headed. “Joe Frazier.” His lips danced with the words, he was delighted he’d said them, oh how witty he was, the count still resonating in his fuzzy head, “six, seven, eight, and up at nine…”

  “No fucking around, son. Tell me your name or it’s over.”

  …eight maids a milking…

  …nine ladies dancing…

  “Philo Trout.”

  …eight days a week, nine angry men…

  …nine lives…

  “That’s better. You good to go, Philo Trout?”

  Nine lanterns, one more than eight.

  There’d been nine lanterns in the pit, not eight, damn it—

  Fuck.

  “Start it back up, ref, we need to get this thing over fast.”

  “Whatever you say, son.” The ref held out his fist to draw the two fighters together. When they knuckle-bumped, the ref retreated. “Ready, box!”

  Philo’s new urgency, in his head now: his conversation with Patrick yesterday. Six lanterns had gone into the pit—all with twelve-volt batteries—but one hadn’t worked. Philo tossed down a few more—three, not two, he was sure now, for a total of nine. Only eight came back up.

  The space was rocking, its audience clamoring for the knockout. Tonka waded in then teed off with shots to the chest, the arms, ribs, Philo taking the blows, covering up, Tonka getting arm weary, Philo eyeing the open seam in the floor every chance he got.

  More dust rose from the pit—for fuck’s sake, how had they missed this…?

  Philo’s fist connected, channeling Smokin’ Joe Frazier with a left hook to his opponent’s cheek, rocking him. Tonka’s knees buckled, shook his head like a neighing horse, clearing out the cotton. Tonka moved back inside, whaled on Philo again, Philo covering up—

  He knew now. The wooden inlaids a few feet below them, embedded in the pit’s ceiling: the grain-polished wood, forty by forty of it awaiting reclamation, with wormholes, knots and grooves. Places for old grain to cake up and eventually turn to dust particles, jostled loose by a raucous crowd on its feet on the floor above it, the particles going airborne. Not a problem as long as there wasn’t an energy source, as in no electrostatic discharge, no open flame, no friction.

  And no lantern, damn it, because even a battery-operated lantern was capable of producing a spark.

  …Below them, corn, barley, wheat, none of it left to eat, all scrubbed away and vacuumed up. Their teeth gnawed, gnashed, bit, crunched—the rats were hungry, desperate, chomping on anything that wasn’t dirt or concrete or wood. Green plastic, clear plastic—a lantern—crunch-crunch-crunch—because something edible might be inside. Inside, instead, was a bulb, the bulb attached to a socket, and the socket wired to the terminals of a battery. The teeth clamped on to and ripped at the wire insulation the bare wires touched, creating a spark amid the dust. The rat squealed when the fur on his face ignited…

  Philo and Tonka straddled a narrow gap in the floor, a breathing floor joint, the two men hunched over, trading short left and right hooks. A swirl of air swept past their ankles on its way to getting sucked into the gap—pfttt-t-t—the audience feeling it too, their short collective gasp quieting the room for a beat. Backfilling the gasp fueled by the buffeting air, Philo had a sinking feeling that all was about to be lost.

  And it would be, right after the shockwave.

  Pfttt-t-t…

  BOOM.

  The belowdecks blast expanded like a depth charge, blowing the plywood pieces and cinder blocks off the holes in the open-air first floor. A fireball found the small elevator shaft and geysered upward, rocketing through to the second floor then whooshing upward to the third. The crowd panicked and pushed away from it, scattering in all directions into the cold night through seams in the hanging tarps, heading to safety outside, to their cars…

  Tonka and Philo lowered their fists and held up, distracted, chaos surrounding them. The fire geyser burned its brightest and quickly extinguished itself, but the damage was done. Fissures in the columns from the explosion climbed to the floors above, the corner nearest the two fighters shuddering on its two marine legs under the pier, shaking loose chunks of building already compromised by the wrecking ball. A cement corner column collapsed, and the Camden skyline was suddenly visible from the elevator shaft outward, jagged building chunks raining down on the outside, bad as an earthquake. Philo, now in survival mode, was on autopilot—

  Get out now, that way, past the shaft, onto the pier.

  “Patrick! Hump!” He’d drag them out with him if he could find them among the screaming, panicked audience. He scanned the crowd—

  One of the massive marine pilings supporting the pier snapped underneath, with chunked concrete, rusted iron, and stone crumpling and slipping on a slant into the river, Philo sliding into the ice-cold water with it. Above him a grain silo calved like a glacier in slow motion, cascading along the water’s edge before sliding in, Philo swimming hard, trying to escape the vortex. A second corner separated, tilting at its base then giving way like a felled tree—timmm-berrr! Twenty feet away while Philo tread water, someone splashed helplessly in the tilting silo’s path.

  No, fuck no…

  “Hump!” Philo called. The second concrete silo gathered momentum on its way down, Hump’s eyes getting bigger, watching it descend on top of him.

  “Hump! SWIM!”

  The felled silo displaced Hump and the ton of water where he’d been, pushing tidally outward. “HUMP!”

  Five seconds passed, ten, Philo still treading water, frantic, spinning in all directions. Thirty seconds. When Hump didn’t resurface Philo dove into the murk, spent two chest-burning minutes searching underwater in the swirling muck, reaching river bottom, a long shot, had to try—

  No Hump. Waves continued oscillating from the collapse, greeting Philo when he surfaced. On one wave, a dead body. Wrong. The guy was alive, but he was dazed and floating.

  Tonka.

  Philo cupped Tonka’s chin, kicked fiercely away from debris still pummeling the water around them, the pier and the river under assault by one side of the grain elevator now folding in on itself. Tonka gurgled, regaining his wits as they reached a second pier thirty yards upriver. Philo pushed Tonka into a ladder, Tonka wrapping his arms around it and climbing, Philo following. Atop the platform Tonka doubled over and heaved, the two men shivering. The wobbling bare knuckler finished coughing up water, said “Thanks, bro,” then stutter-stepped into squaring his feet and shook off the shiver. He raised his hands, showing his fists again. “You ready to go? Let’s finish this.”

  Philo, hands on knees, peer
ed up at him. “You crazy? No, I’m not ready to go. Look around you. Fight’s over.”

  “Don’t be a pussy, Navy boy. A little water don’t bother us Rangers,” Tonka said, coughing again. “You don’t finish, you lose. A technical knockout,” he pointed at the dock adjacent to the collapsed pier, “with witnesses.”

  Philo rebuffed him, turned away. “Not gonna happen, assho—”

  Tonka threw a sucker-punch combination to Philo’s chin from behind, then finished with a loaded overhand right that caught Philo’s cheek flush, dropping him.

  “You’re right, it’s not gonna happen,” Tonka shouted. “TKOs suck! Get the fuck up. My record’s going to thirty-five and oh, all knockouts, right—fucking—now, brotha.”

  Philo grimaced, pushed himself up from the pier’s concrete, onto a knee.

  Tonka bounced on his feet in front of him. “Comin’ at you, old man.”

  What Philo knew now: his opponent’s hardest punch couldn’t put him away. Philo stood, summoned himself, ready to deliver two hundred ten pounds of coiled rage with one heavy-handed punch that Tonka was going to walk into. Kinetic linking, leverage, electrolytes, neurons, and beast mode—all of it was a go. Brotha.

  He planted his right foot, pushed off against it, a full extension of his right leg, back, shoulder and arm muscles, energy moving from the platform up through his body and springing out his overhand right, its torqued release exploding against Tonka’s temple. The bare-knuckle punch stunned the advancing Tonka into a standing knockout, priming him for an uppercut to the chin that lifted him off his feet. Tonka thudded onto his back on the concrete pier and didn’t get up.

  Philo stood over his sixty-fifth KO, rubbing his knuckles. “Now you’re thirty-four and one, bitch. We SEALS like the water, too.”

  In the distance, sirens gathered.

  Philo scanned the river’s edge while haggard-faced survivors wandered through the smoke and the haze of what was left of the grain elevator. Wally Lanakai, disheveled and leaning heavily against one of his bodyguards, stood at the edge of the dock, a witness to the knockout. Philo searched other wandering faces, looking, calling for Patrick, getting no response.

  Behind him on the ladder, amid fits of coughing and gasping, a woman climbed out of the river: the unnamed mob cleaner who’d been on Wally’s arm during the fight. Climbing out behind her, and now silhouetted against the reflected Camden skyline, was Patrick. Patrick called to his boss. “Philo, sir! You’re safe!”

  “You’re bleeding, son,” he said, examining a gash over Patrick’s ear. “Hell, that looks bad.”

  “I’ve had worse, sir. I found Kaipo in the water, and I woke her up, sir.”

  Kaipo? Patrick was now on a first-name basis with his crime-cleaner-slash-airline person. “Glad to see you made it, miss. Let’s get off this pier and figure our way into some blankets.”

  “Mr. Trout,” she said. “Wait.”

  Her eyes drilled his. “Out there, in the water, your friend finding me floating, reviving me…” she said, shivering. “It was a weak moment. A person says things…”

  “A near death experience. Been there.”

  “Yes. But you both need to forget my name—need to forget I exist, forget what I do—soon as this is over. For your own good.”

  “Works for me,” Philo said, less than concerned about it, “but I’ll need the same courtesy. You, and Wally, and this guy”—he chin-pointed at Tonka, who was starting to come around from the knockout—“you guys need to distance yourselves from this, and me. Far as we’re all concerned, this was an industrial accident.”

  She eyed the collapsed grain silo, one half of it in the river, the other standing, the dust on land still spreading. “Tall order, Mr. Trout, but I get it. Tonight didn’t happen, for any of us.”

  Philo turned his attention to the end of the pier, where a hobbling Wally approached, still hanging onto one of his goons. “Yo, Wally!” Philo called. “Your guys bring any blankets?”

  A fireboat was underway upriver, paralleling the shoreline and closing in, its searchlight blazing. The beam swept the area of the collapsed pier and the gurgling black river next to it.

  “I’m so sorry, Hump,” Philo said to glistening tar-water still rippling from the silo collapse. “I love you, man.”

  36

  Philo and Patrick hustled, more like stumble-rushed, back to their unmarked Blessid Trauma van fast as their battered bodies allowed them.

  Philo stripped and toweled off, threw on clean jeans and a tee he’d retrieved from the van’s interior. Patrick was commando, shivering inside a heavy Tyvek top and pants, nothing else for him to change into, with a biohazard hood that hid a gauze pad on his bloodied head. Wally’s Range Rover roared up and fishtailed to a stop alongside, kicking up dirt and dust that swirled in the SUV’s taillights.

  “Stay in the van, Patrick, it’ll warm up. Be right back.”

  The SUV’s rear window powered down, exposing Wally in the back seat along with Kaipo, drying out in Wally’s overcoat. Tonka, up front and riding shotgun in name only, slept under icepacks to his temple and chin. On the horizon, headlights navigated the long, serpentine dirt trail leading to where they were, on the grain elevator’s doorstep.

  “Here’s the purse,” Wally said, tossing a gym bag out the window. It landed at Philo’s feet. “You want to count it, you do it on your own time. We’re leaving before the unwanted company arrives.”

  “What about the action from my bet?”

  “Heard about that. We’ll settle that up later. Gotta go.”

  A five-hundred-dollar bet, at seven-to-one odds. “Give the thirty-five hundred to Tonka. Tell him he needs to come back alive so he can spend it. He does that, maybe I give him a rematch.”

  The Range Rover spun out, and like the other shell-shocked fans in attendance, the SUV found one of the overland paths that spider-webbed away from the building rubble, slipping around law enforcement and the other cavalry-like vehicles arriving now.

  Far as he could tell, all the fight fans were gone, or at least their vehicles were. Philo wouldn’t run. He needed to deal with, needed to fix this apocalyptic fuck-up, one that he and his team had facilitated; needed to give it the right spin with the authorities. This was, after all, a building scheduled for implosion, and Blessid Trauma had been here preparing it for that outcome. Dealing with the collapse now made more sense; he had a reason to be here.

  Police cars, one fire truck, a fireboat, one EMT vehicle. The back half of the building was gone, the part that reached out over the river, leaving an open-dollhouse-like reveal into the building’s front half from the waterfront side. The explosion had stayed in the pit, the fire flashing up the open elevator shaft only once before it ran out of explosive material, nowhere near the same magnitude as the grain silo fire of ’56. When a fire marshal spotted him, Philo had already costumed himself head to toe in Tyvek, to sell his presence here better.

  The fireman chatted him up. “You witness this?” A cop fell in with the fireman, then another, all of them keenly interested in his account.

  “Philo Trout, Blessid Trauma Services, Captain. We were finishing up for the night, my employee and I, still getting the building ready. It comes down in a few days.” He spoke through his mask, not proud of the way he looked, split lips, cut forehead, and an eye that was closing up. “Seems that part of the building had its own timetable. Something in the basement exploded. I think one of my guys might have left a lantern down there that could have sparked up some of the old grain dust. Whatever it was, before we knew it, ba-boom, half the building was in the river.”

  “Anyone else here with you we need to go looking for?”

  “Only other person here is my employee, in the van, both of us on the job—”

  And Hump. What about Hump?

  “Wait. There was someone else, out on the dock.”

  He would hate himself for doing this, for not according Hump, a dear friend, the respect of identifying him.

&nbs
p; “No idea why the guy was here. Some midnight fishing for catfish maybe?”

  …I’m so sorry, Hump. So, so sorry…

  “Okay, thanks, we’ll look for him.” The captain shined a flashlight on him in his mask, checking his face out from different angles. “Hell, it looks like you got pretty banged up. You need medical attention, Mr. Trout. Let me get an EMT—”

  “I’m headed to the hospital already, to get myself checked out. You need anything else, follow up with me later. Gotta go.”

  Philo watched the emergency response from his rearview mirror, his van negotiating the pocked acreage as he calmly navigated his exit from the property. A news helicopter circled the site, shooting footage of the building, the rubble, the river. Things could have been worse, way worse, many more dead than just one.

  If—when—Hump’s body was found, they would investigate and draw their own conclusions. But the truth was there’d been no foul play, just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. An industrial accident; sure, why not. He’d need to add it to the list of gruesome mission outcomes and collateral damage he had to live with every day.

  But this list—it was too long. Lovable, harmless, ladies’ man Hump Fargas. This one would take a toll.

  The van entered traffic. “Fifteen minutes to Grace,” he said to Patrick.

  37

  The large interior vestibule of the former dental office could have used more potted plants, less Hawaiian muscle. Two sumo-size guards stood in their way. Philo dropped his sweatshirt hood to his shoulders so his battered, post-fight face would be visible, enough ID, he figured, along with his name, to gain his and Patrick’s admission. He figured right.

  “Heard what happened, Mr. Trout,” one of the big men at the entrance said. “You’re on the list, but your hardware isn’t. Raise your arms, the both of you.”