by Rex Burns
“I just hope that son of a bitch is,” said Bunch. “I just hope he reaches for a weapon.”
CHAPTER 9
THE ADVANTAGE CORPORATION records had noted that Visser lived out near Commerce City in the 3500 block of Beekman Place. It was a small frame house set back in a littered yard with a high wire fence and a large sign warning people to beware of the dog. They cruised past the darkened windows in a row of equally small houses and turned to make a slow loop around the block. No alley led behind the homes. Where Beekman came to an end, a crumbling brick warehouse looked black and vacant. A railroad track—rusty from disuse—led off toward the industrial sites just beyond the city boundary.
“What do you want to do about the dog?” asked Devlin.
Bunch rustled in the gym bag behind his seat and then hefted a can of dog spray which he gave to Kirk and a snare of piano wire. It was rigged through two wooden blocks to make a running loop. “We do what we have to.”
The name stenciled on the rusty mailbox nailed to the top of a fence post said “E. L. Visser.” Kirk squirted WD-40 on the hinges and then gently lifted the metal catch to swing the faintly creaking gate. They skirted the low front porch, with its single board step leading to the screened door. Silently, they picked their way along the building’s side. Bunch pointed to a tricycle and a scatter of digging toys that marked a kid’s favorite corner in the sandy yard. That was something they hadn’t counted on: Visser with kids.
They eased past the rear corner and toward the back porch, a screened addition tacked onto the house. Bunch was testing the lock on the door when the skitter of clawed feet and an angry, deep growl pulled Kirk around. A charging police dog, its teeth a ragged whiteness, rushed out of the dark, eyes green with the hunger to kill.
“Bunch!”
“Son-of-a-bitching dogs!”
Devlin sprayed the cayenne mixture into the lunging mouth and eyes and dived aside. The dog coughed a startled bark and whipped around to slash blindly toward Kirk’s throat. Bunch’s hands were a blurred motion and the dog, blinking and slinging saliva and straining for Kirk, was yanked straight in midair. As splayed feet scrabbled in the dirt its weight and drive tightened the piano wire around its throat. The flailing tongue whipped in agony against the bulging eyes. Bunch lifted the kicking dog off the ground again. It twisted and flapped from side to side like a broken fish. Its frenzy was all the more intense for the muffled, strangled noise it made while it died. When the animal finally hung motionless, Bunch eased it down, then slipped the blood-wet piano wire through the blocks and wiped it on the dog’s coat. Then he dragged a hand along his damp forehead. “God, I hate dogs. Son of a bitch must weigh over a hundred pounds. Hear anything?”
Devlin stepped over the dog and leaned an ear toward the dark house. Silence. From somewhere in the tangle of streets to the south came the ringing whine of heavy tires on the elevated spans of I1-70. Beyond that, a train gave a long, sad moan as it headed out of Denver and into the black prairies. “It’s quiet.” He slipped a knife blade under the latch on the screen door and eased it off. The porch boards groaned beneath their feet, and the main door clicked loudly as Bunch slipped a thumb lock with a plastic card. He opened it with a slow creak.
They stepped into a kitchen warm with a mixture of odors: the rancid tinge of ill-concealed garbage, a chemical odor from the box of soap sitting open by the sink, the pungent tang of a poorly ventilated water heater in the tiny bathroom just off the kitchen.
The rooms were built in a row. It was the kind of arrangement Devlin’s uncle Wyn called a shotgun house. The room next to the kitchen was crowded with a pair of bunk beds and a crib. Adenoidal breathing came from the small shadows humped under light blankets and half visible in the thin glow of a night- light. The next room held two sleeping forms in a double bed. Beyond could be seen the living room with its television set and litter of toys across the carpet. The largest sleeping form had straight blond hair that tangled on the pillow and across her gapped mouth. The other was Visser. His mouth, too, was open in loud, sour breathing. The steady noise turned into a muffled snort under Bunch’s wide palm.
Bunch held the long-barreled pistol so that light from the window caught it. Visser’s eyes widened over the side of Bunch’s hand. His body, starting in surprise, froze. Devlin motioned for the man to keep quiet and to get up. Bunch followed Visser’s careful movements with the revolver jammed into the flesh under his chin. Pinched, white skin rolled over the barrel’s muzzle. They went out the way they came in, past the sleeping children and the smelly kitchen and into the icy air of the silent backyard. Visser, in his underwear, shivered.
“You see that?” Bunch whispered.
Visser stared at the dark form of the dog and then made a little jerk against Kirk’s hand.
“One fucking sound out of you and we kill you and your ugly kids and fat wife like we killed your dog.” Bunch wagged the wire and blocks. “Hear me?”
The man’s head jerked yes.
Bracing him between them, they half- carried Visser around to the Bronco. Bunch sat holding the revolver against Visser’s ribs while Devlin drove.
“What you guys want?”
“We found the kid,” said Bunch.
“What kid? What’s that mean?”
“The kid you people tortured and killed.”
“Killed? Man, I never killed nobody! I never even heard about nobody being killed!”
“Right,” said Kirk.
“I mean that, man! I don’t know what you people are talking about. I was shooting pool all goddamn night. A lot of people seen me, man—I can prove it!”
Bunch clicked the hammer back on the revolver. It made an oily, efficient sound. “We’re not cops, Visser. We don’t have to worry about due process. Your alibi don’t mean shit to us, so shut the fuck up.”
The streets seemed a bit grayer with the thinning of night, and the widely spaced streetlights were growing feeble. Devlin turned onto Brighton Road and then off again at a dirt track. It followed a chain-link fence around sprawling and ill-lit acres that held piles of heavy equipment, rusty oil rigging, stacks of wire cables and wooden spools. Then it bounced toward the fringe of weeds and scrub that marked the banks of the South Platte. Here the forgotten river was a shallow expanse oily with waste and clots of yellowing chemical spume that floated on the almost stagnant water.
“You guys listen—whatever happened, I didn’t have nothing to do with it!”
“With what, Eddie?”
“You know. What you told me about. The kid.”
Kirk halted the truck beside the fence. A tall stack of steel construction frames hid them from the view of distant I-270. An early jet whistled in from the north as it glided toward Stapleton Airport. In the south against the lightening sky, a tall plume of dark steam and smoke rose from the Public Service generating plant. The nearby Conoco refinery made the cold air smell thick and heavy with its flaring burn-off.
“You hear me? I don’t know nothing about it!”
Bunch gestured for the man to get out.
“No! I don’t want to!”
Devlin grabbed him by the nape and hauled him writhing from the Bronco. Shaking too hard to support him, his legs collapsed against the vehicle. He slid down until his bony knees pressed against his chest, and his hands splayed outward to hold off the two men who leaned over him.
Bunch took the wooden blocks from his truck and ran the loop of piano wire through the holes. It made a high-pitched, sizzling noise.
“Uh hunh—no … .”
Bunch yanked Visser’s head back. Dropping the wire around his neck, he cinched the blocks, and the wire bit into flesh. Visser made strangling sounds and dug his fingernails at the wire as his face turned blue. Then Bunch slacked the blocks. He drove a fist into the gagging man’s stomach. Visser doubled over to vomit and scrabble in the dirt in a mindless effort to crawl under the truck’s high running board. Bunch again yanked the wire taut, and planted a shoe on Visser’s bac
k. “You keep wiggling, you sorry son of a bitch, I’ll slice your head off just like that fucking dog.”
Kirk dragged him from beneath the aluminum running board, with its little piles of gravel and dust collected in the corners. “Maybe I should break his knees so he’ll stay put.”
“No… . Don’t… .”
They leaned against the vehicle and watched Visser slowly stop retching and shuddering.
“I’m puking blood… . You busted something inside—I’m puking blood!”
“Enjoy it while you can, Eddie,” said Kirk. “You’re going to hurt a lot more.”
“No!”
“Oh, yeah.” Bunch smiled.
“But I tell you what. We won’t start until you finish talking. How’s that for Christian charity?”
“What you want to know? Goddamn—what you want to know?”
“Who did it.”
Eddie named Scotty Martin and someone called Tony. Martin had told them that Tony was from out of town—back east somewhere. “I never saw him before the other night when I met with you guys. He come in just for that meeting. I swear I don’t know nothing about him. That was the first time I ever saw him, honest to God. Scotty, he’s the guy set all this up, I swear! I don’t even know that much about it, man. Scotty asked me if I wanted to help out—we’re all on the same shift in the warehouse, so we all had to be in it. That’s all I know about anything, I swear!” He told why Martin and Tony killed Chris. “They wanted to keep you people out of the factory. Nobody brings no shit in, you know?”
“Why?”
Eddie sighed and looked around at the gray dirt of the road, the chain-link fence with its scrolled crest of gleaming razor wire, the empty tangle of weeds and brush at the riverbank. The only humans in sight were the two big men who stared at him as if he were something on a shoe to be wiped away. “We got a thing going there. I really don’t know that much about it. All I know is, every now and then Scotty says there’s a shipment, and me and Johnny Atencio help him move the stuff.”
It took a while. Every time Eddie slowed down, Bunch tapped the piano wire against his neck. That made the words come again. Once or twice each month, Martin, Atencio, and Visser would gather in a corner of the warehouse to unpack a shipping canister and find several kilos of cocaine hidden in the Styrofoam bracing around a molded plastic unit. Visser had no idea how Martin knew which container held the shipment, and he wasn’t about to ask. “It’s not my business to know, man. Me and Johnny, we’re just the mules in this, you know?” They took their shares and stored the rest in their lockers for a few days. “Scotty’s got a touch in with the security people—some body tips him if there’s going to be a locker shakedown. If there is, we take the stuff out. Take it to one of these storage rentals. It gets broken down into smaller wraps—usually four, sometimes five or six. Scotty tells us how many it’s supposed to be. But I don’t know who tells him.”
“What do you do with it?”
“Ship it out in some other canisters. Scotty takes care of that. He knows what canisters are going where. He tapes the load into the Styrofoam packing and off it goes.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know, man. Really. Scotty’s the only one who knows. It goes to the company’s wholesale outlets, but which ones I don’t know.”
“You make a good piece of change off this?” Bunch asked.
“We get a cut. When a shipment comes in, Scotty divvies it up and we take ours before we repack it. But no selling in the factory, Scotty says. We got our own customers away from the factory. That’s the rule. He don’t want management to think they got to run searches for dope all the time. You know: lockers, cars, whatever… . That’s why he got so uptight when he heard about you people wanting to sell in the plant. That, and it’s his territory.”
“His and Tony’s?”
“Yeah. I guess. It’s a big operation, you know? But I swear to God—I swear on my mother’s soul—I didn’t know what Scotty and Tony were going to do to that kid. He said him and Tony was going to ask him about you people. That’s all he told me. He didn’t even want me to come along. Just him and this guy Tony.”
Visser told them a little more about Martin—where the man lived, where he liked to drink, who he hung out with. “We don’t pal around a lot, you know? Me and Johnny are on the same crew, so he had to take us in. You can’t handle them canisters by yourself, you know?”
“You never meet outside the plant?”
“Just a drink now and then to unwind. Scotty, he don’t let people get close to him.” He added, “And if we have to take stuff out to a storage locker.”
“Where’s this Tony from?”
“I told you—back east somewhere. That’s all I know. I swear. I only saw him a couple times.”
“When?”
“At the meet with you guys. He drove. And … .” He chewed his lip.
“When?”
“Day before yesterday. He wanted me to talk to the kid.”
“To set him up.”
“I didn’t know what they were going to do!”
“What about Porter?” Devlin asked.
“Who?”
“Porter—the fork lift operator. Where does he fit in?”
“Christ, I don’t know. I never heard of the guy.”
“He’s selling pot.”
“A pothead? Scotty wouldn’t bring in a guy like that. Me and Johnny, we don’t use. That was part of the arrangement— no snorting on the job. Hell, we don’t even deal the streets, you know? We sell our stuff through a couple middlemen. Scotty told us to do it that way.”
“You’ve never heard of Porter?”
“No. I swear. We kind of keep to ourselves—if he ain’t part of the warehouse crew, I don’t know him.”
Visser crouched against the running board with his arms wrapped tightly around his shivering, naked legs. He looked up at the two men. The red glare of the dawning sun brought a palpable warmth to the air but Visser didn’t feel it. “Man, I told it all. You know everything I know.”
“Then I guess it’s time,” said Bunch.
“Aw, man, don’t do it. Please don’t do it.”
“How fast can you pack your ass out of town and stay out?” Devlin asked.
“Now, man. I mean right now.”
“It’s a mistake, Dev. We should wad this little fucker up and flush him.”
“Don’t do it, man. I can go. Nothing to keep me here, man.”
They loaded him up and Devlin drove to a telephone at the corner of a closed 7-Eleven. Visser stood in the phone hood, his pale underwear streaked with dirt and bagging against the puckered flesh of his blue thighs. He talked to his wife. “I don’t care what you got to leave behind—fuck the house! It ain’t ours anyway. We’re getting out, hear me? Now! Pack everything in the goddamn car and get up here. Now! We’re going and we’re gonna keep going!” He hung up and stared at Devlin, eyes wide and round above the pinched chill of his cheeks. “Fucking women! Want to know everything before they’ll do anything.”
“Dev, this son of a bitch is going to drop a dime on us as soon as he gets out of town. I think we ought to box him up.”
“No, man—I won’t do that. I promise. I been thinking of quitting anyway. Really! I got a stash saved up and I don’t owe Scotty nothing. I won’t do that—I swear!”
“There’s only one way to make sure he won’t, Dev.” Bunch patted the bulge of the Python’s barrel inside his jacket. “Nobody’s around to see it. He’d be just another turd lying in the gutter.”
“Hey, my wife and kids … .”
“You’re not a good influence, Eddie,” said Kirk. “They might be better off without you. Ever think of that?”
“Come on, guys—I swear!”
“We need insurance,” said Bunch. “The best insurance is to waste this little fucker.”
“Guys … .”
Devlin scratched around in the Bronco’s glove box for a pen and paper. “You write down what you t
old us about Tony and Scotty.”
“A statement for the cops?”
“No. For us to give to Martin if we find out you called him.”
“I said I wouldn’t!”
“Yeah. Honest Abe Visser. Write.”
He did, in a sprawling, shaky hand. He signed and dated it where Devlin told him to.
Kirk leaned over the man and gazed deep into the staring black of his pupils. “We can find you, Eddie. Anywhere you run, we can find you if we have to. And so can Tony. Understand?”
He nodded. A white, powdery tongue dragged across blue lips.
They left the man in his underwear, crouched against the wall of the closed grocery store and shifting from foot to foot with nervousness and cold.
Bunch twisted back around on the passenger seat after watching the figure disappear behind them. “He’s going to call Martin. I know how shit like that thinks—he’s going to call to get even with us and then haul ass out of town.”
Devlin tapped the statement folded in his pocket. “He might not. Besides, what can he tell Martin that Chris didn’t?”
“You think Newman spilled?”
“I would have. Wouldn’t you?”
Bunch thought that over. “Probably.” He wiped the Python down with a lightly oiled rag and began dropping large cartridges into the empty chambers. “I could have blown that shithead away so easy. Let’s go find Martin.”
“Suppose we do. What then?”
“We shoot the son of a bitch.”
Devlin felt that way too. Martin had cut off not only Newman’s hands but any claim to humanity as well. But without delving into the philosophical niceties of lynch law or the ironies of duty as a curb to justice, he reminded Bunch that they had taken money from the Advantage Corporation.
“You’re telling me we solve the dope case before we step on Martin?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s bullshit, is what that is. Next you’ll tell me that’s what Chris would have wanted. And then tell me to win this one for the Gipper.”
“I think the only thing Chris wanted was to be out of pain. And maybe to live.”
