Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  But there were worse places to run to ground. When a city dies the jungle takes over, and the only reason jungle has a bad rap is people keep projecting all the uncivilized tendencies of the race on something that was pure at the beginning. The street was quiet between the mad rush to get to work and the madder one to get away from it, but not so dead you didn’t get a little buzz from the odd loose tappet or beep-beep-beep of a dump truck backing up to fill a pothole the size of Crater Lake with gravel and spit, and taking all week at it because the mayor was footing the bill and nobody had told him that paying by the hour was a bad idea on its face. No family photos on the desk to remind you of your obligations, no TV to distract you with stale sitcoms and sex-starved hospital dramas and paid programming that didn’t necessarily reflect the views of the station that nevertheless cashed the checks. No Internet, with its tired jokes and urban legends and Photoshopped porn. A brain factory, that room, pure and simple. What you did with the brain was your own damn business.

  I drew out the leaf from the desk and rested my foot on it. The leg had started to hurt. It was just a dull throb now—in earlier times it had taken the top off my head—but persistent. Breaking the Vicodin habit had been more expensive than physical therapy when my liquor bill went up. Not that I didn’t miss the little white pills.

  My cell rang. While I was groping for it the telephone on the desk rang. The LED on the cell showed the initials of the Detroit Police Department. I answered it and left the landline to voice mail.

  “What’s new?” Alderdyce asked.

  I told him about the surveillance video. There was no reason not to, as the Arson Squad would have a copy. He hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet.

  “Could be anything,” he said. “He stole the lighter, or Zorborón dropped it and he found it. Kids are magpies, snap up anything shiny.”

  “What do you know about the thunderbird?”

  “It’s just about the worst wine in a bottle. Offhand I can’t think of a gang that uses it for an insignia. The Zapatistas lack imagination: Theirs is a Z with a line through it. I’ll run it past the Youth Bureau.”

  “Any news on a bodyguard?”

  “We found Zorborón’s driver shacked up with his girlfriend in her apartment, across from Holy Cross Cemetery. They said neither of them has been out of the place since day before yesterday. Building super backed them up; he had to go up there three times to tell them to pipe down. They like to bat each other around and sing all the standards in between, at the top of their lungs. Not American Idol material, according to the supe. Place smelled like they smoked it with pot and scrubbed it down with gin. Cheez-It dust two inches deep on the floor; the Eucharist of munchies. Warren Zevon playing over and over on the stereo.”

  “‘Werewolves of London.’ Subtle folk, Latins.”

  “Say what?”

  “Something Zorborón said. Not pertinent. Sweet alibi for the driver.”

  “We tanked them both for D-and-D and domestic assault, and him for CCW. Needless to say neither of them will press on the assault, but when the piñata busts you scoop up what spills out. He lugged around the Tiger’s gun for him, but with his record he couldn’t get a permit in Tijuana if he showed up at the police station with a bushel of pesos. They might crack and they might not, but it wouldn’t be the first time a human shield called in sick just when he was most needed.”

  “That would let out Nesto. A sixteen-year-old from Lathrup Village doesn’t have the attention span to rig a conspiracy.”

  “The punk who pulls the trigger is almost never the one who wrote the playbook.”

  I looked to Wally’s ghost for advice, but my foot blocked my view of his hole. “Do you want it to be him?”

  “I have to work extra hard to fit him to it so I can eliminate him. The tag’s out. If he shows his face at home or anywhere in the area he’s downtown meat. Faster if he shows it in Mexicantown.”

  “Suspicion of homicide?”

  “Right now it’s just runaway; but I let the department know the relationship. That way it’s high priority, but if he tries to run, the pieces will stay in the holsters.”

  “You’re all heart, Gramps.”

  “Fuck you. I don’t know the kid from Charlie Brown.”

  “Then why am I even part of this?”

  “We got to create jobs, the president says.”

  I rubbed my eyes. They were cured in secondhand pot and strained from staring at videos. “We through here?”

  “I guess so. How’s expenses?”

  “I’m still working on my last carton. I’ll let you know when I need to tap the Swiss accounts.”

  “You’re going to milk this thing for all it’s worth, aren’t you?”

  “He’s just a kid, John. You used to be one, as I recall.”

  He blew air. There was smoke in it as surely as if I smelled it. “I wish to hell I could.”

  After we were done I lit a cigarette, but the exhaust made my eyes sting even worse and I screwed it out in the tray. I remembered to check voice mail on the desk phone. The message was from Chata. Nesto had called.

  * * *

  “What’d he say?”

  “‘Hello.’”

  “That was polite of him. What else?”

  “Nothing. I should’ve been more clear. I didn’t actually speak to him. Jerry called from work, and when I hung up I found out Nesto had left a message because the line was busy.”

  I let out a plume of smoke in a weary sigh. It was getting to be possible to hear from everyone in the civilized world without ever establishing direct contact. I’d had to call twice before she answered; she’d been on the line with Gerald, her husband. “Are you sure it was Nesto?”

  “I know my brother’s voice. He started to leave a message, then changed his mind.”

  “Maybe he was interrupted.”

  “I don’t think so. I heard background noises for a couple of seconds, then he hung up. He must’ve been trying to make up his mind whether to say anything more.”

  “What kind of noises?”

  “I’m not sure. A train, I think; I heard that horn that sounds like a train whistle. Some other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Noises. Nothing human. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

  “You didn’t erase it?”

  “I’m not a fool.”

  “I didn’t say you were. Don’t take everything as an insult. Did you tell Jerry what’s going on?”

  “I didn’t get the chance. He said he’d be working late; some kind of emergency at the bus office. He was in a hurry, so I didn’t think it was the—”

  “Can you hang around until I get there?”

  “Of course. I haven’t budged from the house since I found out he’d skipped school. I have a cell, but—”

  “I don’t trust them either. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

  It was a little longer than that. I slid over to make room for an EMS unit with all its equipment going and got hung up on I-96 behind a procession of gawkers crawling past an overturned semi. After that, more construction. At the end of the ramp I ignored the NO TURN ON RIGHT sign. Right away I passed two squad cars stopped in a Park-and-Ride, but the drivers were too busy talking to each other to notice. I took advantage of the situation to pour on the coal. In the driveway I was out of the car in time to eat my own dust drifting from my rear wheels.

  I don’t know what the hurry was, except there was a tag out on Nesto; cops are people and I don’t entirely trust every gun to stay in its holster when a citizen fails to heed the voice of authority.

  She led me into the living room with Jesus wearing His thorn hat. Today she had on a thin pale blue sweater and a pair of pleated slacks, loafers on her feet. I hoped, with no agenda connected, that she wouldn’t fall for the fitness craze and lose those extra pounds. There is a narrow line between thin and haggard. The message was on voice mail. I stood in the center of the carpet and held a slim cordless receiver to
my ear while she worked the buttons.

  There was a little hissing silence before he said, “Hello,” then the receiver on his end made fumbling noises. It was an adolescent voice, shallow and uncertain. I heard the asthmatic whistle of the Amtrak and a growling that sounded like the lion house at the Detroit Zoo when the keepers were twenty minutes behind feeding time. It wasn’t the zoo; the trains don’t pass that close.

  I had her play it again, then once more while I separated all the ambient noises. They have computers to do that at l300, but you can become too dependent on technology if you have constant access to it. That made me the most independent detective in the 3l3 area code.

  “The Michigan Central Depot.” I replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “They don’t stop there anymore, but the tracks are still there and the trains have to use them. They blow the horn out of respect. It could be a crossing, but that roaring sound cinches it. There’s a parking garage across the street; that’s the noise, cars going up and down the ramp. What came up on caller ID?”

  “‘Out of Area,’ I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be. Most pay phones come up that way. I know where he called from.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve only had the cell a little while. Before that I memorized all the places in the area where you could make a call from a public phone. The Wayne County Historical Commission ought to put this one on its list before AT&T shuts it down.”

  “Surely you won’t find him still there.”

  “Every missing-persons case needs a place to start.” Actually I had a specific idea, but nothing’s to be gained by scaring a client out of her wits.

  TEN

  The Pacman dozers and earthmovers that are eating up the cityscape and dropping rubble haven’t gotten to the Michigan Central Depot yet, but it’s on the list. For a while the police department had considered moving from the elegant Deco rot of l300, a 1922 construction, into the decaying pile at Fourteenth and Vernor, erected in l9l3; but then it had taken a deep breath and abandoned that plan in favor of parting out its divisions into old precinct buildings. That placed them outside the chief’s supervision. The department was returning to its feudal origins, with each squad self-contained and answering to no one but the inspector on the premises.

  The depot’s an echoing hangar built of brick and girders and native granite, with stained-glass windows and most of the other doodads of Edwardian architecture prominently in place. Pigeons, sparrows, and jays roost in the rafters, using nests built by earlier generations and interrupting their songs of truculence to listen to the hooting of Amtrak whistles as the cars chuckle past; their splatter had formed stalactites under the roof and stalagmites on the floor at the base of the walls. It’s a long haul down Vernor from the part of Mexicantown where he’d been hanging out, almost in the heart of Corktown, where the migration had begun; but a kid like Ernesto Pasada, who didn’t know the neighborhood so well, would be likely to run in a straight line rather than risk getting lost in a zigzag.

  That was the working theory. The train sounds and automobile noises on Chata’s voice mail bore it out, but only on a contingency basis. Cars turned into the parking garage entrance through the Fourteenth Street entrance, paused to take their tickets, and climbed the spiraling ramp to the higher levels, the sound of their motors thundering off reinforced concrete and spilling out the open sides louder than they had been going in. I found a spot near the roof and rode down in an elevator that smelled like an overheated radiator and wheezed and rattled like loose particles in an old lung.

  A pay phone stood across from the garage on a post with a metal cowl that protected the instrument while leaving the user to the mercy of our weather. No one was using it. I laid a hand on the receiver for a few seconds, trolling for psychic vibes left behind by Nesto when he’d called his sister. But the place was fished out. Or just possibly I’m not psychic.

  The place I’d thought of when I figured out where he’d called from was an old frame apartment building that belonged to no particular school of architecture. Some opportunistic realtor had slapped it together in l942 to shelter some of the horde of crackers, Tarheels, Kentucks, and Mississippi blacks who had swarmed north to build ships and planes and tanks to hammer Europe and the South Pacific. More lately it had been a hippie commune and a hotel for transients, with a combination meth lab and crack emporium overlapping that and its current incarnation. It had actually come up in the world, if you considered the cockfight trade less harmful than dope. The cops had to have known what was going on there, but likely had left it for seed so they knew where to go when it came time to arrest someone for questioning. The stink came out the front door and through the broken windows and squatted in the middle of the block like a broken-down honey wagon.

  On the way there I’d stopped at a CVS and hit the expense account for a jar of Vicks. In the car I’d smeared a handkerchief with some of the contents and just before I went inside I ringed my nostrils with the strong eucalyptus mixture. It burned the membranes, but it beat what came out from under the tail feathers of chickens.

  In the residency days a shoebox-size foyer had contained a counter where the clerk collected and gave out the keys, sorted mail into cubbyholes, misdirected the police, and escorted junkies into the street. The desk was gone and so were the interior partitions, making room for steel utility shelves on all sides, stacked with crate-size cages sided with chicken wire, each containing a haughty-looking rooster or a fat brood hen pecking lice from its feathers and scratching at the floor of its cell. The stench of droppings inserted a lever under my stomach and tried to roll it over. I wasn’t sure the Vicks could hold it off for long. I heard clucking and avian sneezing. The neighbors said when the sun came up or a car swept around the corner at night raking the place with its lights, the crowing could be heard clear to the river.

  The place was the champion cock capital of the Midwest. All the best scrappers were bred there, the Seabiscuits of fighting fowl, and if it looked sordid at first glance—it certainly smelled that way—the animals were well fed, the cages cleaned regularly, and all their medical needs attended to by a veterinarian in the breeders’ employ. Ventilation fans whirred in all the windows, a good circulating system kept the residents warm, and a crew scrubbed the floors with industrial-strength disinfectant on a regular basis. The organic odor belonged to generations of evacuated bird colons. It went clear down to bedrock.

  It all had nothing to do with me. I’d seen a cockfight and didn’t want to see another, but there are people who feel the same way about prizefights and baseball. Whether the birds died in combat or had their beaks blunted and their bodies pumped full of growth hormones and their heads and feet chopped off and the rest sold in supermarkets was probably all the same to someone.

  The keeper of the zoo stood up from a metal folding chair and came over, legs bent, feet pointing sideways, back rounded in a permanent stoop. His hair hung in black strings to his collar and on either side of his forehead. A gold tooth winked in an idiot’s smile. He carried a shotgun nearly as short as a pistol, his finger curled around the trigger and his other hand holding the barrels steady. He stopped well inside range; I’d stopped the moment the weapon made its appearance. A scattergun sawed off that far back would open me up like a piñata.

  “Cuidado, amigo,” I said. “Some of the shot might hit the merchandise.”

  I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten through in either language. The whites of his eyes between creased lids were startling against the deep red-brown skin. It went like hell with his outfit: pink polyester shirt with pearl snaps, stiff blue jeans, and lizard boots with pointed toes. In certain nameless villages well below the border, that was formal attire. He might have been a full-blooded Yaqui, unversed in any lingo not used in the mines.

  Boards squeaked under the linoleum behind me. I didn’t want to turn away from the shotgun, pointless caution; did I care to see what a
charge of buckshot looked like as it cut me in half? Anyway I hesitated long enough for someone to yank my right arm behind my back and up between my shoulder blades by the wrist and prick the side of my neck under my left ear with a point that broke the skin on contact. Blood raced down inside my collar.

  “Any more guns, son?” asked a voice in my ear; a high-pitched twang. He might have been left over from the northern exodus.

  He had me pressed up against him and would have felt the revolver behind my hip. “Just the one, Dad.”

  He withdrew the knife. The blade folded back into the handle with a click and in another second I was lighter by a pound and a half. That piece was harder to hold onto than a good pair of sunglasses. He let go of my arm and stepped back. I unbent it and shook circulation back into my fingers. He didn’t tell me to stay still, so I took a step that would keep them both in my sight and turned. He was sixty, lean and rangy in a green work shirt tucked into an old pair of suit pants held up with dingy gray suspenders. His face was a skull with the skin sprayed on, with wattles on his neck that made him look as if whatever flesh the face had had once had melted. There was a scabrous patch on his left temple where the skin had been gouged out as with a router. A man with skin burned as brown as a brogan was a prime candidate for a melanoma. He was bald, but he’d solved that problem by smearing fifteen or sixteen white hairs across the scalp and tying them around his left ear. He’d pocketed his knife and was admiring the stainless steel Smith & Wesson in his left hand.

  “Nice,” he said. “I like the four-inch barrel better.”

  “You wouldn’t if you had to carry it around all day. I’m going for my wallet.”

  “Turn a little that way before you do. I don’t want to take a chance on Django missing you with some pellets and hitting livestock.”

  “Django?”

  “What he calls himself, if I make it out right. He watches the birds, I watch him, make sure he don’t sacrifice any of ’em to some one-eyed jasper in spic-injun heaven.”