Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  I looked at the beige rotary phone on the floor in a corner, patently an illegal hookup—mobiles and cordlesses were out in that racket, with any scanner capable of picking up a conversation over the air—but I let what prints might be on it stay where they were and used my cell. It might have been the same 911 dispatcher I got before, but this time I didn’t play with her. I knew, when the location was reported, who would respond.

  TWELVE

  “Seventy by the end of the week, the weather wizards say.” John Alderdyce took a deep drag and blew smoke at the windshield. It flattened out against the glass and drifted toward the open window on my side of the car. “Snow Monday. Believe it?”

  “Where do we live?” I sat with one hand resting on the wheel. I wasn’t smoking. I’d burned a quarter of a pack answering questions for the first cops on the scene and my throat felt like an uncured hide. When he’d asked to bum a butt I’d tossed the rest of it into his lap.

  “I hate it. Weather sucks, economy sucks, my basement’s got a crack in it I can stick my thumb in. I need a new roof before next winter. My third.”

  “I know a guy who’ll do it for five percent above cost, if he makes parole next month.”

  He wasn’t listening. “I’ve got my thirty in and change. My wife keeps talking about Miami Beach, but I say Phoenix, where it’s dry. That salt air’s hell on chrome. I’ve got my eye on a ’72 Vette with ninety-two thousand on the odometer, add ten thousand while it was disconnected. My third midlife crisis in five years.”

  “I wish you’d stick around. I wouldn’t know how to begin breaking in this new breed.”

  “Learn to text.”

  “I’m not kidding. I just got Mary Ann Thaler broke in to take your place and then she went over to the U.S. Marshals.”

  “If you miss her that much, go stick your nose in something federal. Only tell me when you do: I wouldn’t want to miss that. What made you think the kid would pick this place to fort up?”

  We were sitting in my Cutlass where I’d parked it outside the rooster rookery, Alderdyce in the front passenger’s seat with it slid all the way back and tilted, the back of his head against the headrest and his ankles in brown-and-yellow argyles crossed on the dash. Inside, the science guys were scraping up skin cells and playing with spatter.

  “Leap of faith,” I said. “He called from that phone and there’s no place to hide in the train station.”

  “Number came up?”

  “Nope. Plain old-fashioned detective work. The rest was theory.”

  “Thin.”

  “Threads always are.”

  “Hillbilly’s name is Roscoe, no shit, Berdoo. Ypsilanti native, parents from Kentucky, both deceased. Inherited his old man’s job at Rouge until they replaced him with R2-D2. Rode the high country after that. In his blood; all those Ypsituckians claim lineage back to the original Sons of the Whiskey Rebellion. Did ten years in Jackson for Robbery Armed, the whole deal because he got caught sodomizing an inmate without mutual consent.”

  “He didn’t strike me as the type.”

  “They don’t all turn out for Liza Minelli onstage. Anyway, it’s a power play in stir, not a life choice. No sex crimes of a similar nature on his record outside the House of Doors.”

  “How long was he out?”

  “Ten months. That’s almost six years in people years. His p.o. had him down as shoveling chicken shit on eighty acres outside Dundee. As these dodges go that was almost honest.

  “Used a knife in the robbery,” he went on. “Some penny-dreadful stuff apart from that, B-and-E, shoplifting—pint of Crown Royal under his coat at a Costco—solicitation; he was a bouncer in a cockshop on Michigan Avenue, got six months in County for pulling a knife on a john who was dumb enough to file a complaint. That divorce is still dragging through the courts. I don’t think he ever killed anyone before this, but some of his friends did, so he was a fixture at the show-up every time a corpse needed an explanation.”

  “It’s the Berdoo part I have trouble buying. Sounds like a bad haircut.” I watched a uniform sneaking a smoke outside the door of the old hotel: three drags and then he went back inside. “I can’t say much for his taste in liquor, but that’s no reason to blast him into two body bags. You think he killed the Indian?”

  “You don’t?”

  The sun was glowing hunter orange beyond Dearborn. Daylight Savings Time hadn’t kicked in. The subject wasn’t ripe yet, apparently. I changed it. “What about Django?”

  “Don’t know him. My guess is after we run him through the computer downtown and the one up in Lansing and then the FBI and Home Security and INS do the same we’ll be just as well informed as we are now. He’s got ILLEGAL stamped on his forehead. Undocumented aliens, they call ’em now.” The smell of burning rubber filled the car. He made a face and snapped the scorched filter out the window on his side. “If Berdoo killed this Django, he borrowed the shotgun, used it on himself, and stretched out on the floor with the knife tidy in his hand. You know goddamn well he’d’ve dropped it when the blast took him off his feet.”

  “If he didn’t, it would be because his hand spasmed into a fist. The M.E. would’ve had to break his fingers to get it loose. So someone put it there. How do you think it went down really?”

  “Right now I’m more interested in who put it down and how whoever it was made a couple or three dozen prime fighting cocks disappear while you were watching the front door.”

  “The second part’s easy. I wasn’t watching the back because I didn’t care about the birds. I do now, because whoever took them killed Berdoo and Django or both—Zorboron too, probably—and Nesto might be a witness to Zorboron. That makes him a liability to someone.”

  “I like the big mechanic at the garage for Zorborón. Pedro Mendoza’s the name. He didn’t have to take an alias because Mexico exports more Pedro Mendozas than corn tortillas. He’s wanted in Sonora for killing two rurales in a firefight over a load of Colombian; he had it, the cops wanted it. Not for evidence. Country’s a cesspool. The pricks in Narcotics like him for every kilo that starts out in Juarez and winds up in Grosse Pointe. He’s had more fingers up his ass than Kermit the Frog.”

  “What about the twins?” I remembered the man on the air wrench and his look-alike pounding on a driveshaft.

  “Juan and José Pino, of the Guadalajara Pinos. No record, criminal or Immigration. Autistic, the both of them; we got that from another employee who’s off today, his alibi checks. Give ’em time, he said, they’ll turn a Volvo into a Maserati, but if you send ’em out for the paper they’ll come back with a handful of magic beans. When we know who treated them, if anyone did, we’ll get a court order for their medical records. Savants have superhuman powers of concentration. When they say they didn’t see or hear anything beyond what they were doing inside the garage, and if their history checks out, I believe it.”

  “Find the gun?”

  He shook his head without lifting it from the back of the seat. “Thirty-two, Ballistics says, jacketed round. If he heaved it, we’ll find it, and if we don’t, we’ll collect it when whoever did uses it and we find him, and if we don’t, we’ll nail Mendoza without it.”

  “Why’d he kill the Tiger?”

  “Zorborón played around with the dope racket for a while, didn’t like it and got out. Narcs tossed the garage and his house a couple of times, came up empty. DEA had a go, so far as their attention span stretches. Zip. He was happy with his garage and his roosters. Mendoza wasn’t, but his boss wouldn’t let him quit and throw in with the Maldados or the Zapatistas. Means, motive, opportunity. The trifecta.”

  “Mendoza gave you all that?”

  “Mendoza gave us nada. That’s the theory. All we need now’s the facts to support it.”

  “You’ve got it backwards.”

  “It’s Mexicantown. Black’s white, Pat Boone’s Elvis. You throw away the book the minute you cross the border.”

  “Thin.”

  “This conversation’s going
in a circle.” He sat up, bringing the seat up with him, grabbed the door handle. “Oh, I forgot to say we Googled that thunderbird symbol Zorboron wore, the same one the firebug who touched off his garage had on his lighter. It’s Mayan, old as the temples of Yucatan. Sidebar: Emiliano Zapata adopted it as his personal totem when he rose up against Porfirio Díaz in l9l5. The Zapatistas down there still use it, and they protect the copyright. If anyone who isn’t bona fide—meaning you fought the government in Mexico City twenty years ago—if he’s caught with it on his hide or on something he carries around, it’s an instant death sentence.”

  “What about the ones who call themselves Zapatistas up here?”

  “Especially them, and they don’t mess with it. That’s why they use a Z with a bar through it.”

  “It makes no sense a genuine Zapatista would target Zorborón. He was the real deal.”

  “That’s why we can rule it out. The firebug knew he was on camera; why else would he make sure it never got a good angle at his face? He made sure it got a shot of the lighter, in a hand with a glove on it to hide a tattoo.”

  “There are other reasons to wear gloves this time of year.”

  He let that pass. “He wasn’t built anything like Mendoza, so Mendoza fixed it up with him to make it look like the Old Country Zaps had fallen out with Zorborón. Probably he stole the lighter from the Tiger himself. He was planning the murder that far back.”

  “Yeah, he looks like a deep plotter.”

  “You want a perfect case, watch TV.”

  “So who’s the bug?”

  “Well, if my hunch checks and he wasn’t wearing that glove to keep his lily-white hands from chapping, he’s a Maldado. None of the other gangs in the city wears a tattoo there. We knew they’d make their move against the old guard sooner or later; it’s what these walking scrotums do. And he doesn’t not look like Nesto.”

  “Your flesh and blood.”

  “Chata’s. But if he comes forth and we don’t have to spend the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars in this economy to drag his narrow butt up Beaubien, he’ll get the same break we give all the other punk scum who spare us gasoline.”

  He opened the door and got out.

  * * *

  I sat there until dusk chased the sun into its hole and the air began to turn frigid; we were headed well below forty for the ninetieth night in a row. I wasn’t counting single digits. Then I cranked up both windows and stepped out to stretch my legs, limping a little on the bad one until the circulation found its way as far as the knee.

  The neighborhood was settling back into its mulch of boredom. The yellow tape had provided color for a while, but the novelty had worn off. The coroner’s van had gone with what was left of Django and Roscoe Berdoo—a country song ought to be written with those names tucked into it—but the resurrectionists were still busy inside the building and would be until the ASPCA showed up to collect the fowl.

  The TV satellite trucks pulled out, and the exodus was on. A sergeant with the Early Response Team hung up his mike and drove off. The spectators who always come to rest against the drift fence of police barricades began to lose interest. As I wandered, life tingling with heat in my femoral artery, the diehards turned away one by one and committed themselves to the current.

  A lot had happened in a short time. Thirty-four hours ago the biggest thing on my mind was a mouse in my office wall.

  The only positive note was what Alderdyce had said about someone framing the original Zapatistas for the arson at the garage. The originals were hardcore and no good news locally if they were moving that far north. On the other hand, if the Maldados were crowding in on the Tiger’s turf, the homegrown Zaps wouldn’t sit on their haunches and risk losing ground and face. It would be a war of the werewolves, and the phrase “innocent bystanders” had been coined for the people who strayed into the paths of stray bullets.

  I had everything that had happened in the chicken coop, but it was too complicated to work through standing still. Whoever had the roosters had the answer.

  My cell rang, surprising me; there must have been a sunspot or something to give it some juice. It was Abel Osterling, calling to report what he’d found out about the thunderbird symbol.

  “Old Country Zapatistas,” I said, before he got too far into office hours. “Cops beat you to it.”

  “They usually do, despite what you read. Any luck on your runaway?”

  “Developments. I wouldn’t call them luck.”

  “You okay? You sound like you’ve been hitting the bottle and lost on points.”

  I paused. My well of wit was sucking clay. “You can always make it up in the next round. What do I owe you for the fact-check?”

  I didn’t know if he heard the question. The phone beeped again, rolled over, and stuck its feet in the air. The line was as dead as downtown.

  Last year’s grass covered the empty lot I’d parked beside, bent over and broken by months of snow. Something stirred there with a dry rustle. I’d have missed it if I were still on the phone. There was no wind to explain it.

  I had one foot inside the car, and now I took it out and folded my arms on the roof and watched the little movement. A historic building of some kind had stood there for a century or so until someone bought it and knocked it down, apparently for no other purpose than to provide the city with another place for rapists to bait their traps and lie in wait. It wasn’t dark enough yet for that, so I suspected an urban pheasant or a rat the size of a bobcat. Then I heard something that sounded like a cross between a dry cough and a wet sneeze.

  Winter was a long way from over, but the allergy season starts earlier every year. I left the driver’s door hanging open and waded out into the weeds, watching for snakes, until I came within a few yards of where I’d seen the tops swaying. I had my revolver out. I didn’t think I’d need it, but the last time I’d thought that, I’d paid for it with five weeks in the hospital and two years in physical therapy.

  “Come out, come out, Nesto,” I said. “Your sister’s waiting supper.”

  THIRTEEN

  He was a kid. We tend to forget that, when they’re almost fully grown and their voices have changed, and it’s always a serious mistake, because when you expect too much of someone there is always resentment, and in his case it was at an age when he had the energy and strength to do something about it and no judgment to balance it. He might lash out or run away. If some kind of weapon is too handy he might do something lethal. Seasoned felons are easier to predict, and you can always shoot them when you guess wrong and take your chances with the authorities. But I didn’t put up the gun. That would be taking a chance I couldn’t afford.

  For a few seconds after I’d called out to him he lay motionless in the grass, a child hoping to confound the monster in his bedroom by becoming invisible under the covers. But I could see his narrow back now in the same flannel shirt and the stingy curve of his rump in loose jeans faded almost white. Then he stirred again and got up in one movement, thrusting himself to his feet without first climbing onto his knees. I envied him his flexibility, but it’s a dumb thing to do when the person who called you out is armed. I kept my reflexes on a leash and didn’t fire.

  “Who are you?”

  “The Easter Bunny. Find any eggs?”

  “What?”

  “Wrong room. Forget it. Who are you hiding from?”

  He was in between growth spurts. He looked taller than he was because the last one had outdistanced his body fat, but he hadn’t yet caught up with his large hands and feet. He was going to be tall for a Mexican, if they were any kind of clue. A good-looking kid, once he took a bath and changed clothes. His dark hair, defiantly unbrushed, curled over his ears and his face was narrow and dirty and feral-looking, the full lips set tight and the pupils shrunken in his sister’s hickory-colored eyes. The sun was at ground level behind me, in his eyes, and he didn’t like what he was seeing; narrowed pupils didn’t have to mean he was on drugs. But I kept the muzzle trained on
his slender middle.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. His accent was Middle Western, no trace of Spanish.

  “Not what I asked.”

  “Who are you?”

  “This isn’t Jeopardy. I want answers, not questions. Let’s go again. See the show?”

  He thought about that. “What show?”

  “Seriously; again? Okay. Detroit’s Finest. They’re here all week. Stop wasting time. You heard the sirens.”

  “I thought they were looking for me. That’s why I hid.”

  An answer at last. I’d begun to give up hope. “Now, why would they be looking for you?”

  “I ran away.”

  “I know. I ran after you.”

  “Yeah, I thought that was you at the mission. You don’t run so good.”

  “I know when to stop. My name is Amos Walker. I’m a detective.”

  “Cop?”

  “Private. Missing persons is my specialty. Is any of this starting to make sense?”

  “Did Chata hire you?”

  “I’m working for your uncle.”

  “My uncle lives in Mexico. We never met.”

  “Not an uncle, I guess, the one I’m talking about. Your brother-in-law’s father. There may not be a word for it. Him you’ve met.”

  “No cops in my family.”

  We weren’t getting anywhere, and I was losing the light. If he slipped me again I didn’t stand a chance. “It’s getting cold. Let’s sit in the car and turn on the heater.”

  “I’m not getting in any car with you.”

  “If I were a pervert, your pants would already be down around your ankles.”

  He jumped, blushed; I’d thought that reaction had died along with wearing your underpants out of sight. But he recovered quickly.

  “Working for a cop is the same as being a cop. You’ll take me in.”