Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’re set to make a fresh start,” I said. “Your parole officer would approve. Maybe even enough not to put the screws on you if you miss a bus and wind up on the street after ten o’clock.”

  “You’d tell him I cooperated?”

  “I will, if he doesn’t,” put in the woman behind the desk. To me: “Ortiz gives me the least trouble of anyone we’ve got, and the place is full.”

  That explained the cold shoulder. She’d thought I’d come to harass her favorite resident. I kept telling myself you never knew about people from outside their skins but it never took somehow.

  Mike the Match uncrossed his hands and put them in his pockets. “Plain gasoline should be good enough for anyone. What you’re talking about is traceable; the customer list is so short the Arson Squad’s waiting for you when you get home. Also the first rule is don’t set yourself on fire. Even gas is unpredictable.” He touched the burned side of his face, an involuntary movement. “That high-test stuff goes up so fast you better be on wheels.”

  “No one reported any tires squealing.”

  “How did they make delivery?”

  “Molotov cocktail through a window.”

  He shook his head. “Either they were lucky or they did it another way.”

  “What other ways are there?”

  “Just one. Bottle bomb.”

  “Sounds like just another name for a Molotov.”

  “That’s just half of it. You fill one bottle with your incendiary material, another with drain cleaner and a wad of aluminum foil. Duct-tape them together and plant them where you want. That gives you time to walk away before the foil and drain cleaner get busy and set off the accelerant.”

  “Just ordinary foil and drain cleaner?’

  “It’s a chemical reaction, like Mentos and Coca-Cola. Only much more volatile.”

  “How long?”

  “Depends on how far you fill the second bottle. The more air, the more time the stuff has to expand before it bursts the glass. You can time it like a fuse if you know what you’re doing.”

  “Then it sets off the other?”

  “Like a blasting cap.”

  I turned that around and looked at it from all sides. “Wearing a tether?”

  He reached down and tugged up enough of his left pants leg to show the electronic bracelet wrapped around his ankle.

  “Okay.”

  A smooth brown brow got wrinkled. “Okay?”

  “Sí, gracias. When do you get out?”

  “Six weeks, less a day.”

  “Who’s your p.o.?”

  He gave me a name I didn’t recognize. I said, “I’ll see if we can’t knock a piece off that. You don’t plan to set fire to anything, do you?”

  He smiled for the first time, the scar pulling it slightly out of skew. His teeth were slightly crooked but as white as polished porcelain. “Just a good Havana.”

  TWENTY

  Petey Kresge called while I was driving away from there. Since I was still in the Iroquois Heights city limits I checked all the windows and mirrors for prowl cars and scanned the skies for copters. The ink wasn’t dry on the governor’s no-texting-while-driving ban when the city council doubled the fine locally and tacked on cell use at the wheel. Within six weeks the mayor had a more expensive mistress and every official in town had a backyard hot tub. In that zip code, reform meant a more even distribution of grease.

  “How close are you to a landline?” Petey asked.

  I said I’d call him from the first public phone I came to.

  “Club me a dodo while you’re at it.” He chuckled and rang off.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but the march of time had continued since I went wireless. There followed a comic ten minutes during which a checkout clerk in a Kroger’s in a strip mall thought I was asking for directions to the mother ship, two phones mounted outside gas stations gave back silence for my quarters but not the quarters themselves, and even a drugstore, which is where every snitch in every old movie went to his death while on the wire with the cops, had replaced its vintage oaken booth with a video kiosk. Finally I found a bar where a handful of rumpled figures in rumpled clothes sat on stools in perpetual twilight, and gonged two coins into a black-enamel-and-chrome box in the hallway leading to the john. The narrow passage smelled of kitty litter and bleach and all the time I was on the line a toilet ran and a frantic Brit described the action in a televised soccer game to an audience more interested in seeing the clown face at the bottom of the glass.

  “I about gave up,” Petey said when I identified myself.

  “Don’t start. What’ve you got?”

  “Your Wonder Bread truck’s seen more of the world than me. U.S. Border Patrol seized it two years ago carrying five hundred kilos of cocaine through downtown Bisbee.”

  “Where the hell is Bisbee?”

  “Old mining town pinned to the hills in Arizona. They film movies there set in Spain and Italy. You could piss on Mexico from there.”

  “If they confiscated it, how’d it get back to roost in Detroit?”

  “You’ll love this. It disappeared from the impound lot six months later, right past the guard and a pack of mean fucking dogs and through a chain-link fence twelve feet high with razor wire on top.”

  “Graft job?”

  “Carelessness, D.C. style. A bunch of vehicles were headed out that day for public auction and somebody strolled right in and climbed onto the driver’s seat and jumped the wires and rolled out the gate. It wasn’t on the auction list because the case hadn’t come to trial, but nobody bothered to check it. Who steals trucks? Anyway the guard’s now picking up trash in Gitmo with a nail on the end of a stick and the truck’s got a new VIN embossed on an aluminum tab riveted over the place where the original was filed off the engine block. A tin job, we call it; it doesn’t fool anyone, but on the other hand you can’t prove anything. Engines are made of softer stuff than guns. You can’t bring back the number once it’s gone.”

  “How do you know that’s what happened?”

  “My source makes it a point to enter the legitimate number next to the new one on a program that takes more passwords to get into than Janet Reno’s pants. Also a digital photo that matches the description you gave me, including what’s left of the balloons in the logo.”

  “Sounds like he’s got his retirement party all planned.”

  “He’s counting on his scrapbook to make sure he lives long enough to retire.”

  “Drugs to fighting cocks. That crate’s coming up in the world.”

  “Depends on how you see it. Dope pays better.”

  “Less risk, though, cockfighting. The only people who really care what happens to chickens never outgrew the T-shirt phase. Who registered the phony papers?”

  “A charitable corporation, it says here. Friends of Emiliano. It sounds better in Spanish. They sell chocolate bars for five bucks a pop in supermarket parking lots to shoppers who care about sponsoring Mexican nationals to come to Los Estados Unidos and find a better life.”

  “How do you say sucker in Spanish?”

  “El Norteamericano.”

  “Emiliano was Zorborón’s Christian name. Anything in that?”

  “Possibly. It was Zapata’s too.”

  “Zapatistas?”

  “Yeah. Only not the watered-down local variety. The registration was filed in El Paso. These are the babies who declared war on the Republic of Mexico. If they’re connected to the fighting rooster trade here, it means they’ve expanded the declaration to include Uncle Sam.”

  The toilet was still running when I rehooked the receiver and the game was still on, providing white noise for the drinkers at the bar. They were as communicative as cattle huddled against the wind. The bartender used his rag to rub the grunge out of the contours of a bottle of vermouth that had stood in the same spot since Bush 41; busywork, between refill orders. I figured he’d forgotten how to make a martini years ago.

  * * *

  I wondere
d how Sister Delia was getting along. A sergeant I sometimes swapped insults with at 1300 gave me the address she’d left with the Arson Squad in case they had questions. It belonged to a house on the edge of Corktown, a square box in a style architects call American Craftsman so they won’t have to call it None of the Above, with ROOMS FOR RENT signs in a couple of windows; accommodations are easier to come by than jobs in Detroit. In the days of stickpins and Spanish Influenza, the neighborhood was where the Irish gathered to smoke cigars and elect the governor, but it had gone Mexican generations ago, breaking stride only once a year for St. Patrick’s Day and pitchers of green beer served in the Shamrock Bar by a bartender named Julio. On the way I passed old Tiger Stadium, rubble now with yellow bulldozers crawling over it like maggots.

  The owner, a black woman built like an ore carrier, leaned on her dust sweeper in the doorway, decided I didn’t look like a home invader or a building inspector, and directed me to a room off the second floor landing. The stairs gasped under a comfortably worn runner as I climbed. A pungent mix of old dry wood and Endust surrounded me, a lemony smell laced with deferred decay. A lot of elbow grease was behind that. The woman with the sweeper was part of the rock that kept the city from sliding into the river.

  Delia opened the door on the second knock. She wore a hip-length open-weave sweater over a much-washed University of Detroit T-shirt, mottled jeans hugging her narrow hips. Her hands were still bandaged. I asked her about them.

  “Hurting today,” she said. “I don’t have much time. I have to be at the Henry Ford Medical Center in an hour. That’s a daily appointment to drain blisters and change dressings until I’m safe from gangrene.”

  “I won’t need more than ten minutes.”

  She stepped aside and closed the door behind me when I crossed the threshold. It was a corner room with windows on adjacent walls and lace curtains to filter out the view of neglect in two directions. The bed was neatly made, the patterned rug freshly swept or vacuumed, and a padded rocker and a scruffy but cozy-looking armchair faced each other with a coffee table in between. Christ sagged from His cross on the wall above the bed. A freestanding cupboard would hold the rest of her wardrobe. The house predated built-in closets.

  We sat, she in the rocker, her bound hands resting on her thighs. I asked her what they’d prescribed for the pain.

  “Industrial-strength Tylenol. But I don’t use it.”

  “Practicing for sainthood?”

  “Counting my pennies. Pain goes away on its own, unlike debt.” She smiled. “If I were a weaker woman I’d sell the pills on the street and triple my investment.”

  I changed the subject. Temptation didn’t bear examination. “I didn’t know you went to U of D.”

  She glanced down at the T-shirt. “There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. It’s almost as faded as my memory of the place. I majored in science, if you can believe it. After all these years I still think evolution and the Big Bang Theory are evidence of the existence of God; but neither the faithful nor the clinicians want to hear it. I think they like being at each other’s throats.”

  “That was before the Call, I guess.”

  “Not a Call in my case. I was next to last in a family of ten. Good Catholics, no seed wasted. Four daughters: two to marry, one—the youngest, my kid sister Cathy—to stay home and take care of our parents in their old age, and one to take the vows and get everyone in good with the Lord. There was never any question that it would be anyone but me. ‘Our Savior doesn’t care if you’re comely.’ Quoting my father.” She was beautiful when she smiled. There wouldn’t have been much of that going on in the house where she grew up.

  “What made you stick as long as you did?”

  “My mother was determined to make it to a hundred. As it was she cleared eighty-seven. I couldn’t drop out while she was living. But Cathy got the worst part of that deal. Mom wasn’t the kind of invalid that suffers in silence.”

  “You’ve kept on doing pretty much the same thing you did as a nun.”

  “But on my ticket, not the Vatican’s.” She scratched the back of her right hand with her left; healing is an itchy process. “Are you here to write my biography?”

  “I was breaking the ice.” I told her about my conversation with Miguel Ortiz, leaving out the part about bottle bombs. That was just speculation.

  “You’re sure he didn’t go out a window and shinny down the drainpipe?”

  “The gorgon at the gate’s too sharp for that. Also he’s wearing a tether. Anyway, arsonists are in steep supply in this town. Right now I’m less interested in who torched your place than in the accelerant that was used. ‘High-test,’ Mike the Match called it. I’m going to ask Arson what they call it. It sounds sophisticated for someone who just smudged up the back of Zorborón’s garage and keyed your car.”

  “Keyed is a generic term. Do you want to see pictures?”

  “There are pictures?”

  “I took them for the insurance. Hang on.”

  She got up, opened the drawer in the nightstand beside the bed, sat back down in the rocker thumbing the keys of a cell phone, squinting at the screen. After a moment she leaned forward and handed it to me. “Just push the little camera icon when you want to see the next photo.”

  They’re making those cameras better and better. I got a good look from several angles at a Plymouth Duster with a right front fender that didn’t match the color, a replacement from some junkyard. The damage had included the fender and the rest of that side of the car ending just ahead of the taillight. Something a lot sharper than a key had made those thin jagged angry scratches. I thought of Roscoe Berdoo’s pocket slicer, ground down to a needle; but he’d struggled with his native tongue and lost. A box cutter would have done just as well. It was a message in Spanish. “Irse I know,” I said. “It means get out.”

  “Go away. The other word’s harder to look up. One of the advantages of living in a Mexican neighborhood as long as I have is you pick up words you won’t find in an English-Spanish dictionary. That one refers to a part of the female anatomy, but you won’t find it in a Spanish medical book either. You have to look for it on a board fence.”

  “That explains the penis.”

  “Not a bad reproduction, no pun intended. I wonder if it’s a self-portrait.”

  “Where’s the car now?”

  “At the body shop, waiting in line for spray painting. This only happened two weeks ago.”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “And give them an excuse to roust the neighborhood like they did last time someone filed a complaint?”

  I flicked a hand at the screen on the cell. “This is a warning. So was that business behind Zorborón’s garage. In your case it was probably rape, but they changed their minds. The accelerant that was used on your place can’t be easy to come by.”

  “Meaning it’s too sophisticated for either the Maldados or the homegrown Zapatistas,” she said.

  “There’s a rumor going around that the Old Country Zaps are moving in on Detroit. They’re part of the drug cartel back home. That would be their style.”

  “What makes me such a threat?”

  “What made Zorborón? They start by declaring war on the most visible opposition. That’s how they handle the border patrol; no reason to change their MO just because the climate’s different.”

  “I thought the Tiger was a Zap.”

  “He was when they were revolutionaries. He bailed out of the drug business years ago. If he’d thought someone else would bail in, he’d put up a squawk. That’s a maybe, but these muchachos didn’t attract the attention of Home Security relying on wishful thinking.”

  “Well, they’ve put me out of business for the time being. I have to start my donor list all over from scratch. I can remember most of the names, but my records were full of notes about how much was actually donated against what was pledged, who was a soft touch, who I could guilt and who I could level with, stuff like that.”


  “That’s the kind of language I expect from a con artist.”

  “Sometimes it flies close to extortion. The charity game isn’t for wimps.”

  “A wimp would have given up the minute that cocktail came through the window.”

  “Windows break. Things burn. It’s why God invented glaziers and fire insurance. State Farm agents have faith, why shouldn’t the rest of us? Especially in the charity game.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see anything? The cops are tapped out for witnesses. Maybe someone slowed down on his way past the first time, glanced in to make sure you were where you needed to be when the curtain went up.”

  “If someone did, I had my head down trying to make out my own handwriting. You might have noticed the view out the window wasn’t the Bay of Naples. I didn’t while away hours mooning over the beautiful sight.”

  “They might come back to finish the job.”

  “Why? I’m back at square one. Anyway, they made their point, so I’m not exactly top priority anymore. If I were you, I’d concentrate on the natives. With Zorborón on a slab and me parked on a siding, the Zaps are free to squeeze case dough out of the protection racket and use it to flood the streets with dope. In six months, maybe less, they’ll be able to buy everything in town right up to City Hall, the way they did in Tijuana and Juarez and a dozen other border towns.”

  I ran my palms over the threadbare arms of my chair. “That’s a tall order.”

  “Just knee-high. Other places, prosperous places, they’d have to bombard it before they made a frontal assault. Destroy all hope, soften it up. Detroit ran out of hope twenty years ago. The residents expect their cops and politicians to run crooked. They prefer them that way. When they’re caught, the suckers pony up to pay their court costs. It’s a wonder the barbarians didn’t drag the border up here ten years ago.” She smiled again, less beautifully: one of those smiles that sharpened the creases in her face and added years to it. She wasn’t that old. People age at a different rate in Mexicantown. “Am I bitter?”

  “You had a shock.”

  “Just get the bastards, okay? I’ll light a candle for you at Holy Redeemer every day until you do.”