The Drifter

by Nick Petrie

  “He was a tricky bastard with that license plate, wasn’t he?” said Peter. “Two layers of slippery. He’d like someplace empty.”

  “Gotta start somewhere,” said Lewis, turning off the Yukon. “What do you like for ordnance?”

  “What, there’s a selection?”

  The tilted smile got wider. “Step around back, son.”

  Under the rear cargo deck, where the spare tire and jack should have been, lay a folded Mexican blanket. Lewis unfolded the blanket with a slight flourish.

  Peter blinked. “Tell me exactly,” he said, “what is it you do for a living.”

  “If I told you,” said Lewis, “I’d have to kill you.”

  Gleaming under the rear dome light was an Ithaca combat shotgun with the big magazine, along with a sawed-off Mossberg street-sweeper, an ugly, alien-looking Steyr automatic rifle with a folding stock, and a selection of handguns ranging from a big chrome Dirty Harry .44 to an Army-issue Beretta to a pair of flat black Glock .45s. And the enormous 10-gauge shotgun that Lewis had been cleaning on the day Peter and Dinah had walked into the storefront. It made every other weapon look a little bit like a toy.

  “Where’s the Thompson?” said Peter. “It’s not a real collection without a tommy gun.”

  Lewis shook his head sadly. “Can’t get ’em. Illegal as all hell. However, these here fine specimens all legally purchased by a nice old lady on the North Side.”

  “And you’re just holding on to them for her.”

  “She don’t like to clean ’em. I find it calms my mind.”

  “I imagine it does,” said Peter. “You’re kinda freaky, you know that.”

  “Naw,” said Lewis. “I don’t sleep with ’em or nothing. They just tools. Get the job done.”

  Peter still had the Sig Sauer he’d bought from Lewis three days before. He took one of the Glocks to supplement and tucked it into the pocket of his Carhartt. An extra clip went into his hip pocket, in case they ran into zombies or bears or other dangerous wildlife.

  Lewis propped the 10-gauge over a shoulder like a man carrying lumber. “What’s our primary objective?”

  He watched the warehouse as he spoke, the lazy drawl fading for a moment as he focused on the work ahead. Peter thought Lewis had probably been a pretty good soldier.

  “Just a sneak and peek,” said Peter. “I want an idea of who this guy is and what he’s doing.”

  “What if he’s there? Making a pipe bomb or some damn thing?”

  “Then we grab him, find out from the man himself. Shoot him in the leg if you have to. No, you’d cut him in half with that cannon. Let me shoot him in the leg.”

  Lewis pointed to a black tool bag. “Take that, too.”

  It was heavy, and clanked when Peter picked it up. “How many sledgehammers do we need?”

  “How else you think we gonna get in?” asked Lewis. “Just say please?”

  —

  They walked the street in the dark, Lewis carrying the 10-gauge down along his leg. The wind was up, whistling across the rooftops, and tree branches clacked overhead. The single functional streetlight had a halo around it from the damp in the air.

  They bypassed the main entrance and the truck loading dock and stepped into the shelter of the rail siding, where the rusting steel-framed roof and a screen of tall weeds helped hide them from prying eyes. The cracked concrete loading platform would have been the same height as the boxcar doors.

  In another neighborhood, the building would have been renovated. Peter imagined loft apartments on the upper floors and a decent restaurant on the main with tables set up under this shelter in nicer weather. He hoped the old building would be brought back to life. Although at the current rate of decay, there might be little left to restore.

  The big sliding forklift doors had been boarded up years before, and a man-door was cobbed into one of the bays. The key was broken off in the rusty deadbolt, and two heavy padlocked hasps held the door shut at top and bottom.

  Peter opened the tool bag and took a penlight from his pocket to peer inside. Vertical compartments lined the interior for easy organization, with a central well for the heavy gear. “Your tools, you decide,” he said in a low voice. “Sledgehammer or crowbar?”

  Lewis clucked his tongue softly. “Finesse, jarhead, finesse.” Reaching in, he plucked an orange-handled tool from a padded interior pocket. It looked like a cheap electric screwdriver, but with a cap covering two slender tangs of bent metal where the driver head would be.

  “Lock pick,” he explained quietly, plugging the twin wires into a padlock’s keyhole and pulling the trigger. “If they don’t know you got in, they don’t know to look for you.”

  Usually Peter had gotten into a building by using two large Marines with a steel battering ram. That or C-4. “So you’re a burglar,” he said as the first padlock popped open.

  “Do I look like a guy sneaks around for a living?”

  “You’re sneaking around right now.”

  Lewis’s teeth gleamed in the dim glow of the penlight. “You’re just dying to know, aren’t you?”

  The pick hummed again and the second lock opened. Lewis stowed the tool in the bag and removed two tactical flashlights, bright but small enough to hold along the barrel of a pistol. Handed one to Peter and picked up his shotgun again, holding his own light along the shotgun’s slide to point where the barrel pointed. Looked at Peter and nodded.

  Peter took the Sig Sauer from his pocket, opened the door a crack, and listened. No sound, no light. He turned on his flashlight and stepped inside, rising white static making a frictive buzz in the back of his head. His chest tightened immediately.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  It was stale and musty. His flashlight beam picked out the corners of a big, empty chamber with walls of stained yellow brick and sixteen-foot ceilings. The floor above them was held up by giant oak timbers that had twisted and cracked as the green lumber dried. They stood on worn wood planks designed to support draft horses and the freight they had once moved.

  Dust covered everything. Several sets of footprints walked away from them toward the dark gap in the wall opening to the next chamber. They followed the footprints. Everything silent but for the soft sound of their feet and the roar of the static in his head.

  There would be a basement below, as well as a freight elevator to the floors above that was probably broken. Peter was not looking forward to the stairs. To do this right, Peter would have wanted at least a squad, if not the whole platoon.

  The second chamber was as empty as the first. The dust equally undisturbed, save the footprints that led them forward. But the smell was changing, a low chemical funk that got more intense as they moved deeper into the warehouse.

  The white static flared higher. This was too much like the industrial buildings they had searched in Iraq, where the Baathists would pop up and fire on them from cover before scuttling deeper into the maze. Peter felt the sweat begin to pop on his forehead and neck, despite the deep cold of this place. In another few minutes he’d be sweating through his shirt.

  He pushed it down and kept walking.

  The third chamber wasn’t empty. It held a neat row of ten big white plastic drums beside the roll-up door to the truck loading dock. The door was brown with rust, but the rollers and tracks gleamed with fresh grease.

  Peter walked to the plastic drums. With his bright flashlight shining behind the drums, they became translucent. A liquid darkness filled the bottom third of each drum. The drum covers were threaded, and screwed off like a jar lid. Peter found a cover that would move and spun it counterclockwise.

  When he cracked the seal, a petroleum stink rose like poison perfume.

  He bumped the drum with his toe and watched the languid ripples in the heavy black liquid. “Fuel oil,” he said. “Ten drums of fuel oil.”

  He though
t of several reasons somebody would stockpile partial drums of fuel oil in an abandoned warehouse.

  None of those reasons were good.

  Lewis had his light pointing down. “Look at the floor,” he said, his voice pitched low but still carrying in the hush of the room. Peter shifted his own light.

  The trail of footprints joined with many more, following the twin trails of what could only be a hand truck, through the roll-up door to the plastic drums and back again. And another traffic pattern, footprints and the same twin trails. But a lot more of them.

  A scattering of fine white pellets, half ground to powder underfoot, led from the roll-up door to a fourth chamber. But this one was closed off with a plank partition, curved at the top to fit the arched brick opening. Peter could tell by the dimensions of the planks and the rough saw marks that the work was at least thirty to forty years old. But the heavy commercial security door set into the partition was new. With a steel jamb and a serious lock.

  Lewis put the light on Peter’s face and leaned in.

  “Hey. You okay?”

  Peter held up a hand to keep the light from his eyes. “I’m fine. We need to get into that next room.”

  “You not fine. It forty degrees in here and you sweating like a pig.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” His chest felt wrapped in metal, and his breath came hard. The static wanted to fill his head, but he kept it down, pushed it down. There was work to do now. Breathe in, breathe out.

  Lewis looked at him for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Calm your shit. Gonna go get the tools.”

  Peter closed his eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. It helped. He listened to the silence of Lewis walking away, then the silence of his return. The soft clank of the tool bag set on the hard plank floor. When Peter opened his eyes, Lewis was bent, examining the deadbolt.

  He gave a low whistle. “That one serious. Can’t open that with the electric pick. Time for the sledgehammer.”

  Peter shook his head. “They can’t know we were here,” he said. “Let me look in that bag. I have an idea.”

  “They gonna know we here, anyway,” said Lewis, nodding at their bootprints in the dust. “Might as well get it done.”

  “You think they’re Indian scouts, can tell a man by his bootprints?”

  “You saying you wouldn’t notice the extra prints?”

  “Of course I’d notice,” said Peter. “So would you. But I think there’s a few of these guys, and they’re not all brain surgeons. Now let me see that bag.”

  “No chain saw, if that what you looking for.”

  “Shut up and hold the light.”

  Lewis kept his tool bag neat and orderly, and Peter quickly found what he wanted.

  There were certain conventions when installing doors. Usually, the hinges went on the inside, the side you were trying to protect, because the hinges were a weak point. Remove the pins, and the hinge side of the door was no longer connected to the jamb.

  But whoever had installed this security door had put the hinges on the side where Peter and Lewis stood. Which meant either the installer was trying to keep someone on the other side from getting out, or he didn’t really know what he was doing. Either one was fine with Peter, as long as the guy hadn’t used NRP hinges. NRPs had a threaded steel insert that kept the pins from being removed when the door was closed. But they weren’t standard with every security door.

  So Peter took a claw hammer and a punch and tapped on the hinge pins from below, trying to get them to lift.

  They did. First the bottom, then the middle, then the top. The work helped him keep the static down. Breathe in, breathe out.

  “Here,” he said, holding out the slightly greasy pins. Lewis took them.

  Then, with a small cat’s paw on the bottom of the door, Peter slowly and carefully levered the hinge side of the door outward. The deadbolt stayed put, but when the hinge side was completely free, Peter just lifted the door away from the jamb.

  Lewis stepped past him, the 10-gauge at the ready.

  There was nobody in the room. It was another big chamber, maybe forty feet on a side, with the same spalling brick walls and timbered ceiling.

  The floor had been swept, and a cheap folding banquet table and two plastic chairs were set up in the far corner.

  Neatly stacked on four wooden pallets were large white bags in heavy-duty plastic.

  Bag after bag after bag.

  Lewis stepped closer and read the label.

  “Fertilizer,” he said. Then looked at Peter. “Ammonium nitrate. Fifty-pound bags.”

  Peter scanned a pallet. Breathe in, breathe out.

  Counted the bags.

  Did the math.

  Looked back up at Lewis.

  “Ten thousand pounds,” he said.

  The white static screamed. Peter felt himself begin to shake in the cold, dark space.

  Lewis’s air of detached amusement was gone. “How big was Oklahoma City? The federal building?”

  “Five thousand pounds of fertilizer,” said Peter. “And two drums of racing fuel. But fuel oil does the job just fine. And those ten partial drums out there probably add up to four full ones.”

  “Twice the size,” said Lewis. “Twice the size of Oklahoma City.” His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “That’s a big fucking bomb.”

  Peter had learned about ANFO bombs in Iraq, named for their two major components, ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil. They were used by miners and farmers and guerilla fighters in asymmetric warfare. And domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

  Clearly, thought Peter, someone had big plans.

  “What’s the target?” he said. “If you were going to blow something up, something big, what would it be?”

  Lewis shook his head. “I can’t think of anything you’d blow up for money. If you set this off at a bank, you’d vaporize the vault. Hell, the whole block.”

  “Unless you were going to hold something ransom.”

  “Like what?” said Lewis. “Lambeau Field? Threaten to blow up the stadium in Green Bay, you’d have every Packer fan in the state on your ass. And who the hell would pay?”

  “This doesn’t feel rational,” said Peter. “Or at least not profit-driven, not how I can figure it. Timothy McVeigh didn’t make a nickel, he just wanted to make a point.”

  “Lot of good it did him,” said Lewis. “Lethal injection. But what about all that cash you found? That don’t seem too ideological to me.”

  “Me neither,” said Peter. “They didn’t need it to pay for materials, the shit’s already here. Unless the ideology is a diversion. Hiding some other motive. Like money.”

  “Always comes back to money,” said Lewis. “Who we got on this thing that we know about? Who are the players?”

  Something clicked. “Skinner,” Peter said. “That’s gotta be it. If you blow up the right thing, something happens in the markets.”

  Lewis shook his head. “Shit. Whatever happened to armed robbery?”

  But Peter was looking around. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There’s gotta be a starter charge. You can’t just light a match under this stuff.”

  Lewis nodded. “You need dynamite or Tramex or something like that.”

  Neither component would blow up by itself. You needed another material to create a starter blast, something to get the temperature up. Create the conditions for the big bang.

  But Peter knew what they had planned to use. He looked at Lewis, and saw that Lewis knew, too.

  Four beige rectangles, pliable as modeling clay, would do nicely.

  Currently stashed in the secret panel under Peter’s truck.

  “We need to get the cops here.”

  Peter didn’t answer. He was walking through the rest of the room, looking at what had b
een left. The folding table and chairs were cheap and could have been bought at any home store. But there was nothing personal, no papers. Not even fast-food wrappers. These people were not amateurs. Their only mistake was losing the C-4, and that was probably because Jimmy had taken it from a locker at the veterans’ center.

  At the back of the room, Peter saw an old cast-iron door set into the brick wall. It was heavy with rust, probably the same age as the building itself. There were rust flakes on the floor, too. The giant strap hinges shone with new oil, and tool marks on the door showed where someone had worked to get that door open.

  Peter reviewed his mental map of the building. This wall was the end of this building.

  But it wasn’t an outside wall.

  He had another mental map. This one of the block and the buildings on it.

  He was pretty sure he knew what was on the other side of that old cast-iron door.

  “Peter.” Lewis didn’t raise his voice, but it carried an urgency that Peter hadn’t heard before. “We need to call the cops. You listening to me?”

  “I hear you,” said Peter. “But calling the cops is no guarantee. And just getting rid of this stuff won’t get the guy who killed Jimmy. We might lose Dinah’s payday. And we’d probably lose yours, too.”

  Lewis looked at him. “I’ve done my share of shit,” he said. “But I can’t let this thing go for some payday. Not for your revenge, neither.”

  “It’s not just that,” said Peter. “If we call the cops right now, we won’t know who put this together, or how. They’ll just start over. We need to get deeper into this.”

  “That’s what the goddamn cops are for.”

  “Lewis, it’s not even a bomb yet. Right now it’s just supplies and suspicion. It’ll take them hours just to mix it up and get it in the truck.”

  “Or we get sidetracked and come back and it’s gone. You ever think of that?”

  “What I think,” said Peter, “is that under that slick mercenary veneer is a guy who actually gives a shit.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Lewis looked at his watch. “You got four hours. Then I’m calling the cops.”

  “I have a better idea,” said Peter. “Is there a Radio Shack or something around here?”