Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Right. Time to go to work.

  Climbing back down the basket to the concrete floor, the din of the cleaning crew in his ears, Freddie realized he was going to have to make one extra stop along the way, but when he found the men’s room it was full of cleaning crew. He could have startled those people if he’d wanted to, but he used the ladies’ room instead, then forgot and flushed and that did startle them. He was just barely out of the ladies’ when they all piled in, staring, awed.

  The puzzle-working guard had abandoned not only his post but his puzzles; the magazine and pencil sat on the chair instead of him. Maybe he’d gone off to have a word—a shouted word—with the cleaning crew.

  Eventually that guard would return, if only to get his magazine. Zipping over to truck 21409, Freddie pulled down its door, and if it made any noise even he didn’t hear it. Then he pushed the button for the garage door, and down it came, no doubt clanking and squealing, but who cared?

  The next job was to get out of here. Freddie made his way to the front, and there was guard number four, now in a chair near the main entrance. So this must be his routine; because the cleaning crew had to go in and out several times in the course of their work, this guard moved from his regular position to cover the unlocked doors while they were here, both to keep unauthorized persons from coming in and to keep members of the cleaning crew from cleaning the place out a little too enthusiastically.

  Easy as pie. Freddie walked by the guard, waited till a cleaning-crew guy in his green coverall went out to get something from his truck, and eased through the doors just behind him.

  It was July, but it still got cool at night. Feeling a little chilled, Freddie jogged around to the back of the building, which took a long time, because it was a very big building. He and Peg had driven back here last time, which hadn’t taken any time at all, and had seen the arrangement, and it was still the same now. Snuggled up against the rear of the building were the trailers, and in the spaces where there was no trailer there was a closed garage door instead. A pair of large floodlights, one at the top of each rear corner of the building, created a flat landscape in sharp white and deep black, with conflicting shadows. The blacktop parking area back here was smaller and scruffier than the one in front, fading off into weedy plane trees and shrubbery at the back, where half a dozen big blunt cabs for those trailers were parked.

  Freddie had been involved in hijackings before (though never completely on his own) so he knew how to do the next part, which was to jump the wires on one of the cabs, back it up to trailer number 21409, and switch off the engine. Then, after double-checking that this actually was trailer number 21409, as a pink trip sheet taped to its side confirmed—he wouldn’t want to remove the wrong trailer, from an open garage door, which might cause comment—he attached the electrical and hydraulic hoses from the cab to the trailer, restarted the engine, drove very slowly forward a few feet just to be absolutely certain that was a closed garage door he would see back there in his outside mirror—it was—and then he checked the lights and brakes, and everything seemed fine.

  It was unlikely the people inside would be able to hear this truck engine anyway, but they certainly weren’t going to hear it while the cleaning crew was at work. Freddie slipped into low, did some massive turning of the big wheel, and eased that heavy trailer on out.

  He did not go past the front of the building, but turned the other way, diagonally across the empty parking lot and out an exit to a side road, then from there to the main intersection, where the light was red. No traffic went by. No traffic went by. No traffic went by. The light turned green. Freddie made the turn, and drove away from there.

   

  * * *

   

  The agreement was, they would meet at the burned-out diner at one o’clock, but Peg was too keyed up to stay at home, not after the eleven o’clock news, when there were no more distractions. She wanted to know how things had worked out for Freddie, and she also had this momentous announcement to make to him once the night’s work was done.

  If there were no problems, that is. If there was a problem, she certainly couldn’t compound it for the poor guy by giving him bad news. So she certainly hoped there weren’t going to be any problems, and for that reason and all the other reasons she just couldn’t hang around the house waiting, so finally she piled out the front door and into the van, and as a result she reached the burned-out diner forty-five minutes early, and of course he wasn’t there.

  She parked around behind the diner, lights off, as they’d agreed, and sat in the dark, practicing how she would tell him, her exact words and his exact words, and twenty minutes later headlights appeared over there on the road side of the diner. So he was twenty-five minutes early, if it was him. And if it wasn’t him, she hoped at least it wasn’t state cops, either here to coop or to check on this van parked in the darkness back here.

  But it was Freddie. That is, when the passenger door of the van opened there wasn’t anybody there, so that meant it was Freddie. Hardly even noticing that kind of thing anymore, Peg said, “How’d it go?”

  “Great,” his floating voice told her, as the van dipped and swayed because Freddie was getting in and climbing over the seat and going to the back where his clothes were. “No problems at all. I even got to sleep for a while.”

  “Terrific,” she said, listening to the slide and slither of him getting dressed back there, and then Dick Tracy joined her, wearing pink Playtex gloves and a long-sleeved buttoned shirt and khaki slacks and pale socks and loafers. “Hi, Freddie,” she said.

  “What a snap, Peg,” he said, the Dick Tracy face puffing and collapsing as he spoke. “I think I could hit a different one of those stores every week, up and down the Eastern Seaboard.”

  “Let’s just do this one,” she suggested.

  “Right. One thing at a time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Follow me,” he said, and got out of the van.

  Peg started her engine, switched on her lights, and drove around to the front, and what a big trailer that was out there! For Pete’s sake. “Wow,” she whispered, peering up at how tall it was, how way up off the ground were those yellow lights along its top edge. And how long it was. And it had more yellow lights on the sides, and red lights at the back, and red and yellow lights on the cab, and great big headlights out front. It was more like a steamship than a truck, like a great big cargo ship on its way around the world.

  She beeped to let him know she was ready, and the big rig slowly started forward, grinding upward through the gears, moving out onto this empty country road in the darkness, Peg in her van easing along in its wake.

  They had to cross the Hudson River, which they did on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, which was all right, because twenty years did not go by before they got to the other side. They kept driving west until they got to the New York State Thruway, where the Dick Tracy mask and Playtex gloves would get their first of several tests tonight. This was the first time they were going anywhere that Peg couldn’t do Freddie’s driving, which made for a great unknown. So, just to be on the safe side, while waiting behind the truck for Freddie to take his toll ticket from the guy in the booth, Peg opened an extra button on her blouse, and when she drove forward to get her own ticket she was kind of leaning forward a little, smiling.

  And the guy in the booth had the weirdest expression on his face, as though asking himself, What the hell was that? But then he saw Peg, and he saw the shadows within her open blouse, and he forgot all about the previous driver. “Hi, there,” he said, handing Peg her ticket.

  “Hi.” She smiled some more.

  “Nice night,” he suggested.

  “Sultry,” she said, rolling the l around in her mouth like a strawberry, and took off after Freddie.

  They were over a hundred miles from New York. Freddie tucked the big rig into the right lane and kept it at the speed limit, fifty-five miles an hour, not wanting to attract any official attention. Peg tucked in
behind him, turned on the radio and settled down to the long and boring drive.

  All the way down the Thruway, with traffic very light the whole way (mostly trucks). Then, when they were near New York, they switched over to the New Jersey Turnpike, which meant two more toll-people Freddie left stunned and Peg left happy. Down the turnpike through New Jersey to the spur over to the Lincoln Tunnel, and two more toll-people, one of whom (at the tunnel) was a woman, so Peg’s wiles wouldn’t do any good. On the other hand, this woman was a toll-taker at the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, so she hadn’t seen anything odd at all about the guy driving that big tractor-trailer; in fact, if you asked her, he looked more normal than most.

  Freddie had told Jersey Josh he’d probably phone between three and four in the morning, and it was in fact about a quarter past three when, reaching Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, Freddie pulled the big rig to a stop at the curb in a no-parking zone, and Peg pulled in behind him. Getting out of the van, stretching, stiff and sore, she walked forward to the cab, looked up, sighed, and said, “Freddie, put your head on.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I remembered for the tollbooths.”

  She watched Dick Tracy reappear. “You mean, you drove all the way down with your head off?”

  “It gets hot, Peg.”

  “I’m surprised we didn’t leave a hundred accidents in our wake.”

  “You can’t see up in here at night,” Dick told her. “It worked out, didn’t it?”

  “Sure. I’ll call Josh now, right?”

  “Yeah.” The Playtex glove pointed. “I parked where there’s a phone booth. If it works.”

  It wasn’t a booth, it was just a phone on a stick, but it did work. Peg dialed the number, and after about fifteen rings it was finally answered. “S?”

  “Hi, Josh,” Peg said, with absolutely false friendliness. “It’s Peg, calling for Freddie.”

  “O.” He didn’t sound happy.

  “We’re here with the stuff. We’ll meet where you said, right?”

  “Meet Freddie.”

  “The both of us, Josh.”

  “S,” he said, sounding bitter, and hung up.

   

  * * *

   

  A long long time ago there was an actual slaughterhouse in Manhattan, way down below Greenwich Village, near the Hudson River. In the nineteenth century, they had cattle drives down Fifth Avenue, bringing the cows to the slaughterhouse, but then they built a railroad line that was partly in a cut between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, which is still used by trains from the north coming down to Penn Station, in the West Thirties. Going down from there, the old train line was elevated, at second-floor level, and ran all the way downtown, the trains that carried the doomed cows trundling south and south, as buildings were constructed all around the track, and neighborhoods grew up, until here and there the elevated train line was actually inside buildings along its route.

  Then it all came to an end. The slaughterhouse shut down and there was less and less manufacturing of other kinds in lower Manhattan, and fewer and fewer cargo ships from Europe that unloaded there, so there was no longer a need for a railroad line down through Manhattan south of Penn Station. But that old elevated line had been constructed of iron, and built strong enough to carry many tons of train and beef, and it was not an easy thing to tear that big old monster down, so for the most part it was left standing. Here and there, when new construction was under way, it made sense to remove a part of the old line, but most of it is still there. It’s there today, just above your head, black old thick iron crossing the street, out of that old building and into that old building, an artifact from an earlier and more powerful time.

  Down in the West Village, a block-square brick factory building had long ago risen around the railroad line, incorporating the track inside the building. After World War II, when that factory was converted to apartments, the old loading docks and other access to the tracks were all sealed up with concrete block and finished on the converted side with Sheetrock walls. The unlit unfinished ground-floor area beneath the track was used as parking space by a few neighborhood businesses, a plumber and a locksmith and one or two others, but over the years that cubbyhole down there became a hangout for the kind of people who have only good things to say about anonymous sex. There were some robberies down in there, and some assaults, and then two fatal stabbings within a month, at which point the city sued the corporation that owned the building, which was the first time the corporation had had to confront the fact that the filthy grungy hellhole beneath the old railroad track was actually a part of the structure they owned. So they concrete-blocked one end of it, and put a high chain-link gate at the other end, with razor wire on top, and only the supers had the key to the gate, which meant that, within six months, half a dozen of the worst felons in the neighborhood had keys to the gate.

  One of these was an associate of Jersey Josh Kuskiosko. He it was to whom Jersey Josh would deliver the truck and its goods, for a nice profit on the evening’s work, it having been agreed that Freddie Noon would be paid forty thousand dollars if the truck and goods were as advertised, whereas Jersey Josh’s associate would then pay Jersey Josh one hundred thousand. That is, once the truck, and its contents, were safely locked away inside that gate, inside that apartment building, under those old railroad tracks.

  Freddie had not had that much experience maneuvering a monster this large around streets as small and narrow and bumpy as those in the West Village. Every time he made a turn, at least one tire climbed the curb. That he didn’t hit any parked cars was a miracle. Peg, trailing along behind him, had to keep closing her eyes and waiting for the crash that never came.

  But then Freddie saw it, out ahead; the old railroad line, the black iron terrace of the Nibelungs, a black bridge spanning the street from one nineteenth-century brick factory to another, with the murky expanse of New York Bay in the background, beneath a clouded sky.

  That creature hulking in the deeper darkness under the span was more than likely Jersey Josh; the truck’s headlights somehow seemed to avoid shining directly on him. The two guys with him maybe actually were Nibelungs: brutish, nasty, and short.

  Freddie wasn’t used to thinking in terms of the height of the vehicle he was driving, so it wasn’t until later, after he was out of the truck, that he realized that, when he’d driven under the railroad bridge, he’d had less than three inches’ clearance. Which, of course, was as good as a mile.

  In any event, Freddie drove the truck under the bridge and beyond, stopping with just the very rear of the trailer still underneath. Then, as he climbed down from the cab, feeling very stiff and sore after all that time in the same unnatural position, Peg drove the van into the narrow lane left between the truck and the line of parked cars at the curb, and stopped next to Jersey Josh, who was standing between cars, frowning at the big trailer as though he’d expected something smaller, maybe pocket-size.

  “Hi, Josh,” Peg said.

  Josh looked at her and said nothing. The two henchmen—born henchmen, those two—stood back on the sidewalk, near the chain-link gate, and said nothing. Freddie approached, in his Dick Tracy head and Playtex gloves.

  Perky as she could be, Peg said, “You got the money, Josh?”

  “Check,” Josh said.

  Peg shook her head. “We don’t take checks, Josh,” she said.

  He pointed a blunt and filthy finger at the trailer. “Check truck.”

  Freddie had reached them by now. “Josh,” he said, “you know it’s all there. Everything you asked for. In fact, even two extra washing machines. I’m throwing them in for free.”

  Josh turned his head to look toward Freddie’s voice, and then recoiled at what he saw, bouncing his butt off the hood of the car behind him. “What U?” he cried.

  Freddie waved a Playtexed hand at the henchmen. “You trust these guys because they’re your pals,” he said, which was patent nonsense. “But do I know them? No. So I don’t want those guys to kno
w who I am.”

  “I know who you are,” one of the henchmen said. “You’re Dick Tracy.”

  The other henchman said, “How come a cop?”

  “If a real cop stops me,” Freddie explained, “he’ll think I’m on his side.”

  “Gloves,” Josh pointed out, pointing at them.

  “Fingerprints.”

  Josh shook his head, bewildered as usual by the antics of the human race.

  “Money,” Peg said, extending a graceful arm out of the van.

  Josh ignored her. Pointing his right hand at the truck and his left hand at Freddie, he said, “Back in.” Then pointed both hands at the chain-link fence, which one of the henchmen was now unlocking.

  The other henchman stepped forward and said, “We’ll move these cars, they’re ours,” meaning the ones blocking entrance to the dungeon.

  But Freddie said, “Not me, Josh. You got guys know how to baby these babies. I couldn’t back one of these monsters anywhere if I had to.”

  “Deal,” Josh said.

  “No, Josh. The deal is I bring it here. You want me to back that up? I’ll knock the whole building down, the first thing you know you’ll have cops here, wanting to know what’s going on.”

  It’s the little things that change history. Josh had been prepared to honor his side of the bargain, but on the other hand, Freddie and Peg had bested him in a couple of encounters recently, leaving a bad taste in his mouth in addition to the bad taste that was always there. Also, one was always up for betrayal, if the situation looked promising. And now Freddie wouldn’t back up the truck.

  “No deal,” Josh said.

  “You mean, you want me to take the truck away?”

  “It stay.”

  “We keep the truck,” said one of the henchmen, catching on fast.

  “You go away,” said the other henchman, also a quick study.

  Peg said, “Without our money?”

  Josh gave her a nasty smile. “Revenge,” he said.

  Both henchmen drew pistols from under their Hawaiian shirts. “Maybe,” one of them said, “we keep the broad.”