Shotgun Lullaby

by Steve Ulfelder

  “He’d love to,” the woman said.

  “There is only one state capital that contains three words,” the kid said, still tugging my key chain.

  “I know your guy Floriano,” Andrade said. “He’s a good tech.”

  “He says the same about you.” A lie, but a good one.

  “He does?” Pause. “I’m sorry about the Biletnikov dude. Even if he did owe me six-fifty.”

  I gritted my teeth and let that slide. “I’m sorry I busted up your elbow. Why don’t you head over now and get a feel for the shop? I’ll call Floriano, tell him to expect you.”

  The woman pressed a cold can of Coke into my hand as she let me out the door. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Least I can do,” I said.

  “Salt Lake City,” the kid said.

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later, I sat in my truck eating a pair of roach-coach hot dogs and eyeballing the Hi Hat. I’d looped the block before parking, hadn’t seen any sign of Fat Teddy’s Mercedes SUV. Also hadn’t seen anything that looked like heavy security. There was a camera bolted above the Hi Hat’s alley door, but that was par for the course at a city nightclub.

  All this suited the plan I’d come up with during the drive: to grab a few minutes alone with Boxer.

  Given some one-on-one time, I could feel him out, see which way he leaned. Charlie or Teddy? Was Boxer babysitting the boss’s kid and hating every minute of it? Or was he working with the kid to overthrow a weak boss who had one foot out the door? Hell, was he the actual trigger man who took out Gus?

  My next move would depend on the answers.

  I finished the dogs, hopped from my truck, wiped hands on jeans as I angled toward the front door. Didn’t go in, though—veered away instead, looking as sketchy as possible. Which wasn’t exactly a stretch. I was betting the front door had a security cam, too, and I wanted to look wrong in a way that would catch Boxer’s eye.

  Rounded the corner, walked the twenty yards to the Hi Hat’s delivery alley. Stood at the corner, looked both ways a few times—piling on the sketchiness for whoever might be watching—and headed down the alley. Passed a Dumpster, a stack of milk crates, a tangle of old rolled-up chain link …

  … and smiled inside as a steel door opened and Boxer stepped out.

  It’s nice when a plan works.

  Over his white shirt/black slacks uniform he wore—I’m not kidding—a sky-blue cardigan sweater. Unbuttoned. As I neared he made the move I’d seen before, putting casual hands on casual hips to show me the Desert Eagle that wasn’t one bit casual.

  “Help you, friend?” He said it frind in an accent that was almost familiar, but not quite.

  “Hell yes you can help.” Without looking at the camera behind and above his right shoulder, I said, “That thing got audio?”

  He paused half a beat. “Negative.”

  “Good.” All the while I walked toward him, keeping my voice and my moves casual. We were just two guys talking.

  The dude was good. As I neared he didn’t back away, didn’t flinch or overreact, didn’t touch his gun for reassurance. He just stood, hands on hips, until I was close enough to slip a stick of gum in his shirt pocket. Then he said it again, with an edge this time: “Help you, friend?”

  “You can help me figure something out.”

  He waited. He had shark eyes. They gave me nothing.

  “You can help me figure out why a pro like you, who looks to’ve spent time in some serious places, is babysitting Charlie Pundo’s nothingburger baby-raping turd of a son.”

  The right corner of his mouth gained enough altitude to show a hole where a tooth belonged. I was pretty sure that was a smile. So he is Charlie’s guy, and he does hate Fat Teddy’s guts. Your instincts were right. Now press it.

  “Yeah, that Teddy’s all man,” I said. “At least when it comes to twelve-year-old Guatemalan girls. Which made for quite a mess, the way I figure it. Whole family had to get disappeared. Were you in on that?”

  Boxer squinted and tugged at his right earlobe. I took it as a sign I was getting to him.

  Which was dumb.

  “You think you’re in a certain line of work,” I said, “until one night the boss tells you to crash some immigrant janitor’s apartment. To snatch him and his wife and his kids. Not exactly what you—”

  I didn’t get to finish.

  Because Boxer, who’d been cocking his fist when I thought he was tugging his ear, knocked me cold with the quickest, heaviest right hand I’d ever felt in my life.

  Or ever hope to.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I came to in a place that smelled like sweat and sawdust. High windows, dirty light. I fuzzed out, fuzzed in. My head hurt like hell. I felt a blurt of puke, kept it in.

  Heard a voice, soft but urgent. All due respect. Nowhere near this place. Not today.

  That voice. I remembered. Boxer. He’d tugged his earlobe.

  When I pushed to a sitting position, my left cheek screamed pain. I touched it. Big swelling, like I’d tucked a golf ball in there.

  I’d been wrong about a lot of things but right about one: that dude had surely spent time in the ring.

  I finished sitting up—it took a while—blinked, took things in. Warehouse, a big one, ten thousand square feet easy. Curving plywood ramps, most of them badly patched and graffitied. Over there: a Coke machine lying on its side. Far corner: the weight of an HVAC unit had pulled down a chunk of ceiling. The stench clarified itself: bums, rats, junkies, beer piss, slow-rotting plywood, human shit, rubbers, bird carcasses.

  Soundtrack: Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Unhurried. A patient sound, soft on soft.

  I shook my head once more and turned and figured out a couple of things.

  I was in an indoor skateboard park. In fact, I was sitting at the bottom of a giant ramp, a half-pipe I think they call them. Damn thing had a diameter of thirty-plus feet. This one was the pick of the litter—it still looked usable, which was more than you could say for most of the ramps there.

  My eye was drawn upward, where the half-pipe’s rim was painted to look like swimming-pool tile, and I saw the source of the patient noise: Charlie Pundo, sitting sixteen feet high, long legs dangling, running shoes thunk-thunking plywood. Even with those shoes, he wore a sharp suit and tie. He stared straight ahead at nothing. He sure didn’t look at me.

  He’s sixteen feet away, and he doesn’t have wings. Get up and run away now.

  “Ahem.”

  I cranked my neck, heard it rattle, spotted Boxer behind me. He stood easy, one foot on the half-pipe, the Desert Eagle in his right hand.

  So he punched like a steam engine and he could read my mind.

  Great.

  “Sax,” Pundo said.

  I looked. He beckoned with a white tube that looked like a baton. “Come on up.”

  I made a how the hell? shrug.

  “I did it,” he said. “You can, too.”

  “Sir?” Boxer said to Pundo, not liking the idea.

  Pundo waved him off with the baton. “Don’t worry about it. Go see how the guys are making out.”

  The guys? As Boxer walked off—after hesitating, like he really didn’t dig the idea—I noticed footsteps here and there. Wondered how many guys there were.

  Pundo whistled through his teeth, made a pendulum motion with his free hand.

  “What the hell,” I said out loud. And started to run back and forth.

  It’s probably easy for fourteen-year-old boys who weigh a hundred and ten, but it sure wasn’t easy for me in Red Wing boots. I trotted up one side of the half-pipe as far as I could, spun a clumsy one-eighty, and trotted back the way I’d come, using momentum to gain a little altitude on the other side.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times. Sweating now, the one-eighties tricky because my body was nearly parallel to the floor, the way a skateboarder would be.

  I decided I had as much momentum as I was going to get. Put together a burst, ran u
p Pundo’s side, flung my arms, grabbed the edge. I pulled, boot-scrabbled, heaved a leg, pulled some more.

  And made it. I sat to Pundo’s left, hot as hell, panting but trying to hide it.

  He was back to his thousand-yard stare now. He said nothing. In his right hand, close to his chest, he held an old-school Colt Detective Special, blued. With his left hand he tapped the baton on the ramp. Now I saw it wasn’t a baton, but rolled-up papers.

  I patted the inside pocket of my jacket.

  The police report on Teddy’s rape was missing.

  Pundo held it, rolled up, in his hand.

  Which probably explained why we were here.

  Pundo said nothing. Held his revolver as easily as most people hold a breadstick.

  While he brooded, I used the time to scope the warehouse from this vantage point, figuring angles.

  Off near the hole in the ceiling a guy came into view. He walked backward, splashing a trail from a red plastic jug.

  “You’re torching this dump,” I said as gas joined the other smells.

  Pundo said nothing.

  I craned my neck, still checking angles, escape routes, possibilities. This half-pipe had once been reachable by a ladder made of two-by-fours, but the ladder lay on filthy concrete now, torn up like everything else.

  I spotted another guy, this one with an orange beard, also dumping gas. So call it Boxer plus two, and assume they were all armed.

  Good news: they were preoccupied. Lugging around a gas can and a lighter does focus the mind.

  Bad news: they were Boxer’s men. He knew his shit. They would, too.

  When I looked at Pundo again, he was looking at me. He’d unrolled the police report, had set it neatly in the space between us. The Colt, pointed at my belly, shook not one bit.

  He said, “I bought this place for him.”

  “For Teddy.”

  “Eight years ago? No, nine. He was a big boy even then, and he wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, you’ll pardon the pun, when it came to school. Or friends. Or anything else.” He turned his head to look straight out over the skate park—his skate park—and he half-smiled. “He expressed interest in skateboarding, rode around our driveway for a few weeks. I bought him this place so fast, and at such a price, my accountant quit.”

  Then we were quiet some more. Below, men moved around while Boxer gave instructions.

  Wait. Was that something else in my peripheral vision? Off to the left, where my view was blocked by the downed HVAC unit, it seemed the light changed for a second or two.

  Could be anything. Could be a cat running past a window.

  But it could be something else. And something else, anything else, had to be better than the box I was in.

  So stall. Keep the clock running and try to get lucky.

  I said, “Did he like it here? Did he skateboard a lot?”

  “He loved it. He made friends, cut down on the video games, even dropped a few pounds.” Pause. “For four months. Then a twelve-year-old called him a fat whale, and Teddy bashed all the kid’s teeth out on the cast-iron railing they were doing tricks on, and the kid’s dad had some juice here in town, and before I knew it Teddy was enjoined from coming within two hundred feet of the motherfucking skate park I bought him.”

  Pundo never raised his voice while he told it.

  While we said nothing again, Boxer approached the bottom of the half-pipe with a plastic bag from Home Depot. He pulled items from it one by one, arranging them at the edge of the ramp.

  A stout eighteen-inch screwdriver.

  Duct tape.

  Zip ties, huge ones.

  Finally, an eyebolt with a shaft two inches long. The type of thing you’d screw into a tree branch to make a tire swing.

  With the gear laid out, Boxer looked up at me and made that smile that revealed the missing tooth. He raised his eyebrows once, then again, like a silent-movie bad guy.

  Then he picked up the eyebolt and the screwdriver. He used the screwdriver’s handle like a hammerhead, pounding the eyebolt into a half-pipe support to get it started. Then he screwed in the eyebolt. When it was too deep to turn by hand, he shoved the screwdriver blade through the hole and used it for leverage.

  “The place went to hell after that,” Pundo said, ignoring Boxer below. “Lay fallow a long while. Last year I thought about rehabbing and reopening, but I’ll be damned if my people could find three skate parks outside California that turn a profit. So up in smoke it goes, a nice write-down. I shouldn’t be here, of course. Christ, I should be in another state, with a half-dozen witnesses to boot. But when I heard about this”—he tapped the police report—“I needed to speak with you.”

  “Before you set me on fire.”

  “Yeah. Before that.”

  Below, Boxer was finishing up. He’d run the eyebolt in deep enough to work up a sweat—wanted to make sure once they zip-tied me to it and torched the warehouse, I stayed put.

  “You’ve got a son,” Pundo said. “You told me so when we met.”

  “Haven’t seen him for a while now,” I said.

  “They disappoint you.”

  “Or you disappoint them.”

  “Is that the way it played out for you?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, tapping the report. “For the most part, though, they disappoint you. You stand by them. You’d do anything for them. And they let you down.”

  Boxer and his two guys came together near the bottom of the ramp, and I recognized the third guy as the bartender from the Hi Hat. Shaved head, crisp white shirt. The three of them must be finished setting up, because nobody held a gas can. Boxer looked at Pundo and tapped an imaginary wristwatch.

  “Well,” Pundo said, rolling the report and tucking it away.

  “One question,” I said. It was a stall: off in that corner, light had shifted again. Something was going on. I hoped.

  Pundo raised eyebrows.

  “Why kill me?” I said, thinking fast and talking slow. “I don’t count for shit. Your kid’s no worse off than he was. I got my hands on a year-old police report. So what? But if you take me out, you take a big risk and a step backward. So why?”

  It seemed to surprise him. “For family. Of course.”

  Then Charlie Pundo pushed off and slid down the half-pipe on the ass of his fine suit. He rose and walked out of sight dusting the seat of his pants. He never looked back.

  The three guys formed an arc in the bottom of the half-pipe. Holding a fistful of zip ties, Boxer finger-crooked. “Drop in, friend.” Again, frind. What the hell was that accent? Australian? No, but almost.

  Boxer was trying for easy confidence, like I had no alternative but to slide down, get myself zip-tied to an eyebolt, and then burn to death.

  But I was looking at shoes.

  And the shoes damn near made me smile.

  I put weight on my hands like I was getting set to slide.

  I wasn’t.

  All three of them wore dress shoes. No way were they climbing the half-pipe with leather soles. That must have occurred to Boxer—he’d been trying to bluff me down.

  I leaned forward even more until I felt him relax just a hair.

  Then I threw myself backward and flattened out on the deck.

  A handgun fired three fast rounds.

  Boxer said, “Knock it off! Knock it off! You’ve got no angle!” Then, quietly: “Fuck me.”

  As long as I stayed flat, they couldn’t see me from where they stood. And they couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see.

  So I could stay right here, prone atop a half-pipe in a rat-turd warehouse, for the rest of my life.

  It didn’t sound so great. Until you compared it to burning alive.

  I looked around, spotted a length of two-by-four hanging where there used to be a railing, wrenched it loose. Two big-ass deck screws protruded from one end.

  Something new. I sniffed. Smoke?

  Sound: dress-shoe footsteps. I watched the edge of the half-pipe, coc
ked my two-by-four. Heard a slip, a heavy thump, a howl. “Take your shoes off and try again,” Boxer said. Then: “Socks too, for Christ’s bloody sake.”

  No question about it now: I smelled smoke. It was gathering near the ceiling. Maybe Boxer’s boys had lit their matches early.

  The now-barefoot guy tried again. I couldn’t see him, but I heard his back-and-forth footsteps build height, as I had a few minutes earlier. The footsteps neared. I regripped my club and eye-scanned the top of the ramp.

  I saw a hand. Then another.

  I uncoiled with my club.

  I rammed an honest inch of galvanized deck screw into a knuckle.

  The hand released. The man screamed, fell, hit like a sack of doorknobs.

  When the guys below spotted my arm and club, they cut loose with what had to be semiautomatics. They were good, but they weren’t lucky: bullets chewed the lip of the half-pipe in front of my face, but all that hit me were splinters.

  Then a bunch of things happened. They happened fast, but my brain processed them slow. That was a good sign—it used to work the same way in a race car.

  The smoke grew heavy enough to sting my eyes. Since I was near the ceiling, it was harder on me than it was on Boxer and his boys. I’d have to jump soon, like it or not.

  I flipped onto my belly to pick a landing spot. Stayed as flat as I could, but Boxer saw movement and snapped off a couple rounds. They whistled past the ass of my jeans.

  Boxer knew what I was getting set to do. He said, “Go around back!” I heard the second guy move. The third was rolling around in the half-pipe, moaning and useless.

  I looked down. Shit. Sixteen feet straight to polished concrete, a guaranteed busted ankle. But I had no choice: the smoke now had me coughing, squinting. I got ready to drop.

  Motion. There, that damn far corner again. What the hell was going on?

  I blinked against smoke, then blinked again as I tried to understand what I was looking at.

  A couch. A raggedy-ass cushionless sofa the color of blood.

  The couch was sliding my way.

  I got it: someone was pushing the couch, doubled over, using it for cover. He was coming fast.