Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  Traffic was light at that evening hour. He let out the Nash’s engine, changing lanes handily to get around the occasional slow-moving vehicle. The blast of cool air through the gaping hole in the windshield struck him full in the face, bringing all his brain cells to life. He had never felt so alert, not even when he was using the bayonet. He’d heard of this happening under fire. It was under just such conditions that heroism was born.

  Ahead and to the right, the River Rouge leviathan hove into view with the explosive force of a convoy of battleships under full steam, stacks belching fire as its coke ovens smelted down thousands of tons of toasters, teakettles, and worn-out Model T’s and reshaped them into fleets of jeeps. Almost directly across from the enormous city of plants stood the stockade and barracks of historical Fort Wayne, the military installation built to protect Detroit from a Confederate attack that never took place, now finally serving its patriotic duty as a temporary storage place for light and heavy armored vehicles waiting their turn to be shipped overseas. That entire stretch of highway glittered like the rainbow bridge to Valhalla.

  Glittered a little too much.

  As he topped the low rise, red flashers dyed the car’s interior the color of blood. A pair of Detroit black-and-white prowl cars were parked nose to nose across the avenue to form a roadblock. He saw the peaked caps of the officers lined up on the other side with shotguns and revolvers leveled across the long hoods and turtleback roofs.

  “Step on it.” Zagreb was leaning forward across the back of the front seat, .38 in hand. “You got an egg under your shoe?”

  Burke said, “I got it against the firewall now. He must have a Spitfire under that hood.”

  “I see his taillights.” McReary had both hands on the dash.

  Canal said, “Bullshit. He’s got them off by now.”

  Burke said, “Not at the speed he’s going. Even he ain’t that nuts.”

  “Who we talking about?” Canal asked.

  Zagreb told them to shut up. “That roadblock should be coming up.”

  McReary said, “I wouldn’t count on it. We caught a squeal on the two-way when you two were busy collecting trash. Some kind of free-for-all on Belle Isle. There might not be any cars available.”

  “That would just about take the cake. When two drunks batting each other with beer bottles get more love from this department than a maniac with a knife, it’s time to join the navy.”

  “Why all the time the navy?” Canal asked the lieutenant. “What’s so fucking great about ships?”

  “Easier on my piles. There it is! We got the block.”

  The red glow half a mile ahead was like a stuttering sunrise.

  One of the taillights disappeared.

  Burke swung up the side-mounted spotlight by its handle and switched it on. Its beam shot out, striking the gray car broadside. “He’s turning.”

  McReary said, “Into what, the river?”

  “Fuck the river,” Zagreb said. “That’s Fort Wayne.”

  The iron gate was chained and padlocked. He kept his foot on the accelerator, trying to regain the speed he’d lost when he made the turn. He struck square on. The chain held. He hit the steering wheel with his chin, chipping a tooth. Crunching the pieces, he backed up and hit it again. The hood buckled, a headlight went out. Still the chain held.

  The siren was getting closer. He didn’t look that way, or the other to see if the officers from the roadblock were headed his direction. He backed all the way to Jefferson, slammed the transmission into low, accelerated steadily, shifted into second, and pushed the pedal to the floor. The other headlight went out upon impact. The gate sprang open, he downshifted to avoid stalling, then sped up again and threw the cane directly into third. The entire frame shuddered, but the engine roared, and the speedometer slid up to fifty.

  Straight ahead was the Georgian pile of the barracks, a penitentiary-like building given over to a military museum. He tried to turn, but one of his tires rubbed a bent fender and he had to wrench the wheel hard to the right. He bucked up over a decorative border of whitewashed stones and across grass, inches short of the building’s granite front. He’d been trespassing a full thirty seconds before the MP stationed in the guardpost inside the gate woke up, shouldered his M-l rifle, and fired the first angry shot ever heard on the grounds of Fort Wayne. The bullet whistled high over the roof of the Nash.

  The guard’s sloth enraged him. What if he were a saboteur?

  The MP probably wasn’t twenty and could pass for sixteen, a real Willie Best, jug ears, freckles, and all. His white helmet looked too big for him. In his dress khakis and crisp armband he might have been a boy playing soldier. He was back in the guard box cranking up his telephone when Zagreb got out of the car and approached him, stepping around the twisted debris of the gate. He was holding his badge folder out in front of him.

  “I’m a lieutenant with the Detroit Racket Squad,” he told the guard. “The man who crashed your gate is a suspect in five homicides.”

  The MP silenced him with a white-gloved palm, finished his report, and hung up. Immediately a whooping siren started up and banks of stadium lights mounted on fifty-foot poles slammed on overhead, flooding the compound with their merciless white glare. Zagreb had to shout.

  “Is there another gate?”

  “No. He’ll have to come back this way if he’s coming out at all.”

  “We’ll just go on in and make sure.”

  “I don’t think so. This is a government restricted area.”

  “That’s okay, son. We won’t steal anything.”

  The guard raised his rifle.

  Just then Canal, McReary, and Burke came up. They had their revolvers out.

  Zagreb said, “Son, you don’t want to die for your country without ever getting out of it.”

  “This is my detail,” the young man said. “I could get shot by firing squad anyway.”

  “If they were going to do that, they’d do it for letting the nut with the Nash get by you. Lower the piece and come with us. When we nail this guy I’ll tell your CO you did it. You’ll make sergeant.”

  “I am a sergeant. And I can’t leave my post.”

  “Well, we’re in hot pursuit of a fugitive in a multiple-homicide case. That means where he goes, we go. Even if it’s the White House. I’d tell you to look it up in the manual, but I don’t have time. Lower the piece or I’ll shoot you as an accessory.”

  “I asked for combat. They put me in charge of a parking lot.” The rifle came down.

  Back in the car, Burke drove carefully over the twisted pieces of iron. “What do you think they’ll do to him?”

  “Somebody has to hang by his balls, and it won’t be his commanding officer. Put on some go.” The lieutenant sat back.

  They turned onto the grass, following the ruts made by the previous car. After a minute the spotlight picked up a reflection. They slowed down, then stopped. The Nash was parked past the end of the barracks. The door hung open on the driver’s side and a cloud of thick steam was hissing from the smashed radiator. Burke killed the headlights, leaving the spotlight trained on the car, and they alighted and fanned out to surround the vehicle.

  Canal had brought the flashlight from the glove compartment. He stood back and shone it through the windows. When they were sure no one was inside he stepped closer and directed the beam onto the front seat. Nothing was there but a magazine, open to a spread on bathing beauties.

  “Okay, we take it slow from here,” Zagreb said. “We got us a wounded bear.”

  He didn’t feel hampered in any way by the loss of his car; quite the reverse. He was always more comfortable on foot. He kept in excellent shape with calisthenics, and his options broadened when he wasn’t loaded down with heavy machinery. The towering lights had destroyed his cover, but the compound was swarming with troops from the Quartermaster Corps sprinting toward prearranged stations, and a figure moving with assurance and an apparent knowledge of his destination drew less curiosity than som
eone skulking in shadow. Ahead of him, on the other side of a chain-link fence, sat rows and rows of armored vehicles, lined up in formation as if prepared to trundle toward an enemy stronghold on West Jefferson. He tucked the bayonets naked blade up his sleeve and sprinted that way.

  The fence was higher than it looked from a distance, twelve feet at least. He didn’t hesitate, but started climbing quickly. He balked at the coils of barbed wire on top, then unzipped his two-tone jacket and draped it over the wire. He heard a shout then, but he kept moving, pulling himself up and over, not hastening but not wasting time either. When the first shot rang out he was on the other side of the fence and letting go. The bullet missed.

  He hit the ground rolling. The impact emptied his lungs; but he knew if he paused to catch his wind he was lost. He rolled to his feet and ran, taking in air with painful stabbing sobs. The bayonet had torn his sleeve when he landed. He untangled it from the material as he ran. There was more shooting. He zigzagged, just like John Garfield in Air Force. Zeroes strafing him, bullets stitching up the earth at his heels.

  The harsh white light made stationary monsters of the light and heavy tanks inside the compound, like a herd of mastodons flash-frozen in mid-migration by advancing glaciers. He slid between two of them, drawn instinctively into the shadows. Their molded-steel jackets were cool to the touch, the camouflage paint fresh enough to give off a strong smell of turpentine. He moved deeper into the herd, putting yards and tons of armor plate between himself and his pursuers, seeking the center of the iron womb. The proximity of so much martial machinery made his nipples hard. His erection actually put a hitch in his stride.

  At length he poked the bayonet under his belt, slanting the blade backward, and clambered up onto a fender. The day’s humidity had condensed into droplets on the smooth metal; the moisture seeped through his clothes, chilling him with the thrill of risk. He was Humphrey Bogart in Sahara, the lone survivor of his unit wiped out in North Africa, becoming one with his tank, prepared to sell his life dear.

  And now he was atop the turret, with its 37-mm gun up front and fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on a swivel at the back. He ran his hands over the hatch, found the handle. It swung up and over silently on oiled hinges. He put a foot inside, groped with it and found the rungs welded to the side. Swung his other leg inside and climbed down, into blackness. The raw steel smell was overpowering.

  He touched invisible switches and handles and protuberances about which he knew nothing: the movies he’d seen had been disappointingly silent about such details. In any case the tank was hemmed in by its brothers and he couldn’t have gotten it out even if he could start it and figure out how it was propelled. He climbed back up.

  The siren continued to whoop, but beneath it he heard shouts and knew they were inside the fence, searching the tanks and the spaces between. With his legs still inside the turret he hunkered behind the rear-mounted machine gun, gripping it by its fisted handle. An electric current bolted through him on contact. The black pall of sky overhanging the artificial illumination went bright, the painful blue of the cloudless canopy of the Pacific. Bataan, the final minute of the last reel, Robert Taylor in his tin hat and sweat-soaked fatigues, like Bogart the lone survivor of his unit, a week’s worth of black beard smudging his handsome face, itself twisted into a mask of hate, swiveling the big machine gun right and left, slamming round after round into the hordes of Japanese swarming up from the beach, hot brass shells spitting out of the ejector and splinking onto the sand, each one representing another dead enemy.

  He found the trigger and squeezed. Nothing. Not even a click. The gun wasn’t loaded. He burst into tears. Then he stopped himself with a sharp snuffle of snot, crawled up over the turret, and slithered along the fender on the other side. He reached back and slid out the bayonet. The handle felt more natural than had the grip of the gun. It was the friend of so many campaigns, so many victories against the enemy at home. He couldn’t believe he’d despaired. And because he couldn’t believe it, he wiped the episode from his memory.

  Zagreb, bunched up with his squad and quartermaster’s men at the gate in the chain-link fence, had been forced to wait an endless minute for a corporal to show up with a key to the padlock. Canal had wanted to shoot it off, like in the movies, but Burke, ever the squads ground to common sense, had pointed out that if the bullet didn’t bounce off and kill one of them, it would almost certainly jam the lock so it couldn’t be opened without a hacksaw.

  Then the gate was open and they were inside and spreading out to search among the columns of silent tanks, the detectives with their badge folders hanging out of their breast pockets to avoid getting themselves shot by the army. Zagreb could feel the hair on the back of his neck prickling his shirt collar. He hadn’t felt that since he was in uniform, hunting among the boxcars in the Penn Central railroad yard for a Jackson parolee who had raped and murdered a nurse on Cass. He knew how Frank Buck must have felt tracking a wounded predator into the bush.

  He wished they’d turn off the siren. The tanks’ metal fittings, cooling from the day’s heat, made noises that might have belonged to a man clambering over them, and that constant hooting was no help in determining the difference. His knees and neck ached from squatting to peer between the tracks and hoisting himself up and craning to see above the turrets. He stopped often to change hands on his gun and mop his palm on his trousers. The butt grew slippery again almost immediately.

  He stopped and held his breath. Several yards to his right he heard a noise that might have been a man sobbing. The sound broke off suddenly. In the aftermath he couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just the echo of the siren off a curved metal surface, like a propane tank ringing after a cherry bomb was set off. But then it shouldn’t have stopped, because the siren was still going. He moved that way.

  He was having trouble keeping his bearings. It was like searching a cornfield with ten-foot stalks on all sides, obliterating the horizon. He put a hand against the side of a tank that was smaller than some of the others, no more than fourteen feet long, for rest and to consider his direction. He felt a slight vibration through the metal, as if something was moving across it. He looked up at the turret.

  A dark flying figure blocked out the sky. He whirled to bring his gun around just as the full weight of the figure struck him and bore him to the ground. An arm went across his throat, choking off his cry. He struggled, tightened his grip instinctively on the .38, then another arm snaked across his front and something pricked him above his belt and jerked back in a hooking movement. It stopped, worrying at something; it was hung up in the strap of his holster. He braced a knee against the ground and shoved back with all his weight. The grip broke. He scrambled to his feet, stumbled against the fender of the tank, grabbed it for balance, and spun around, holding the revolver

  He’d seen the face before, earlier than the police sketch. He didn’t know where. The young man had fallen into a sitting position on the torn earth with his back against the steel wheels of the neighboring tank. He’d struck his head; he shook it, then opened his eyes, looked around, and lunged for the shining steel bayonet that had fallen near his right foot.

  “Stop!” Zagreb cocked the hammer.

  Ziska froze with one arm extended. His eyes moved from side to side, and the lieutenant realized they weren’t alone. Canal and McReary had come around the corner of the tank with their guns out. At the opposite end of the long aisle between the vehicles all in line, Burke approached on the run, his long, revolver-carrying shadow stretching out in front. Shouts getting close, more running feet. The soldiers had heard Zagreb’s cry.

  The man on the ground relaxed then, shrinking in on himself. His sleeve was torn, exposing the flesh where his arm lay limp and pale between his knees. He was a broken thing.

  Zagreb said, “Hey.”

  Ziska took a moment to respond. He looked up without lifting his chin.

  “Pick it up.”

  The lieutenant was no longer sweating. Hi
s skin was cool and he could feel through it the man’s emotions, the tension in the other detectives as they watched, the vibration of combat boots approaching. Burke, the fourth horseman, had caught up; he felt his heart thudding from the hard run. Ziska, visibly reassembling himself from his shattered pieces, was a dead ringer for his image in charcoal. He looked exactly as he had when Cathleen Dooley had seen him, just before he slaughtered two people in J. L. Hudson’s in the middle of a weekday afternoon in wartime Detroit.

  Kilroy reached out tentatively. Then he scooped up the bayonet and braced his other hand on the ground to hurl himself forward.

  Four guns barked and kept on barking until they clicked empty.

  chapter thirty-five

  ON A SULTRY SATURDAY in July 1943, Lieutenant Max Zagreb decided to devote his day off to doing nothing. That wore thin by afternoon, and he dug himself out from under a pile of pulp magazines—the slicks just reminded him of Ziska and his subscription-salesman cover—and went to see a movie.

  The feature at the Fox was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but he was mostly interested in seeing the newsreels. The war had busted wide open beginning on June 22, when B-24 Liberators from the Ford Willow Run plant carpet-bombed the Ruhr industrial valley, flattening German munitions factories from Recklinghausen to Antwerp. Then on July 10, America invaded Sicily, pouring onto the south coast from the Pantelleria jumping-off point and plowing inland behind Patton’s Seventh Army. Montgomery’s Eighth landed three days later. Caught between the Americans and British, the Italians began to retreat like Mussolini’s forehead. The Pathé cameras dwelt on teenage gunners poking bucket-size cartridges into boiler-size breeches, but the real story was that the war was being fought between Henry Ford and Alfried Krupp, wobbly-kneed old men with smelting furnaces for hearts. The capacity crowd applauded each dubbed-in explosion. Zagreb figured they were there for the air-conditioning.

  The auditorium was silent through the next segment, a follow-up on the Detroit riots. Some of Governor Kelly’s 1,000 National Guardsmen were shown patrolling the littered streets with M-l rifles, backed up by five thousand federal troops in jeeps and armored cars dispatched by President Roosevelt, who on Monday, June 21, declared martial law in the city. Carpets of shattered glass glittered on the sidewalks and pavement, looted suits and dresses abandoned in the getaway rush festooned the sills of empty display windows, a group of patrolmen and civilian volunteers wearing special armbands were shown rocking an overturned Chevy coupe from side to side in an effort to right it. The narrators stentorian voice intoned the statistics for the two-day toot: thirty-four dead, nine of them colored; six hundred injured; property loss nearly two million dollars; one rumor of rape and murder on Belle Isle, false.