The Moonpool cr-3

by P. T. Deutermann

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Not what-who: I’m looking for Allie Gardner. We all assumed she’d never been here, at Helios. I’d like to confirm that, before yet another assumption bites me in the ass.”

  An hour and a half later, we were closing in on the south end of the Wilmington container port. Tony had the boat’s red and green side navigation lights on but had turned off the white lights. There were four enormous ships being worked farther up that long bulkhead pier under the glare of a forest of gantry cranes, but the downstream end was empty of activity and all the crane lights were dark. There was little moonlight, and while the container stack area was brightly lighted, the surface of the river a hundred yards out remained in darkness. Tony said we were going in on slack high water in the estuary, so the current was minimal. It would turn to ebb and increase significantly in about an hour.

  Our search through the visitor records hadn’t turned up anything useful. Pardee and I had slipped into coat-and-tie outfits before going with Ari to the physical security admin office. I was hoping that anyone seeing us there would assume we were just some more federal people. We’d examined the time frame when Allie had been in Wilmington and found no record of her ever visiting Helios. Then we’d done it again to see if any other names jumped out at us, but none did. There were a lot of contractors and suppliers, making it clear that Helios was heavy into outsourcing. There was one entry indicating a Thomason had visited a Thomason, but that didn’t have anything to do with anything as best I could tell. I’d asked Ari if we could have a copy of those days’ log pages, and he’d promised to get us one when the admin offices reopened tomorrow.

  The second reason we’d come by boat was to see if it was possible to approach the container port from the river without being discovered, and, if we were discovered, what would happen next. Tony held the boat in position at idle while we waited to see if a passing security truck would notice us. Ten minutes later, one came by up on the unloading area of the pier, but passed by with no reaction to us. My guess was that either the driver’s night vision was nonexistent against all those gantry crane lights farther up or he’d seen the boat and thought nothing of it.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said.

  Tony pointed the bow toward the end of the bulkhead pier. We crept in at idle, rounded the end of the pier about fifty feet out, and nosed up into the creek that formed the downstream boundary of the port. To our right were darkened warehouses and other semi-industrial buildings, which looked like they’d been abandoned for years along the riverbank. Stumps of long-gone pier pilings littered the bank, along with a backwater collection of listing barges, piles of rusty barrels, and dangling outflow pipes. To our left was the southern end of the container stack area, with lanes and rows of shipping containers stacked four to ten high.

  “I’ve got five feet under the keel,” Tony announced as we pushed farther up the narrowing creek.

  The water stank of oil, sewage, and other things, none of them good. The bulkhead pier on our left ended in a dirt bank and some long-dead trees. Farther up the creek was that jumbled pile of damaged and discarded containers I’d seen on our first visit. The security lighting ended at the edge of the stack laydown area. The container graveyard was not lighted at all, and it was also outside the chain-link fence that defined the port perimeter. The creek ran between the fence and a small mountain of discarded containers.

  “Four feet,” Tony said, putting the engine in neutral and coasting forward now. He’d pointed out earlier that if we ran aground now, at high slack water, we’d be there until the next high tide came along to float us off.

  “Can you put us on the bank with that container pile?” I asked.

  He turned the boat toward the ribbon of oily trash bobbing along the dirt bank. Pardee went forward with a boathook to see what he could grab, while I stayed in the cockpit with Tony and the shepherds. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a body or two floating in all the mess, and, in fact, I saw at least one furry soccer ball with the head of a cat.

  The boat stopped with a small bump, and Pardee hooked something on the bank to hold us there. I turned back toward the container port to see if we’d attracted any attention. The silent stacks looked back at me. The fence at the top of the opposite bank looked to be about ten feet high, but I could clearly see where the bottom of the chain-link had billowed out or been compromised by gullies washed out at low points. If we’d gone to that side of the creek, it would have been easy to climb the bank, watch for security trucks, and then slide under the chain-link. I wondered if they had a problem with pilferage in the stacks at night.

  “Boss?” Pardee said.

  I turned back around. He was pointing into the container junkyard, where I could see the flickering reflection of a small fire. Then I saw a human shadow on a nearby container, and then another. Frick growled quietly.

  “Hobo jungle up there?” I said.

  Pardee nodded. “Looks like it,” he said. “I guess you could live in an empty container.”

  “I want to go up there, see if we can talk to somebody. Find out how hard it is to get into the container stack yard at night.”

  “You taking the dogs?” Pardee asked.

  “Hell, yes,” I said. “Why?”

  He repositioned the boathook to steady the boat, which was trying to swing around in the creek. “Because those folks up there see those dogs, ain’t nobody gonna stick around to have a nice chat.”

  “You think they’ll run?”

  “I believe they will,” he said. He stuck his tongue out at Frick. She lifted a lip. “I would.”

  I patted Frick’s head. “Then they better be really good runners,” I said.

  In the event, they didn’t run. They didn’t even see us coming until Pardee surprised the shit out of a noisome collection of derelicts, drunks, and aging homeless types surrounding a small fire that was burning in a sawed-off steel drum. We’d separated in making our approach. Pardee had come in from the landward side, stepping into the firelight from between two mangled containers that had obviously been in a trucking accident several years ago. I remained in the shadows between the edge of the pile and the river, with the shepherds sitting by my side. The dozen or so denizens of the junkyard studiously ignored the large black man who was stepping carefully over two sleeping forms and into the middle of the group.

  “Evening,” he said.

  “We ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong,” one man said, still not looking directly at Pardee. “Just stayin’ warm, is all.”

  “No problem,” Pardee said. “This isn’t a roust. I’m looking for someone.”

  “You a cop?” another man asked. He appeared to be younger than most of the group, with shaved hair and some piercing jewelry on his face. The vivid red splotches on his face and neck indicated active disease of some kind.

  “Skip tracer,” Pardee said. “I want someone who knows his way around the stacks over there, someone who can take us in through the fence and back out again without getting caught.”

  “Who’s us?” the younger one said with a sneer. “Got a mouse in your pocket?”

  “Us is me and my partner over there.”

  That was my cue to step out into the firelight with the dogs, the sight of which provoked some uneasy repositioning among the assembled multitude.

  “Them’re po -lice dogs,” a third man said, looking around nervously to see who or what else might be lurking in the shadows. “You guys is cops.”

  “Nope,” Pardee said. “And cops are definitely what we want to avoid tonight. You boys hang out here. One of you must know how to get into that stack yard over there. There’s money in it for the right guy.”

  “If you guys are bounty hunters, who you chasin’?” sneer-face asked. I already wanted to smack him. I think Frick wanted to eat him. Pardee passed the ball to me with a quick glance.

  “We’re looking for a guy, late fifties, maybe even sixty,” I said. “Good shape, real short haircut.
Likes to give orders.”

  “How much money?” an older man asked. I hadn’t noticed him before, but he looked like he might have been somebody once, despite the rags and the filthy beard. He was sitting in the prime spot at the fire, in the warmth but out of the smoke.

  “A C-note to take us in, show us the layout, and get us out again. Twenty minutes, tops, start to finish. Then we’re gone.”

  “You fixin’ to steal some shit?” a man asked. “ ’Cause them cans over there? They’s all locked up. They even got alarms and shit.”

  “I popped one, once,” a seriously grubby geezer announced. He was sitting all by himself, and the crusty stains that painted the front of his clothes from chops to crotch may have accounted for his isolation. “All’s was in there was a hundred-lebbenty milyun boxes of goddamn shit-paper.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with shit-paper,” another observed. “Better’n usin’ yer shirt, like you do.”

  This provoked general amusement, but I could see that the older man was interested. Pardee saw it, too, and produced the hundred-dollar bill, which got everyone’s attention.

  “Shee-it,” the young one said. “I’ll do it.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” the bearded man said, getting to his feet. Surprisingly, the young kid didn’t argue. The rest of them subsided into their boozy meditations.

  The bearded man was nearly my size. He was wearing jeans, boondockers, two sweatshirts, and a black knit hat. His hands were tattooed with the smudgy ink of what looked like prison art. The way he was built and the animal grace with which he moved alerted me to watch him carefully. Pardee caught it, too. The rest of the junkyard crowd were bona-fide derelicts; this one was a hard guy, probably on the run and hiding out among the human debris that seemed to be accumulating on the edges of every American city these days.

  “Lead on, then,” I said. Pardee stepped aside and the man went past him, giving Pardee the once-over. “You guys strapped?” he asked as we moved away from the campfire.

  “What do you think?” Pardee replied, not actually answering the man’s question.

  “Because there’s rules,” he said.

  “Rules?”

  “Yeah,” he said, stopping now that we were out of sight and sound of the others. “The security guys over there? In the yard? They know there’s gonna be some shit going down, time to time. Deal is, they won’t shoot at us, we don’t shoot at them. They catch a guy, he’s fucking caught. End of story. Don’t fuck that up for us, okay?”

  I nodded. We started walking again, through the piles of wrecked, burned, or simply rusted-out shipping containers. There were dozens of them, dropped onto the point of land between the stinking creek and the fenced stack yard. Pardee stayed close to our guide, while I stayed back and watched the shepherds as much as I watched the bearded man. If he was leading us into an ambush, the dogs should be able to sense it and give us warning. Then he surprised us.

  “So you’re looking for the colonel?” he asked over his shoulder, as we picked our way through a jumble of sheet metal and hydraulic hoses.

  “Might be,” I said. “How do you know him?”

  He laughed. “Same way you guys do, probably. We’ve done some business.”

  “ Here? ” I asked, indicating all the accumulated junk. Even as I said that, I noticed that there was a clearly defined path through all the wreckage.

  “No, mostly on that nice big boat of his,” he said. Then he stopped and held up a hand. “Okay-from here on in, we don’t talk. Make sure those dogs don’t bark, either. See those three cans?”

  There were three containers, badly dented and rusted out, that appeared to have been dropped in a line. The doors were long gone. Then I realized that they were lined up, front to back. A steel tunnel, or covered bridge, which crossed the creek and landed us on the bank below the chain-link fence up above. A perfect place for an ambush, too. There was light shining down the bank from the light standards in the yard, but that tunnel was black as the grave.

  “Stay to the left-hand side, you won’t fall through,” he said. “I’ll go first, you all come single file, and quiet-like. No lights, no talking.”

  I gave Frack a command, and he trotted up to join the bearded man, who looked down in momentary alarm at the big black dog that was now his new best friend. “In case there’s a bad guy hiding out in all that mess,” I said. “He’ll let you know, and then he’ll tear some shit up, if he feels like it.”

  Starting with you was the unspoken message, but Beard just shrugged and said okay. Pardee followed him and Frack. I went next, with Frick behind, in case the problem erupted behind us. I had my. 45 out, too, rules or no rules. Pardee had his uncovered, but still holstered.

  Nothing happened. We picked our way through the darkness of the three containers, our footfalls echoing quietly in the wobbly steel tube. I could sense big holes in the floor to my right, and could actually smell the creek. We used the tie-down fittings to stay upright against the slope of the tunnel. Once I heard one of the dogs scrabbling for footing on the metal floor, but the bearded man kept going, forward and up toward where the final container brought us almost to the edge of the fence. There was a well-worn track going the final ten feet from the last container to the bottom of the fence. I went forward to join our guide just inside the container.

  “They have to know about this,” I said quietly, pointing to the worn path with my chin.

  Beard shrugged. “There’s lots of scams working in this place,” he said. “The people who run it expect a certain amount of wastage, as they call it. The trick is to keep it in bounds. That’s what the colonel likes to say. Keep it in bounds, not too much, nobody getting too greedy, and they’ll look the other way.”

  “For a piece of the action, you mean.”

  He nodded. “Up to a certain level. This seaport here is a union shop. Teamsters. Longshoremen. Merchant marine. Railroad.”

  “The helping-hands unions.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he smiled. “Sweethearts, every one of them. Some guys want a piece of the action; the big bosses just want peace in the valley, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  I said I did. He pulled out a small set of binoculars and began to scan the area of the stack yard along the main river. Pardee continued to watch him, while the shepherds sat down and waited for new orders.

  “What was the colonel’s interest in this place?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “Was?” he asked, giving me a sideways, suspicious look.

  I’d screwed up, but I pretended not to notice. “Some people want a word with him, so they hired us. If he’s on the run, he’s not likely to be doing regular business, here or anywhere else, right now. Not our problem either way. I’m just curious.”

  He went back to scanning the lanes and the rows of boxes piled out in the yard.

  “The colonel, he’s in the import business,” he said. “He’s moving illegals.”

  Now, that was a surprise. The notion that Trask had been moving Mexican field workers across the American border wasn’t much in keeping with his rant about how the country was going to hell. Then I remembered the sudden swarm of foreigners out of that one container.

  “You talking wetbacks in seagoing containers?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” he said. “They don’t put the colonel’s meat in cans. Those big-ass ships bring ’em in like passengers. And, according to the colonel, these aren’t tomato pickers. These are journeymen who can do complicated shit. People who can run a lathe, do CAD-CAM, X-ray techs, or guys who can operate a big Caterpillar tractor.”

  “They come up in the ships from down south?”

  “Right. The crews are all in on it-they’re getting paid off, too. The ships feed ’em and maybe even work ’em. They go in a can just before the ship lands.”

  “And then?”

  “Then those cans go out there, into the stacks. The ones with people in ’em go on the bottom of a stack, every time, real convenient-like. Then the colonel, he come
s in with the boat, uses some of us to help him move them out.”

  “Help how?”

  He shrugged. “I take a crew of those derelicts in, stir up some shit. You saw those people. They get desperate for their next bottle, their next rock, I offer cash. I send them in under the wire. They go pretend to bust a box, along come the cops, there’s a big deal, lights and sirens, all the while the colonel’s moving his goods in a different part of the yard.”

  “Where does he take them?”

  “Away,” Beard said.

  “Who’s paying for all this?” Pardee asked.

  “The companies who’re gonna use ’em here in the States,” he said. “Like the colonel keeps saying: This is a seaport. Skilled people are just another commodity.”

  “Where does he take them?” I asked again.

  Beard looked over at me with a disappointed expression, as in, He doesn’t tell us and we don’t ask. “You really want to go in there, or did you find out what you came to find out?”

  I looked over at Pardee. Busted.

  “That’s what I thought,” Beard said. “Can we go back now? Lieutenant?”

  I’d begun to wonder why he’d been so forthcoming about what was going on down here. The bearded guy was grinning at us now. Then he fingered a slim government ID card from a slit in his belt. His name was J. B. Houston.

  “ICE,” he said. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And you would be the retired sheriff’s office lieutenant with the two German shepherds that the local Feebs are so fond of.”

  Pardee was shaking his head disgustedly. Houston looked around to make sure none of the tramps had followed us and then indicated the fence. “Let’s go up there, and I’ll show you something.”

  I’d been trying to think of something intelligent to say but had failed entirely, so we followed him up the hill, slipped under a loose skirt of chain-link, and walked out into the stack yard. We were at the most remote end of the yard and a good half mile away from the active pier and the unloading activity. I kept looking for video cameras on the light standards but didn’t see any. Houston took us into the space between two rows of stacked containers and then knelt down on the concrete at the base of a stack.