Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover

by Mike Cooper

  “Tumbug, he owns that land, and he wants to build a little cabin. I said I’d help start the foundation. We got a deal on the cinderblock from the concrete plant over in Connellsdale. I drove it here, but as soon as we started unloading, Bug’s all like, shit, my back hurts! It’s killing me!” Dave went back into the shop, came back a moment later with a five-gallon plastic bucket holding a pair of sledgehammers, a corded hammer drill, gloves and some other tools. “You ask me, I think he was just worried about missing the start of the Panthers game.”

  “Why don’t you drive that?” I pointed at the bay that held the Charger.

  “Oh, no.” For the first time he seemed completely serious. “She’s just for racing.”

  When all the bay doors were closed, Dave went inside the office once more. “Too much beer. I’ll be right back.”

  The rain had eased, hardly more than a drizzle. It felt like it was going to be that kind of weather—on and off, clouds heavy overhead. I wondered what I was doing here, whether I should just get in the Malibu and leave, right now.

  Instead, I took out my crummy phone and dialed Ryan.

  Ten rings.

  No answer.

  He hadn’t picked up earlier in the morning, either—I’d tried twice, once when I got up and once on the way to Dave’s shop.

  When he didn’t answer his phone yesterday, it was five rings then click. Now it was just ring-ring-no-answer.

  If that meant something, I didn’t know what. I tried another number.

  Zeke picked up right away.

  “Silas? Shit. Wait.”

  My phone rang fifteen seconds later—he had to call me back through the Canadian anonymizer.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Zeke demanded.

  “Nothing. I lost the tail and they never came back.”

  “You sure?”

  Dave was still inside. I put my back to the shop and watched the road.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “At least you’re alive.”

  “Um . . . you thought I might not be?”

  “You talked to anyone else yet? Since yesterday?”

  This was not making me feel better. “Just tell it.”

  “There’s a team looking for you,” he said. “They came into Volchak’s last night, around eleven—direct to the bar, then around the tables. A thousand bucks for an address or a phone number. They had your name. Said it right out loud.” He paused. “They had your name.”

  Shit. “Anyone give me up?”

  “Sure. The guys are like, I know him! Silas, yeah, that asshole!”

  “What?”

  “Well, everyone tried—fake information, of course. For a grand? But the men in black didn’t actually pay out, so I guess it’s all fair.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No. I got three calls right after they left.”

  “Who were they?”

  “No one knows.”

  Thin sunshine brightened, filtering through the overcast, then faded away again.

  “But one of them was a woman,” he added.

  “I thought you didn’t see them.”

  “Not at Volchak’s.”

  I don’t think he was doing it deliberately, so I suppressed an urge to yell into the phone. Speaking slowly: “Did you encounter them someplace else?”

  “After I heard, I went up to your place. They were coming out when I got there.”

  Worse and worse.

  So far, I’ve always been able to keep my public and work lives completely separate—my home is Manhattan, for God’s sake, not a cave in the mountains. To most people, I’m a guy they see around, something in finance or insurance, a face at the gym. Not hiding, in other words. But when I’m on the job, I disappear. Completely. No connection to the real me whatsoever.

  Until now.

  “Recognize them?”

  “No. A woman, like I said, and two men.” He gave me a useless description. Unless someone’s albino or missing an arm or something, eyewitness testimony is pointless. Five ten, fit, short hair—we all look like that, Zeke and me included.

  Which Zeke knew, of course. “The girl, though—reminded me of someone. Maybe it was the hair. Stylish.”

  “Stylish?”

  “A blonde. Light colored. Too dark on your street to see much.” Which is one reason I chose the place. “Good cut.”

  Maybe he’d started reading Vogue. “So?”

  “So she was in charge.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “She got into the front passenger seat. Plus the body language. I was down the block, by the laundromat. Couldn’t hear anything, and they drove away before I could get close.”

  “How’d you know they were coming out of my apartment, then?”

  “Because the lock was broke when I went up. They’d drilled it out and punched the deadbolt. Metal bits on the floor, they didn’t even try to clean up.”

  He didn’t bother describing the car. It would have been a rental or stolen or a throwaway.

  “Ryan’s still not answering,” I said. “I talked to him once, twenty-one hundred last night or so, but now nothing.”

  “I’ve been calling him too. Nothing.”

  “You check out his place?”

  “Don’t know where he lives. You?”

  “No.” Ryan might have had a life somewhere, but he kept it secret, which is good practice until you need someone like Zeke to come help you out.

  “No one else cares about Ryan. They’re all talking about you. And your new friends.”

  Suddenly I had new friends everywhere.

  “It’s two teams,” I said. “Guys in a car, following me out of Pittsburgh, and a separate group at my apartment in New York.”

  “Working together, though.”

  “That’s not an unreasonable assumption.” Given the timeframe. “But it’s hard to believe Brinker has enough sway to whistle up a nationwide manhunt.”

  “How much do you think he’s skimming?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Millions?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So there’s your juice.” Zeke had a simple view of the world.

  What made it complicated was Markson. Brinker had obvious reasons to want me out of the picture. Someone at Clayco corporate, worried that Markson might find out about Clay Micro’s spectacular malfeasance, might also want me out of the picture. Nothing made sense otherwise; companies following Markson’s business ethics just don’t hire people like me or my pursuers.

  But still: two teams?

  A door banged. I glanced back to see Dave coming out of the office.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “You want my advice, stay out of the city for a while.”

  “You serious?”

  “They didn’t toss it.”

  I didn’t follow. “Toss what?”

  “Your place. I looked in, and everything was in order. The way they treated the lock, if they’d done a search it would have been totally ransacked.”

  “Well, fuck.” More bad news.

  “That’s right.” Zeke got the final word. “They’re not after information, or clues, or whatever. They want you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The drive took thirty minutes, west and back toward Pittsburgh, roughly following the Monongahela. I had the wipers on, then off, then on again—the clouds just wouldn’t make up their mind.

  I wasn’t saying much, distracted by Zeke’s news. I don’t mind the usual riffraff populating my line of work, but another team of professionals was different. Intimidating white-collar executives is one thing; shooting it out with high-powered mercenaries quite another.

  Dave leaned his seat back.

  “I tried to find our mother,” he said.

  “Uh.” I looked over at him.

  The change of topic was abrupt. Or maybe hearing it like that—our mother—threw me.

  Of course I’d thought about doing the same when I was young. The
middle years were rough. I got a new family every year or two—some of it my fault, but mostly it was the adults’ bad luck and money problems. I imagined the same thing I figure all foster kids do, the ones who were put up as infants: They’re European royalty. Or supersecret spies. Or Bill Gates!—he wants me to grow up normal before he gives me a billion dollars.

  My last folks were okay, though. They stuck with me all through high school. After that I was in the world, and my origins were ancient history. The desire to go back faded away, not worth it.

  “That’s what got me started, right?” Dave looked out his window. “Never imagined I’d find a brother. I just wanted to know who my mother and father were.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or really just mother. My family, as I got older they said things once or twice—not meaning to, just little things that slipped out. But you know how it is. You pay attention.”

  Yes, you do pay attention. Growing up like Dave or me, you’re never on sure ground. Every clue, every hint matters, trying to figure it out.

  If you don’t know where you came from, it’s so much harder to know where you’re going.

  “They didn’t like our father. Or had heard bad things about him. I don’t know what, exactly, but I just picked up the idea he was worthless.”

  “He gave us away,” I said.

  Surprising myself. Some buried emotion had surfaced there, just for a moment.

  “That’s right.” Dave was silent. “Anyway, I thought maybe I could find Mother. The adoption registries, sometimes they’ll let you send a letter or something. But it didn’t work.”

  A small puzzle. “This was all in New Hampshire?”

  “Only a year. My adoption family moved here when I was two. The old man was following steel work, can you believe it? I don’t know what he was thinking, like they were knocking down all the mills just so they could put up new ones.”

  “I thought everybody went bankrupt in the eighties.”

  “A few hung on.” Dave yawned. “Not forever, though. In fact, that’s what we’re doing today.”

  “What?”

  “Helping take down the last blast furnace in Pittsburgh.” He laughed. “In America, for all I know. Some shit, huh?”

  The mill was a small one. That’s what Dave said, but it was hard to believe, looking at the huge complex of towers and ironwork and massive buildings. A bright sign at the entrance had a swoosh logo and “FerroCorp” in a modern, purple font, but everything else looked like 1935. Rusty train tracks switched in amid heaps of clinker and slag. A vast parking lot, mostly deserted, just a handful of vehicles up by the main gate.

  The gloomy drizzle didn’t help.

  I parked next to a Ford 350 with a bed hitch and an empty gun rack in the cab window. Dave was on his phone—“Yeah, sorry, got held up this morning, where are you?” He clicked off and pointed at the largest tower. “Over there. We have to walk in.”

  He carried the bucket of tools. A guard in a dark blue jacket nodded us past the gate.

  “Sad day,” he said.

  “Guess so,” Dave said. “You work here long?”

  “Ten years.” He looked beyond retirement age. “In the cast house mostly. That furnace was hot for eighty years, until just a month ago.”

  “Bet it’s still hot.”

  The man grimaced. “Damn sure.”

  Inside, the natural world disappeared. No trees, no hills visible, no birds, just cracked paving in a landscape of rust and broken metal.

  Like every postapocalyptic video game brought to life.

  We found a half-dozen men in flannel and Carhartt standing at the base of the cylindrical furnace. It was a broad chimney, fifty feet high, made of oversized, black-glazed refractory brick. A low, dark building grew from one side; a conveyor slanted up the other, and various pipework and scaffolding seemed to run everywhere.

  At five points around the base, crude platforms had been set up: a pallet on a pair of sawhorses, two fifty-five-gallon drums placed together, a stack of wooden crates. On one a man stood precariously, swinging a sledgehammer to drive a long pipe into the heart of the furnace.

  “Yo, Dave.”

  “Hey, man.”

  The guy with the sledge hammered the pipe end flush with the brick. Holes had been drilled above each platform, and the others had their pipe already installed. He admired his work, then hopped down, hammer on one shoulder like John Henry. His Tractor Supply boots slipped a bit on the damp ground.

  “That’s it. Ready to go.” He had two missing teeth in front but long mutton chops to make up for it.

  “All right then.”

  “Where’s the dynamite?”

  Dynamite?

  So here’s how their mad plan was going to work. The furnace was full of slag and waste, topped off from decades of use. Even a month after the last steel had been poured, the huge thermal mass of the tower kept the heat trapped—as much as five hundred degrees at the core. If they knocked the tower down in a conventional way, the white hot remnants would scatter everywhere, damaging equipment and injuring workers.

  Explosive demolition, done professionally, could handle it: set charges, establish a perimeter, get the right paperwork and inspections done, on and on. But that would cost more money than FerroCorp wanted to spend.

  Instead, Dave’s friends had offered a simple alternative. They put a stick of dynamite in each pipe, sticking halfway out. Five guys were going to take position, standing on the platforms with sledgehammers ready. On the count of three, they’d slam the dynamite into the core, drop the hammers and run like hell. A few moments later heat would detonate the charges, the base would blow out and the furnace would come down.

  “That’s insane.” I couldn’t believe they were serious. “What if somebody trips or something? What if the dynamite goes off two seconds early?”

  “Naw, we done it before.” The evident leader had several inches and maybe fifty pounds on me. “OSHA ain’t in favor, but hell, this is how the flatheads been doing it for a hundred years.”

  “Blowing up furnaces?”

  “Clearing the scrag inside.”

  I didn’t think anyone even used actual dynamite anymore. Water-gel explosives like Tovex are easier, less toxic and so much safer that only a moron would do so.

  The U.S. military gave me as thorough an education in small explosives as you can get anywhere, and we never once detonated a stick of dynamite.

  This argument met with complete indifference. “You got a hammer?” the chief asked Dave.

  “Two.”

  “Two? Don’t sound like he’s interested.” Looking at me. “But that’s all right, we’re good.”

  Dave shrugged, an odd expression on his face. Embarrassment? I felt an unfamiliar emotion ripple through me.

  It took a moment: I was letting him down.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “No problem. Brendt, we ready?”

  They were like a bunch of third-graders.

  “Don’t you fuck up and hit it early.”

  “Yo, Brendt, on three or five?”

  “Three. Can you count that high?”

  “Who’s got the video?”

  I backed away, not taking my time. Out in the parking lot seemed like a minimum safe distance. A sixth guy, who I hadn’t noticed before, stood behind a slag car on one of the railroad sidings, holding a camera at ready, and he called as I passed.

  “You can stand here. Best view.”

  I looked over. “That’s not even two hundred yards. Wouldn’t you be happier farther away?”

  “Better shot from here. We’re gonna put it on YouTube.”

  The slag car had a massive, bell-shaped iron tureen suspended between two pivots. It probably weighed several tons. Maybe the videographer was more cautious than I thought.

  Still.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we should call 911 right now. Give them a head start.”

 
; “Don’t worry about it. Brendt knows what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t see any company bosses standing around.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  Oh, yeah, I’d lost track. No doubt a weekend was all the better for slipshod, regulation-violating, totally illegal demolition jobs.

  “I’m going to watch from over there.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged and raised the camera to his eye, shielding the lens from a gust of light rain. “Won’t be more’n another few seconds though.”

  Sure enough, a loud shout came from the base of the furnace.

  “Go!”

  I looked over in time to see the hammers all swing simultaneously. They struck the furnace walls in silence—the sharp cracks arrived a second later, while the five men were leaping and stumbling and sprinting away.

  Fuck. I jumped to land behind the slag car, covering my head with both arms and crouching in the shelter of the iron vat.

  BO-O-O-O-M-M-MMM!

  The explosion was a deep, roaring blast. I glanced out, peering past the railcar’s frame, to see the base of the tower balloon outward in a cloud of dust and smoke.

  The chimney swayed and collapsed in on itself. The noise deafened, a long thundering crash of masonry and metal. Our view was cut off as a debris cloud engulfed the entire area. Before everything disappeared into the maelstrom I saw the very top of the furnace fall and the conveyor’s heavy scaffold start to collapse.

  I hunched down again, trying to press my ears shut with my fingers while keeping my forearms crossed over my face. Video Guy laughed and shouted, barely audible over the roar. Standing unprotected, his video might end up like one of those avalanche films, a sudden rushing tumble then black.

  It was over in a minute, maybe more. The noise eased and the smoke began to clear. I stood slowly, blinking at the sharp dust in my eyes.

  “Whoo-hoooo!” The other lunatics emerged from different places around the furnace. Or where the furnace used to be, rather. Now it was a huge smoking pile of rubble.

  Dave came over. “How about that, little brother!” Everyone seemed overadrenalized, slapping each other on the arms, pointing, laughing. Video Guy had his camera on review, watching the screen. They all looked grimier than five minutes ago, dust in their hair and black dirt on their clothes. In the mist the smudges turned to muddy smears.