Let It Burn

by Steve Hamilton

  “The casino,” she said. “They used that building for the casino.”

  I tried to imagine Darryl King meeting his brother at the Motor City Casino. Maybe the most camera-dense environment in the entire city. He’d be a fool to show his face there.

  Yet what if he sent that message down the line without thinking about what that building had become? He could be sitting outside that casino, watching for his brother to appear, cursing himself for not doing a better job in his planning, but sitting there just the same because the message had been sent and now he had to play out his hand.

  “I should go over there and check it out,” I said. “Lacking any better idea.”

  “I’ll keep thinking,” she said. “If I remember another kind of breadbox, I’ll give you a call.”

  “All right, please do. I’m gonna get going.”

  I was half out of my chair when she stopped me.

  “It was really him? Darryl’s really looking for his brother?”

  “Somebody’s looking for TK,” I said. “As of two nights ago.”

  “That has to be Darryl,” she said. “After all this time, he’s looking for his brother.”

  That much was true, I thought. As for what he’d do with him when he found him … I wondered if I’d end up being there when it happened.

  *

  It was a short drive to the Motor City Casino. Of course, that was the general idea behind the message. Pick a spot they both knew, a spot both could have walked to, back in the day. Pick a spot that would mean something to the two of them, but nobody else.

  But if you were looking for the old bakery where they made the Wonder Bread, dominating the corner of Grand River and Temple Street, your only clue would be the WAGNER BAKING CO. sign high on the original brick walls. The rest of the corner was taken over by the gleaming metal facade of the casino, with the new hotel looming right behind it.

  It lit up the night sky, of course, as all non-Indian casinos do. There was a parking structure next door that took up a good city block. It was already feeling like a lost cause, but I drove up through the structure, all the way to the top level. I parked near the edge overlooking the casino, and I went and stood there and looked down at the people all dressed up for the evening, going into the casino to lose their money.

  I looked at my watch. It was pushing eleven o’clock.

  “One hour,” I said to the night. “What are the odds it’ll be anywhere around here?”

  I went down to the street and walked around the casino. I tried to look like I was on my way somewhere at all times. I figured the security guys probably wouldn’t look kindly on a man just standing outside, scoping out the building for an hour.

  Midnight came and I had my answer. If Darryl was going somewhere every night at midnight, hoping to meet his brother, I was pretty sure it wasn’t here. My biggest worry was that the meeting had already happened. I just had to hope that a few days would pass before Tremont got the message and made his way up here, assuming he felt like coming at all.

  I gave Mrs. King a call, apologizing for the late hour, but of course I knew she’d be up. I told her I had come up empty. That we would regroup tomorrow and try to think up a new plan.

  “Put it in your head,” I said to her. “Right as you’re going to sleep. Ask yourself where the breadbox is. Maybe in the morning it’ll come to you.”

  I wished her a good night. Then I went back to my motel.

  *

  When I went back to see her the next morning, she didn’t have an answer for me.

  “I did like you suggested,” she said. “I told myself that I’d remember some reference to the breadbox by the time I woke up, but it didn’t happen.”

  We had coffee in her kitchen. I had brought along my map of Detroit, and I spent a good part of the morning figuring out just how far a young Tremont would venture from his mother’s house, and where Darryl would go to find him.

  I shook my head and drew a big circle, with Ash Street at the center. It was a good-sized piece of the city, from downtown all the way up to Wayne State. It was basically the western half of my old precinct.

  “I know these streets,” I said. “I drove on them every day. That same summer he went away. So where the hell is the breadbox?”

  She got up and grabbed the phone book. Then she sat back down and looked up “Bakery” in the Yellow Pages.

  “There’s a bakery over on Cass,” she said. “Kinda far, but no, this is one of those organic places. I don’t think that was around then.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “Here’s a bagel place by the college. Did they even have bagels back then?”

  “In New York, yes. Michigan, I’m pretty sure, no.”

  She went through the rest of the listings.

  “There’s just no other bakery in the area anymore,” she said. “Of course, I’m not surprised. Most of the businesses are gone now.”

  I looked at her. “Say that again.”

  “Most of the business are gone now.”

  “So we need to go back in time,” I said. “Look up bakeries in old phone books.”

  “Where are we going to find those?”

  “Where do you think?” I said, getting up from the table. “You feel like taking a ride with me?”

  *

  I held open the passenger door for her. My truck was a little high off the ground, but she hauled herself up with no problem.

  “I can’t remember the last time I rode in a truck,” she said. “Not since my man ran off.”

  “Sounds like the worst move any man ever made.”

  She smiled at that. “You got that right, Mister.”

  She put her seat belt on, then sat with her purse in her lap as I drove us over to the Detroit Library. We parked and went inside, found the reference desk, and asked for the old editions of the Yellow Pages. I remembered being here once before, at this very desk, asking to see the old city directories. I was hoping that once again the trusty reference librarian would come through for me. Ten minutes later, Mrs. King and I were sitting at one of the big tables, looking back in time.

  “There was so much more of everything,” she said as she took a quick run through the book at random. “Even back then, when it felt like we were already hurting.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that. So I asked her to go to “Bakery” and start reading off the entries. I had a pad of paper to write down any that sounded promising. There was the Wagner Baking Company, of course. We’d already been down that road. We found another old bakery that had been on Michigan Avenue, and another that had been up on Warren Avenue. There was nothing else within reasonable walking distance from Ash Street.

  We thanked the reference librarian and got back in my truck. Then we went and searched for the address of the old bakery on Michigan Avenue. It was west of the stadium site, on a block where someone had been taking old abandoned storefronts and painting them bright colors.

  “Someone’s going to town here,” she said. She nodded her head toward the building in the center of the block. “That one’s got the windows you’d expect to see for a bakery, huh? Put those nice cakes right out front for people to see?”

  “Did you ever come here to buy bread? Or anything else?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  As we sat there pulled up against the curb, I couldn’t help but look out across the opposite side of the street, where the old train station rose a few blocks away from us, high above everything else.

  “All right, let’s check out the other one,” I said, pulling back into traffic. We turned on Rosa Parks and went up to Grand River. It was the one diagonal street in a neighborhood full of east-west and north-south. When we got to the intersection with Warren Avenue, it was yet another illustration of just how badly this city had fallen apart.

  “I remember this,” she said, pointing to the southwest corner, where there was now nothing but a buckled slab of concrete in the ground. “There was an auction house h
ere, and a place to buy tents and awnings and things.”

  “I think the bakery was half a block this way.” I took the turn around a great brick building that had probably once been a manufacturing site. The sign on the top of the building now advertised ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE. At ground level someone had spent many hours spray-painting an elaborate set of graffiti and garish cartoons.

  I couldn’t find the actual address for the bakery. Whatever building it had once lived in was now long gone.

  “No breadbox here,” Mrs. King said as she looked at the empty lot. “There’s nothing here at all.”

  “We’ve got a couple of possibilities now,” I said. “Although that last one down by the station feels a little more promising. Coming up here, that’s the opposite direction entirely.”

  “What are we going to do next?”

  “You’re going to go back home. You never know when Darryl might just show up there.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do my favorite thing in the world,” I said. “Sit around and wait.”

  *

  I took her back to her house. Then I went back to the Michigan Avenue site by myself to scout it out. There was a pawnshop on one corner, then the old storefronts, then a bar on the other corner. There were two more bars across the street. It was quiet now in the afternoon, but I had to figure this block would really pick up after dark.

  I circled around the block. There was parking behind the buildings. I could keep making a loop around the block, watching for Darryl King, or for the car he was driving, assuming he was still in his aunt’s car, a ten-year-old powder blue Pontiac Bonneville with a big dent in the front right quarter panel. Or else I could get out and walk around on foot. Either way, I’d have to keep my eyes open.

  If it was later in the day, I would have just stayed there and gotten ready for my midnight watch. But I still had hours to kill, so I ended up going back up to the other location. I still wasn’t feeling like this was nearly as promising, but I parked my truck anyway and walked around on the empty streets. There was an auto parts store next to the old empty bakery site. Next to that was one of those “wholesale distributors” where you can buy office furniture, light fixtures, refrigerators, probably even a kidney if you hit them on the right day.

  This can’t be the place, I thought. I turned to go back, already thinking about when I would grab something to eat. Then I saw the railroad bridge.

  It was a block to the north, down a little one-way side street. As I walked closer, I saw that it was actually two separate bridges for two separate, parallel sets of tracks, about thirty feet apart. There was a sidewalk that ran under the bridges, and as I walked along it I found what seemed like a decade’s worth of trash and dirt and a few halfhearted attempts at graffiti.

  There was a thin trail that sloped up from the sidewalk into the gap between the two bridges, where it disappeared into a thick mass of sumac trees. It was the last thing I wanted to do at that point, but the train tracks were here, right here behind the site of an old bakery, and I couldn’t make myself ignore that fact. So I bent down to clear the lowest branches and pushed myself through the underbrush, following the trail as it led up a short slope to the higher ground between the tracks. This little sumac forest was protected on either side by the tracks, and it ran from this street all the way to the next street a block away, where the train tracks crossed over another set of bridges. It wasn’t a place you’d expect to find any people, not in this forgotten strip of real estate, yet the ground was littered with candy wrappers and condoms and hypodermic needles and God knows what else. I was just about to turn around and get the hell of there. That’s when I saw the remains of a little shed at the end of the trail.

  “Oh, no way,” I said to myself. “This can’t be it.” Yet as I moved closer I saw that it had been here for a long, long time and, while empty at the moment, had been used by a thousand drug addicts and vagrants and probably a few animals.

  A low rumbling had been building all the while I was up there. Now as it broke through to my consciousness, I knew exactly what it was. I stood there next to the shed and watched the freight approaching on the northernmost tracks. It didn’t seem to be going that fast, but as it came upon me I felt the push of the air around me and the earthquake under my feet from the ten thousand tons of iron. It was close enough that I could reach out and touch it if I wanted to. I could imagine grabbing a handle as it passed by, letting it lift me off my feet with a great jerk. The moment of sheer terror as I trusted all of my weight to the strength of one hand, with failure meaning that I’d surely fall under the wheels and feel my legs sliced cleanly from my body.

  You might come here, I thought, if you were a fourteen-year-old boy with nowhere else to go. No friends to hang out with. If you loved trains and dreamed about hitching a ride on them someday, you might come here to this little shed in the right-of-way between the railroad tracks, behind the bakery.

  You might even call it the breadbox.

  I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to come back here at midnight, but I knew that was exactly what I had to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When the night came, I rolled into the lot by the auto parts store. There was a service center built into the store, with a dozen cars all parked outside waiting for new brakes, a muffler, or whatever else. I lined my truck up between two of those cars and turned off my ignition and lights.

  I had gone to a hardware store and bought a strong flashlight, the kind with a long, heavy handle that could double as a club if it had to. That was the only preparation I had done.

  Now that I was finally here, sitting in my truck and waiting for midnight to come, I had a couple of hard questions to ask myself. Questions that I had been doing a good job of avoiding. I was there to find Darryl King. That’s the only thing I knew for sure, but once I found him, then what?

  Try to talk to him. Find out what he knew about his brother. Find out what he planned on doing with his brother, once he found him.

  So you’re looking for a man, I told myself, who is himself looking for another man. So what happens if you find them both tonight?

  Then maybe I find out if my gut feeling about Tremont is right after all, and maybe I finally learn that I should think these things through a little better, before I start wandering down dark streets at midnight all by myself.

  There were a few cars going by. I watched them stop at the intersection, waiting for their green light. Midnight was coming fast. I got out of the truck and headed down the street. I had my light jacket on, with the flashlight tucked inside. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d be feeling better with a gun tucked in there as well. Or if I’d be feeling better with Leon there to cover my back.

  I took a quick look down the side street. I didn’t want to just walk right down to the railroad tracks. Not yet. I turned at the corner, made a loop, and came back onto the main street. Cars kept going by, but I didn’t see anybody stopping. Nobody turned down the side street.

  Then I saw the car.

  A powder blue Pontiac Bonneville with a big dent in the front right quarter panel. This had to be Mrs. King’s sister’s car. This had to be Darryl King behind the wheel.

  I didn’t panic. I didn’t try to hide. He had no reason to suspect I’d be there, and apparently he wouldn’t even recognize me anyway. So I acted like a man who has transacted whatever business has brought him to this lonely corner of the city, and now he’s walking back to his truck. The car turned down the side street, toward the tracks. I waited a few beats. Then I made my move.

  I walked down the side street to where the railroad bridges would pass over it. I walked quickly, a man with purpose. I had my hand on the flashlight, ready to swing it if I had to, but as I passed by the parking lot behind the wholesale distributor, I saw the car parked there on the far side of a big Dumpster. It was the perfect hiding place. No cop would ever think to come down this dark road to nowhere and look in this one lonely,
half-hidden spot.

  I kept walking, past the lot, under the first bridge. I went past the trail in the sumac and under the second bridge. Then I took a quick look behind me. There was nobody there. I ducked behind the far side of the bridge’s abutment.

  I took a few deep breaths. I willed my heart to slow its beating. I listened.

  A few minutes passed. Then I heard the sound of a car door closing softly. Footsteps on gravel, then on pavement, then on dirt. I peeked around the embankment and made out a figure disappearing into the brush. I gave him another few beats. Then I was back on the move again.

  There was nothing on this earth that would have gotten me to follow him up that trail. He’d hear me coming and then he’d have every advantage. So I went over to his car and found the best spot to surprise him on his way back. The surprise was for one simple reason. If he had a gun, I wanted to take it away from him. Then once I knew I wasn’t going to be shot, I would start trying to talk to him.

  You’ve always been good at talking to people, I told myself. Now we’re going to find out just how good you are.

  I settled down on the other side of the Dumpster. The one streetlight back here was burned out. That worked in my favor. There was a half-moon that kept hiding behind the clouds and reappearing again. My eyes were fully adjusted to the dark now. I was ready to finally meet Darryl King.

  The minutes ticked by. At twelve fifteen, I heard the footsteps again. He had given up for the night. He wasn’t going to see his brother. I couldn’t help wondering, how long was he going to keep doing this before he gave up hope? A week? A month? That can be one of my first questions, I thought, because it’s just about showtime.

  I waited for his feet to hit the gravel of the parking lot again.

  Step. Step. Crunch.

  That’s when I came around the Dumpster, turned on my flashlight, and pointed it in his face. He was a bigger man than I had been counting on. In the photo he looked soft, but now that he was here I could see he must have spent the last year or so getting himself into shape.

  “Stop right there,” I said. “If you have a gun, drop it. Right now.”