Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Right.”

  “Don’t shake Thorpe’s hand. He’s a lefty.”

  I thanked him and got out and pushed the door shut.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  And now here I am, stopped in the middle of the lane on Factory Way a hundred feet short of the broad asphalt drive leading up to what remains of the old Stutch Motors complex, smoking a Winston down to the filter. I don’t want to move because ironically enough it’s almost the only spot in the city where the throbbing glow of the hot steel can’t be seen; municipal hedges planted to obscure the community’s bestial beating heart and the shoulder of the hill stand between us. I return to the moment in dreams, and so I always think of it in present tense.

  The Ram’s motor idles smoothly. The crickets are louder. A jet that is only a turquoise blue and an orange winking light crosses a hole in the overcast, rushing to catch up with the muted surflike roar of its engines as it heads somewhere that is a hell of a long way from here. I check the load in the .38 again. Now the bitter scorched-rubber stench of the filter igniting stings my nose. I snap the stub out the window and put the indicator in Drive. The dream ends there and then it’s then again.

  I rounded a squat concrete pillar with the defunct STUTCH PETROCHEMICALS sign engraved in brass, a thing too pretty to be taken down by even GM’s corporate raiders, cruising barracuda-fashion between the long gray columns of the stock reports in the Wall Street Journal, flipping their tails suddenly and streaking in at the first sign of a steep loss in the third quarter. Opposite it, perpendicular to the street and lit by ground floods, stood a long rectangular sign reading GENERAL MOTORS in fat, harmless-looking letters of robin’s-egg blue on a white background, and below them, in letters one-third their size, IROQUOIS HEIGHTS PLANT second-billed in black.

  I hadn’t turned any too soon. In the corner of my rearview mirror I spotted the low wide front end of a city cruiser entering the block at crawl speed, swiveling its spots on both sides of the street in search of juveniles out past curfew. I held my breath and kept watching as it rolled past the end of the drive. I hadn’t been seen.

  I crept forward to avoid bursting a tire on the sharp edges of broken blacktop, crumbled like piecrust beneath the chuckling weight of inbound dump trucks heaped with iron pellets and out-bound flatbeds hauling steel coils stacked like silvery logs with their centers hollowed out. The raw earth was coarse sand streaked with red clay. Clumps of wild juniper had sprung up on either side of the drive, casting nasty shadows beneath the harsh white of the stadium lights mounted on twenty-foot poles twenty feet apart; under Stutch, the slope had been trimmed as neatly as any lawn in Grosse Pointe. A Chiricahua Apache could not have crawled up it undetected, much less a Fifth Columnist or a union lineworker striking for a cost-of-living raise.

  Any thought that the premises were not locked down as tightly as they had been in the past evaporated when the old foundry hove into sight. It was eight stories of soot-blackened brick, blacker than the sky behind it except for stuttering flashes of the jewel-faceted glow of the hot steel through the window, and set back fifty feet from the gate in a cyclone fence. The fence was made of gleaming chainlink, indecently new and twelve feet high, with coils of razor wire on top, glittering under the floods and twenty times more effective than the barbed wire it had replaced. There were inmates recovering in the Jackson prison infirmary with yards of stitches holding in their intestines who thought they could clamber over smaller gauges of the same wire by draping it first with the mattresses from their cells. But they wouldn’t get even that far here: Glass insulators showed at intervals among the chain links. A yellow metal sign wired to the fence warned visitors in black letters that the fence carried ten thousand volts, courtesy of Detroit Edison. I wondered if the carcasses of small birds scattered about the ground with their forked feet in the air had been added for emphasis.

  Another sign attached to the gate told me to honk. I honked, and after ten seconds the gate drifted inward in two halves, propelled by a pair of torpedo-shaped hydraulic tubes. I pulled ahead and stopped in front of an octagonal sign. It was one of the old yellow stop signs, freckled with rust. A round-faced guard in an old-time postman’s cap leaned out an open window in a painted plywood kiosk and asked to see my ID. I showed him Dollier’s security card with my photo, holding it so that my thumb covered the date of birth. He looked from the picture to my face and nodded. “Uncle Jimmy sure is taking an interest these days. I seen more new faces in a week than I seen in four years.”

  Uncle Jimmy is GM. “You’re telling me. I was just getting comfortable in Warren.”

  “You’re early. Eight-to-four don’t start for twenty minutes.”

  “I had to get out of the house.”

  He grunted understanding. He was a babyfat forty, with a Hitler moustache and satchels under his eyes. “Should of stayed a bachelor.”

  “Who, you or me?”

  “Everybody. Ever notice how tomcats are always smiling?”

  I said I hadn’t thought about it. My knuckles were white and shiny on the steering wheel. I had to draw a philosopher.

  “My relief, now; he’s a happy newlywed,” he said. “He’s never early.”

  “He’ll learn.”

  That hadn’t occurred to him. Brightening, he waved me past with a pudgy hand wearing a gold band sunk in fat.

  The compound was as bright as day. The lightposts painted with silver Rustoleum were as thick as trees and there was an old-fashioned round spotlight as big as a tractor tire mounted on a swivel on the old machine-gun emplacements on the factory roof. During the Second World War, when the place made tank turrets for Chrysler, and later, when the boys came back and bought tail-fins in pairs: like saddle shoes, both doors had stood open around the clock so as not to slow down the parallel streams of shifts coming in and going out. The place would have looked even more like a maximum-security penitentiary then. Now it looked like the Warner Brothers backlot, gloomily awaiting the return of George Raft and the prison flick.

  I drove around a small one-story brick building, a miniature replica of the main foundry building with tin sheets replacing the broken window panes, plainly empty, and parked in an employee lot with more spaces than cars; backing into a space so the pickup would be pointed out. All the odds were in favor of a running exit.

  The distant roar of the high jet was still audible when I stepped down to the pavement. I looked up, but the hole had closed and there was no sign of it overhead. I knew then it wasn’t the jet I was hearing. It was the impersonal controlled rage of the blast furnace transforming tons of iron pellets into liquid steel. From that angle, looking up toward the window in the foundry, I saw only the reflected light flickering off the tarred roof of the smaller empty building that stood the length of a football field away. It looked like sheet lightning.

  If the 1936 plans were still current, the security entrance was around the corner from the big doors. Walking that way, feeling under my Windbreaker for the Chief’s Special, I smelled mildew, the dank desperate air of a dripping basement. Old mortar has its own kind of decay, not as offensive as animal rot and nowhere near as noble as wood, but pervasive and without hope; the smell of Alcatraz, or of a dungeon used during the Inquisition. Pain, sweat, anger, and worry seeped between the porous grains and pooled around the foundation. But then that might have been just the mood I was in. It probably smelled jolly to a foreman one week away from retiring with full benefits.

  How it smelled to a three-year-old boy without his parents was something I was better off not thinking about.

  It was a steel fire door, battered as a farmer’s truck and unmarked, no handle. There was a white gutta-percha button set in a socket next to the jamb. I pushed it. I heard nothing.

  The door opened inward and I rested my right hand on the butt of the revolver. Another guard in a butternut twill uniform and postman’s cap asked to see ID. This one was ten years younger and fit, with blue-black beard gleaming like anthracite
beneath his skin. He looked at the card, told me to move my thumb. I hit him with the .38.

  I was holding it around the cylinder and when the steel back-strap tapped his temple he took a step forward and then the hydraulics went out of his knees. At that he managed to thumb loose the strap that held his sidearm in its webbed holster. I figured he practiced his quick-draw in front of a full-length mirror. I caught him under the arms, shuffled forward through the door, and sat him on a steel-framed chair with a copy of Newsweek folded to the Transitions column on the seat. “James Butler Hickok, security specialist for General Motors; pistol-whipped Friday, April 28.” I took out his weapon, a cast Ruger P85, and put it in my left-hand slash pocket.

  The guard made a guttural noise and stirred. I tapped him again. He went as limp as a sock and I had to hoist him up and hook his right arm over the back of the chair to keep him from sliding to the floor. I put away the .38, found the roll of athletic tape I’d borrowed from Rayellen Stutch in my right-hand pocket, and wound several yards around his ankles and wrists, securing him to the frame of the chair. I pulled his necktie off over his head, balled it up and stuck it in his mouth, and ran the rest of the tape around the lower half of his head to hold it in place. Then I saw the alarm button on the floor and had to drag him three feet away, chair and all.

  We were in a cloakroom-size chamber with no ceiling of its own. The walls went up eight feet and then stopped, with nothing but air between them and the joists twenty feet up. Leland Stutch’s windowed office, suspended from the same frame that supported a deserted catwalk, looked right down into the cubicle. There were no lights behind the glass. No one came out and no alarm was sounded during the minute I stood there with my hand on my revolver.

  The ceiling troughs shed some light inside the little room, but it wasn’t sufficient for reading and someone had brought in a domestic lamp with a flowered china base and a pleated shade and set it on a heavy scarred yellow-oak desk with magazines and a deck of cards on top. The only decoration was a bank calendar on one wall with a color photo of Picture Rocks.

  Wild Bill in the chair had both eyes open. I didn’t like the way he was looking at the button on the floor, so I unplugged the lamp, cut the cord at the base with my pocket knife, tied one end to a chair leg, and the other to one of the squat legs that held up the desk. He might have been able to scootch one or the other, but not both. He glared bullets at me all this time.

  “You shouldn’t have asked me to move my thumb,” I said. “I’m sensitive about my age.”

  I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me. The furnace was roaring steady as the debt.

  I remembered something then and went through his pockets until I found a fistful of keys on a ring with a leather tab attached. I hated to do it, but I took out the Smith & Wesson and tapped him again. They were heating the last batch of steel for the day and I didn’t know how soon the works would go silent. You can still make a lot of noise with a necktie in your mouth. He was going to wake up nauseated and seeing double. I hated to do it.

  A door in the partition opened onto the plant floor. I ditched the guard’s Ruger in a wastebasket to cut down on weight and went out slowly, holding the .38 down at my side. A dozen or so hardhats were dotted about, coiling cables and sitting in forklift cabs watching the steel being poured, but, like them, I was just an ant in that vast room and they were used to people coming and going. They hadn’t been put on alert, then. Thorpe was playing close to the vest.

  The place was mostly automated despite its ancient exterior, so there weren’t a quarter as many workers present as there would have been even fifteen years ago. Four times as many wouldn’t have made the place look any less empty. It was big enough to hangar a 747, and that was just the charging room, where the steel was poured. Floor-to-ceiling partitions separated it from the smelter, where the raw ore was Bessemered and converted into pig iron, and the rolling mill next door.

  My nostrils stung with the smell of hot metal. In the center of the room, above a set of rails on a trestle, a concrete ladle, reinforced with iron and burned blue-black, like the bowl of a pipe, collected a stream of white-hot molten steel from the furnace, releasing at the same time a thinner stream from a hole in its base into ingot-molds mounted in the beds of open rail cars. When the molds were filled the cars scooted on an electric charge through a portal into the next room, where rollers waited to flatten the ingots into sheets like cookie dough, which when cool would be coiled into long cylinders, to be transported for stamping and assembly elsewhere. The thick stream pouring into the ladle was liquid light, with smoke and steam rolling off it, and staring at it for any length of time without the protective goggles worn by the workers invited permanent blindness. I looked away quickly and still had to shut my eyes tight until the purple spots faded.

  The heat in the big room was oppressive. I was soaked through beneath the thin leather Windbreaker. Most of the workers were in undershirts, stained as black as the ladle. This was the blazing Purgatory at the center of the American automobile industry.

  According to the blueprints, an elevator and a set of fire stairs each led down to the basement from the southwest corner of the charging room. I chose the stairs. I stopped at a brick wall where the door was supposed to be. On close study I saw where the old wall left off and the new one began. They’d done a neat job bricking it up, but they couldn’t get the same material; the color was slightly different. I followed the wall until I came to the elevator. It was all dark shaft behind an old-fashioned folding cage. There was one button in a brass panel next to the door. I thought about it. Then I pressed it. Here was where the element of surprise went out the window. I leveled the revolver and waited.

  The car made as much noise as a fat man lifting himself out of a tub. It shuddered to a halt, a homely freight job with silver-covered Celotex between the studs and a plywood floor, corrugated like cardboard, and I folded aside the cage and stepped aboard. The cable groaned.

  Before I pressed the down button, I reached up and loosened the bulb recessed into the ceiling, twisting it in quick jerks to avoid burning my fingers. The car went dark and I rode it down, crowded tightly into the far right corner on the theory that anyone waiting at the bottom with a gun would open fire on the center. I braced the Chief’s Special for a hip shot.

  No one shot at me. There was no door or cage in the basement. I stepped straight out into a corridor lit by recessed fixtures, shedding separate pools onto a linoleum floor with a swirled pattern.

  I seemed to be in the middle of the corridor. It stretched out for at least fifty feet in either direction and vanished into darkness. The walls were plaster, painted a warm yellow to offset the subterranean gloom, but it was turning a mustard shade that only contributed to the sensation of interment. There were no pictures on the walls, just doors staggered on both sides. Each had a narrow rectangle of wire-gridded window and a no-frills steel knob with a cylinder lock. None was labeled.

  The security offices, including the big one reserved for the director, were supposed to lie to my right, with the emergency living quarters comprising five rooms strung out in the other direction from the elevator. I hoped that hadn’t changed. The disappearance of the fire stairs had me rattled. I turned left and crept along close to the wall.

  The lights appeared to be on in all the rooms. I flattened against the wall, gripping my gun, and slid an eye past the edge of the first window. There was a twin bed, a camp-size refrigerator with a two-burner hotplate on top, a card table, and two folding chairs. The room was six by eight and I could see the whole thing. The mattress was rolled up at the foot of the bed. No one was inside.

  Same story in the next room. The one after that was a community bathroom, with a stool and a sink and a shower stall and frosted glass in the window. I had a heart-stopping moment when I flung open the door and wheeled in fisting the revolver in both hands. I didn’t disturb anyone.

  Behind the window in the fourth door, Matthew Glendowning was sitting up in bed with
his chin resting on his knees and his hands locked around them. His eyes were pink and swollen, but he wasn’t crying. He looked bored. He had on the same clothes he’d worn the night before, but he was barefoot. No one was with him.

  I juggled out the ring of keys. On a hunch I tried the knob first. It was unlocked. I didn’t like that, not by half. But I opened the door and went in.

  Matthew was off the bed in one motion, butting me in the stomach with his head of black hair. I jackknifed, emptying my lungs, but when he started around me I got a hand inside the neck of his T-shirt and twisted. He kicked me, and pain shot up from my shin, but he wasn’t wearing shoes. I kept my balance and spun him and pushed him into a wall, pinning him by the shoulders with the gun still in my right hand.

  “It’s me, Matthew,” I said. “Mr. Walker. Remember? I’m a friend of your mother’s. I drove the car.”

  He stopped struggling then and stared. His mouth opened wide. I hugged him to my chest, to muffle the bawling mainly, then tightened my grip and carried him out.

  I turned right toward the elevator and stopped. Connor Thorpe was standing halfway down the corridor. Beside him was a uniformed guard aiming a pistol-grip shotgun at my chest and Matthew’s back.

  “Steal from my boss, steal from me,” Thorpe said. “Only this time I’m the boss. The gun and the kid, Walker. Put them down in any order you like.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  There was no satisfaction on Thorpe’s basset face, no clue in his slumped posture, hands in the pockets of his heavy-duty business suit, that he felt anything at all about bagging an intruder. It wasn’t that he had control over his features, which he had to have V had in the beginning or he wouldn’t have come this far; he’d just been at it so long, living constantly two minutes ahead of the kind of person he’d been put in place to outwit, that he no longer felt anything at the climax, win or lose. His sad eyes and perpetual scowl meant nothing more than the smile on a sarcophagus.