Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  Wager cruised the Trans Am in that almost peaceful time that comes just before dusk, even along the strip. He went all the way out beyond the city-county line and past used-car lots, furniture stores, gas stations, quick-print shops—the increasing number of businesses that had nothing to do with nightlife or sex. Dotted farther apart and growing brighter as the sky darkened over Colfax, the signs for bars and discos and clubs kept the strip alive. But this far out, the johns had to drive from one beckoning glow to the next, and this early the empty curbs and gravel parking lots at the buildings’ sides were marked only by occasional cars left like driftwood from last night’s flood.

  He was looking for the blond man, Wager explained to himself. But he knew that his chances of spotting the suspect were worse than bad. The real truth was, he just wanted to drive, to feel his mind sink into the comfortable mental cushion that steady driving offered. There was not one thing he could do, but it felt better just to be in motion. Not a very different feeling, he smiled, from his fourteenth year, when the older kids in his gang began to get their driver’s licenses. Then, the world’s possibilities suddenly expanded as far beyond the barrio as two dollars’ worth of gas could take them. Looking not for trouble, just for the new horizon, for the excitement that always lay just beyond it. And with that expansion came a loss of detail. When you were a kid and you had to walk everywhere, you couldn’t go as far, but you saw a lot of things up close. Like this low sunlight that made telephone poles look almost furry with their brown color. It was an image that brought back that long-dead time and place of the barrio: a telephone pole tan and splintered by the spikes of pole-climbers, and Wager, maybe nine or ten, throwing dirt clods at it in the quiet of an evening. The hollow pop of a hit was pleasing, and he liked the way a freckle of clay clung to the dark wood after the dusty explosion. You knew the fences and the yards and the names of dogs, and where paths cut into the high weeds of empty lots and where somebody had started digging a fort. You knew it all, so that by the time you were in your teens you hungered to see something new, to shake off that familiar dust, not caring that it would be blown away forever. He wondered if Doc had felt that kind of nostalgia for things so lightly held and so easily given up. Yes—everybody felt it at one time or another. Doc, like Wager, wouldn’t admit it aloud; but he had felt it because he, too, had been a child and somehow had become the man he was, and then had been killed. By someone else who had once been a child, too.

  A car swung past him, its exhaust a loud rip of sound through the light traffic. A few minutes later, Wager saw it in the parking lot beside a small nondescript tavern, the dust of its sudden stop still hanging in the fading sunlight. A handful of young men, laughing and shoving at each other’s shoulders, spilled out of the car toward the building.

  A few drinks, a round or two of quick jokes and loud laughter, and they’d be back in the car, feeling the motion pull them toward new adventures. Things weren’t that different, and that knowledge added to Wager’s melancholy, a feeling that seemed to seep from the trash-littered curbs and empty sidewalks, the vacant concrete, and the almost-empty shops turning mauve and purple with the fading heat of another summer day.

  All the people who made the strip work—the pimps, the whores, the pushers and dancers, the hustlers and hustled—had once been children. They had gotten their first car, and spun their wheels in idle, joyous motion. What had happened? How had their motion led them here, while others—their friends, kids who shared the same cars and aimless drives—were now in expensive houses, had their own businesses, were lawyers, maybe, or teachers? Was it that, like Wager, these people had never stopped moving on? Was their taste for excitement always stronger than the appeal of settling down to a constructive if boring life? Had they swung in orbit until their chance to anchor themselves had blown away like the dust they stirred? The strip brought that type of life: a kind of weightlessness that was guided in one direction after another by the whisper of promise—for some, money; for others, friendship or love; for many, just continual change. It was an appeal Wager could understand because he shared it; and especially on quiet evenings like this, when movement seemed both empty and fulfilling, an odd feeling of yearning mixed with satisfaction, and, amid all the motion, a softening of one’s sharp edges of suspicion and awareness.

  He angled the Trans Am to the curb just across from the Turkish Delights and sat, motor idling, to gaze at the fretwork that formed a mock-oriental entry to the bar. The rest of the building was black cinderblock that faded to charcoal gray, but the onion-shaped basket stood out like a giant red-and-gold wart at the corner. It had to look better at night; with the right lights and the throb of drums and laughter wafting out the door, the entry made promises to men who came seeking. For a fee—always for a fee. Because there was no sense fooling himself, Wager knew. The people who worked the strip were no longer children, no matter what their age. There was freedom perhaps, but even that was found only by a few. The other part of that life, maybe the biggest part, was the unending struggle to find the dollar that would buy that freedom. Money flowed like a river down this strip, and if you were in the right spot at the right time, you could siphon off enough to keep you warm and happy for the rest of your life. Annette Sheldon had found one of those spots. But if the current shifted? If you became one of those who were fed upon rather than feeding? Then your value was your use to someone else—in whatever way they chose to use you. And if you were more valuable dead than alive, that, too, could be arranged. It wasn’t that life was necessarily cheap along the strip—it was just relative to the cost of other things, and you had to keep struggling to stop somebody else from putting a price on your life.

  Waiting for a break in the increasing traffic, Wager dropped his car into gear and swung around to head back toward downtown. The lights now outshone the darkening sky and the street took on its tunnel effect, as if the glare was both walls and ceiling that could keep out not just the rain and wind, but tomorrow’s pitiless sun as well. Moffett and Nolan should be on duty by now, and maybe they could dig up something about the blond-haired man.

  The telephone bell was felt before it was heard, a pecking in the brain that sent a spasm through sleep and then blended with the clattering sound to pull his gummy eyelids into slowly blinking awareness. He dragged himself, boneless as a wet towel, across the bed and groped for the phone, knocking it off the nightstand but able to hang onto the receiver long enough to flop back and press it to his ear. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Detective Wager?” The female voice sounded hushed and nervous.

  “Who’s this?”

  “I know about the blond man. The one who was with Doc.”

  “Who is this?” His vision cleared. In the dark, the red figures of the digital clock said 1:42.

  “Can you meet me in forty-five minutes?”

  “Why don’t you tell me now?”

  “I can’t. Meet me—please!”

  “Where?”

  “Twenty-third and Blake. Under the viaduct.”

  That should be private all right—and dark as an outhouse at midnight. “At two-thirty?”

  “Yes.” The line clicked into a buzz.

  The taste of a hurried cup of coffee was still tart on the back of his tongue as he eased the Trans Am across the eroded railroad tracks and lumpy tar of the streets that formed old downtown. Here and there a streetlight glowed dully, its glare fading before it struck the pavement, and the shadows of the warehouses loomed as thick and vague as bales of wool. He was twenty minutes early. Two blocks from the viaduct, he turned onto that section of Wazee which ran parallel to Blake, and flicked off his headlights as he came within a block of the viaduct. Coasting to the curb, he closed the door softly, moved across the empty street in the hollow light of the city’s glow, and paused at the corner to study the viaduct and the area around it. Like much of lower downtown, many of the brick buildings were designed as factories and warehouses. They had tall, windowless walls that boxed the broken sidewal
ks, and here and there worn spur lines from the nearby railroad yards glinted like narrow puddles in the black streets. The viaduct’s ramp lifted somewhere down the block so that by the time it crossed Blake it was high on its square metal legs. A band of concrete overhead, it rumbled dully from an occasional set of wheels. In the shadows between the piers, old Twenty-third Street was still surfaced with paving blocks—large, slightly rounded stones polished by heavy tires and showing as dim streaks that rippled from the occasional distant light. Wager saw nothing move—not a human figure, not an unlit car, not even a warehouse cat. And in the total deadness of the place, he felt the back of his neck tickle as the hairs rose: it was a trap.

  Slowly, keeping to the darker shadow of the building walls, he worked his way in a circle around the unlit corner. Once, lights wagged stiffly over the bumpy pavement as an automobile cruised toward him, tires loud in the quiet night. He slipped into the deep recess of a delivery entrance and watched the vehicle’s outline hiss past. The box of emergency lights on the car’s roof showed it was a police cruiser, and it moved with the steady pace of a routine patrol on a dull night. The ruby taillights bounced down the block, flashed once, and then turned out of sight toward the Denargo area.

  Waiting for his night vision to return, he checked the time and began to angle toward the pool of shadow that was the viaduct. He was still ten minutes early. If it was a trap—if his spasm of fear was right and, for some reason, he was being set up, then he still seemed ahead of whoever it was. The whoever that knew he was looking for the white-haired man. The whoever that got his telephone number from the card he left in front of Nguyen.

  Wager paused at the shadowed corner one last time and strained to see into a dark that thickened as the viaduct pinched toward the pavement below. Still nothing moved. Not a sound. No vague darker shape that could be an automobile or a figure waiting against the paler gray of a pier.

  Unconsciously, like a man entering icy water, he took a deep breath and started walking across the intersection toward the viaduct. The pavement’s grit was loud under his shoes and he could picture the clear silhouette he made in the open street. He crossed the midpoint of the intersection, where a manhole cover caught a steely gleam from the sky; then he was into the shadow and squinting down the row of piers whose grayness receded into a blur. The oddly bright numbers on his watch said 2:28, and he paused, stilling his breath to listen for a whisper of movement or the far-off whine of an approaching car. Nothing. He walked slowly toward the next pier, eyes shifting from one point to another to use the off-center night vision that had been part of his life in Vietnam. Then he heard it, the flat rustle of tires moving slowly, and a moment later the muffled sound of a car engine almost at idle as it quietly approached.

  The faint noise echoed from the surrounding brick walls and the concrete sky above, blurring its direction. Wager stepped close against a pier, turning his head this way and that, but it came before he could spot it: a dark sedan in the narrow lane beside the rising bed of the viaduct. Lightless, it turned between the steel legs, then suddenly flashed on its high beams, pinning him in their glare. The headlights bobbed with a jerk of brakes and, as his watering eyes strained past the barrier of light, he heard a door quickly open. He spun around and found narrow shelter behind one of the thin piers whose stark shadow leaned sharply away from the lights. His own twisting shadow was split by the beam as he heard the first shot, a muffled, soft thump that said Silencer, and saw a flash struck from a steel piling in the dark to his left. Pulling his pistol as he sprinted wildly for the next pier, he dodged, keeping the row of steel beams flickering between him and the killer. He may have heard a second shot; he definitely had heard the engine rev sharply. The black shadows of the steel legs began to sway back and forth and whip across his running form as he desperately tried to keep the killer off balance behind him. To each side of the viaduct, the street widened into one-way avenues, and down the center, between the steel pilings, stretched an endless alley of open space. Behind him, he heard the fat tires squeal rhythmically on the stones; now the shadows hung momentarily still on one side as the motor raced and Wager, seeing them slip past faster, reached a hand to the cold, gritty flange of a pier and flung himself in a tight arc as the glinting fender lurched for him, brushed his hip, and threw him heavily against the steel. Behind the speeding glare of the headlights a rapid flicker of orange sparks sprayed toward him, a hot breath across his wincing face. He felt the punch and smell as bullets, muffled by the silencer, sizzled into the night, and then the car was gone. Its taillights swerved from under the viaduct in a squeal of melting rubber as it sped beyond a building’s solid black corner.

  Wager, still clinging to the thin steel of the viaduct’s leg, stared numbly into the silent street. Slowly, he reholstered his unfired pistol and felt his breath settle into something like normal gasps. And the almost irrelevant thought crossed his mind, that it was good he had not had time to fire a round—that there was a lot of paperwork every time a cop fired a bullet. That the Bulldog would want to know exactly what Wager was doing all by himself on this case and why he was idiot enough to walk into an obvious trap.

  Wager would not have been able to answer him.

  He seated himself at the far end of the counter in an all-night restaurant and let his eyes study the fake cowboy decor. He had been in here a hundred times, but now it was as if he saw it all anew. It did not make it any more attractive—just new. Like the pressure of the counter stool under him, and the almost sweet smell of brewing coffee, and the quiet murmur of voices from the room crowded with night people. All that was new, too. The wallpaper was tan with brand markings scattered over it, and the menus had happy cowgirls twitching buckskin fringes beneath the restaurant’s name: Howdy from Cowboy Bob’s 24-Hour Chuck Wagons. The round stools and the seats in the filled booths were covered in imitation piebald calfskin; the waitress, her face expressing her weary feet, wore a green uniform that was out of place, but which Wager had never noticed before. Her baggy eyes, from across a new distance, frowned at something on Wager’s face, and her hand went to her own cheek.

  “You been in a fight?”

  “Why?” His voice, too, sounded new and distant in his own ears.

  “You got a cut or a burn or something. Right there.”

  Wager’s fingers touched a numbed welt. It seemed to grow as he brushed his fingertips along it, and, under their pressure, a stinging ache began. “Bring me some coffee—black. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The bathroom mirror showed a hot, red welt angling up across his cheekbone. It didn’t look as big as his fingers had told him, but it was big enough—and far closer than he wanted to come to any bullet. He stared at the mark for a long, meditative minute before soaking a paper towel in cold water and pressing it to his flesh. He wasn’t scared; maybe fright would come later. He still had nightmares about the first time he had been shot at, so long ago, but the later times had faded into half-comic war stories and now they seemed as if they had happened to someone else. Right now the someone else seemed to be staring back at him out of the mirror, and he felt the same numb distance from that self-image that he had felt from the waitress.

  He lifted the towel and looked for a trace of blood, but saw none. There was a little luck in that. The big luck was that the killer had missed. All those bullets—it must have been a semi-automatic—and this close, and the guy had missed. The silencer. The clumsy weight and balance of an extra couple inches of steel on the end of the barrel.

  He pressed another wet towel to the welt, satisfied that it did not seem to grow any bigger as he watched. Nor any smaller. He’d have to come up with some story for the people at work. Cut himself shaving … A night of passion …

  Strange how a cop could develop a curiously mixed sense of his own vulnerability. How, sometimes, he could, as the little brass sign on Sergeant Brozki’s desk boasted, walk through the valley of the shadow and fear no evil because he was the meanest son of a bitch in the
valley. And at other times, feel as if the cross hairs of a rifle were centered on his back, and a finger was pulling the trigger….

  Earlier, as he’d driven out east on Colfax, he had felt curiously invulnerable, cushioned by his nostalgia from the awareness of what might happen to any cop at any time. When he thought back, he could recognize that divided consciousness when he’d answered the telephone, one part of him agreeing with sleepy carelessness to meet the voice, the other trying to wake him to the possibility of real danger. But he had been in his invulnerable phase; he had happily bullied a Vietnamese bartender; he knew that nothing would happen to him and not just because he was a cop but because he was Gabriel Villanueva Wager, who could take chances and pay no price.

  “You all right? You cold?”

  He blinked and focused on the waitress, whose baggy eyes looked at him with concern.

  “You’re shaking,” she said. “You got a fever?”

  “No.” He looked down at the coffee cup in his hand, uncertain how he got back to the counter and to his seat. “Nerves,” he said. “Too much coffee.”

  “Well, here,” she lifted the saucer and wiped the counter with a sponge. “Let me get you some decaf. You drink that much coffee and you’re gonna get sick.”

  Wager shook his head. “That’s okay—I don’t want anymore.” He set the cup down as cautiously as he could, clattering it briefly before his cramped fingers could clear the handle. Sucking in a deep breath, he forced his shoulders down and forward, stretching the clenched muscles at the base of his neck and feeling them drain of tautness and strain. Golding had shown him that trick, taken from one of the earlier fads the man had followed in his journey to spiritual oneness with whatever. But even a stopped clock was right twice a day, and Golding’s little exercise worked. Stretching again, Wager felt the muscles slack, felt his breath and pulse slow, his trembling flesh settle into relaxed suppleness.

  He had been terrified. When the car swung in to nail him, he had been too startled and frightened to fight back against the surprise of those searing headlights. And when his feet, ungoverned by his mind, had fled, terror had gripped his soul as deeply as any time in Vietnam, when he had huddled helpless and totally isolated beneath the quivering timbers and leaking sandbags, the churning thunder of rockets and mortars that had made living only a matter of luck and death only a matter of time. Only twenty minutes ago, he, Gabriel Villanueva Wager, had been so mindlessly terrified that he had run. It was something you could—after a while—admit. Maybe it was something you could even live with. But he had to wonder if it was something he could work with. He had to wonder if the next time—and there was bound to be a next time—he would suffer the paralysis of terror. Or would he explode mindlessly, in fear of that paralysis? He had to wonder if he could still govern his own flesh.