By the Book (18 page)

There was a new kind of kinship between them as they pulled up across the street from the junkyard. There was a silent mutual agreement that if Felix was going to stand up like a man, he was also to be treated like one—and neither one was too sure Krane would feel the same.

“Okay,” she said, turning her head to face him. “Tonight he’s just going to show you around, discuss wages and the terms of the pay-back agreement, and then you start work tomorrow, so this shouldn’t take too long. I’ll wait right here for you. If you’re not back in thirty minutes, I’m coming in after you. Okay?”

He nodded, but the look in his eyes told her that he suspected Krane could inflict a great deal of pain in thirty minutes.

“Twenty minutes,” she said, forcing the fear from her voice. “Twenty minutes and I’m coming in. How long does it take to look around a junkyard anyway, huh?”

“Stay in the car, Elly,” he said, his tone flat and reconciled. “I can handle this.”

“Twenty minutes and I’m coming in.”

His gaze slipped from the door of the run-down building across the street to meet hers. He’d told her to stay in the car, but he couldn’t bring himself to forbid her to follow him. He tried to smile, but the gesture held no reassurance for her that he thought anything other than that he was going to see his Maker.

“Everything is going to be fine,” she said, falling back on her assumption that all people were basically good.

Once more he nodded. He took a deep breath and pulled on the door handle to get out. He walked slowly across the street and through the dusty parking lot. It was 5:40 and there was still plenty of daylight, though an evening dullness had taken most of the blazing glare from it, so she could see him perfectly. His one look back was quick, an afterthought to his turning the knob to go in. He was scared.

Ellen fidgeted, chewed her lower lip, and watched the clock in her dashboard blink off each second. At 5:43 she pulled on the handle of the car door and got out. She started across the street, then turned around and went back to lean against her car. If things were going well in there, the last thing Felix needed was his big sister barging in to hold his hand as if he were a baby.

Still, with every minute that passed, she became more and more certain that she’d made a huge mistake; that for the first time in Felix’s life he might be right about something. She should go over there, she thought. So what if she embarrassed Felix? They’d think she was the reason for his drinking. She could pull a dumb-female trick: “Can I join the tour, pretty please? I’ve never seen a real junkyard before,” she could say.

She turned to look at the clock and at the same time heard the door across the street squeak open.

The burly man from the rusty stool came out first, then Felix, followed by Tom Krane. Her heart was thumping out a funeral cadence, slow, loud, and resounding. In a bizarre, almost dreamlike moment their steps matched the slow, solemn thumping as they walked to the side of the building and the open gate of a tall wire fence. She noticed she was holding her breath when Felix looked over at her, and she didn’t release it when he smiled and waved.

“You better go on home, Ellen,” he shouted to her, his companions slowing and turning their heads to watch. “This is going to take longer than we thought. It may be a while. You go on home, and I’ll bum a ride home from one of them.”

She frowned, tried to see his face more clearly, tried to pick up a signal in his voice that something was wrong. He smiled and waved again, then turned back and fell into step with the other two men, saying, “Thanks for the ride over here. I’ll see you later.” Fifteen more slow plodding steps, and he disappeared through the fence and behind a pile of junk. Her heart was about to burst. She let go of the stale air in her lungs and took a deep breath. She must have needed the extra oxygen, because it seemed to snap and fizz inside her brain, shake things loose, help her see things more clearly.

Or not ...

She wasn’t really sure what set her off or why. She just knew, with every fiber of her being, that something was wrong. Horribly wrong. And she was running.
They’re not going to give him a lift home. Why would they give him a lift home? These are not nice men; they wouldn’t give their grandmother a ride home.
Over and over in her mind the alarms went off on a sour note. She thought she heard her name being called, thought it was Felix calling her. The fear was disorienting her though, the call seemed to come from behind and it didn’t sound like Felix’s voice. But she knew it was him and kept running, through the gate in the wire fence.

But once inside, she had to stop. The junkyard was much bigger than it looked from across the street. There were three primary avenues, one straight ahead and one off to each side from where she stood. Cars and car parts were piled two and three deep along each side of the avenues—buses, bikes, and baby carriages dispersed among them. Refrigerators and metal rowboats; tractors and trailers. There were acres of them. She moved forward a bit to where the three roads intersected, looking down each, catching a movement off to the right—about a hundred feet down.

Coming up on the spot, she heard a muffled cry, then in a small alcove of debris she saw Burlyman grab hold of Felix, and Krane deliver a crushing blow to his face.

“No! No!” she screamed, watching blood splatter and ooze from her brother’s nose and mouth. The burly man did something to Felix’s arm, and he cried out in pain. “No!”

With the instant recognition that her words weren’t going to stop them, she took a running start, grimaced at the next blow to Felix’s midsection, took a flying jump, and landed on Krane’s back. His arm came up to throw her off and she wrapped her leg around it. With both arms firmly around his neck—and not daring to let go—she could smell the grease and sweat and pure evil on him. Instinctively curling her lips back to avoid contact with him, she sank her teeth into the fleshy part of his shoulder at the base of his neck.

He howled and bucked like a crazed bronc. She felt his skin give way under the pressure of her teeth, tasted blood in her mouth. Then she was flying. ...

Everything after that happened in a blur. First she was whizzing through the air, then it felt as if she were shattering into a thousand little pieces as she came crashing down to the ground, hitting the side of an old panel truck, her head knocking it twice before the world tunneled in and out of focus. In and out, and while she fought the hazy darkness she was aware of the noise. Lots of voices, lots of shouting—more than the three men she knew to be in the junkyard with her. Panic gripped her as she remembered Felix, his face bloody and broken. Were lots of men attacking him now? She was desperate to see.

“Felix?” she cried out, the fog turning gray and beginning to thin out. Fuzzy shapes and forms crossed her field of vision. Khaki uniforms. Lots of them. “Felix?”

“He’ll be okay,” someone beside her said. She turned her head and blinked her eyes until she had a clear picture of Bobby Ingles. Thank God she’d been too nice to be cruel to him in school. He was watching the six or seven other police officers crowded around Felix and the two loan sharks, when he said, “Looks like he’s beat up a bit, but he’ll be okay. He knew he might have to take a couple hits before we could get in here.”

“He what? He knew what?” Supporting herself on one elbow, she rolled forward onto her hands and knees to get up. Every muscle in her body felt as if it had been pinched, viciously. “He knew what?”

“That he might have to take a couple punches before we could get in here to arrest those two.”

Using the panel truck to guide her, and Bobby’s hand for support, she stood up and scowled at him through the dizziness in her head. “What the hell are you talking about?” She took a tentative step toward the huddle around her brother and winced with pain. The next step was just as bad, but the one after that was a little better. Talking helped. “Felix didn’t know this was going to happen. I made him come here. I almost got him killed.”

“He suspected. We all did,” Bobby said, following her at a discreet distance when it became apparent that she didn’t want or need his help to walk. “Especially after the other night at the hospital.”

She was vaguely aware of the ambulance pulling into the back of the junkyard, advancing toward them. She needed to get to Felix. She hobbled a little faster.

“I don’t understand, Bobby. I don’t understand any of this. I understand that I was a fool, but the rest ... I just don’t understand.”

“Tuesday night at the hospital—” he began, but she’d caught a glimpse of her brother and started pushing people away to get to him.

“Aw, Felix, Felix,” she cried, kneeling down beside his battered body, his face swelling and discoloring under the blood. So much blood. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Tears rolled freely down her cheeks. “Can you see me? Can you hear me? Felix?” Only his left eye was swollen closed; he opened the right one and glanced around trying to find her. “I’m here, Felix. I’m sorry. Please be all right.” He tried to speak, tried to wet his lips with a bloodied tongue, and the pain twisted his face. “Don’t talk. Don’t talk. He needs help. Someone help him. Don’t die, Felix. Please don’t die.”

She wasn’t sure what drew her attention to it—through the tears and anguish and hubbub going on around them—but she suddenly felt his fingers grasping hers, squeezing them tight, shaking them a bit, like a victorious combatant.

“That’s right. That’s right, Felix,” she said, brushing away her tears with the back of her hand and trying to smile at him. “You won. You were right all along. I don’t know how you did all this, but you won.”

“Any time Krane’s name comes up, we know something’s going down. Tuesday night when Felix was trying so hard to get himself arrested, taken into custody so Krane couldn’t get at him, I figured he was in some sort of trouble,” Bobby Ingles said. He sat across from her in the surgical waiting room, speaking softly, calmly—explaining what had transpired that evening. His hands were clasped between his knees and he was leaning forward on his elbows. Felix had been wheeled into surgery twenty minutes earlier. “Between the time Felix sobered up and the time your mother came to pick him up, we asked him about the situation. He denied over and over again that he was in trouble with Krane. He said he knew who Krane was but had no personal relationship with the man. I told him then what Krane was like.” He spread his fingers wide, helpless. “I told him he wasn’t the first guy to get in a bind with him and he wouldn’t be the last guy we found beaten half to death in a gutter somewhere.”

“If you knew Krane was loan-sharking and beating up people, why didn’t you arrest him?”

“No proof. And his victims were too afraid to testify against him.”

“I don’t understand that,” she said, bewildered. “They can’t pay him if they’re too beaten up to work. It still doesn’t make sense.”

“Power,” he said simply. “They beat up one person and everyone else moves heaven and earth to pay him. It generates fear.”

“And they were going to use Felix to teach—”

A movement in the doorway caught her attention; she looked up. There stood Jonah, a safe haven, a light in the darkness, a warm bed on a cold night. There stood Jonah, vital, sexy, and all male.

It was as if someone pulled her plug and let all the air out of her, or as if she’d been holding herself together with paper clips and chewing gum while she waited for him—and now that he was there, she could fall apart and he’d pick up all the pieces.

Without a word from either of them, she stood and walked straight into his embrace.

He held her, rocking her gently, feeling an overwhelming gratitude for he knew not what.

He moved his hand from her back to the side of her head, to hold her close. She cringed.

“What? Are you hurt? I saw them bring Felix in from upstairs, then you arrived in the cop car. Are you hurt?” He held her away to check for himself. There were bruises, on her arms and legs, and a few minor scratches. “They wouldn’t let me in to see you and then they said you were over here, that Felix was in surgery. Ellen, what’s happened?”

“I’m fine,” she said, palming his cheek to ease his concern. “I banged my head, but I’m fine. Felix is in surgery. He has a broken nose and mandible, a fractured arm, and some cracked ribs.” She shook her head. “It’s all my fault.”

“Were you in an accident?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I wish we had been,” she said, taking his hand as she turned back to Bobby Ingles. She made introductions and gave a brief explanation of what she knew. “Felix told me they’d kill him, but I didn’t believe him. I made him go and now ...” She held out her hands to show that she’d gotten Felix worse than nothing by making him go.

“Actually, that worked out pretty well,” Bobby said, picking up the tale. “On Wednesday, when your mother told him you’d gone to Krane and gotten him a job, Felix must have figured he was going to lose this one, one way or another. With you or with Krane. So he called me. I’d told him that morning that if he was willing to wear a wire and testify against Krane, we could put the guy away for a good long while. Shut down his operation. Felix called that afternoon and said he would.”

“But we had dinner with him that night,” she said, glancing at Jonah for confirmation. “He didn’t say a word about it.”

“He couldn’t. Krane isn’t stupid and he knew we were onto him. One slip and we’d have him. The way you interceded for Felix was a perfect setup, and Felix said if you knew the truth you’d never let him go.”

“Well, of course I wouldn’t have. Walking in there like that was suicidal. What I did was stupid, but what he did was—”

“Pretty gutsy, if you ask me,” Bobby said. “He actually planned most of it himself. Told us to come wire him up in your mother’s backyard while your mother was inside taking her afternoon nap. Told us we had to let you drive him over, so that Krane wouldn’t get suspicious. But you had to leave before we could do anything. That waving and telling you to go home was our signal that things were going sour, that Krane had no intention of giving him a job. And it was perfect except ...”