Jack Daniels and Associates: Snake Wine (15 page)

16.

Frank pressed his ear against the warehouse's front door and said, "Nothing yet. You aren't knocking loud enough." The warehouse was an old two-story affair with rusted aluminum siding with long ripples in the surface that stretched from the ground to the roof. It was small compared to the rest of the buildings surrounding it, and set far in the back near the water. Waves crashed along the harbor's wooden docks and gulls cried as they circled the air above, looking for food.

Hanley Harbor was in the working district and dirty-looking men were scattered along the piers, fishing day and night. They weren't the yuppie fishermen from Montrose Harbor who tied bright colored sweaters around their necks and wore leather shoes. There were no rich housewives jogging past with their dogs. The fishermen looked hungry. They looked like they were trying to catch dinner.

The water smelled and Frank wondered if maybe it was such a good idea to eat anything caught in there. He looked around the side of the building, inspecting the tall metal fence rimmed with rolling waves of razor-sharp steel that would tear the flesh off a man's bones if he got tangled in it. "Knock again, but this time, do it like you mean it."

"I know how to knock on a suspect's door," Jack said. She made a fist and bashed it against the door's heavy metal surface again and again. 

"That's the point. You aren't supposed to knock at all." Frank grabbed the door handle with both hands and kicked the bottom of the door several times, shaking paint chips off the outer walls and denting the door in the lower right corner. He looked back at Jack and said, "That's how we do it when we go to Kensington."

"I'm surprised you knock at all," Jack muttered.

They heard a woman's voice inside the building call out, "Stop banging! If you break my door I'm calling the police."

Instinctively, both of them moved to the side of the door, getting out of the fatal funnel. Jack reached in her pocket and pulled out her badge wallet just as the door cracked open and she held it up and said, "Too late. We're already here."

The woman smiled awkwardly as she opened the door, dressed in nothing but a light silk robe that she pinched around her chest to keep it closed. The fabric was thin and cream-colored, showing the dark areolas of her breasts and cut high above her thighs. Jack glanced sideways at Frank, who kept his eyes glued firmly on the woman's face. A clown could have popped out between the woman's legs and started honking a vaudeville song and Frank would not have looked. "Miss Li Xiao?" Frank said.

"Yes, can I help you?" she said.

"We need to speak with you in reference to a complaint about your property."

Jack stayed quiet as Frank talked, letting him stick to the script they'd concocted as she tried to look past the woman and into the building, to get eyes on as much as she could. There wasn't much to see. The woman was standing in a dark front office that had no windows and the door to the warehouse was shut behind her.

"What kind of complaint?" Li Xiao said, tucking a long ring of dark hair behind her ear. "That doesn't sound right. I have no problems with anyone."

"I'm sure it doesn't," Frank said softly. "Listen, a lot of times, these complaints are lodged by people just looking to start trouble for hard-working people. I have no doubt there's nothing wrong. Why don't you let us come in so we can explain the process, we'll sign off that everything's okay, and you can go about your business – whatever that business is."

"Well, you see, officer, I have a very specialized environment in this building. It is a habitat for endangered creatures, and I do not want to disturb them."

"What kind of creatures?" Frank said.

The woman let go of the front door, and it began to close slowly as she vanished behind it. Frank held out his hand to stop the door and said, "Ma'am?"

Jack leaned in, trying to get eyes on the suspect. The chances of a half-naked woman pulling a machine gun on them were slim. It was a more likely possibility that she'd run. Both Jack and Frank stepped into the doorway and stopped when they heard Li Xiao say, "Such as this."

The woman appeared in front of them holding a two foot long cobra wrapped around her right wrist. The snake's head was a burnt-sienna color and Li Xiao petted it along the spine, making the snake rise. "This is the Katien spitting cobra," she said, leaning down to blow softly along the creature's back. Its hooded neck flared in response, and the snake opened its mouth, showing Frank and Jack its fangs. Li Xiao cupped her hand under the snakes jaw and said, "The spitting cobras always aim for the eyes of their victims."

Jack was rooted in place at the sight of the snake, hands frozen at her sides. They weren't even two feet away. The snake wouldn't have to spit. It would probably be able to leap off the woman's wrist and bite her and Frank before either one of them could move.

"I'm not really fond of snakes," Frank said. "Can you please put that away?"

"This snake has more right to be here than you do," Li Xiao said. "It is his home you are asking to enter as well."

Jack snickered and said, "You mean we need its permission to come in?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," replied Li Xiao.

Jack shifted slightly, moving the right side of her body past the doorframe and out of the woman's view, trying to get her gun out without drawing any attention. "Hey, I've got a question. You ever lose any?" she said.

"Lose any what?"

"Any snakes. When I was a kid in school our science teacher brought a snake in for class and it escaped from its cage overnight. We spent the rest of the year in terror it was hiding in the cubby holes or going to bite us in the ass when we sat on the toilet."

"Sometimes," Li Xiao said, her dark eyes glittering as she continued to stroke the snake. "But I have nothing to fear from them. The snakes protect me and know me as one of their own." Both the snake and woman turned to look at Frank, taking his measure. "The same cannot be said for everyone else."

Frank could see what Jack was doing and said, "We'll try to keep that in mind."

Phinneas Trout crept along the back fence, keeping low to the ground. He checked the warehouse and light posts for security cameras but didn't see any and kept moving. The fence was threaded tightly and straight. Most older properties had loose spots along the back you could lift up like a curtain and slip under. Not this one. Whoever owned the building cared more about the fence than anything like seeding the rear yard for grass or scraping the decades of rust off the siding. The top of the fence was not an option either. Spools of Constantine wire, armed with razor blades every two inches, covered every inch of the upper strut.

He was going to have to do it the hard way.

Phin looked over his shoulder to check the pier behind him. Frank's damn satellite photos hadn't shown how freaking close they were to the pier. How any asshole walking around on it could just turn and say, "Oh, look. There's a suspicious young man breaking into that warehouse. Maybe we should call the authorities."

Thanks, Frank, Phin thought. Just another reason you are a colossal dick.

Phin checked to see who was on the pier. Nothing but old fogies, and they were too busy talking and looking out into the water to pay him any mind, and even if they were, he decided they probably couldn't see him at that distance. Phin pulled a hand-sized multi-tool out of its nylon scabbard on his belt and folded it in half to expose the rugged wire cutters in the middle. They should put a set of lock picks on these things and market them to burglars, he thought. In fact, if I get out of this gig alive and without going to prison, I'm going to draw up a design and make the damn thing myself. Sell it on the internet or something.

Snip.

He cut through the first wire quickly and then moved on to the second and third. He didn't need a big hole. Just enough for him to squeeze through. It's not like Herb's coming out this way, he thought. If he's in trouble, we're going to tear the whole place down getting him out. If he's in there loving life, thinking everything's sweet with his new sexy Asian babe, he's going to have bigger problems on his hands in the form of Jack Daniels.

Snip.

"Come on, come on," he grunted, squeezing the wire cutters with both hands. It was getting harder to make a cut, but he wasn't sure if it was because the tool was getting dull or his hands were getting tired. It didn't matter. He only had another foot or two to go.

"Hey!" someone shouted from behind him.

Phin turned slowly, blinking in astonishment that someone was so bold as to call him out like that. It was an old man in high-waisted denim overalls, leaning on the pier's rail. Didn't this fool know Phin would bash his skull in and toss him into the harbor? "What?" Phin snarled.

"You do fence repair?"

Phin looked down at the hole in the fence and said, "Yeah. We're replacing this section."

"I need an estimate on my building."

"All right. Later."

"Sounds good."

Phin turned back to the fence and started cutting faster, trying to get the hell out of sight. 

"Hey!" the old man shouted again.

Phin looked back.

"You got a card?"

Phin shook his head as he made the final cut.

"Word of mouth, eh?"

Phin peeled back a handful of fence and said, "That's the only way I know how to do things, pal. I'm all about the old school."

"Atta boy!" the old man called out, as Phin slid inside the hole and kept low, cutting right to head for the first crate near the fence large enough for him to drop down behind. The wood was rotten and filled with holes, and Phin rolled over to spy through one of them, searching to see if the old man was still watching. Luckily, he'd wandered off to the other end of the pier to bother some other person. If this goes wrong because of you, they'll be fishing your body out of the water next week, Phin thought. He moved to the next crate, staying down, and then another. He went from cover to cover, checking the warehouse windows for signs of movement. There was nothing but the sound of gulls screeching overhead and waves slapping the docks at the waterline.

Two steel doors were built into the back of the building, and neither one of them had handles. Just my luck, he thought. All of the crates were in bad shape, but he managed to find one that would support his weight, so he hustled it over to the back wall. He set it under the lowest row of windows, but they were still too high to reach. "Goddamn it!" Phin hissed. He climbed up onto the crate and reached as high as he could, standing on the tips of his toes to feel for any kind of ledge in the siding that he could grab, but there was nothing. None of the other crates would support his weight so stacking them was out of the question.  

That left one option, and it sucked.

Phin closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The windows had a one inch ledge three feet above where he could reach. That meant they were almost fifteen feet off the ground. It wasn't even soft ground. It was dirt and stone. If I miss, coming down off that thing is going to hurt big time. That's a broken leg at least. Maybe even a back or a spine. 

Listen, you're a sick man, something whispered in the back of his mind. You're a sick man and you're getting older, and this isn't the sort of shit you should be doing. You don't even know this guy Herb that well. Let's just extract from this little fool's errand, and go grab a bottle or a baggie, and forget all this nonsense.

He thought about Jack then, about her standing in the doorway trying to get in, expecting him to be there. He thought about how tired she looked lately, and how maybe, just maybe if they found this fat bastard of a partner of hers, she just might get enough sleep to join him for another game of pool.

Anyway, what the hell, he thought. At least I'll have a hell of a story to tell the nurses in the paraplegic section of the hospital.

Phin bent down at the knees as far as he could and sprung up, throwing his arms into the air and stretching out with all his might to reach for the tiny, slippery ledge.

His fingers brushed above the ledge and he clenched onto it, slamming hard against the aluminum wall. He immediately stuck the soles of his sneakers onto the surface, trying to dig in with the rubber enough to support himself. It was like Spider-man, just a whole lot uglier and more dangerous, but as he clung there, much to his own disbelief, Phin looked down and saw that he'd made it.

He looked at the window and said, "I swear to God, if you're not open, I'm going to burn this building to the ground with everyone and everything still inside it. Be open, you son of a bitch. Be open. Be open." He reached up with one hand, grunting as all the weight of his upper body was hanging on the tips of his left hand's fingers, and pushed.

"Yes!" he whispered. The window pivoted inwards and he stuck his hand through, grabbing the inside ledge with his hand. Anchoring himself there for a moment, saving his strength, Phin slid up onto the windowsill and hung there, half his body inside the building and the other half sticking out through the window, feet kicking wildly in the air.

He looked down at a pile of long wooden planks several feet beneath him that formed some sort of catwalk. Phin folded his forearm over his face and dropped down through the window, crashing down onto the planks hard enough that the noise echoed throughout the large, open room below. He laid there for a second, trying to catch his breath. He was inside. He could hardly believe it. There was some sort of spot light directly over his head with a massive bulb aiming down. It looked like something stage crews used to light rock bands at a concert.