Metzger's Dog (5 page)

Chinese Gordon took the stairs to the third floor. It took him only a moment to find the office he had noticed earlier, and he had no trouble opening the lock. He had expected things to be easy, but this reminded him of a dream he’d once had in which the walls of buildings were made of a thick, soft concoction like cheese.

Inside, he found a line of doors on a long hallway. He studied the doors and the placement of the rooms and decided on the one at the far end of the hall. It would be either a broom closet or the boss’s office. It must be on the corner of the building, so that meant a chance for two windows. The professor he’d seen before was definitely of two-window rank.

He opened the lock and smiled. It was the boss’s office, all right. There was a big desk and an old manual typewriter. No secretary would use a machine like that. The walls were lined with books, the sort of books that cost too much unless you got them free. Chinese Gordon scanned the office. There was no safe, no display case for something rare and valuable. He moved his face close to the painting on the wall, but even in this light he could see it was only a commercially printed reproduction of an Utrillo street scene. He’d stayed in a motel once where the same print hung over the bed.

Maybe it was a waste of time. They could have been talking about bolting down the office machines. He sat on the desk and thought. The younger man wasn’t the type for bolting down typewriters. In a five-hundred-dollar suit he wasn’t selling burglar alarms, either. Whatever it was had to be valuable. Upstairs Kepler and Immelmann were loading a million dollars in cocaine the university had been keeping in what amounted to a jewelry box, but the man hadn’t been up there. He’d been down here.

Chinese Gordon rushed into the hallway and began opening doors. He peered into each room for some sign that it might hold something worth stealing. There was nothing. In the fourth room he stopped. Inside was a computer terminal. Shit, he thought. What if they were just worried that somebody would come in and access their fucking data base? For an instant he considered smashing the screen of the terminal. It would have given him pleasure, but he controlled the impulse.

Everything about the way the rooms were arranged would induce the feeling that the farthest office was the safest. It had to be there.

Chinese Gordon went back to the boss’s office and stood in the doorway. There were books on the desk. When he tried the desk drawers they weren’t even locked, so he didn’t search them closely. Then he noticed the row of filing cabinets. There were four. The lock button was pushed in on the third one only. The time was going by. If this wasn’t it, then he’d have to forget it.

Chinese Gordon picked the lock and flung open the top drawer, which contained nothing. The second drawer was empty too. In the third drawer was a box the size of a ream of paper. He tried the last drawer, and it was empty.

There was no strong reason to take the box, but there wasn’t a strong reason not to, either. God knew he’d done enough work for the damned thing. He left the office with the box under his arm and ran up the stairs to the fourth floor.

I
MMELMANN AND
K
EPLER WERE ALREADY IN THE HALLWAY
holding the carton between them. When Chinese Gordon appeared, they moved into the elevator.

“Problems?” asked Kepler. “If there’s a security guard with a broken neck, I’d like to know.”

“No,” said Chinese Gordon. “Just thought I’d pick this up on a hunch. I’ll tell you about it later.”

The elevator door opened and they stepped out. The first-floor vestibule was still empty. Somewhere in a distant hallway they could hear the metallic clanking of a bucket and the squish of a mop wringer. They moved quickly out of the building. As the others made their way down the walk to the van, Chinese Gordon gently guided the door shut. It locked behind them automatically, and he smiled to himself. He liked it when things were as he’d expected them to be.

Chinese Gordon drove along the dark, deserted, winding road across the campus, stopping at every corner to obey the signs that protected the thousands of pedestrians who crowded the walks in the daytime. He started singing, “Look out the way, Old Dan Tucker,” as he made the long curve that led to the exit gate.

He was building to his favorite part when he’d get to sing about old Dan Tucker comin’ to town, when the headlights settled on the figure of a man in the road. It was a uniformed parking attendant, and he was setting up a sign that said “Exit Closed.” As the van drew nearer and the headlights brightened on him, the man raised his hand and squinted. His face and hands looked unnaturally white.

“Shit!” said Kepler. “It’s the same one.” He pulled up his pant leg and grasped the grip of his pistol.

“One of these times you’re going to blow your foot off,” Immelmann observed.

Kepler turned to Chinese Gordon. “You said they’d change shifts.”

Chinese Gordon said, “No problem. See?” The man stepped back and waved them on. “We’re going to make it.”

Suddenly the man’s face changed. The squinting eyes widened, the pinched expression flattened, and the mouth hung open as the man disappeared from the glare of the lights and the van glided past.

Kepler was holding the .357 Magnum in his hand now. First he lunged across Immelmann to reach the side window, but Immelmann’s long, lanky shape was trapped in the way. Immelmann bent his elbows like wings and tried to pull his bony knees to his chest, but he only succeeded in jerking a kneecap into Kepler’s chin. Chinese Gordon could hear Kepler’s teeth clap shut with a click. Kepler dropped to the floor and scrambled toward the back of the van.

Chinese Gordon studied the dark silhouette of the security man in the rearview mirror. The man was running now, a fat trot that seemed to bounce and jolt his body up and down without bringing it much nearer to the van.

Kepler shouted, “I’ve got the box off, Chinese!”

Immelmann said, “What for?”

“He’s going for the kiosk, you idiot! The telephone!”

Chinese Gordon stopped at the traffic light and glanced ahead for an opening in the stream of cars. Kepler was waving his pistol and shouting, “You’ve got to take out the kiosk, Chinese! Now, before he gets to the phone!”

Chinese Gordon pressed the three buttons under the dashboard. The generator whirred, the fan hummed, and the back door slid open. In the mirror he could see the lighted parking kiosk, a tiny outpost in the darkness, centered in the crosshairs. He could see the parking guard’s chubby shape trotting along, his hat now gone. Chinese Gordon grasped the remote-control switch in his right hand. Ten minutes could make all the difference.

He said, “Hold onto something” and flicked the switch with his thumb. The gun roared, the van jolted forward, and Chinese Gordon’s view was obscured by flame and smoke and movement. When he looked through the rearview mirror again, he could see that the kiosk was gone. Strewn along for a distance of a hundred feet beyond were pieces of burning wood and chunks of pulverized cinder block. He could see the parking guard crawling on his hands and knees down the center of the street at amazing speed.

Chinese Gordon stepped on the gas pedal and pulled out into traffic, the van trailing smoke out the back door and side vents. Cars along the boulevard had pulled over and stopped, as though the terrible noise had stunned them. Chinese Gordon turned on the flashing lights and leaned on the horn as he hurtled down the street among them. He squealed around the corner on two wheels and headed for the freeway entrance.

Immelmann moved to the rear of the van to help Kepler close the door. “I wonder what they earn,” he said.

“What?” shouted Chinese Gordon.

Immelmann smiled. “You know, those parking guys.”

8
                  
Chinese Gordon’s body was hunched forward over the steering wheel, his right foot still on the gas pedal and his teeth clenched as the van knifed into the space between two cars and shot up the Harbor Freeway. He drove with ferocious tenacity, first shuttling from lane to lane to dodge slower cars that floated by like drifting swatches of color, then easing into the wake of a long-haul semi that moved up the left lane with a frightening gallop that meant an empty trailer and the driver’s firm intention to keep the engine straining at least until he had to gear down on the grapevine at Bakersfield.

Kepler said, “Figure seven or eight minutes for that sorry bastard back there to realize he’s not dead. Figure a minute to remember to call the police, and maybe five minutes for them to decide he’s not crazy and start trying to do something constructive.”

Immelmann thought for a moment. “Fifteen minutes, then. That’s about what I figured. We’ve used up about five.” He smiled. “So in about ten minutes either they’ll have us or they won’t get us.”

Chinese Gordon said, “We can’t make Van Nuys in ten minutes, even following this maniac.”

“True,” said Kepler. “They’ll have the choppers over the freeway before then anyway.” He turned to Immelmann. “Thank the good Lord that Old Chinese has a plan.”

“I do?”

“Of course,” said Kepler. “You always do.”

“Well, I don’t exactly have one at the moment, but I’ve been thinking about it.”

“See?” said Kepler to Immelmann. “What’d I tell you? He doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to get out of this, but he’s thinking.”

Chinese Gordon took the ramp from the Golden State Freeway behind the semi and then veered to the right lane, picking up speed. He passed two more exits before he saw the sign he remembered. “Good,” he said. “How long since we left the campus?”

Immelmann said, “About six or seven minutes.”

Chinese Gordon drifted onto the exit ramp and coasted onto another ramp at the end. He drove north on the Glendale Freeway to Foothill Boulevard and then cruised up Foothill Boulevard.

“I see your plan,” said Kepler. “You’re going to keep turning onto smaller and smaller roads until finally the road and everything on it just disappears.”

“Close,” said Chinese Gordon as he passed a hamburger stand. He brightened. “It’s right up here.” He drove along what seemed to be empty fields for a distance onto a gravel drive and followed it a hundred yards into the trees and stopped before a chain link fence.

“What’s this,” asked Immelmann, “a garbage dump?”

“No,” said Chinese Gordon. “It’s a junkyard. Get the lock on that gate.” Immelmann jumped down and trotted to the gate. He examined the padlock for a moment, seemed to fondle it in his hand, and then tugged it open.

“Amazing, isn’t he?” asked Chinese Gordon.

“Yeah, just like Houdini,” said Kepler. “What are we doing here?”

“I know it’s not a great plan, but it’s all I could think of.” Chinese Gordon glanced at his watch. “It’s been about fifteen minutes and we’ve put a good fifteen miles between us and the college. That’s something, but by now they’ll have helicopters, maybe even roadblocks on the freeways. If we don’t do something, we’re finished.”

“Agreed,” said Kepler. “Three Fools Killed in Shootout with LAPD.”

Immelmann was waving them forward, and Chinese Gordon obeyed, inching along with the headlights off. Immelmann closed the gate and snapped the padlock, then climbed into the van.

They drove up and down the aisles of car bodies, some crumpled and distorted, others merely pillaged, a hood or a bumper gone. There were automobiles of all kinds, some sitting stranded on blocks without tires, others looking as though they had been parked just for a moment. There were whole sections of the place devoted to cars of one brand, other areas that seemed to defy classification. Chinese Gordon drove on until he saw a zone where the rusting hulks of metal seemed to rise higher than usual, then turned down the aisle toward it.

There were campers, pickup trucks, even two tow trucks, and then the vans. There were vans of every make and description, every combination of colors. He found an opening and parked next to a van that lay on its side like a sleeping hippopotamus.

They got out and stood in the darkness. Immelmann removed the magnetic signs from the van’s sides and the yellow light from the roof and stowed them neatly inside, while Kepler peered into the cooler. The three sat down in a row on the ground beside the van. Kepler popped open a can of beer that sounded unnaturally loud, and passed it to Chinese Gordon, then popped two more. In the huge expanse of abandoned, rusting metal there was no motion, no sound. In the unnatural silence Chinese Gordon could hear the sizzling sound of his beer foaming out of the top of the can and dripping onto his lap, but he was too deep in concentration to be distracted. The next stage of things had to be perfect. It had to be something that—

“Listen,” whispered Immelmann.

There was only the sound of the beer fizzing in the hollow cans, a quiet, comforting, metallic sound. As Chinese Gordon listened, the sound seemed to swell, to grow. Something else seemed to be adding to it, augmenting it, a deeper, more rhythmic sound. He whispered, “Into the van.”

They scrambled in and huddled around the warm barrel of the automatic cannon. They all knew the sound too well, had heard it too often in too many places to mistake it for anything else. As they watched through the windows they saw the tiny red spot appear over the hill and float slowly toward the junkyard, sometimes sweeping smoothly for a time, then stopping, hanging in a swaying arc above the vicinity of the freeway and then moving on. As it approached, the noise grew louder, first to a high humming, then deeper and deeper until the growling noise of the engine could be distinguished from the beat of the whirling rotors. As they watched, the red spot paused, hovering, and a bright beam of white light shot downward to the ground, then swept a few hundred feet, and then flicked off. In the distance now they could see the red running lights of other police helicopters moving methodically back and forth over the roads. Now and then one would shine its searchlight on the ground, and a circular pool of light would transfix whatever was beneath in its glare, and then sweep on.

“Looks like Da Nang,” said Chinese Gordon.

“Here it is,” said Kepler. The helicopter hovered over the junkyard and turned on its searchlight. The disc of bright light shot around the fence, lingered for a second on the shack near the gate, and then moved on.

For a long time none of them moved. Two more helicopters passed overhead and then moved back over the road and followed its course to the northeast.

“G
ONE,” SAID
K
EPLER
. “Now what?”

“Now we think,” said Chinese Gordon. “That poor schmuck back there must have been a lot clearer than we thought if they’re already making a sweep this far out. We have to assume he gave them some kind of description of the van, so they think they know what they’re looking for.”

Immelmann shrugged. “Three men in a white airconditioner repair van, armed and dangerous, et cetera.”

“I don’t like leaving the van,” Kepler said. “We might get lucky and the guy who owns this place won’t notice it for a day, but more likely he will. People who deal in worthless shit always think it’s great and hate to part with it, so they go around and visit it whenever they’ve got a minute.”

“We could smash it up a little,” Immelmann said. “We could open the safe here.”

“There’s the armor plate that Chinese bolted inside, and the gun,” Kepler said. “Everything about it says ‘Call the Police.’”

“We may as well get started,” said Chinese Gordon. “There are only four cans of that spray paint we used on the sawhorses. There’s tape in the toolbox. We’ve got to use everything carefully. Don’t waste it, don’t leave anything lying around. I’ll start taping the chrome and the windows. You two see if you can find anything around here that will change the way the van looks, even if it’s only hubcaps or some damned hood ornament.”

“You’re going to paint the van red?” said Kepler. “In the dark? With cans? Chinese, think about it. Pretend you’re a cop. You’ve been listening to the radio. Some hysterical parking guy says he saw a white van blow up his outhouse with an automatic cannon from an airplane. Then you hear the reason it happened was because the van is carrying the Gross National Product of Peru. Say you’re not some rookie, but a real honest-to-God twelve-year veteran. It’s three in the morning and nobody has seen the white van yet. What are you going to do if you see a red van coming your way?”

“At three in the morning, sure,” said Immelmann.

Chinese Gordon shrugged. “You said yourself we can’t leave it here. We can’t take it out as it is. We can’t do anything but change it and head for home in the rush-hour traffic tomorrow morning, when there will be more white vans on the road than there are police.”

Kepler and Immelmann moved into the darkness, carrying screwdrivers and wrenches. It was difficult to see at first, but as they walked among the battered shapes of trucks and vans, they began to discern the accessories, some practical, others vain: A truck had a trailer hitch, a van had a rack to hold its spare tire on the back door. Another had a set of spoke hubcaps and wooden door handles.

“This is sort of fun,” said Kepler as he unscrewed a set of mud flaps under a Volkswagen minibus. He heard Immelmann give a snort, and he supposed Immelmann was right. Then he heard Immelmann say something unintelligible. He rolled out from under the Volkswagen and looked up at Immelmann, who was standing in the empty path between the rows of car bodies, staring at something off in the darkness. He was muttering, “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit,” so quietly that Kepler could barely hear it. Kepler lay on the ground and peered into the silent shadows. Then he heard it, far away at first, and then louder and louder, a tick-tick-tick, faster and faster, and then he caught a glimpse of it.

It was the black shape of a huge dog, so big it seemed to brush its shoulder against the hood ornament on a ’57 Chevy as it passed, but he knew that wasn’t possible. It was just the distance and the darkness, but that made it even worse, because a dog that charged two men from a couple of hundred feet instead of stalking them was something worse than just big. Then he remembered why junkyards never have night watchmen, something that had slipped his mind when he’d been hiding from the helicopters and wondering why he always listened to Chinese Gordon’s schemes. Kepler lay on his belly and pulled the .357 Magnum out of his boot. He steadied the pistol in both hands and leveled it on the sound, the “huff, huff, huff” of the charging beast’s eager chest. He knew he’d see it, if only for a moment when it was about ten or twelve feet from Immelmann. It would jump high for the throat because it was surely that kind of dog, the kind the owner would starve and beat and abuse until it hated the smell of a man so much even he couldn’t go near it when he came to open the gate in the morning, so he had to lure it into an enclosure with food. There would be time for only one shot, but Kepler didn’t expect to need more. After it blew the dog apart, the slug from the .357 Magnum would crack the engine block on the car across the aisle.

He held the gun steady on the sound, waiting for another flash of vision, something to focus on. The dog sounded like a freight train—“huff! huff! huff!”—more than heavy breathing, and not a bark, more like the dog was talking to itself, maybe even laughing. He felt an instant of regret—the poor crazy animal, waiting all this time finally to sink his teeth into somebody, and—

“Don’t shoot it,” said Immelmann.

“What?”

Immelmann walked calmly across the aisle and stood beside an old bread delivery truck. He opened one of the back doors wide, climbed inside, and Kepler lost sight of him. Just then the animal appeared, dashing at terrible speed, taking eight or ten feet at a leap, its mouth open wide, its lips rolled back to bare a set of teeth from some nightmare. It overran the truck by some twenty feet in its insane ferocity, then seemed to turn in the air to scramble to the open door. It leaped inside, giving voice to a snarl that sounded like something being torn.

Kepler jumped to his feet and sprinted for the truck, but as he did, he saw Immelmann get out of the driver’s seat and slam the door, then walk around the truck and close the back door. An instant later the dog hurled itself against the door so hard the truck shivered.

“Pitiful,” said Immelmann. He looked in the window and said, “Sorry, you poor bastard.” The dog’s face pressed against the glass, its front teeth trying to bite the surface. The dog threw himself against the door again and again, making a booming noise and shaking the truck. Then he tried to bite the glass again, and his rage grew into a titanic frustration at not being able to open his jaws wide enough.

Immelmann looked at the dog’s face and said sadly, “He wants to bite the world, doesn’t he?”

Kepler stifled an impulse to shoot him through the glass. “Come on,” he said, putting the pistol back into his boot. “If we get out of his sight maybe he won’t hurt himself trying to get at us.”

They returned to the van to find Chinese Gordon al-already painting. He had taped paper over the windows and lights and was carefully spraying with an even, steady motion of his forearm, back and forth. Immelmann set down his burden of chrome and picked up a can of paint. They worked in silence for what Kepler judged to be three hours. After a little while Kepler stopped hearing noises from the bread truck three aisles away. He kept himself working, even after he judged the van was as red as it ever would be and Chinese Gordon insisted on doing all the cutting and screwing that was making his van look like a fire truck designed by a mental defective, by thinking about the owner of that dog opening the door of the bread truck. The man would arrive at seven-thirty and call the dog to its cage. He’d lay steak in sight, then wait. He’d whistle, he’d make every noise he could think of. At eight or eight-thirty he’d be sure the dog was dead or at least too sick to move. Then he’d come inside, walking on tiptoe. By then he’d have stopped being afraid and be thinking about a new dog—a puppy, probably, that he’d have to start teaching to kill people, start abusing and starving. But he’d still have to start looking for the old dog because a two-hundred-pound carcass rotting in your yard would be a horror. At some point he’d find the bread truck and open the door. Kepler leaned into the van, pulled a beer can out of the cooler, and popped it open. He poured a stream of beer down his throat and smiled to himself.