Thorazine Beach (9 page)

“Clayton started a second business,” she said.

“Import-export?”

Her face said she didn’t appreciate the sarcastic edge. “It was nannies at first,” she said. “Au pair girls, that sort of thing.”

“At first…” I prodded.

“Then I began to suspect…well, you’ve seen the pictures.”

“Yes. And where did you see them?”

“In one of the…briefcases.”

“You mean, actual
briefcases
full of…?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked right at me. “Clayton has a built-in gun cabinet—I don’t even know the combination. He likes target shooting, hunting, that sort of—”

“Thing, yes. And—”

“And one day he’d left…well, it was open, and—”

“You looked.”

“It was wide open, and there was one of the guns missing and, well, I thought it was so odd to find a briefcase in…so naturally I…I looked.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“Well, as I said, there’s a certain…
stress
…in
any
marriage.”

“And a little more now,” I said.

More Kleenex. “I love my husband,” she said. “Notwithstanding…”

“Of course,” I said. It sounded like token sympathy, even to me. “And you want…”

“I want to know,” she said, plucking up some nerve and quickly losing it. “And I want this to be over.”

Barbara Jean gathered the pics, returned them to the folder, the folder to her case. “You are,” she said, “trustworthy, are you not?”

She wanted an answer. I didn’t give it.

“Mr. Minyard,” she said—where did
that
come from? “I’ve come to expect a certain degree of loyalty…” I closed my eyes. The words sounded like Isaac Breitzen in lipstick.

She looked at me. I looked back, not quite knowing what my face said.

Her face relaxed—a bit deliberately, I thought—then took on a touch of Southern coquette. “I’m sorry, Jack, it’s all so…” She looked away. Lip. Eyes down. Kleenex yet again.

I admit: I’m a sucker for certain things, certain images. Mike Hammer, Spenser—
they
can be tough, bar-bourbon, unfiltered. Me, as a detective—I’m totally decaf and whipped cream. I leaned in and touched her arm. “No. Barbara Jean…
I’m
sorry.”

“Let’s go outside a minute,” she said. We did, sat at one of the tables under a green umbrella that cast no meaningful shade, and if anything added to the heat. I’d never seen Barbara Jean smoke. But she pulled out a package of Nat Sherman’s—black, gold-tipped, expensive as all get-out. She offered me one but I stuck with my own. Her lighter, I saw, was a Dunhill, antique, gold. I flicked my own yellow BiC. The way she let me was, in its way, revealing. As if she’d
learned
it, learned it in some kind of calculated, dress-for-success way, from the kind of women who know how to impress men in cocktail lounges.
Touch the man’s hand lightly as he lights it…that’s it
…
just a gentle brush
. That, and a warm, smoky smile. “I’m a late starter,” she said. “But I’ve learned, it calms me. And I do like…” She smiled again. “…a certain style.”

Two grand in cash and an hour later—yes, I did wonder where the cash came from, but I didn’t ask—I’d agreed to a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have.
Strict
confidentiality.
No
police.
Daily
reports—in person, never by phone. I was to keep working whatever jobs Eileen gave me—and I tucked MacDonald in there, too, though we never mentioned him. That, she said, would be part of the cover.
No one
, she said, could know I was working for her. In return for this: two grand a week, just like today, till I was done.

“Well, Jack,” she said. “I am
so
grateful. And—look at the time…you’ll want to be getting started, I expect.”

Nikki came out the door, a melmac plate in her left hand, spoon in her right, mouth full, plopped herself down at our table. “Hell of a casserole, BJ,” she said, and turned to me. “Jack, I’ll give you the dish out of the fridge, coupla days, when I’m done and run it through the diswasher, and you can take it back to BJ.”

“Come on, MacDonald. It rained all last night. Third night in a row it’s—”

“Jack I need you to…”

I need I need I need
.

“You are cashing stamps like crazy, here, MacDonald.”

“I know, I know, I know.”

We’d both cashed a hundred, a thousand, between the two of us, all those years. And had still more to go, I hoped. Bitching was just part of the deal.

“I saved your ass, MacDonald.”

“I saved
your
ass, Chubby Checker.”

True, both counts, and more than once. Without all that saving, there’d be two less asses in town, no doubt.

I’d stopped asking why and what for. The best I’d squeezed out of MacDonald was some cockamamie thing about him working with the feds on “one of those importing-pelts, illegal-poaching, take-no-whales, save-the-tiger things.
You
know, Jack—you go for that shit, you get the Greenpeace calendar.”

He’d been speaking for a few months, now, in terms like
commission, task force
. It was mostly here-and-there stuff. Mentions, allusions. It was all fuzzy—annoyingly vague, at times. Crap. I’d begun to wonder which it really was—whether he wanted to tell me, not tell me, or half-tell me. I’d settled on the last, and tried not to prod or poke. I’d filed a few snippets away.
Wildlife
, he’d said a couple of times. Even, once, the World Wildlife Federation. Then:
Smuggling
.

His story was a steaming pile of Bravo Sierra—a lot of it, anyway. That much I knew. But the one part I bought, straight-up, was what I got when I asked him why
he
wasn’t the one out here suffering. All that patent-leather MacDonald bravado drained from his face. “All I can tell you is, there’s something dirty, Jack. Inside.
Very
dirty. Very…
threatening
. I think they’re…watching me.” That pulled me halfway in. Then that one word, his word,
scared
, made up the rest. Tough bastard. Patrol car. Burglary. Narcotics. Vice. Homicide, even, for a little stretch. I’d
never
heard him say that word.
Scared
. What could I do?

And so it came to pass. One more night. Half-hot air, cold rain, rattling on my old Canadian Forces poncho. Days before, I’d rigged a little lean-to, one I could set up and take down each night, tucked in between the big dirt pile and a bush. A little brush for cammo, break up the shape. Each morning I’d hide my lean-to, poncho and poles and a couple of lengths of rope, under the edge of a stack of debris, dig it out again at night. Rain pants, rain jacket, some cammo paint and cut-up pieces of ghillie suit to mask the shape and shine and silhouette of my gear. All of it surplus-store crap—yet another benefit to life on Summer Avenue.

After the third night, I’d stopped relying on MacDonald to bring me, park me, pick me up, and had begun parking my car at an all-night Mapco I’d found three blocks along Raines, the other direction from the grocery. I gave the night guy ten each time to watch my car. Sweet deal, he thought. And I could use the exercise. I made up a story about going out for hours-long walks, about nighttime bird-watching. Silly, that—I needn’t have given him that, he likely didn’t give a rodent’s rear. But the story did explain all the gear I was lugging. I even tucked a birding book under my arm the first night, and passionately outlined my intense desire to photograph the secret mating rituals of the yellow-breasted corncrake. The guy bought the ten, if not the tale. And MacDonald appreciated, he said, my self-sufficiency. Which meant, I suppose, he appreciated the extra chances to be with
her
.

My instructions from Mac were: Look for a full-size container from either of two specific container companies—Hanjin, and Hapag-Lloyd. Both common, though Lloyd a little the less so. Look for serial numbers that ended in certain three-digit strings: 481, 603, 709—there were a few others, long since committed to memory. Look for one of these containers that the crane plops in
this exact
position. Mac had drawn me a diagram: the position I’d be looking for was to be lined up under the left edge of the main container-yard building and, beyond that, the tallest radio mast on top of the hump yard control tower. Then, look for the gang graffiti.
Specific
gang graffiti, spray-painted right under or right beside the container company’s name. Then: two more things. One, look for a fifty-three-foot trailer, a Crete, way on the left, darker end of the trailer lot, near the south gate, where they hardly ever parked anything. Two, if I saw the Crete there, call MacDonald. Stat.

Funny symbol, that gang thing. Didn’t look like any Memphis gang’s, or any gang I knew of, but then MacDonald or any cop would tell you there’s a new gang a week in town. This one MacDonald had once called “Three-six-gamma,” the shape he’d drawn on the yellow stickie no one was ever to see:

Circles and crosses appear all the time in gang graffiti. I’d sat through MacDonald’s own seminar on the subject, a couple of years back. The symbols were mostly more complicated than this one. You’d get a circle cut up by an X, numbers would mean addresses, dates, times of gang meetings, and whichever quadrant the number was in would tell you which—address, date, or time.

When he’d first shown me, I’d been suspicious about the gamma-thing. “Gangs do Greek letters?”

“Has been known,” he said. “But not generally, no. They’re not desperately literate. Not so much interested in your classical languages and lit.”

“Not a Memphis-based gang, Mac. Is it?”

“Umm…no. Least…I don’t think so.”

“Where from, then?”

“Uh, Seattle, we think.”

We, indeed. I’d already made a bet with myself that, if I were to call the Seattle gangs unit—Tacoma, Vancouver, anywhere up that way—they’d tell me they’d never heard of anything called three-six-gamma. I could have called, could have faxed, would have got
some
kind of an answer, even without being a cop. But if I got that answer, I’d know MacDonald was lying. I was willing to know that. But not to
know
it. Not beyond a reasonable doubt. Not beyond that point where every guy in the firing squad gets to believe
he’s
the one who got the blank round.

Sat. Watched. Coffee from my thermos. Sat. Tuna sandwich. Sat. Watched. Yawned. Snickers bar, nice and hard, from my mini-cooler. I stopped after one bite, tossed the rest into the outer dark. Contraband.

More than one night I’d seen Hanjins and Lloyds bearing numbers with what seemed the right three final digits. But an eight, more closely inspected, became a three—that sort of thing. Once, I’d seen what I thought was the symbol, but the wrong serial, the wrong company’s container. False alarms both, MacDonald told me. Don’t worry about it. How the hell could he be
that
sure?

Sometime after midnight, 31st July to the 1st of August. The rain let up a little.

Sounds. Not unusual. Cracking branch. Movement, small animal—there was
something
here, I’d learned, that was attracting feral cats. Quiet again. Right now, no movement over in the yard. The craneman’s coffee break, I assumed. The hiss of the drizzling rain. The layer of steam it made over the ground.

My head jerked. I heard what I hoped had been only a few seconds of snoring. The cranes were moving again. My video-cam’s tripod had tipped over, the camera doing a close-up digital documentary of my dirt pile.

Sounds. Behind. Unusual. Foot on gravel—definitely not animal. Other foot on gravel—heavier. Coming nearer, but other side of the pile, other side of the ditch. Stopped. Froze. Footfall again. Light. Heavier. And, in between, the gentlest little thud. Slow. Light. Little thud. Heavier.

Waiting.

“Don’t you fucking move.”

Loud enough, directed enough I knew he meant me, knew exactly where I was. Railway cop? No, no—that little thump, it sounded for all the world like a cane, of all the bloody things.

Then: Unmistakable. Chuck-chick. Pump-action shotgun.

“I’m coming over,” the voice said, some gravel in it. And more than a hint of an experience I surely didn’t want to be on the wrong end of.

I knew for sure when he started onto the board-bridge Mac had laid for me. Light. Cane. Heavy. Not a railway cop. Not a Memphis cop. Not anyone with a badge. Not a nice grown-up you can run to.

“Don’t you fucking move.”

I breathed.

I moved.

I ran, as much as a man of sixty with eighty-five extra pounds can be said to
run
at all. Busted out of my lean-to, left all my gear. My toes tripped on rocks, branches, gopher holes. More than once I fell, my hands, arms, scraped each time. More than once, I banged my shins on what I guessed was scrap steel, broken concrete. A rip on a protruding piece of rebar.

Diabetes. Peripheral neuropathy. You have no idea. The skin on my shins screamed.

“God damn you!” behind me. And I wondered whether he mightn’t get that wish.
Jesus Jesus Jesus
, I said, whether aloud or inside I didn’t know, and couldn’t tell whether it was swearing or prayer.