01. Labyrinth of Dreams (11 page)

"Yeah, it's true, they busted a bunch of them today including Big Tony, but it wasn't us," he told me, sounding more than a little irritated at that fact. "Turns out the FBI was running a parallel operation and we almost queered it with this Whitlock business. Seems they found out about him and his kinky double life, and used him to go up and down the chain. A few of the middle fish haven't been rounded up yet, but the organization's broken but good. This one, anyway. There's always ten more to replace it, unfortunately.''

"What about Little Jimmy Nkrumah? He on the list? He was the guy who hired us—and just fired us."

"Huh? Nkrumah? Nope. Don't see that name here anywhere. You're sure this guy was involved?"

"Positive. He was the middleman in the money tree, and it was his money that Whitlock skipped out with."

"Hmph!
That's funny. Maybe they're just leaving him out to dry or something, since they say they traced the money all the way, or maybe they've turned him as one of their boys. I don't know, Horowitz. We're all one big happy federal family, right? Only we don't tell each other anything at all. Well, what's the difference? You did as good as could be expected, so there's nothing more between us, and you've lost a client and our quarry turns out to be the Bureau's man, so it's over."

"Uh—Kennedy? If it's over, what's Whitlock doing in Oregon with a woman who looks enough like him to be him in drag? Who is she, and what the hell are they doing out here leaving his wife and kids hanging."

"Who knows? Witness protection, maybe. We got an order to lay off him, and you do, too, if you don't want to get back in trouble with us again. I admit there's a lot of funny, unexplained stuff with this, but I don't know it all; it's not my case anymore. I got a thousand more in the active file, so that's it. By next week some rival mob will move in and cover Big Tony's whole network, and nobody using stuff on the streets will even notice the difference. Just let it go, Horowitz— for your own good."

That was almost as unsatisfying as the call to Little Jimmy. All of a sudden everybody from the mob to the DEA was telling me that Whitlock was an untouchable, all the questions were better left unanswered, and all we needed to do to find the land of milk and honey was take the next plane out to anywhere at all but here. It stunk.

"So what do you want to do?" Brandy asked me.

"What
can
we do? I mean, right now our boy's gone from being the most wanted by everybody to being a total untouchable for all sides. For all we know, he's up in Hicksburg negotiating a new bank loan."

"But you don't believe that, and neither do I."

"No, but Little Jimmy wasn't scared of the feds; and one good reason was that the feds didn't know about Little Jimmy. They also think Whitlock passed the whole two and a quarter million down the line as per plan, but
we
know he skipped; and Little Jimmy did the passing of his own money and wanted Whitlock tracked down without his own boss, Big Tony, knowing he got skimmed. Little Jimmy would rather risk prison than write off almost his whole fortune, so either whatever scared him is worse than prison or somebody covered his losses. Who the hell would spend that kind of bread to buy out and protect a shark like Nkrumah?"

"Maybe it's the hand of G.O.D., Inc. Wanna go find out?"

"No, but I won't be able to sleep nights ever again if I don't anyway. Not when we're only three hours away from the answer. I just hate being my own client, that's all. The client's a cheapskate who'll stiff us."

"Maybe, but I'm game. I want to see these whackos, anyway. Move out of the booth. I got to call San Francisco."

"Huh? Who do you have to call
there?"

"Overnite Courier. They got a box of mine I got to get forwarded up here somehow."

"A box? What? Clothes?"

"Nope. If these cards are still good, we'll take care of that next, and in style. But I ain't goin' up in those redneck mountains without Daddy's magnum."

"You sent your
gun
by overnight parcel?"

She shrugged. "Couldn't take it on the plane, you know."

4.

Shots in the Dark

I was getting used to this charge-and-never-pay business; I would be sorry to see the gravy train end in a couple of weeks. I wondered just who was now paying the bills that came in. Still, we had something of a wardrobe now, including a couple of suitcases, plus toiletries and the like, and we were both feeling a little more human. Brandy had reverted to her jeans-and-tee-shirt routine for now, although they were new, and some sandals, although she kept that professional-looking wig. She also had even found a couple of other wigs of varying colors and styles, and she'd picked up some better clothes in case the occasion warranted. Me, I'd gotten another off-the-rack suit, although right now I was in jeans and a plaid sport shirt, and I just hadn't been able to resist a pair of ranch-style boots and a black felt cowboy hat.

Brandy should have been excited about this part as much as or more than before, since she was the one who wanted to see this out anyway, but I found her somewhat moody. "What's the trouble, babe?" I asked her. "All this finally getting to you?"

She shook her head and stared out the rental-car window at the passing scenery. "Uh uh. I just—don't feel
comfortable
around here. We been through the airport back there, to a bunch of stores, and now on the road, and there wasn't a single black person anyplace we been. I never
been
in a place where there were no black people before except me."

The truth was, I hadn't really noticed, but now that she mentioned it I couldn't recall any. Oregon had the reputation for being real liberal near the coast, around Portland and Salem in particular, and as rock-ribbed reactionary in much of the rest of the state. "Anybody give you trouble back in the stores?"

"No, it's not that. Not exactly. They just sort of treated me like I was some kind of exotic animal or something. Funny comments—you know, like whether or not one of the wigs was
right
for my, er, well...."

"Uh huh. Well, it's a price to be paid if you want to see this through. I can still turn around, get a room near the airport, and we can fly back tomorrow morning, all the way to Philadelphia and home if you want."

"No, no. I want to see this through. Specially after what that rental-car girl said."

It had been just another piece in this crazy puzzle that didn't add up at all. The couple had borne a striking likeness to one another, but
he
in his business suit had seemed somewhat smaller and younger than she, with a high-pitched tenor— and
she
had said virtually nothing, but seemed bigger, almost mannish. It had been almost as if the man and woman had been wearing each other's clothes and aping each other's mannerisms.

The town itself was on a main drag, as those things went, but it was no four-lane expressway. It was a winding, two-lane stretch that went up into the wooded mountains and became the main street of a bunch of little towns.

MCINERNEY, the sign announced just before you got to the turn and saw it, pop. 1349. It was two blocks long and maybe had houses going back a block or two on either side, with the small business district using diagonal parking. There was a drugstore, a couple of small cafes, a post office, a sheriff's office, a little town municipal building, a small food market, a service station, four places selling redwood burl to tourists who wandered by, and a small branch bank. There wasn't even a McDonald's. It all had wooden fronts and twin boardwalks for sidewalks, and not much else. The only reason it didn't look odd was that we'd gone through a dozen nearly identical places on the drive up here.

The reason why G.O.D. picked the spot, though, seemed to have to do not only with the depressed area, but also with the railroad tracks we crossed just the other side of town that then turned and paralleled the main drag. We passed a small motel, then saw the complex through the trees although it was well hidden from the road. The whole roadside was bracketed by a chain-link fence that was high and imposing, although partially hidden by the trees through which it snaked; but when you looked back through, in a couple of spots you could see some mighty large buildings up there.

There were two entrances; one just north of town near the railroad tracks, and the other a main entrance about a mile further up that looked like the entrance to a military base. It was wide and paved, although it took a strategic turn away from visibility as soon as you cleared the gate, and it had a gatehouse in the center with railroad-style crossing gates blocking entry or exit without the man in the gatehouse pushing a button. A sign there indicated that Truck Entrance and General Receiving was the road near the tracks, but nowhere was there a sign indicating what sort of company this was.

By the time we'd arrived, it was well after seven, so there was little traffic around. You couldn't help wondering, though, how a place like that could be supported by a town this small. Commuting wasn't the answer, either; you'd have to go a couple of hours in either direction over a road like this to round up enough people to staff it. There wasn't much more we could do now; it was approaching darkness. I turned the car around and we headed back for the small motel, which was also, as far as I could see, the only motel or hotel in or near the town. If Whitlock was coming here, and wasn't staying with friends or associates at or inside the plant, the odds were that he was using the same place. I hadn't noticed a red Olds in the lot, but that might not mean much.

The desk clerk, a grandmotherly little old lady, stared at the registration card. "Philadelphia. We don't get many folks from back east in here. You with General?"

"Not exactly," I responded. "But we do business with them now and again. They sell a product for us now, but only in the east and midwest, and we're seeing if we want to expand to the coast and if it's worth the cost."

"Oh,
really? What sort of product?"

"Women's wigs, actually. Natural-hair wigs at reasonable prices, and a new way to clean and restore them at home without costly treatments."

She nodded and completed the registration, no longer caring or even very curious about us. Even so, if we didn't wrap this up in a day or so, I knew everybody in town would know about us and why we were allegedly there, and that would include the powers that be, over at the company. I was counting on the fact that places like that have a complicated bureaucracy and that the left vice president usually didn't know what the right vice president was doing.

The room was surprisingly nice for a little motel in the middle of nowhere run by Grandma Moses. They had a color TV with cable so we could make sure not to miss any General product ad, and the usual amenities, and the beds were clean and firm.

Brandy had arranged for her box to be sent up to the Bend airport office of Overnite while we went shopping, and now she unpacked it. It did in fact contain the pistol and a box of bullets, but it also contained an assortment of other stuff, including a can of mace and a set of brass knuckles.

"You ask about the Currys?" she asked me. She was really feeling self-conscious in these parts, and hadn't come in with me to register.

"No, I figure this is a company town from the word go. If I asked her, then it might just tip them, even if they just dropped into the office for something and she mentioned we were asking about them. This is a small place, and if you think you're out of place here, they are, too. I—"

At that moment there was a tremendous roar of an engine and the whole place started to shake, and did so for several minutes. I went outside and walked around back of the unit with Brandy. The damned train tracks ran maybe ten yards in back of the motel, and this was one hell of a train going by. It seemed to go on forever, not just boxcars, but covered gondolas full of stuff, and tank cars, as well as flatbeds on which truck trailers were attached. After a while, the train stopped, still not ended, and there was a long pause when it just sat there. Then it lurched, backed up slowly, lurched again, then went forward a bit more.

"They're switching off a lot of cars, that's for sure," I told her. "I guess they must have their own little switchyard in there. I hope nobody wants to go into or out of town for a while."

She stared at the train, deep in thought. "You know, these cars seem to be loaded up with stuff. Those open ones have covered loads, and the freight cars are sunk down on their springs."

"Yeah? So? Before they can send the junk out, they have to have it in."

"Maybe. But did you see any railroad cars with mail or United Parcel signs on 'em? I couldn't make 'em out too well in the dark, but this outfit sends almost everything either UPS or mail."

"No, I didn't notice any, but that doesn't mean much. They probably just ship it out in special boxcars to the parcel terminals," I responded. "It'd be the only easy way in or out of here. That post office in town wasn't big enough to serve our block in Camden. Maybe they got their own post office up on the hill, or their own private UPS station. Some big places have that."

"I dunno. Maybe. It just don't seem right, somehow."

I shrugged. "Maybe this is just delivery from the hundreds of makers and importers of stuff. Maybe a different train ships 'em out once a day."

We left the train to its dancing, and walked back around, and Brandy looked up and then almost pushed me against the building.

"Hey! What ... ?"

"Shhhh!
My eyes may be goin' bad, but I swear there's a big red car pulling into the motel!"

I peered around the end unit and, sure enough, here it came. It couldn't have been coming from town, though, not with the train blocking the way, and it was unlikely to have been coming from the north. They had been over at the plant, that was clear.

We were in number twelve, and they pulled into the space for number sixteen, only four doors down from us. "Stay here for a moment," I told Brandy. "I'm gonna walk down and get a Coke." The soft-drink machine was at the end of the unit, just past number twenty-four.