Burning Midnight (18 page)

The female attendant cleared her throat. “You need to take this conference someplace else. The gurney's for patients.”

I offered Delia the crook of my arm. She grabbed for it automatically with a hand, drew her breath in sharply between her teeth, and hooked her arm in it instead. I exerted very little pressure and she was on her feet. She's nearly as tall as I am, and strung with steel wire.

We crossed the street away from the emergency traffic and sat on the steps of Holy Redeemer. She looked at her hands. “I've never been vain about my nails, that kind of thing. I took it all for granted. I hope there's no scarring.”

I took one hand gently, peeled back adhesive tape and folded back gauze. “Blisters is all. Your mother was right: Put butter on them and leave 'em alone.”

“My mother was a Holy Roller; she only pretended to convert. She threatened to disinherit me when I got my hair cut.”

“You're running out of churches to drop out of. What happened in there?” I tilted my head toward the burning building.

“I didn't see it. I was writing genteel blackmail letters to prospective donors and got up to get some envelopes from the supply closet. They tell me if I hadn't done that”—she shrugged—“anyway, the front window crashed and the place was in flames. I tried to get to the desk to salvage what I could. That's when my blouse caught on fire.” She plucked at a sleeve where the material had been cut away by the paramedics. “It fused to the flesh. Natural fabrics for me from now on.”

“How many people know when you're in the office?”

“Only everybody in the neighborhood. But I'm not important enough to murder.”

“What's important varies from person to person. They didn't need a state-of-the-art accelerant to take down a vacant building.”

“Amos, I didn't know anything could catch fire that fast, I mean the whole place in an instant. I'd swear it was napalm.”

“Pretty sophisticated for someone who started out by keying your car.”

“Do you think they're connected?”

“Maybe. They went from a little scrap fire at Zorborón's to first-degree murder.”

“I heard about that. I won't be attending his memorial service, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, including my worst enemy. Which he was.”

“He didn't have any more control over what's been going on here than you did. This new breed is too close to what's happening down on the border. Zorborón was just a symbol. They tipped him over to make their point: This isn't your father's Mexicantown.”

She shivered a little. She wasn't dressed for a Detroit street in late winter. I left her for a moment to beg a blanket off the EMS team, came back and draped it around her shoulders. She smiled thanks and drew it together at her throat. She was acclimating herself to the pain in her hands.

“Was that on the level about the gangs selling protection?” I asked.

“Street talk. No one approached me.”

“They wouldn't, if all they were interested in was taking you out of the picture. The Tiger didn't say anything about it, so I'm assuming they didn't try to sell him either. Why waste your pitch on a carcass? Who's running the Zapatistas these days?”

“What makes it them and not the Maldados?”

“I talked to
El Hermano
. I'll talk to him again. I was asking you about the Zaps.”

“They take turns.”

I looked at her.

“I'm serious,” she said. “Whoever's in charge depends on whether the rank-and-file are satisfied with the job he's doing. They model themselves after the Old Country Zaps: True Marxists don't believe in centralizing leadership. They take a vote on everything, and if someone dissents, he goes his own way, no consequences. Trying to talk to them is like taking a swing at Jell-O.”

“That Indian thing again. Marx was a Johnny-come-lately. But what happened here and at the garage weren't committee decisions.”

“What about the rooster house?” she asked. “I heard about that this morning.”

“I don't know. It feels different somehow. Not Maldado, and not Detroit Zaps. I could be wrong.”

“A third wheel?”

“I could be wrong,” I said again. “My leg says different.”

“I see you limping on it sometimes. I've been curious about it.”

“An old mistake. These days it only acts up when I live wrong or something doesn't hang together. I always had it, I guess. It's just gone into the bone and curled up there.”

“Where I came from we called it divine guidance.”

“Kind of like what made you go to that supply closet.”

“That was dumb luck. Part of the trick is knowing the difference.”

“Got a place to stay?”

“I have a room. I only slept in the store when I worked late. When I've had some rest maybe I'll be able to reconstruct some of those files from memory. When Arson's through maybe they'll let me stir among the ashes.”

“They'll have them all sorted out for you. Those boys get plenty of experience every Devil's Night.”

“Apart from that I'll start from scratch. Someday I may even find it in my faith to forgive the rotten sons of bitches.”

*   *   *

When I left her, a heavyset blonde with big eighties hair was doing a stand-up in front of a TV camera. She managed to crowd “conflagration,” “holocaust,” and “inferno” into one sentence.

Alderdyce was just finishing up with a reporter from another station. When the lights went out I told him what I'd gotten from Sister Delia. I threw in the third-party speculation at no charge.

“Let's keep that a wild guess,” he said. “We got plenty to work with as it is. We kicked Mendoza over to INS this morning. He's their jurisdiction now, theirs and Mexico's over those two dead
rurales
a while back. He didn't do his boss.”

“Wild guess?”

“His hands and clothes tested negative for gunpowder residue. He didn't have time to wash up and change and ditch his old clothes and get greasy again between the time Zorborón was shot and you found him.”

“Where are you holding Nesto?”

“We're not. Buho sprang him. He plays bridge with a judge. I asked Chata to keep the boy home a few days. It didn't take much persuading. I put a car in front of the house. I doubt this bunch would try anything that far outside the neighborhood, but I've been wrong more often about what
won't
happen than about what will.”

“Anything on that bread truck?”

“Not yet. Secretary of State's priorities aren't ours.”

“Mind if I look into that end?”

“You play bridge too?”

“Not with Lansing. My source wouldn't pass a civil service background check.”

“Too much information. Have fun. Just come to me with what you get.”

“Don't I always?”

He inserted a thumb under his necktie and turned the dimple into a blister; dimples offended his sense of order. “Jesus, I'll be glad when this one's finished and I can go back to hating your guts.”

 

EIGHTEEN

Petey Kresge had been holding down a corner booth in the Sextant Bar on Lafayette since before cell phones. In the old days he'd had a line installed so he could take and place calls without leaving the table and the pitcher of beer that was always on it, just like the old-time news hawks whose black-and-white photos decorated the walls in their fedoras with cigars in their kissers; the place was a five-minute walk from both the
News
and
Free Press
buildings—the originals—and from Prohibition until the Joint Operating Agreement reduced both papers to daily shoppers, if you'd hung out there and kept your ears open you'd have known tomorrow's headline and saved yourself a nickel.

That's history; so's Detroit. Today's journalists—the ones who still write for print—drive home straight from the office and their phones don't ring in the middle of the night. That's good for family, but it's taken all the sense of anticipation out of fishing the paper out of the bushes, and even that happens only three times a week now.

Petey claimed relation to the family that founded Kresge's Department Store, later Kmart, but the rest of the family hadn't gone along with the claim, so he made rent forging vehicle registrations in cases where the VIN on the engines didn't match the numbers on the chassis. It paid well in the town that invented carjacking. I was banking on the theory that whoever had arranged a bread truck for a chicken run wouldn't have gone through the Michigan Secretary of State's office and risked leaving a paper trail.

If you didn't know him you'd think him younger than he was by ten years, a slender lad with a long jaw always working at a wad of gum under a Red Wings cap, who didn't need a razor more than every other day. His eyes were blue and clear and he had less than 10 percent body fat. Beer was his only vice, and he could make a glass last all afternoon. Unless you joined him in the morning just after he set up shop, you found the stuff in the pitcher invariably lukewarm. That was if he asked you to join him.

I found him in his usual circumstances, with a laptop open on the table and his cell, pager, and Etch A Sketch electronic notebook lined up side by side next to it. His glass steeped on a paper coaster, but a puddle of condensation had formed around the base of the pitcher. His fingers were a blur on the keyboard.

“How's the transportation business?” I slid into the seat opposite him.

He answered without looking up. “Shitty. GPS has got all the best boosters too spooked to jump a wire. The cowboys who aren't I won't work with. State cops are promising to have an onboard computer in every prowl car by next year. What's next? I may have to join my brother-in-law in the green card racket. I hate my brother-in-law. Green cards are for saps who want to get butt-fucked by an entirely different class of convict.”

“There's always life on the square.”

“Don't think I haven't been tempted.” He paused in his typing long enough to call out for another glass.

“Not on my account,” I said. “I manufacture my own spit.”

“Eighty-six the glass,” he told the man behind the bar. “Maybe the car-key business, but I'll need case dough. They put microchips in them now, the car won't unlock or start without 'em. Used to be all you needed was a hardware store key-maker and you were good to go.”

“Society's tough on free enterprise. Ever do any business in Mexicantown?”

“Best quesadillas this far north.”

I wrapped a bill in a paper napkin and slid it across the table. He tapped a few keys more, then unfolded it in his lap. “One of the new ones, huh. More colors than the Polack flag. I know a guy who can beat 'em. All's you need is the right equipment; expensive as hell. They've taken counterfeiting away from the boys with a printing press and a green visor and dropped it in the lap of Al-Qaeda. Took care of the competition.”

“You know anybody who
doesn't
have a sheet?”

“My bookie. He works out of the Woodward branch of the U.S. Post Office.” He stuck the hundred-dollar bill in the flap pocket of his twill shirt. “I wasn't kidding about the quesadillas. Real lard; what the Greeks called ambrosia.”

“I didn't come here for a recommendation. I'm looking for a Wonder Bread truck. Somebody used it to clear out a bunch of fighting cocks.”

“I heard about that. Didn't hear anything about a bread truck.”

“You weren't supposed to.”

“I just know makes and models and whatever VIN they're using now. Nobody tells me what they were used for, and I don't want to know what they're going to be used for. I haven't worked with a Mexican in a couple of years. Ones I see usually have a chop shop going, operating across state lines: Mercedes goes missing from a garage in Chicago at midnight, five o'clock that same morning it's getting a fresh paint job in Southfield. What started out as a local beef is now federal. These days, you go up against the feds, they tie you to bin Laden and yank all your rights. I'm a crook, not a terrorist.”

“This is probably local, being Wonder Bread. It would be an old truck, plenty of tonnage. It would throw oil like a son of a bitch, because they don't care about the Blue Book. By now it's dropped off its load and is on its way to Alaska, all cut up into transportable parts to shore up the Bridge to Nowhere. Nobody cares about two dead men, but PETA's got a hard-on against abusing domestic fowl. If this bunch knew you shied away from Mexicans, they might have had an Anglo front for them, maybe somebody you know and have done business with in the past. My guess is they wouldn't have had it for long before they put it to use. Why hang on to a hot vehicle that big and obvious unless you need it right away? Possibly as late as yesterday, after Zorborón got popped.”

His fingers resumed moving. I got out a cigarette, just to play with; you can't smoke anywhere anymore, not even in a bar where you could make pictures out of the old nicotine stains on the ceiling, like cloud formations. After a little while I felt neglected. I put the cigarette back in the pack. “If I had one of those, we could play
Battleship
.”

He shut the laptop. “You know what I was looking at? South African gorillas. If I saw a piece about gorillas in the paper I'd go to the sports section, because I got no interest in gorillas. But everything on the Net's fascinating. It's not really an addiction. Nobody ever died going offline for a day. Jacking off, that's what it is. I didn't do any truck business yesterday.”

“That was speculation. They might have been planning to move anyway. They'd store it inside, maybe in a barn or storage unit, something outside the city. The job might have come in from a county with plenty of rural real estate. If they left a contact number, the area code would belong to one of those. Go back say a month. Go back farther if we have to, but these guys don't take much in the way of chances. They didn't waste any time clearing out the inventory after I told their caretaker the cops would be getting around to them sooner or later; took out the caretaker and his partner while they were at it. Where they come from, what they've been doing, chickens are worth more than humans.”