Critical Mass (13 page)

“I don’t suppose your mother called you ‘Bullet,’” I said as he pushed me to the stairwell.

“Shut up!” He shoved the gun harder against my spine.

“If she thought you were special, she would have used a special name,” I mused. “Lancelot, or Galahad, or—”

“Shit-Face,” he shouted. “She used to call me ‘Shit-Face,’ which you are going to be when Freddie finishes with you. He don’t like bitches coming around messing with his business.”

“That explains a lot.”

I tripped on the stairs, twisted and shoved my shoulder into his diaphragm. He fell backward, tumbling down, hitting his head on the edge of the riser. His gun went off as he fell. The shot echoed and re-echoed in the stairwell.

Footsteps pounded on the floor above me. Shouts, “Bullet, what the fuck? You kill the bitch?”

A man leaned over the banister at the upper landing, saw Bullet, shouted for help. “Freddie! Bullet, he’s—it looks like he’s dead, man!”

“Shit, Vire, bitch shoot him? Get her, you fuck-up!”

Bullet’s body blocked most of the stairs behind me. I couldn’t get around him without exposing my back to Vire’s gun. I slung a leg over the banister and slid down to the next landing, just as Vire fired. I had a tiny edge; Vire took time skirting around Bullet on the stairs, pausing to fire wildly down the stairwell.

I reached the front door, but the locks were sealed from the inside. I pulled my gun from the leg holster, took cover as best I could in the dark at the back of the entry hall. Someone had left a bicycle. I tripped and fell heavily over it and lost my gun. I fought free of the bike and hurled it at Vire as he came up the hall toward me.

The bike caught him in the face. I scrabbled on the floor for my own gun, found it just as all the stairwell lights came on. A moment later Freddie himself appeared. He was a big, rangy guy with a scraggly beard and black hair flopping over his forehead. He picked up the bike and flung it to the ground in front of Vire.

“Who the fuck left the goddamn bike in the hall? Morons, do I have anybody but morons working for me? Who are you, bitch, and what the fuck you doing picking my locks?”

“I’m looking for Judy Binder.” I was winded; my words came out in gasps.

“Judy Binder? You kill my man Bullet looking for that wasted bitch?”

“Is Bullet dead?” I said. “I didn’t shoot him; he fell down and hit his head.”

“Yeah, you tell that to judge and jury, bitch.”

“Bitch. Fuck-up, fuck, bitch. You’d be more interesting if you developed your vocabulary.” Freddie had a semiautomatic in his right hand, but I kept my own gun pointed just below his belt buckle; this made him unconsciously put one hand over his crotch.

“I’m not talking to you to be interesting, b—whoever the fuck you are. What do you want with the Binder ho?”

“You remember Ricky Schlafly?” A moral person would just shoot Freddie and get it over with.

“Ricky? Yeah, of course I know the dude. We do—” He cut himself short. “What about him?”

“Haven’t you heard? Ricky won’t be doing business with anyone anymore. I found his body in a cornfield. Crows had plucked out his eyes. They ate his balls, too. It was an ugly sight. Makes a person think about mortality and all those things.”

“Ricky dead?”

Vire kicked the bike away and took a step toward me. I kept my own eyes on Freddie’s eyes. The wilder they got the more likely he was to start shooting.

“Ms. Binder was down there with him, but she ran away. I’m trying to find her; she’s a material witness.”

“What? You a cop?”

“A lawyer,” I said, thinking it might be marginally safer than admitting to being a detective. “We need to find Judy. Is she here?”

“She’s trouble, Freddie, told you not to let her in the door. I’ll go upstairs and take care of her.”

“Take care of this one first.” Freddie’s gun hand came up.

I hit the floor, rolling, firing, ducking behind a wedge of wall under the stairwell. Eight bullets in my clip; three gone. Freddie marching toward me, firing.

Over the ferocious noise, a bullhorn: “This is the police. Put your weapons down and come out with your hands in the air.”

11

CHEMISTRY SHOP

Y
OU’RE THE PI
Conrad Rawlings trusts? One of you is going to have to explain why that makes sense.”

Ferret Downey was talking to me in an empty apartment across the hall from Freddie’s drug shop. As soon as he’d come up the front walk, with two patrol officers in his wake, I’d known who it was: with his long nose and drooping mustache, he looked exactly like a ferret. He only showed after I’d been cuffed to Vire for over half an hour.

Vire turned out to be short for Virus, which turned out to be a nickname for Erwin Jameson. Erwin. Such a weeny name for a bodyguard.

My legs were wobbly: shock, too much exertion. All the gunfire in the hall had left me with a loud whining in the ears; I had a hard time hearing what any of them, cops or robbers, was saying.

“We wasn’t doing nothing,” Freddie said to the first responders. “This bitch comes and starts picking my locks, can you believe that? In broad daylight?”

“You a user or a dealer?” one of the officers asked me.

“My name is V. I. Warshawski; I’m a licensed investigator. You can see my ID in my wallet. A woman who disappeared two days ago is in this building. These goons threatened to shoot her. We need to look for her
now
: she may still be alive.”

The officers were not interested. They were so sure I was in the
drug business that they only made a pretense of looking at my license. When it became clear they weren’t going to ask the crime scene crew to look for Judy, I stopped contributing to the conversation—even after Freddie claimed I had broken in, killed his main man, Bullet, trashed his building by shooting it up. Basically, he added, he was just a man trying to live a peaceful life; he only started firing a semiautomatic in self-defense.

Various officers wanted to know if someone sent me to take out Freddie. Who was my Mexican contact? Where was I standing when I shot Bullet?

I didn’t say anything, just stared at the street, silently cursing myself for not following Conrad’s advice. At one point an ambulance arrived; a stretcher crew brought Bullet down. His face was uncovered; they had him strapped in a neck restraint, which made me believe he wasn’t actually dead.

“He’s still breathing,” I said to Freddie. “If you’ve got good health insurance for your playmates he should be back in the lineup before long.”

Freddie spat in my face. What a prince.

When Lt. Downey finally arrived and learned who I was claiming to be, his face did not light up in ecstasy. “Yeah, we got a heads-up she’d be coming out here. What’s been going on?”

The first responders said they’d been alerted to gunfire on Lorel, found the three of us shooting at each other. Freddie started his pitch about self-defense, that I’d broken in, blah, blah.

“You a deaf-mute, Warshawski, or you going to give your version?” Downey asked.

I twisted my neck to look at my cuffed hands, but didn’t speak.

“Oh, release her,” Downey said to one of the officers in a voice of long suffering. “Rawlings over in the Fourth vouches for her, although damned if I can see why.”

When my hands were free I rubbed them slowly, massaged my shoulders, did some neck rolls. “Judy Binder is or was on the third
floor.” I still was having trouble hearing and wondered if I was actually speaking. “I came to see if she was hiding here, which I told your team; so far I don’t think they’ve bothered to look for her. When I got here, Freddie and his buddies didn’t answer the bell.”

“That why you were picking the lock?” Downey’s sergeant asked me.

Bullet had taken my picks before shoving me into the building; the techs had found them on their way in.

“Man, we saw her breaking in, watched it on the monitor,” Vire blurted. “Bullet went down to stop her!”

“That why you broke Bullet Bultman’s neck?” the sergeant asked me.

“He had a gun stuck in my spine. I didn’t like my odds if we got all the way to the top of the stairs, so I ducked and gave him a hard shove. I didn’t shoot him. If there’s a bullet in him, it came from Erwin. Erwin was pretty hysterical. He flew down the stairs, shooting like a maniac. I don’t know how he missed me.”

“It’s ‘Virus,’” Erwin hissed.

“Is there a bullet in the Bullet?” Ferret Downey turned to survey his squad.

“Don’t think so, Looey.” One of the SCI team stepped forward. “They’ll be able to tell at the hospital.”

“Take me inside; we’ll have a look-see. Warchosi, or whatever your name is, you come along. We’ll find you a place to sit that doesn’t contaminate the evidence.”

“Erwin here said Judy Binder was in the building,” I repeated. “He offered to kill her if Freddie wanted, but Freddie told him to shoot me first. I want to find her before another of Freddie’s punks tries to kill her.”

Downey blew on the ends of his droopy mustache. “I know you’re God’s gift to Conrad Rawlings, but I’ve managed to stagger my way through crime scenes without your help for twenty years. It’s hard to believe anyone would waste time and money looking for a junkie, but if we find one hiding on the premises, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

His sergeant snickered appreciatively. I took a deep breath: I reminded myself that a clever response would bring me only a brief reward. What I really wanted most was not to have the last word, but to leave soon. With my gun and without being charged.

A tech came along with shoe covers and gloves for Downey, his two acolytes, and me. There were six apartments in the building, but no signs of any inhabitants, unless you counted the bicycle in the lobby that Virus-Erwin and I both had fought with.

The drugstore was open on the third floor. A TV was on: Sox up by three in the eighth. The feed from the camera watching the street showed only streaky lines: no one had taken off the strip of duct tape. A grinding rap beat came from a room somewhere in the back. It grated on my ear, but I was pleased that I could hear it. The ringing from the gun battle was beginning to fade.

Downey told his sergeant to try the apartment across the landing. The door wasn’t locked, another sign, if one needed it, that Freddie controlled the whole building.

“You go in there,” Downey told me. “We’ll get to you when we get to you.”

The sergeant pushed me into the room. I stumbled again and couldn’t avoid landing on his left foot.

“Sorry, Sarge,” I said. “Gunfight and standing cuffed for so long, my coordination isn’t too good right now.”

He eyed me measuringly, fingering his revolver. “You want me to stay in here with her, Looey?” he asked Downey.

“She won’t go anywhere as long as we’re holding her gun,” Downey said.

Sad, but true. The sergeant shut the door and left me alone with a dirty beige armchair and a portable TV on a metal TV table. My legs were genuinely unsteady as I lurched over to look at the chair. It was filled with cigarette burns and ash and had stains whose origin I didn’t
want to contemplate. Discarded butts and roaches had fallen into the crevice between cushion and armrest.

I would have welcomed a rest, but not in an armchair that held an arsenal of lethal bacteria. I wandered into the back of the apartment and found a room with a narrow bed, the sheets smelling sweet-and-sour, a faint smear of blood on the pillow. On the floor, a bra, once white, now gray and stretched out of shape; some wadded-up tissues with dried blood on them. Under the bed, a thick layer of dust that made me sneeze.

I squatted on my haunches, unwilling to sit on floor or bed. The bra belonged to some woman who had no money or no interest in her appearance. A junkie most likely. Judy Binder, for instance. The motto on the T-shirt Jari Liu had been wearing yesterday at Metargon popped into my mind:
In God We Trust, All Others Show Data.

I had limited data: just Vire’s asking Freddie if he should kill the “bitch” now or later, but I guessed Judy had been sleeping here.

I got to my feet and went into the kitchen. A couple of used dishes stood in the sink, where a bunch of cockroaches was enjoying a pre-dinner snack. Another party scurried away when I opened a cupboard. All it held were high-sugar cereals, a box of microwavable popcorn, and a couple of greasy glasses.

There were two doors, a new one that must have been put in to connect this place with the temple of doom, another that stood ajar. I pulled it all the way open and saw a back staircase. I tried the temple of doom door, but it was locked.

I picked up one of the glasses to use as a crude amplifier. When I put my ear to it, I gagged, imagining what was on the hands of the last person to touch it.

Real detectives do not suffer from germ phobia, I lectured myself. Think of Mickey Spillane. Think of Amelia Butterworth. Neither of them ever shied away from a dirty job. With the glass pressed against
the keyhole, I could hear the cops in the other apartment, but couldn’t make out individual words. Judging by the commotion, more units had arrived.

If Judy Binder had been here, she would have heard the shoot-out between Vire and Freddie and me. She would have scampered, just as she did when someone shot Derrick Schlafly in the cornfield two days ago.

I handed the greasy glass over to the cockroaches in the sink and went to the back staircase. There was a light switch on the wall, but no bulbs in the overhead fitting. I pulled out my phone and tapped the flashlight app.

Halfway down, I found a beat-up loafer, probably a size six. Someone had been racing so fast, with so much fear, that she couldn’t stop for a shoe. At the bottom, a door opened onto a weed-filled yard. The door didn’t have a handle or a lock on the outside. I shone my phone around the area floor and found a broken chair to use as a doorstop.

The yard seemed to be where Freddie dumped his old beer cans and tequila bottles. The nettles and sow thistle were tall enough that I kept tripping on bottles on my way to the high metal fence that surrounded the yard. A gate was heavily crossed with chains. I worked my way around the perimeter. At the south edge, soil had eroded enough that a slim or desperate person could slide underneath. The second worn-out loafer was here. Judy, or whoever had been in the fetid bed upstairs, had gone out this way. Barefoot across the broken rocks and glass.