Dead on the Island (19 page)

She lit another cigarette. "I guess it
didn't. I'm sure it was a mistake, now. Dino isn't what I thought
he was."

I eased off a bit. "Maybe he was, at one
time. Twenty years of watching daytime TV can change a man."

She laughed. "Sharon
is
strong-willed," she said, to change the subject or to get back to
what we were originally talking about. "I remember when she was a
baby, before she could even walk. I had to keep her from pulling
the pans out of the cabinets in the kitchen. One day after I'd
stopped her at least three times, and then a fourth, she banged her
head on the floor in frustration. She had a terrible bruise. I
thought the neighbors would turn me in for child abuse."

"Then you think it's possible?"

"That she's behind all this? I suppose so,
but it just doesn't seem likely. We've always had a close
relationship. We talked about things."

"But you never told her about Dino. You
never told her about your past."

She looked down. "It didn't seem to
matter."

"Things like that never do," I said. "Not
until it's too late."

~ * ~

When I left Evelyn's house, there was still
a lot of time until 2:00 a.m. I drove by and fed Nameless, who ate
only enough to keep himself from starving by the next time I came
home. He certainly wouldn't deign to eat enough to acknowledge any
degree of dependence on me.

There was nothing in the house that I wanted
to eat, so I dropped by a Stop-and-Go and picked up some Slim Jims
and a couple of sixteen-ounce bottles of Big Red. The Big Red would
be warm before I got a chance to drink it, but I would just have to
suffer.

Pelican Island, a very small island next to
Galveston, must have seemed like a great idea to developers at one
time, but it hadn't panned out. The expected boom had never
occurred. Instead, all that occupied the island were the Seawolf
Park, featuring a real WW II submarine, and the campus of Texas
A&M's Galveston branch. The Causeway was certainly nice,
though.

I drove down 51st Street, but I didn't use
the Causeway other than to get my bearings from it. I checked my
speedometer so that I'd know when I'd driven a mile and turned left
down Port Industrial Boulevard, which ran alongside the ship
channel. At the edge of the channel I could see a huge square
mountain of sulfur, bigger than my house. It was being chewed away
and loaded on a ship.

It was good to see the activity. There
wasn't that much work for longshoremen in Galveston anymore. Some
who had been living there for years were considering moving away to
find jobs. The union wasn't painting a rosy picture of the future,
either.

I found the warehouse I was looking for
easily, but I didn't stop the car. I drove on by and waited until I
found a side street where a couple of other cars were parked. I
pulled in behind one of them and left the Subaru there. I walked
back to the warehouse, carrying my sack of Slim Jims and Big Red.
The Mauser was stuck in my waistband, covered by the sweatshirt.
There was no one around to see me.

The warehouse stood on a block by itself,
surrounded by what had once been a graveled parking lot. There
hadn't been any traffic in the lot for a long time; it had sprouted
weeds and grass, and weeds grew thick around the base of the
building itself.

I stood in an alley a block away and looked
the warehouse over. It was a tin building, built up off the ground
so that trucks could back right up for loading or unloading. On the
side that I could see, there were three sliding doors, all covered
with tin, that could be opened from inside.

I went closer, and I could see that there
was a double wooden door in one end, reached by steps leading up to
a small porch. I circled around the building and saw three more
sliding doors on the side opposite the others.

I could almost feel the emptiness of the
building. There was such stillness about it that it would have been
almost impossible for anyone to be inside. The tin was weathered
and gray, peeling away in places from the frame, which appeared to
be made of the same huge timbers that buttressed the edges of the
floor that I could see below the doors. These timbers were chipped
and shredded by the bumpers and tailgates of the trucks that had
backed into them and used them for cushioning for a good many
years. In a couple of places around the bottom of the building, the
tin was missing completely, but I could see nothing in the darkness
underneath.

I hadn't really expected anyone to be there,
but I watched for an hour anyway, holding onto my sack and moving
from place to place. An occasional car passed by, but never the
same one twice. No one appeared to be interested in me. Finally, I
went inside.

Or underneath, to be more exact. The floor
was so high that I really didn't even have to bend double to slip
beneath the timber at one of the places where the tin was missing.
I stood for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.
Eventually I could see that there were huge pilings holding up the
flooring. I had hoped to find a break, a missing timber, but there
was none. I couldn't do any good under there, or I didn't think I
could. So I lurked around under there until there were no cars
coming and then came out and hopped up on one of the timbers
jutting out from the sides. There was a powerful twinge from my
knee to remind me that what I was doing probably was not just going
to be a picnic with Slim Jims and soft drinks.

I stood up and tried to slide the door, but
it wouldn't move. There was no place to get a real grip, since the
framing was all inside the building. Then I pushed hard at the
bottom, which swung inward. I pushed even harder and made a space
big enough for me to slip through.

It was dark and dusty inside. There were
gaps in the tin roof, so a little light got through. Dust motes
spun in the stray beams of the late afternoon sun. I looked around.
There were a few cardboard cartons in one corner. Their sides were
collapsed and broken. A couple of empty Pennzoil cans lay beside
them, triangular holes punched in the tops.

There were four heavy posts supporting the
roof. A calendar on one of them advertised FRED'S AUTO SUPPLY. The
date was 1984. A faded picture showed a well-developed young woman
with red hair, who was holding a wrench in one hand and a gigantic
sparkplug in the other. She was wearing a very small and tight pair
of overalls.

I walked down to the double doors that
opened onto the porch. They opened easily, and I felt a bit
foolish. I should have tried the front entrance. To my right was a
dilapidated platform scale. Three thick iron weights used for
balance sat on top of the arm.

Built into the corner of the warehouse was a
restroom. I looked in. I've seen dirty restrooms before, but this
one was a prize winner. The toilet might have been made of black
enamel, except that a few streaks of yellowish white showed
through. Most of the white paint had worn off the seat so that gray
wood showed. Even the lavatory was filthy. Whoever had worked here
hadn't possessed a strong sense of personal hygiene. Even allowing
for the fact that the building had been vacant for years, the place
was a mess. It looked as if it had been used for a century without
being cleaned.

There was one good thing about the bathroom,
from my point of view. It had obviously been added to the building
sometime after the original construction had been completed, and
instead of extending the walls up to the high tin roof, the builder
had made them eight feet high and had even put in a ceiling. I
hoped the ceiling was sturdy enough to hold me.

I pushed the scale over so that I could
stand on the arm, and with a little scrabbling, holding my sack
between my teeth, I got up. My knee was throbbing, but after I
rested for a minute it was fine.

There were a few boxes up there, filled with
stuff that whoever had once owned the building had by now long
forgotten: rolls of adding machine paper, stacks of invoices held
together by string and crumbling rubber bands, and some
grayish-green ledger books. Everything was covered with a thick
layer of dirt and dust.

I shoved the boxes as close to the edge as I
could. I could sit behind them and relax as much as it was possible
to do under the circumstances. I'm not allergic to dust, but it
filled my nostrils and made me want to sneeze.

To take my mind off things, I ate a couple
of Slim Jims and drank a Big Red. I felt better, knowing that I
wouldn't starve or die of thirst while I was waiting. After an
hour, however, sitting on the boards began to make me sore. I
shifted position as often as I could without making too much
noise.

A lot of things can go through your mind
when you're waiting like that, waiting for something to happen and
not knowing exactly what you're waiting for. I thought about Dino
and Ray and the old days, the times we had. I thought about Jan. I
thought about Evelyn Matthews and her daughter.

For the first time, I wondered whether
Evelyn could possibly be involved in the kidnapping. What if it was
her resentment, rather than her daughter's, that had led to a
desire for revenge against Dino? What if
she
had told Sharon
about Dino and his part in her past? What if the two of them had
cooked up the kidnapping between them?

I convinced myself that it wasn't possible.
If she had been in on things, Evelyn would simply have let Dino be
killed at the airport rather than save him. She could have had both
the money and her revenge, easily enough. No, it had to be
Sharon.

I sat there and constructed a new theory. Or
revised the old one. Sharon and Terry had gone to Chuck Ferguson
for help. He'd found the three bruisers through his contacts with
the Houston underworld. It wouldn't be hard for him to find three
men like that. He'd hired them, but they'd gotten greedy and begun
eliminating the other participants in the scheme, starting with
Shelton. Maybe Sharon had managed to escape them, but they still
had Dino's name. So they decided simply to kill him and make off
with the money. For that matter, maybe Sharon was already dead,
buried somewhere on Bolivar. She wouldn't be the first person
buried over there. Since they couldn't produce her, they had to
kill Dino to get the money.

It all sounded highly plausible while I was
lying there in the dusty dark of the abandoned warehouse. I had a
feeling that it wouldn't sound that way to me in the cold light of
the outside. There had to be something I was missing, something
that would clear everything up and bring it into focus. All I had
to do was think of that one thing, and all would become clear. But
I couldn't think of it.

The time dragged by. Every time I punched
the light button on my watch to check, five seconds would have
rolled by. It seemed like five hours, which is the main reason I
hate waiting.

About eight o'clock I had another Big Red,
and about five minutes later I realized that a major disadvantage
of being where I was included the fact that the toilet facilities
were separated from me by the ceiling. I didn't want to climb down,
but I didn't want to use the Big Red bottle, either.

So I went down. There was no water in the
toilet, but that didn't matter. I pulled the decrepit door closed
after I finished and climbed back up.

Another hour or so passed, dragging by like
a snake with a broken back. There was very little traffic outside.
I amused myself by timing the passing cars, but I quit after three.
The first interval was ten minutes; the next, fourteen.

Finally I pulled a couple of ledgers from
one of the boxes and used them like a pillow, lying on my back on
the board ceiling. I would make a lousy fakir, but I tried to clear
my mind and relax.

Eventually, I did.

They came around midnight. It was very dark
in the warehouse, and I didn't want to risk even the light from my
watch, but midnight was about right.

I had managed to relax almost too well. With
my head pillowed on the ledgers and my back resting on the boards,
I'd finally gotten to that semi-drug-like state between waking and
sleeping where your thoughts and your unconscious mind become
almost indistinguishable and it's hard to say whether you're asleep
or awake.

I was awake enough to hear the steps on the
porch outside, at any rate, and by the time the two men got inside
I was fully alert. I couldn't make out any features, of course, but
in the moment that they were briefly silhouetted in the doorway I
could see that they were certainly bulky enough to be two of the
three I'd met already.

In my drifting state of a few minutes
before, I'd almost thought I was making some sense of the whole
confused caper, but the sight of the two gorillas brought me to a
hard reality that had to be dealt with on a purely physical level.
They weren't something I could drift and dream about any
longer.

They stood for several minutes, almost
motionless, probably waiting until they could see a little better.
I could make them out only as darker blobs in the general darkness,
and I was hoping they might have brought a flashlight. Not that I
wanted them to turn it on and examine their surroundings too
closely. I was fairly certain they wouldn't see me, but I didn't
want them even to try.

They were very quiet, and I found myself
practically holding my breath. If it had been quiet earlier, it was
deadly still now. I hadn't heard a car pass for so long that I
couldn't even remember when the last one had been.

After what must have been about ten minutes,
though it seemed much longer, they began moving around the
warehouse, still without speaking a word. No light was turned on,
but they moved confidently, as if they knew where they were and
could see well enough.