Fire Sale (24 page)

I screamed at Mitch to come, but he didn’t even break his stride. I pelted after him. I heard Mr. Contreras’s lumbering tread for a few yards, but the traffic overhead soon swallowed the sound. At 100th Street, the youths turned west, toward the river, Mitch hot on their heels. I’d gone a block before admitting I’d lost them. I stood still, trying to hear where they’d gone, but couldn’t make out anything except the thunking of trucks on the Skyway and the lapping of the river somewhere on my left.

I turned back to Ewing. If Mitch caught them, I’d hear the uproar. But I would be in way over my head if I left the main road and tried to thread my way on foot through the dead-end streets and marshy lots that these guys called home.

27

Death in the Swamp

B
ehind me, a set of headlights picked me out like a deer on a country road. I ducked behind a Dumpster. The car stopped. I huddled in the dark for a moment until I realized it was my own car, that Mr. Contreras, with more sense than I possessed right now, had brought it up from where I’d abandoned it.

“Where are you, doll?” The old man had climbed out of the driver’s seat and was scanning the empty street. “I seen you a minute ago. Oh—where’s Mitch? I’m sorry, he just suddenly jumped and took after them punks. They go down the road there?”

“Yeah. But they could be anywhere by now, including the middle of the swamp.”

“I’m so sorry, doll, I see why you don’t want me butting in when you’re working, can’t even hold on to the damn dog.” He hung his head.

“Easy, easy.” I patted his arm. “Mitch is strong, and he wanted those guys. If I hadn’t been playing Annie Oakley back there, maybe Mitch wouldn’t have gotten so wound up to begin with. And if I’d taken the car, instead of thinking I could catch two twenty-year-olds on foot—” I bit off the words: second-guessing and guilt-tripping are luxuries a good detective should never indulge in.

My neighbor and I called to the dog for a minute or two, straining to hear him. The Skyway is a diagonal road and was to our left here, close enough that the traffic made it hard to hear other sounds.

“This isn’t doing any good,” I said abruptly. “We’ll drive the area. If we don’t see him soon, let’s come back in daylight with Peppy—she might nose him out.”

Mr. Contreras agreed, at least with the first part of my suggestion. When he’d climbed into the passenger seat, he said, “You go on home, get some shut-eye, and bring Peppy back, but I ain’t gonna leave Mitch out here. He never spent the night outside by himself before, and I’m not gonna have him start now.”

I didn’t try to argue with him—I sort of felt the same way myself. We crawled west on 100th Street, Mr. Contreras with his head out the window, giving an ear-piercing whistle every few yards. As we got close to the river, the ram-shackle houses gave way to collapsing warehouses and sheds. The two punks could have sought refuge in any of them. Mitch might be lying there—I clipped the thought off.

We made a painstaking circuit of the four blocks that lie between the Skyway and the river. Only once did we pass another car, a one-eyed bandit missing the right headlight. The driver was a skinny, nervous kid who ducked his head when he saw us.

At the river, I got out of the car. I keep a real flashlight, industrial-strength, in my glove compartment. While Mr. Contreras stood behind me and played the light along the bank, I poked around in the dead marsh grasses.

We were lucky that we were on the far edge of fall, when the ranker vegetation has frozen and dissolved, and the marsh grasses no longer provide cover to a million biting insects. Even so, the ground was a clammy mud that sucked at my shoes; I felt the cold brackish water oozing into them.

I heard slithering and rustling in the underbrush and came to a standstill. “Mitch,” I called softly.

The rustling stopped briefly, then started again. A kind of rat came out, followed by a little family, and slid into the river. I moved on.

I passed a man lying in the grasses, so still I thought he might be dead. My skin curling with disgust, I went close enough to hear him breathe, a slow, kerchunky sound. Mr. Contreras followed me with the flashlight, and I saw the telltale needle lying across the open lid of a beer can. I left him to such dreams as remained for him and climbed back up the embankment to the bridge.

We crossed the river in a strained silence and tried to repeat the maneuver on the far side, both of us calling to Mitch. It was after five, with the eastern sky turning that lighter shade of gray that presages the dying year’s dawn, when we staggered back to the car and collapsed against the seats.

I pulled out my city maps. The marshland was huge on the West Side; a team of trained searchers, with dogs, could spend a week here without covering half of it. Beyond the expanse of marsh, the network of streets started up again, mile upon mile of abandoned houses and junkyards where a dog might be lying. I didn’t really believe our two thugs would have gone west of the river: people stay close to the space they know. These guys had found or hijacked or whatever they’d done to the Miata close to their home base.

“I don’t know what we do next,” I said dully.

My feet were numb from the cold and damp, my eyelids ached with fatigue. Mr. Contreras is eighty-one; I didn’t know how he was staying upright.

“Me neither, cookie, me neither. I just should never’ve—” He broke off his lamentation before I did. “Do you see that?”

He pointed down the road at a dark shape. “Probably just a deer or something, but put on the headlights, doll, put on the headlights.”

I put on the headlights and got out to crouch in the road. “Mitch? Mitch? Come here, boy, come here!”

He was caked in mud, his tongue lolling with exhaustion and thirst. When he saw me, he gave a little “whoof” of relief and started licking my face. Mr. Contreras tumbled out of the car and was hugging the dog, calling him names, telling him how he’d skin him alive if he ever pulled a stunt like that again.

A car came up behind us and blared on its horn. The three of us jumped: we’d had the road to ourselves for so long we’d forgotten it was a thoroughfare. Mitch’s thick leather leash was still attached to his collar. I tried to drag him back to the car, but he planted his feet and growled.

“What is it, boy? Huh? You got something in your feet?” I felt his paws, but, although the pads were nicked in places, I couldn’t find anything lodged in them.

He stood up and picked up something from the road and dropped it at my feet. He turned to look back down the road, back west, the way he’d come from, picked up the thing and dropped it again.

“He wants us to go thataway,” Mr. Contreras said. “He’s found something, he wants us to go with him.”

I held the thing he’d been dropping under the flashlight. It was some kind of fabric, but so caked in mud, I couldn’t tell what it was.

“You want to follow us in the car while I see where he wants to get to?” I said dubiously. Maybe he’d killed one of the punks and wanted me to see the body. Maybe he’d found Josie, drawn by the scent from the T-shirt he’d been lying on, although this rag was too small to be a shirt.

I found a bottle of water in my car and poured some into an empty paper cup I found in the grass. Mitch was so urgent to get me going west that I persuaded him to drink only with difficulty. I finished the bottle myself, and gave him his head. He insisted on carrying his filthy piece of fabric.

More cars were passing us now, people heading for work in the dreary predawn. I took the flashlight in my right hand so oncoming cars could see us. With Mr. Contreras crawling in our wake, we padded along 100th Street, Mitch looking anxiously from me to the ground in front of him. At Torrence, about half a mile along, he got confused for a few minutes, darting up and down the ditch along the road before deciding to head south.

We turned west again at 103rd, passing in front of the giant By-Smart warehouse. The endless stream of trucks was coming and going, and a dense parade of people was walking up the drive from the bus stop. The morning shift must be starting. The sky had lightened during our march; it was morning now.

I was moving like a lead statue, one numb, heavy foot in front of the other. We were close to the expressway and the traffic was thick, but everything seemed remote to me, the cars and trucks, the dead marsh grasses on either side of us, even the dog. Mitch was a phantom, a black wraith I was dumbly following. Cars honked at Mr. Contreras, inching behind us, but even that couldn’t rouse me from my stupor.

All at once, Mitch gave a short bark and plunged from the side of the road into the swamp. I was so startled that I lost my balance and fell heavily into the cold mud. I lay there dizzily, not wanting to make the effort to get back up, but Mitch nipped at me until I struggled back to my feet. I didn’t try to pick up the leash again.

Mr. Contreras was calling down to me from the road, wanting to know what Mitch was doing.

“I don’t know,” I croaked up at him.

Mr. Contreras shouted out something else, but I shrugged in incomprehension. Mitch was tugging at my sleeve; I turned to see what he wanted. He barked at me and started to cut across the swamp, away from the road.

“Try to follow us overland,” I shouted hoarsely, and waved.

After a minute or two, I couldn’t see Mr. Contreras. The dead grasses with their gray beards closed over my head. The city was as remote as if it were only a dream itself; the only thing I could see was the mud, the marsh rats that skittered at our approach, the birds that took off with anxious cries. The leaden sky made it impossible to guess what direction we were going. We might be heading in circles, we might die here, but I was so tired that the thought couldn’t rouse me to a sense of urgency.

The dog was exhausted, too, which was the only reason I could keep up with him. He stayed a dozen paces ahead of me, his nose to the ground, lifting it only to make sure I was still with him before nosing ahead again. He was following the tracks a truck had laid down in the mud, new tracks made so recently that the plants still lay on their sides.

I wasn’t wearing gloves, and my hands were swollen with cold. I studied them as I stumbled along. They were large purple sausages. It would be so nice to have a fried sausage right now, but I couldn’t eat my fingers, that was silly. I jammed them into my coat pockets. My left hand bumped into the metal thermos. I thought dreamily of the bourbon inside it. It belonged to someone else, it belonged to Morrell, but he wouldn’t mind if I had a little, just to keep me warm. There was a reason I shouldn’t drink it, but I couldn’t think what it was. Was the bourbon poisoned? A demon snatched it from Morrell’s kitchen. He was a funny, heavyset demon with thick, twitching eyebrows, and he carried the thermos to Billy’s car, then stood watching while I found it. A cry under my nose made me jump. I had fallen asleep where I stood, but Mitch’s hot breath and anxious whimper brought me back to the present, the marsh, the dull autumn sky, the meaningless quest.

I slapped my chest, my sausage fingers bunched together inside the coat sleeves. Yes, pain was a good stimulant. My fingers throbbed and that was good; they were keeping me awake. I wasn’t sure I could fire a gun again, but who was I going to shoot in the middle of the swamp?

The grasses thinned, and rusty cans began replacing marsh rats. A real rat moved across the track in front of me. It looked at Mitch as though daring him to fight, but the dog ignored it. He was whining constantly now, worried, and he stepped up the pace, urging me forward with his heavy head when he thought I was lagging.

I didn’t notice when we left the marsh, but suddenly we were picking our way through a dump. Cans, plastic bags, the white lips of six-pack holders, raggedy clothes, car seats, things I didn’t want to recognize, all mashed under-foot by the truck whose tracks we were following. I tripped on a tire, but kept slogging forward.

The refuse sort of ended at a barbed-wire fence, but the truck had been driven straight at the fence, and an eight-foot section had come loose. Mitch was sniffing at a fragment of crimson stuck to the barbs, whining and barking at me. I went to inspect it. It was new, new to the area, I mean, because the color was still so fresh. Every other piece of cloth had turned a dirty gray. I tried to feel it, but my swollen fingers were too cracked to tell anything.

“It looks like silk,” I said to Mitch. “Josie doesn’t wear silk, so what is it, boy?”

He picked his way across the sagging piece of fence, and I went after him. When we were clear of the fence, Mitch started to run. When I didn’t keep up with him, he came back to nip me in the calf. Dehydrated, hungry, frozen, I ran with him across a paved road, up a steep hill, onto a plateau covered in dead grass that was springy and flat underfoot. Maybe I had fallen asleep again, because it was too much like a fairy tale, where you go through the demon-filled woods and come to a magical castle—at least, the grounds to the magical castle.

I had a stitch in my side and black spots dancing in front of my eyes, which I kept confusing with Mitch. Only his hoarse bark kept me going in the right direction, or, at least, the direction he was headed. I was floating now, the turf a yard or more below my feet. I could fly, it was the magic of the fairy castle, one mud-heavy foot leaving the ground, the other leaping behind it, I only had to move my arms a little, and I catapulted headfirst down the hill, rolling over and over until I was almost lying in a lake.

A giant hound appeared, the familiar of the witch whose castle I’d invaded. He grabbed my coat sleeve and tried to pull me along the ground, but he couldn’t move me. He bit my arm and I sat up.

Mitch. Yes, my dog. Leading me on a mission impossible, a mission to nowhere. He bit me again, hard enough to break through my peacoat. I shrieked and pushed myself upright again.

“Jeesh, you a marine sergeant or what?” I croaked at him.

He looked at me balefully: I was the sorriest excuse for a recruit he’d seen in all his years in the corps. He trotted along the edge of the water, stopping briefly for a drink. We went around a bend, and I saw in the distance a small fleet of blue trucks and, in front of me, brown mountains of garbage. The city dump. We were at the city dump? This hound led me through hell to get to the world’s biggest supply of garbage?

“When I find someone to drive me home, you are—” I broke off my hoarse and useless threat. Mitch had disappeared over the side of a pit. I walked cautiously to the edge. It had been dug out and abandoned: dead, scrubby weeds were starting to grow along the sides.

Two bodies lay at the bottom. I scrambled down the rocky clay, my exhaustion forgotten. Both bodies had been badly beaten, so beaten they were black and purple, with pieces of skin flayed off. One seemed to be a man, but it was the woman Mitch was pawing at anxiously. She had a mass of tawny hair around her swollen, battered face. I knew that hair, I knew that black leather coat. And the crimson fragment on the fence, that had been her scarf. I’d watched Marcena Love tie that scarf up any number of times. My good-luck scarf, she called it, I always wear it in battle zones.