Strawman Made Steel (11 page)

“You a dick?” he said, then, before I could
reply, “
Private
dick. Provenor.”

“Sharp,” I said. “What’s the tell?”

“The .38, or somethin’ smaller, under your
armpit. I saw it when you queue-jumped. And your shoes need a polish. You steal
from a hobo?”

“You’d make a good dick.”

He shrugged his shoulders, which made his
neck bend like a sapling in the breeze. “Nah. Too much self-respect.”

Our quarry cut over to Flatbush Ave and
crossed Manhattan Bridge onto the island. We were going against peak hour, but
the sun had dropped from the sky by the time we entered the concrete thicket
that remained of the Lower East Side.

Changes to the rent law were fast pushing
out the lower middle class. The pastiche of inhabitants was mirrored by
mismatched buildings. Seemed none of the architects were interested in the future.
Everyone wanted to re-capture. Reprise. Borrow.

Fine by me, but they could have picked a
period.

Many of the town houses were dark, looking
like they were prepped for demolition. It was across from one such building
that the cab carrying the Alltron man pulled up. He got out, bent to pay the
driver, and crossed the street.

The kid pulled our cab over half a block
away, into a dark stretch of curb where the spill of lamplight from either side
didn’t reach.

I handed the kid a bonus. He took it
without obvious avarice.

I said, “Be good to your mother.”

“She’d dead,” he said, and turned the cab.
I heard the thrum of its engine wane and get lost beneath the whine of a
distant patrol car.

I slipped into the deep shadow behind
stairs of an old Brownstone, and watched my man mount the steps to the
dead-looking townhouse. He paused at the door, swapped the briefcase to his
left hand, and fiddled a key into the lock. The door opened without a sound. He
melded with a wedge of shadow and the door shut. Its lock clattered, a loud
noise in the quiet street.

I jammed my hands in my coat pockets
against the dropping temperature and leaned against the stairs. I watched and
waited, but no light appeared anywhere in the grid of windows facing the
street.

Maybe the guy lived here. Maybe he gave to
charity, and didn’t have the money to pay the gas bill.

From my vantage point, I examined the
building for another access point. Short of rapping on the door and doing the
travelling salesman bit, I wasn’t going in through the guest entrance.

I was speculating on the fire escape when I
saw movement on the sidewalk. A guy no taller than an oil derrick, no wider
than a meat truck hove into view. He wore a hat three decades out of date. A
coat wrapped his trunk like butter spread too thin, and its hem dangled three
feet above work boots. His head was sunk into shoulders solid as the
faith-moved mountain.

He walked in a straight line, but his head
swiveled toward the stairs of my townhouse. He stepped past it, then, like a
piece of bad choreography, turned on his heel and came back. He glanced up and
down the sidewalk, and then took the stairs two at a time to the door.

In the fading light, I could just make out
his hand digging like a pit bull in his coat pocket. When the hand appeared again,
it grasped an object. But it wasn’t a key. With it, he laid one blow on the
door lock.

One was enough.

There was the partially muffled noise of
splintering wood, and the door hung open like the slack mouth of an idiot.

He went in. The shadow had a time
swallowing him.

I counted to ten, and then ducked across
the street and into the throughway at the building’s side. Jutting into the air
two feet above my head were the bottom rungs of the fire escape―and me without
my track pants.

I touched my piece once to make sure it was
snug. I squared my feet, sunk a little onto my haunches, and leapt for the
bottom rung.

I caught it first go, but the ladder didn’t
hinge down. It was rusted in place. I hauled myself up hand over hand until I
reached the first landing.

From there I covered the building’s scant
six floors quickly, then scaled one last vertical. It ended in a short balcony
of grey stone crusted with lichen. I pitched over that and landed on the roof.

The roof was a ten-foot band of flat,
tarred space surrounding a long section of slanting, tiled roof.

The building had been a well-to-do
townhouse, was now a soon-to-be-ex-townhouse. But before that, it had been a
factory with a live-in floor. There are plenty of them in lower Manhattan,
relics of the recovery period, when industry adapted, was reborn.

I found what I was after on the far side of
the roof, after crunching my shins on half a dozen capped vents hiding in the
dark under my knees―a steam overflow vent like an upside-down hockey stick.
Thick enough for a McIlwraith. The boiler it had served would be long gone.

I squeezed myself in under its head, sat on
its lip, and eased my feet into its shaft. I hitched my shoulders to get my
coat sleeves under the heels of my palms, planted them on the vent’s shaft,
and, trying not to pop any of its plates, slid down its dark throat.

Half-way down I realized that if the bottom
of the shaft was guarded by a grille, I would soon be a very bad smell for the
tenants.

No grille. No smell. No valley full of
weeping virgins.

I squeaked to a stop with my feet dangling
into thin air, and let go before my imagination woke up. I dropped onto a
wooden floor, rolled and froze. A sprain-like pain washed through my ankles like
a gun report. Then all was well. False alarm.

I stood and dusted my shoes with my hat.
The only light was a sliver of moon slipping through a shard of broken window.
The rest of the window was blacked out.

I waited for my eyes to adjust.

Motion in the roof cavity tickled my eye.
There must have been a draught. I peered up at a series of rafters making
A-frames off into the dark.

I’m not an emotional guy, but what I saw
put a lump in my throat and a tingle down my neck.

Rank upon rank of shoes dangled down into
the moon-sheen. In the shoes were feet. Dead men’s feet.

I heard a voice. But it didn’t come from
above. My lump went. The tingle left off.

I concentrated and strained to hear what
the voice was saying. It spoke a language I didn’t understand, but I got the
gist: there was about to be another pair of shoes hung up to air.

I thought there were plenty up there
already. I investigated.

The voice was rumbling through the thin
timber of a door at the far end of the loft. I crept to the near side of the door
on fairy steps and put my ear to it.

The voice was getting excited.

A spray of light gleamed around door, and
from a flicker of shadow I sensed someone moving on the far side. I squatted,
quiet as a mouse, and put an eye to the keyhole. Through it I got a bead on the
owner of the voice. It was the guy from the street with the pleasant sales
technique, and from the way his shoulders were bunching he was about to make
mischief on a thin guy trussed at his feet. I couldn’t see the man I’d tailed
here from Alltron or his suitcase.

I flexed my arm. My shoulder still hurt and
I was giving away a thousand pounds on Mr. Manners, but if I didn’t move he was
going to make kindling of his prisoner.

I hoped the door wasn’t locked.

I waited till that big back moved between
me and the light, twisted the knob, and threw my shoulder into it.

The door slammed into the big man’s back
and stopped like it had hit the opposite wall.

He turned and in the same motion cast the
door fully open with one hand. The other hand was balled into a fist, which he
threw at me like a wrecking ball. The only thing that saved me was how slow he
was. If he’d connected it would have been lights out and play the organ.

I dropped under his punch and slugged him
on the jaw. A lucky shot. He dropped like a redwood―slow but done―shook the
floor and lay still.

While I sucked on a split knuckle, I
finally got a good look at the man trussed on the floor. A lamp cast yellow
light over his stubbled head, which hung pendulous from a too-thin neck.
Leather suspenders made little knolls of his shoulders, and he peered up at me
from behind glasses as big as bus windows. He looked like the reflection of an
accountant in a sideshow funny mirror.

“Untie me,” he said. His enunciation was
crisp.

I did.

He stood, rubbing one wrist.

I turned and toed the body on the floor.

“Who’s your friend?”

When he didn’t reply, I looked his way.

From somewhere he had pulled an automatic
pistol, and was pointing it in my direction. I sidled left to see if I was the
target, and was tracked by the hollow eye of the gun. Lucky me.

“You will sit,” he said, and flicked his
free hand at a plain pine dining chair.

“True,” I said, standing still. “I’ll
probably shout, spit, and shit too sometime in the near future. What’s your
next prediction, Nostradamus?”

He whipped the gun at me with an arm like a
cobra. It lashed my cheek, and connected with the bone. The impact washed
through my skull looking for someone who cared. The side of my face went numb
immediately, except for a fiery spot under the skin at the focal point of the
blow. Numb was fine. I could handle numb. It was when that side of my face woke
up that the fun would start.

“If you had prophesied, ‘I will hit you
with a gun,’ I might have moved sooner.”

His face was a blank.

He said, “Would you like me to hit you
again?”

I sat in the chair.

I felt like it was missing a table and a
plate heaped with meatloaf. I think I was surly from being pistol-whipped by a
bean counter.

“Put your arms behind you,” he said.

He kept the gun trained on me as he moved
out of sight. Then I felt the chill metal of handcuffs clasp my wrists.

When he appeared again, he weighed the gun
in his hand in front of my face, and then hit me on the other cheek. I tasted
salt in my saliva, and this pain ran round my skull till it found its mate.
They got together and gossiped.

I grimaced and licked my lips. “You balance
tires too?”

He ignored that. With one hand he frisked
me, found my .38, pulled it from its holster and put it on a desk.

Then he went over to the big guy I’d laid
out and squatted by him. He went through his coat pockets, then dug under the
coat and checked his pants and shirt. His search yielded an ancient looking
chain watch, a tangle of rubber bands, a handful of peanut shells, a pince-nez,
and a wallet. He rifled through the wallet, then laid all of the items on a
small desk amid a mess of papers.

Then, stooping over the prone man, he
frisked him from shoes to hat. Apparently satisfied, he gripped his gun by the
barrel, and, holding it like a hammer, clubbed him on the temple. The skin
there rose in an angry red welt.

From a drawer beneath the desk he produced
another set of hand cuffs. The place was a regular police station. Then he
returned to the man and knelt, and I heard the cuffs grind tight.

I mused, “In my business I meet a lot of
assholes.”

He ignored me, tugged a chair over to the
desk, and sat. He put his gun down and his hands began to play over the mess of
paper like harvestmen brooding over eggs, collecting, straightening,
positioning. Returning them, I guessed, to the order they’d had before the big
guy showed up.

I judged no insults were going to penetrate
the accountant’s OCD haze, so I took the opportunity to run an eye over the
room.

It looked like a typical clerk’s office, if
you subtracted the comatose giant and the wiseguy handcuffed to the chair. It
had two doors, one I’d come through, and the other for the big guy. Three
triple-decker filing cabinets of green metal, listing a little under load. One
lampstand, unlit, and one desk lamp, burning bright, and casting a huge shadow
of the accountant’s head onto the opposite wall. As he worked, his glasses
would now and then catch the light and throw it across the wall in bright arcs.

The room had probably served as a foreman’s
office for the workfloor in a previous life.

One fixture stood out as clearly post-hoc.
Bolted to the wall, low down on the far side of the desk was a safe. A cube of
heaving-looking, low-gloss metal. Masonry powder and curls of sawdust were
still collected around the heavy-duty bolts driven through the safe’s brackets
into the wall and floor.

The sound of paper being butted into a
stack drew my attention back to the accountant. He had made a neat job of the
desk. Everything stood in its own pile, separated by clear margins. Paper,
stationary, the giant’s personal effects, the pistol, and my revolver.

He swiveled on his chair till he faced me.
His face was still a bland oval, as though it cost him too much to employ its
muscles.