Triage: A Thriller (Shell Series) (15 page)

Rad nodded, reached inside his blazer. I braced myself.

His hand came out with something that looked like a small lasso. “TUFF-TIES restraints,” he said. “They’re designed with a little give so you won’t lose circulation in your hands. Made out of braided nylon, tensile strength of eight hundred pounds, you’ll be locked in with eighteen polycarbonate teeth.”

“Glad to know stainless steel handcuffs aren’t de rigueur,” I replied.

Rad whistled. “
De rigueur
. Nice. You truly do dispel the myth of the dumb musclehead, Shell.”

“What if I refuse to be restrained?”

Rad’s laughter bounced off of what glass was left in the Acura. Shepard eased open the passenger door, clopped around the back of the car, came up on the driver’s side where he stood patiently.

“Slide over to the other seat, Shell. Shepard will drive.”

I hesitated.

“This is how you wanted it,” he said. “I’m beyond negotiating at this point.”

The car settled down about a foot it seemed when Shepard took my spot behind the wheel.

“Need you to loop this through the door handle,” Rad said, handing me the TUFF-TIES. “We need to make sure you’re locked in nice and secure.”

My second hesitation in less than a minute lasted only a beat.

I looped the restraint through the door handle as directed.

“Shepard,” Rad said. “Finish securing our friend’s wrists if you would.”

The restraints did have some “give”. Circulation wouldn’t be an issue for me. Rad had it figured correctly. I settled myself in. No other choice available. Locked in nice and secure.

TEN

ROUTE 21, ALSO KNOWN as McCarter Highway, is a four- to six-lane stretch of roadway that runs from the Newark Airport Interchange at Route 1 & 9 to US Route 46 in Clifton. Originally constructed in 1927 to travel from Newark to as far as Belleville, it would be extended twice more in the years to follow. The first expansion took place in 1948, lengthened the highway to Paterson. The second expansion happened in the late 90s, lengthening it to its current endpoint in Clifton. By and large the route runs parallel with the PassaicRiver.

I’d rented the Acura at a place right on the highway, not much more than a football field in distance from Elm Street in the Ironbound. Ishmael, the older West Indian proprietor, had been smoking a cheroot when I entered his office. He dropped it into a Styrofoam coffee cup and crumpled the cup and tossed it into a brown wastebasket that was absent a trash bag. He wiped his hands on his brown pants, stood from his barstool and, lips puckered, gave me a respectful nod. And distance. The first rule of business is to know your customer. I liked him straightaway.

When he did finally speak, to settle all of the details of our transaction, it was in a voice with the melody of a Bob Marley song. He wore a white dress shirt with
navy
blue stripes and pressed brown slacks. Professional attire, for sure. But I noticed he had a roustabout’s hands. I like just about anyone with some evidence of hard living in their hands. Ishmael’s misshapen knuckles looked as though they belonged to Tommy Hearns or Marvin Hagler or Sonny Liston. Even more reason for me to rent from him.

His office assuaged some of the tension that had worked its way into my posture the moment Siobhan’s call made me plop down on my ass in the sand. In addition to the cheroot he’d smoked, the office smelled like forest and marijuana and hurried sex. That due to several burning sticks of patchouli incense he planted in a mayonnaise jar filled to its midpoint with pennies. A calendar on the wall behind his desk displayed a picture of a syrup-colored woman in a lavender bikini bottom with an ass like Hottentot Venus.

About the only thing I didn’t like was the establishment’s name—Ashmore and Cartier Car Club Inc. Too pretentious for my taste. But the “A” in the name would place the business first thing in the Yellow Pages. And the Ashmore and CartierIslands were exotic in the same vein as some of the vehicles Ishmael had available for lease or rental. This all according to the genial West Indian. I took him at his word.

“What are you going to do about the damage to this window?” I asked Rad.

He coughed, hacked phlegm, and said, “Nothing.”

“Not good, Conrad.”

“Call me that again and I’ll pull out all of your teeth,” he said calmly. “Your dental records will be rendered moot as far as identification.”

“You’ve threatened me for the last time,” I told him.

“You’re stupid as cash for clunkers,” he said, and fell into an eerie silence.

Shepard moved us back up Clinton Avenue to Lincoln Park, made a right on Broad Street, a left on South, and then moved straight ahead to McCarter Highway.

Route 21 ran north and south.

Both Ashmore and Cartier and NewarkLibertyInternationalAirport were located due south on McCarter.

But Shepard pointed us north.

I didn’t question his direction. Instead, I quietly tugged at my hand restraints. Tensile strength of eight hundred pounds, Rad had said. He wasn’t kidding. I was locked in secure, suddenly feeling vulnerable enough to notice the dryness of my mouth and the sweat pooled in my armpits. I licked my lips and cursed the night sky that covered us in a blanket of darkness. A blanket and yet it offered me no comfort or safety on any level.

Shepard’s foot was a cinderblock on the gas. Streetlamps passed by so quickly they seemed to blink. Like hazard lights. Rad remained mostly silent in the backseat, except for the occasional throat clearing. I attempted another inconspicuous tug at my restraints.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zilch.

I swallowed, readjusted myself in the seat.

“There’s a point where you’ve gone too far to turn back,” I said aloud.

I didn’t expect Rad to reply, but I waited for his hateful laugh to fill the car.

Got nothing.

And realized that was infinitely worse.

I’M VIOLENT BY NATURE. I’ve been that way for as long as I can recall. I’d like to think that my violence is focused if nothing else. I do not wake up each day expecting it anymore in the same way as Shepard or Rad. However, I am not foolhardy in my understanding either. Some situations call for brutality.

Pure and simple.

Shepard, wordlessly maneuvering my rental Acura north on Route 21 in the direction of bad luck and trouble instead of toward Ashmore and Cartier Car Club Inc. and Newark Liberty International Airport, represented a tremendous threat to my person.

Rad, just as silent as Shepard, sitting in the backseat directly behind me, a holstered .38 with the barrel and sight chopped off close to the cylinder, grips wrapped with black electrician’s tape, the gun concealed behind his blazer, represented another.

Two threats.

But my hands were tied. Literally.

As I wrapped my mind around the futility of my situation, Shepard finally eased the Acura off of the highway, taking the Grafton Avenue exit. Before I could process the implications, he looped around and followed a path right back to Route 21, moving us south now instead of north. In the correct direction. Toward Ashmore and Cartier Car Club Inc. and NewarkLibertyInternationalAirport. I was slightly confused, but not disoriented. I figured we still weren’t going to the airport or the car rental place. A beat later my conclusion proved to be correct. We were leaving the highway again. The exit for Chester and Riverside Avenues. At the off-ramp Shepard turned left, moved up Riverside.

I knew where that led.

I was suddenly aware of a noise, a loud sound that approximated window shutters clapping in a breeze. It took just a second before I realized the sound was actually my heart punching my chest. I started to say something but knew my words would carry no sway.

Off in the distance, opposite where we were headed, stood a house of worship. It looked to be a temple of some sort. A large stone structure that was impressive despite some obvious neglect. I whispered, “Cherubim were the Hebrew adaptation of a Sumerian image. Perceived in the Bible as sphinx-like creatures with human heads, a lion’s body and two wings.” I paused, swallowed hard, and licked my lips. “The Seraphim, as described in Isaiah 6:2, were creatures of fire with six wings.”

I did not know for certain where any of that knowledge came from.

We passed by a discarded warehouse that covered one entire block. By my estimation, nothing industrial had occurred in the warehouse in years. The structure was marred by ugly, amateur graffiti. I’ve seen some graffiti that was close to being actual art. This wasn’t. Most of the building’s windows were blown out, nothing but jagged pieces of glass left to produce sparkling jack-o-lantern teeth in the gloom. Several more similarly depressed buildings loomed ahead, all of them protected—from what I did not know—behind chain-link fence. None of the buildings had signage or banners or awnings on which to advertise their business, but I took one to be some kind of chemical plant, another to be an auto body repair place. A bunch of rusted boats squatted on cement blocks in one of the yards. And nearly every yard was overrun with trash and dead grass and tire-unfriendly gravel. I didn’t see them as we passed, but I envisioned syringes and used condoms littering the grounds. Not that anyone was down here to participate in those two vices. I was looking at an industrial graveyard. Joyless and desolate and devoid of any sign of life.

“Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.”

Conrad’s sudden words sliced the silence with the precision of Cherie’s knife.

I didn’t have a reply, but I cleared my throat.

“You know the definition of indignity, Shell?” he asked.

His voice was a cold finger traveling up and down my spine, searching for a soft spot to sink its nails in to.

“An act that offends a person’s dignity or self-respect, an insult, humiliating treatment,” he answered for me, and clucked his tongue. “Treat someone with
indignity
and you’re bound to get yourself in some deep doo-doo. Payback being a bitch and all.”

Shepard turned off the road, brought the nose of the Acura facing the chain-link fence of one of the industrial tombstones. Then he got out, the Acura’s frame sighing in relief without the strain of his weight, and dug in his pocket for a set of keys, one of which he eased in the
Locinox
gate lock that secured the property. I knew about Rad’s unchecked propensity for violence. I knew about Shepard’s sap, and stories, as yet unproven, about his missing tongue. A mixture of urban legend and truth, no doubt. But I’d heard nothing about this smallish warehouse building absent of windows and covered in Neo-Nazi graffiti that sat on the deserted track of land fronting the PassaicRiver.

“Rad,” I said.

“Now is not the time for you to speak, my friend.” He shook his head and made a dramatic shush sound, a finger pressed to his lips. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word...”

“Remember what you said about payback being a bitch,” I warned.

“I will,” he said, then back to taunting me. “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. If that mockingbird won’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…”

Another chill snaked down my spine as Shepard made his way from the gate back toward the Acura, but I refused to acknowledge the crinkling of my flesh with a shudder. What I needed was time to put some kind of viable plan in motion. And quiet to come up with said plan. It didn’t appear as if I would get either, though. The car sighed again as Shepard dropped down behind the wheel. Meanwhile, Rad’s off-key approximation of singing continued to assault my eardrums. The mockingbird lullaby replaced by vintage Neil Young,
Down by the River
.  The rasp in Rad’s voice was interrupted only by a deep wheezing sound every beat or so.
I shot my baby
, he droned,
dead, oh, shot her dead
,
down by the river
. I couldn’t help but think that the night, and all of the darkness that had and still surrounded it, was somehow my comeuppance for a life lived more than inappropriately. Rad was correct. Payback is indeed a bitch.

But maybe I’d be able to get some of my own payback. In order for that to happen, though, I knew I’d need some things to really break my way in the next few moments. Unfortunately, it started out terribly. I lost a precious thirty seconds or more of thinking time, of strategy time, when Shepard didn’t get out and shut the gate closed behind us. The fact that he left out that important detail made me swallow hard again. An open gate would certainly arouse suspicion and attract attention if someone were to pass by. Shepard and Rad were not at all concerned with anyone seeing it open. That spoke volumes of the situation. Not good.

We traveled down a path on the east side of the building. The warehouse was bigger than I’d originally realized. More
depth
, I thought. Not actually a homophone of
death
, but close enough for me to quickly tuck the word safely away and concentrate on my immediate surroundings instead. Several large, rusted oil drums. Metal frames of some sort stacked against the building. Loose cinderblocks and bricks in a high pile. An ancient bulldozer that resembled a bulletproof Tyrannosaurus Rex. A heap of trash formed into an improbably neat hill. And about fifty yards beyond us, off through a grove of trees, the blue-green-brown currents of the PassaicRiver. I could not look at the river.