Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

When we halted, I lay on my face panting shallowly, feeling the motor rumbling underneath me, too exhausted to brace myself against the next jolt forward. I heard a crash to my right and slowly moved my head to look. The doors to the truck swung open and I was dazzled by light. I thought it was daytime, thought it was the sun, thought I’d go blind.

Grobian strode along the back of the truck. Close your eyes, V. I.; blunk them up: you’re unconscious, the eyes blunk up when you’re unconscious. Grobian thrust a lid up with a rough thumb; he seemed satisfied. He grabbed me around the waist and slung me over his shoulder and thumped back out. I opened my eyes again. It was still night-being locked in total blackness had made even the night sky look bright at first.

“This time we’re in the right spot,” Grobian said. “Jeesh-suburban prick like you, dumping Czernin and the Love woman on the golf course instead of the landfill. This Polish cunt will be under ten feet of garbage by the time the sun comes up.”

“You don’t talk to me like that, Grobian,” Mr. William said.

“Bysen, from now on I talk to you however I please. I want that job in Singapore, running the Asian operations for By-Smart, but I’d consider South America. One of those or I’m talking to the old man. If Buffalo Bill finds out what you’ve been up to with his precious company-”

“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral,” William said. “I’m not worried about anything you say to him.”

“Big talk, big talk, Bysen. But if you acted as big as you talk-you’d never have gotten involved in crap like this. Men like your father, if they can’t do their dirty work themselves they’re smart enough to have friends of friends of friends figure it out so no finger ever points to them. You want to know why Buffalo Bill won’t trust you with more of his company? Not because you’re a lying, cheating SOB-he respects lying, cheating SOBs. It’s because you’re a lying, useless weasel, Bysen. If you hadn’t been Buffalo Bill’s son, you’d be lucky to have a job typing figures in your own warehouse.”

Grobian swung me like a hammock and flung me from him. I landed facedown in muck. I heard him dust his hands and then heard him and William head back to the truck, bickering the whole way, not looking back at me, not even talking about me.

I lifted my head just as the truck jerked into gear again. The headlights flooded me for a moment, showing me where I was, the side of one of the giant mounds of earth where Chicago buries its trash. Beyond the By-Smart semi, I could see lights from other trucks, city trucks, a line of beetles moving toward me. Every day, another ten thousand tons comes in, gets emptied, and covered again with more dirt. The city trucks work round the clock, hauling away our refuse.

My stomach was frozen from fear. Grobian was backing the By-Smart semi, starting to turn it in a wide, clumsy circle. When he got out of the way, the line of beetles would crawl on up the hillside and dump their loads on me. I frantically pushed my left foot against my right, bending my toes inside my boot, bracing myself by putting my head into the sludge. I couldn’t waste time watching the semi’s progress. I pushed so hard I screamed from the pain shooting up my spine.

My right foot came out of my running shoe. I pulled my foot free of the fabric tying my legs together. Drew my knees under me and pushed myself standing. I was free, I could jump up and down, the drivers would see me. My thighs wobbled with fatigue, my arms were pinned behind me so that my shoulders felt they might burst in their sockets, but I wanted to sing and dance and turn cartwheels.

The garbage trucks weren’t on me yet: the By-Smart semi was still blocking the track, lurching in a circle. I stopped jumping. Save your energy, Warshawski, save it for when you need it. The semi kept turning, not straightening out for the outbound road. The line of beetles had stopped and was honking at the semi. It seemed as though Grobian had forgotten how to drive. Or was William trying to prove he wasn’t a completely useless weasel by taking the wheel himself? The tractor made too wide a turn and brought the trailer over the side of the hill. The trailer teetered for a minute on its inside wheels and toppled over. The tractor fell back on its hind wheels, hung for a second, and then collapsed on its side.

The night ended for me as far too many had already this month: in a hospital emergency room, with Conrad Rawlings staring down at me.

“Whatever you have for breakfast, Ms. W., I want to start eating it, too: you should be dead.”

I blinked at him hazily through the curtain of pain blockers shrouding my mind. “Conrad? How did you get here?”

“You made the ER nurse call me. Don’t you remember? You apparently had ten kinds of fits when they tried to put you under, that I had to get here before you’d let them treat you.”

I shook my head, trying to remember the shreds of the night behind me, but the movement hurt my head. I put a hand up to touch it and felt a sheet of adhesive.

“I don’t remember. And what’s wrong with me? What’s on my head?”

He grinned, his gold tooth glinting in the overhead lights. “Ms. W., you look like the lead zombie from the Night of the Living Dead. Someone shot you in the head, which, if I thought it would pound any sense into it, I can only applaud.”

“Oh. In the warehouse, right before he knocked me out. Grobian shot me. I didn’t feel it, just the blood pouring down my face. Where is he? Where’s William Bysen?”

“We sort of have them, although the Bysen legal machine is moving into action, so I don’t know how long I’ll get to keep them. When I got here, they were trying a story out on the cop on duty in the emergency room, that you had hijacked one of the By-Smart semis and they’d fought you for it, which is how the truck got knocked over. The fire department crew that brought the three of you in objected that your hands and feet were tied, and Grobian said they’d done that to keep you from overpowering them. Want to comment?”

I shut my eyes; the glare from the overhead light hurt too much. “We live in a world where people seem willing to believe almost any lie they’re told, no matter how ludicrous, as long as someone with family values is telling it. The Bysens prattle so much about family values, I suppose they can get the state’s attorney and a judge to believe this one.”

“Hey, Ms. W., don’t be so cynical: you’ve got me on the case now. And the city garbagemen have some evidence that the Bysen story doesn’t exactly explain.”

I smiled at him in a muzzy, dopey way. “That’s nice, Conrad, thanks.”

The pain blockers kept carrying me off on their tide, but on my rides to the surface I told him about Billy and Josie, and as much as I could remember of my night at the warehouse, and he told me about my rescue.

Apparently, when the semi toppled over at the landfill, the city crews had sprung from their trucks and raced to the accident scene-as much voyeurs as Good Samaritans. It was then that one of them had caught sight of me, feebly flopping about the hillside. They’d called for help, and gotten a fire truck but no ambulance, so after the firemen freed Grobian and William from the tractor the three of us rode a hook and ladder together to the hospital.

I sort of remembered that; the pain from bouncing up Stony Island Avenue at top speed in a fire truck had woken me, and I had a dream-dazed memory of Grobian and William shouting at each other, blaming each other for the mess they were in. I guess it was only when they got to the hospital, and had to give a story to the police, that they’d decided to join forces and blame me for their mess.