Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“My father works in Detroit,” the Mountain volunteered out of nowhere as we crossed La Cienega. “Thirty-year man. For thirty years he's been putting the same fucking fender on the same fucking car all day long. Then he goes home and drinks two six-packs of Stroh's and falls asleep on the couch with his shoes on. Where do you think she's going?”

“As I already said, where the kids are.” I braked to avoid a head-on as yet another Italian car, driven by someone whose driver's license probably noted that he'd had a pre-frontal lobotomy, turned left in front of me. “But, Jesus, don't let me interrupt your autobiography.”

“What I mainly remember about my mother,” the Mountain continued serenely, “is that she could get his shoes off without waking him up. I thought it was terrific. Now I think about it, I realize she probably could have amputated his legs without waking him up. How many kids you think they'll be?”

“Depends on how many are in L.A. They're selling them in about four states.” A spate of drizzle misted the windshield. Alice's wipers would only have made it worse, so I just locked on the red blurs of the Mercedes’ taillights and kept driving.

“She's turning,” he said.

And she was. She was making a right, turning south onto a little street with a name that might have meant something to the people who lived on it. There were more people on the sidewalks here, and more of the faces were black. The people gathered in front of immaculate four- and six-unit apartments and sat on the fenders of five-year-old cars and watched the world drive by.

“Heartbreak city,” the Mountain said, glancing out the window. “Nobody going noplace.”

“There's something to be said for staying home,” I said. The Mountain greeted this hand-stitched homily with the silence it deserved, and Mrs. Brussels made a left onto Jefferson Boulevard. She lost a little traction on the newly wet road, and her taillights did a brief shimmy. With one of those abrupt transitions that make L.A. the world's most schizophrenic city, we found ourselves in an industrial area.

Here there was no one on the sidewalks. In some blocks there were no sidewalks. The streetlamps layered the damp landscape with a bluish light that turned the Mountain's lips purple. It was not an improvement. Warehouses hunkered down, dark and featureless, behind chain-link fence topped with razor-wire. Behind the fences Dobermans roamed, snapping at moths and waiting for something bigger.

“Nice neighborhood,” the Mountain observed. “What happens when we get there?”

It was an extremely good question. “We park and wait and watch, and when we're sure that we can take the guys inside, we go in and take them,” I said. “Then we set the kids loose.”

The Mountain said nothing.

“Then we go home,” I said lamely.

He lit a cigarette and passed it to me, then lit another for himself. “Boy,” he said, “that's some plan.”

I dragged smoke into my lungs. “It's a little short on details,” I admitted.

“ Short ?” he said, exhaling a cumulus cloud. “It sounds like a political platform. What are all these guys supposed to be doing while we win the war? Multiplication tables?”

“That's where you come in,” I said as Mrs. Brussels pulled into a driveway. “What we have here is a classic division of labor. You're going to sumo them, and I'm going to finish them off.”

“Great,” he said. “I hope some of them are fat.” I passed the driveway and pulled over to the curb. The drizzle had let up, but the night was darker than Junko's eyes. On the whole, that was good.

“What we're going to do now,” I said, dragging feverishly at the cigarette, “is we're going to count to twenty. Slowly. Then we're going to get out of the car and walk around the block, in the direction away from the gate she just drove through. We're going to count doors and windows. We're going to look for another gate, anything anyone could drive a car through. We're going to keep our mouths shut until we're back at the car.”

“And then what?”

“Then we're going to figure out what to do.”

“I was wondering when we'd get to that,” he said. He waited a moment. “How far have you counted?”

“Sixteen.”

He tapped the dashboard three times, very rapidly. “Twenty coming up,” He said. Then he tapped again and opened his door. Before he got out, he turned back and held out a hand. I found it in the dark and took it. It felt like it was made out of asbestos. “It's been nice knowing you,” he said. Light from somewhere glinted off what might have been teeth.

“Let's total the fuckers,” I said. We got out of the car.

With the Mountain to my left, we paced the sidewalk. He broke stride to step on his cigarette, and his hand went automatically to his pocket. I slapped it away and took the box of wooden matches from his hand. I shoved them into the pocket of my shirt.

“No matches,” I said. “Nothing that anyone might see.”

“Okay if I suck on it?”

“You can jam it into your tear ducts. You can chew it and swallow it. Just don't light it.”

“Falafel,” the Mountain said aggrievedly. “You'd think the man had a plan.”

The warehouse occupied a whole block. It was an extremely dark block. The streetlights had all been put up somewhere where they could keep rich people from tripping over the cracks in the sidewalk. We turned right onto a street named Detroit, a fact I suppressed because I was afraid it might prompt the next chapter of the Mountain's life. I was getting seriously worried.

“What you didn't ask me,” I whispered, as though the oversight were his fault, “was who she was calling.”

“Getting the kids, you said,” he boomed.

I made little lowering motions with my hands, indicating that he should put a damper on the volume. “Question is,” I whispered, “who's delivering them? A bunch of shoe clerks or twelve Arnold Schwarzenegger clones?”

I stopped walking, wrapped the fingers of my right hand through the chain link, and turned to study the warehouse. There were lights visible through the five big transom windows I'd counted so far. The windows were about ten feet off the ground, not useful exit routes unless the floor of the warehouse were raised six or eight feet. As though it had been summoned on cue, a car turned in off Jefferson, pulled up to the warehouse door, and doused its lights. At a single toot of the horn, a door in the warehouse opened, emitting a rectangle of light, and someone who could conceivably have outweighed the Mountain got out of the car and walked around to the passenger door. Through the door of the warehouse came a short, skinny guy who stood behind the giant. The skinny one had something in his hand. The giant opened the passenger door, and two small figures emerged. They couldn't have been more than five feet tall. It was hard to see them, but they seemed to be wrapped in blankets. Thin, knock-kneed legs stuck out below. With the big guy in front of them and the little sharp one behind, the two kids went into the warehouse. The door closed again.

“One big one, one tweak, two kids,” the Mountain announced to the night.

“And no other exits,” I said, clinging to the routine I'd outlined. “So far.” The size of the big one had unnerved me slightly. And what had the skinny one been holding? I began to think longingly of calling the police.

“The kids are on our side,” the Mountain murmured. “We can take the other ones.”

We scouted the remainder of the eastern side of the building and then hurried along the side facing away from Jefferson. There was one big airplane door that you could have driven a Sherman tank through, but I just registered it as the first possible exit and hauled the Mountain along. There was also a gate in the chain link, but it was chained and padlocked from outside, so I ignored it. From this side, you couldn't see who or what was arriving.