Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

The next shipment, as far as we could tell, pulled up to the warehouse after we'd turned right onto the third side of the rectangle that made up the block. There was the same single toot on the horn, and another walking whopper clambered out of the car and waited. The sharp skinny guy re-emerged from the warehouse with the same indefinite object in his hand. This time three small loosely wrapped people were shepherded inside before the door closed.

“Five kids, two oxen, and the same tweak,” the Mountain said, his face pressed up against the chain link. “Okay odds. Let's go get them.”

“There could be more coming. We don't want to lose some of the kids because there's a firefight going on inside the building when the next car arrives. Let's give it ten minutes.”

“Firefight?” The Mountain sounded surprised. “What firefight? I break their spines and you get the kids.”

“Listen,” I said, “we could wind up shooting.” I reached down to touch the little automatic I'd tucked inside the front of my pants. I did it without thinking about it, just to make sure it was there.

“I told you,” the Mountain said, “I hate guns. And there's kids in there.”

“Then go home,” I said. “What do you think, this is a movie? You think we're going to walk in and you're going to flex and they're all going to faint? People are probably going to get shot.”

“Well, fuck a duck,” was all he said. But he looked betrayed.

I pulled Alice's keys out of my jeans and held them out to him. “Go,” I said. “It wasn't a good idea to begin with. You should be at Tommy's, not here. Take the car and beat it.”

The Mountain took a step backward and looked down at the sidewalk. His face twisted and retwisted and then settled itself into an expression I'd never seen before.

“I can't drive,” he said.

The drizzle began again. “What’re you, Greenpeace? Everybody can drive. This is Los Angeles.”

“I can't.” He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the warehouse, at the pavement, at everything except me. I held the keys out for a moment longer and then recognized the look on the Mountain's face. He was telling a lie. It was the first time I'd ever seen the Mountain tell a lie. He was terrible at it.

It was my turn to back away. I felt like the Marquis de Sade trapped into a conversation with Florence Nightingale. I felt like the personification of corruption in a political cartoon.

“Let's call a cab,” I said. It was the best I could do.

“Skip it,” the Mountain said, looking at his left foot as though it had just appeared at the end of his leg-shoe and all-through spontaneous generation. “Just tell me what we're supposed to do, that's all.”

“We're going to wait,” I said, suppressing an urge to hug him. Like Apple, I couldn't have gotten my arms around him. “We're going to wait and see who else goes in, and then we're going to decide. Okay?”

“Sure,” he said without looking up at me.

“And I'll tell you what,” I added as a car turned in to the warehouse from the opposite direction, sweeping us briefly with its headlights, “we're going to wait across the street and sitting down. Okay?” I touched his arm.

“You're in charge,” he said negligently, trusting me with his life. Trusting me with his life was easier for him than telling another lie.

“And we'll count,” I said as yet another bruiser climbed out of the car in front of the warehouse. The same little sharpie came out to serve as rear guard to the little girl who emerged from the passenger side. “We'll count very carefully. Right?”

The two of us crossed the street. I sat on a strip of grass that paralleled the sidewalk.

“Right,” the Mountain said, still standing. “That's three fatsos, six kids, and the little coat hanger.”

“Who has something in his hand,” I said.

“It's probably a vitamin,” the Mountain said, sitting next to me on the wet grass. “Weensy little guy like that needs building up, probably worries his mother sick. You could X-ray him with a squint.”

A couple of urban crickets chirped in a ratchety fashion as we sat there. The drizzle continued. My confidence, such as it had been, was being washed away. We'd gotten them there, all right. If the ones we'd seen were the only ones coming, maybe we could handle them. Maybe. I'd have felt a lot better if the Mountain had been president of the local chapter of the National Rifle Association instead of a benevolent fat guy whose idea of mortal combat was throwing Jackie Gleason out of a six-foot circle.

Nonetheless, I worked on pumping my adrenaline. I'd just finished a deep-breathing exercise that Eleanor had taught me, the New Age equivalent of “Whistle a Happy Tune,” and was starting to stand up so I could go in and massacre everyone more than five feet tall, when the Mountain gave my arm a yank that almost dislocated it.

“Squat,” he said. “Somebody coming.”

Another car, the fourth that we'd seen, cruised through the gates and pulled up to the door of the warehouse.

“One fatty or two?” the Mountain whispered. “Five dollars says one.” The car's horn honked.

“Two,” I said. We shook. I lost. The coat hanger came out again, vitamin in hand, and escorted a single guy with the bulk of a mature elk, plus one child, into the warehouse. Same procedure: the fatty went first, the kid was in the middle, and the little guy brought up the rear, brandishing his vitamin.

“They've got it down,” I said. “They've done this before.”

“Give it three minutes,” the Mountain said, assuming command. Maybe he heard the uncertainty in my voice. “Then we move.”

Four minutes later we were running down the block and through the gate, heading toward the left side of the warehouse. We'd decided not to go for the door on the first pass. I didn't know whether it was locked from inside, and I also wanted to see whether there were people in there who might have arrived before we did. The finish line for our run was the second transom window, which had been propped open.

By the time we reached it, the Mountain was wheezing like a man in an iron lung. Nevertheless, he squatted down and held up his arms. I stepped onto his shoulders and he braced my legs with his hands, exhaled an imperial gallon of air, and stood up.

He rose so fast that I scraped my forehead on the stucco and almost toppled us backward by pushing myself away from the wall. Nothing bleeds like a cut on the head. I could feel blood running down my face as the Mountain steadied himself and I peered in through the window.

What I saw at first were trucks. There were three of them, big mothers, with the Cap'n Cluckbucket logo painted on their sides. They were standard refrigerated tractor-trailer semis, the same models that cart California lettuce to salad bars all over the continent. These trucks held kids: special orders being delivered in response to requests. The kids who traveled in the backs of the trucks were used to the cold. They'd been through obedience school.

It was hard to get a grasp of the internal geography of the warehouse. Bare bulbs under iron cones hung at the ends of wires here and there, creating islands of bright light that gleamed off the tops of the trucks. In the spaces between the splashes of light, it was dark. I felt the Mountain tremble beneath my weight as I waited for my eyes to adjust.

High up on the opposite wall was a large picture window. On the other side of the window was undoubtedly what had been the foreman's office when this had been a legitimate operation, a vantage point from which the highest-paid guy in the room had supervised the loading and unloading of the trucks. Lights were on behind the glass, but I couldn't see anyone. Then a child let out a shrill scream, and I followed the sound all the way to the right and found myself staring at a small circle of people gathered in a dark spot near the door.