David Levien - Where the dead lay

“Fuckin’-A it would’ve,” Terry said. “We’d be mopping out the front now, instead of sitting here.”

“No, I mean a real mess. The guy was packing-”

“Find something out, Larry. And you,” Terry turned to Dean, “stay the hell away from the damn girl-”

“I don’t even know where she is-”

“Stop looking!” Terry yelled. “If you’d have been focused on business, we wouldn’t have this problem. We gotta get these shakes open now, start some money flowing. You got your people in place?” Terry asked Knute.

He nodded. “Most of ’em. The rest are getting in place.”

“Good. We’ve come too far, done too much work to let anything fuck us up.”

“So what do we do about this asshole Behr?” Kenny asked.

“Steer clear,” Terry said, “for now. If he shows his face again, we do him up like Lyman Bostock.” There was a moment’s quiet agreement. Even Kenny, the youngest, had heard the story, though it had happened more than a decade before he was born, of the professional baseball player from Gary who got blasted in the head by some psycho with a. 410.

Terry stood. “Call Pam back in. Let’s reopen the place, keep up appearances. Besides, I need a drink.”

They stood and the meet broke. Bustamante exited first, followed by the boys. Knute hung back and looked to Terry, who spoke quietly. “You’re gonna have to get me back in touch with the guys from Chicago,” he said.

Knute just nodded.

He had seen the monster in that man’s pig-iron black eyes. He’d seen it and he couldn’t un-see it, and the man was now in his path and Behr would have to deal with that. Behr pounded on Ezra’s door, and when it swung open, he nearly staggered inside. His car was parked cockeyed, still running, in the lot out front.

“You all right, Mr. Behr?” Ezra asked after taking one look at him.

“I didn’t catch the guy,” Behr said, and then sought a place to sit down. Ezra helped him to the plaid sofa, pushing away a pile of newspapers, and Behr told him what had happened.

“You need some Anacin?” Ezra asked.

Behr nodded and the older man went off into a kitchenette and returned with the pills and water and a can of frozen orange juice concentrate, which Behr pressed against the base of his skull. Behr swallowed down the pills and used some water on his fingers to clear the blood from his mouth. Then he turned to Ezra. “I won’t be coming back here again. I’ve got to leave you out of this. But I need to know

… that cop, the lieutenant who came by when you were assaulted. What’d he look like?”

“Well,” Ezra said, scratching his chin, “he was a white guy. Medium height. Forties. Mustache.”

“Ezra, you just described three-quarters of the cops in America.”

“It wasn’t a mustache like yours. It was longer, black, like one of them cowboy ones.”

“A handlebar?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Was he stocky?”

“A bit, yeah.”

“Was his name Bustamante?”

“Could’ve been.”

“Did another cop call him anything?”

“Just ‘Lieutenant.’”

Things were colliding in Behr’s head, and he struggled to keep them straight. When Ezra called, he’d come to follow up on someone only tangentially related to Aurelio’s world, and he’d followed it up, and he’d found a connection, albeit tenuous, he thought, to the pea-shake case, and he’d nearly had his head taken off for his trouble.

“You heard from Flavia Inez lately?” Behr asked. Ezra just shook his head. “Let me ask you something else,” Behr said, “when she left, how’d she get her stuff out of here? Who helped her?”

“A couple of guys.”

“Movers?”

“Not real movers. Some young guys.”

“Big kids? High school age?” Behr asked, getting an idea.

“Could’ve been. Since I got old, I can’t tell age too good. But they weren’t professionals.”

“How are you sure?”

“They didn’t have the matching T-shirts, or a moving truck. Just one of them little jobs from U-Haul. They made two trips.”

Behr leaned back on the couch, processing, and switched the can of frozen juice from his head to his bruised and swollen elbow. He felt like he was back in high school algebra solving a formula and he’d just been given the value of X.

Behr pushed himself to his feet and turned to Ezra. “If that guy comes back, you call me and not the cops. You can’t reach me, you call the Stateys. And you be sure to stay inside.”

“Damn straight,” Ezra said, his eyes serious and afraid as he nodded. “I ain’t gonna end up floating down by the railroad tracks.”

Behr just looked at Ezra and nodded, remembering the first time the man had spoken those words, and how they hadn’t meant much to him then.

Night had come down at the end of a long day, and Terry Cottrell had gotten himself cleaned up and ready to go out and meet some boys down at Brandy’s Show Lounge. He was good and ready to see some fine women do their thing and hear what was happening out in the real world. He’d driven out and had pulled through the gate, stopped, wrapped the chain around the gatepost, and just locked it all up when he saw a pair of headlights bouncing along the long dirt entranceway toward South County Municipal Landfill.

What the hell? he thought, gonna have to tell ’em there’s no dumping after dark. Cottrell squinted at the coming vehicle, trying to read its make in the black night.

There was no other traffic at this time of night, but as he reached the fence circling the dumping area, he saw an old Camaro, its lights on, parked just outside of the fence. Terry Cottrell was behind it, in the midst of padlocking the gates for the night when Behr rolled up, almost bumper to bumper with the other car. When it came to information gathering, Behr found he did better staying friendly with people who knew things, doing favors when he could, and just asking. And when he found someone who knew something and asking didn’t work, he’d start demanding. It wasn’t something he’d had to do to a friend lately, but this was where he found himself and so be it. When he’d finished with the lock, Cottrell came around the front of his car and they stood across from each other in bright glare of the headlights and Behr saw right away that he was not a welcome visitor.

“This time I talk, you listen and nod,” Behr said.

“You got me boxed in here,” Cottrell said, seeing his position between the car and the locked gate.

“Won’t be long. Someone’s been making a run on the pea-shake game city-wide. You knew it when I was here last and it’s what you were trying to tell me with that Trafficante bullshit.”

A nod. Cottrell knew a guy who knew a dude, Marcus, who crushed beats down at a bar that was in the middle of all the shit. This was a good dude, too. Not hard, but smooth. Cottrell had met him a few times and could see Marcus had a talent for navigating social situations. There wasn’t nobody he couldn’t get on with, but even he was rattled and looking to scatter. Word was, he was waiting for the right time to get his gear out of the bar and drift away.

“It’s a family.”

Another nod. Cottrell didn’t know why he was confirming shit for him, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. He just wanted Behr gone.

“From up Speedway. A bunch of brothers and a father, and maybe an uncle or some other partner.”

A third nod.

“The Schlegels.”

Cottrell didn’t move. Now they were getting into some ground that was dangerous for him, and he wasn’t about to give up this kind of information. But his eyes must have confirmed it, for Behr continued.

“They’re killing anyone who gets in their way. No one’s talking to the cops, because the Schlegels have the cops.”