George Martin - Lowball

The dancer purred. “Really?”

She ran a finger down his arm; the purring got louder. “Tell me. Is your skin this hard all over?”

“Well, yeah. It’s-” And then he realized she was doing that thing where somebody appeared to be talking about one thing but was actually talking about a totally different thing. Wally blushed so furiously that it actually hurt his face. She watched him, waiting for an answer, but he focused all of his attention on his beer. He took a swig, clutching the bottle so hard that it cracked. The dancer sighed, rolled her eyes at the bartender, and walked away.

The beer ran over his fingers. He flicked them dry, earning a dirty look from the guy sitting a couple barstools down. Wally hadn’t seen him come up to the bar. Now his shirt was stippled with dark spots where flecks of foam had soaked into the fabric. Great.

“Oops. Sorry about that, fella.”

The guy glared at him with huge iridescent eyes like those of a housefly.

Wally said, “Here, I’ll buy your next one.”

The other guy shrugged. “Won’t argue with that.” He took a stool closer to Wally. Wally caught the bartender’s eye and put another bottle on his tab. The dancer lady returned not long after that.

It was a long, embarrassing afternoon, and by the end of it Wally was no closer to finding the fight club.

Somebody knocked on their door just as Ghost was nodding off for the night. Wally placed the Dr. Seuss book he’d been reading to her on the bedside table next to the sippy cup of water, tiptoed to the door, and turned off the light. Another knock came while he stood just outside Ghost’s bedroom, listening for the long slow breaths that told him she’d fallen into true sleep. Only when he was certain she’d stay asleep did he go to answer the door.

Darcy stood in the hallway. He didn’t recognize her right away because she wasn’t dressed like a police officer.

“Cripes,” he said. “I mean, howdy.”

She shrugged, more to herself than to him. She said, “Do you have a minute?”

Wally beckoned her inside. “I just put Ghost to bed,” he said in a half whisper, “but we can talk in the kitchen.”

Darcy shook her head. “I’m sort of in a hurry here.” Wally paused. She said, in a rush, “I think I’ve found the fight club kidnappers. Do you want to come and help me catch them?”

Wally straightened up so quickly he nearly ripped the doorknob off the door. “Holy smokes, yes!”

It took another half hour before they were under way, and Darcy fidgeted the entire time. First, he had to put Ghost back to sleep, and then he had to go across the hall to speak with Miss Holmes. Wally didn’t know what he would have done without her willingness to watch over Ghost. He made a mental note to buy her a cake or maybe cook a casserole for her to say thank you. He wondered if she liked eating Tater Tots. He knew a good recipe for Tater Tot casserole.

But eventually he and Darcy were under way. They took his car. She directed him west, to the very edge of Manhattan.

“How’d you find these guys?” he asked.

“I’ve been spending my off hours reviewing footage from traffic cameras.”

“Gosh. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

“It is a thing. But it took about two hundred hours before I found a pattern.”

Holy cow. Two hundred hours? That was … Wally tried to do the math in his head, but he couldn’t do that and drive at the same time. Anyway, it was a lot of days.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty neat.”

“It wasn’t as fun as it sounds,” she said. But she sat a little straighter, puffed up by the fact of his amazement. “You have no idea how many vans drive through this borough every day. But only one that can disappear and reappear. Turn here.”

He did, saying, “I’m real happy to lend a hand. But I thought you weren’t real keen on my acting like a detective. You had the fancy word for it. Vigil-something.”

“Vigilantism.” Darcy sighed. “Yeah. Well, once I uncovered a possible lead on the van, I realized I had two problems. I knew I needed help. But maybe you remember what my colleagues said a few days ago: ‘If you see them, call the real cops.’ If I tell anybody about this, I’ll get shoved aside, and if it turns up anything useful they’ll forget I was ever involved.” She practically vibrated with irritation. “The second problem is that this place we’re approaching is, technically, outside of my precinct’s jurisdiction. The right way to do this would be for me to notify Detective Black, but that would kill hours because he insists on doing everything by the book.” Wally remembered the detective. He seemed pretty nice, all things considered. Darcy continued, “Franny would contact the other precinct, and explain the situation, and then they’d have to come to some agreement. And maybe the captains would have to talk. They’d have to do some handshake deal to let us come in and do a bust inside their precinct, or more likely they’d insist on having their own guys do it. But you can imagine how much enthusiasm this case receives outside of Jokertown. Missing jokers? Ha.”

Wally said, “So you called me instead.”

“I’m bending the rules a little, yes.” She paused. Fidgeted again. “I’ve never done that before.”

Wally smiled to himself. “How does that feel?”

“Like I want to write myself a ticket with a big fine.”

Wally stopped smiling. “You, uh … I guess you must really want to catch these guys.”

“Yes.”

Darcy directed him to a junkyard situated partially beneath a section of the old elevated West Side Highway, right on the Hudson. West Side Auto and Scrap, according to the sign over the entrance to the yard. The sun had just set past the New Jersey refineries when Wally parked his car outside the tall fence surrounding the property. The residual glow of sunset turned the underside of a low cloudbank pink and orange, casting enough ruddy light to turn Wally’s iron skin the color of rust, and to show him that the junkyard was quiet.

A breeze whistled through the Slinky-curls of barbed wire atop the fence. Much of the yard inside was given over to stacks of smashed-up old cars, some of which were five or even six high in places. The ones at the bottom were a little older, and more pancaked than the ones on top. Few were car-shaped; many had been crushed into squares. Once in a while a stack creaked, or groaned, or rattled. Wally chalked that up to wind, or maybe rats. But aside from the wind, and the constant thrum of traffic along the highway, the yard was still. The dying firelight of sunset silhouetted a tall crane deeper in the yard. The front offices of the junkyard appeared to be housed in an old double-wide mobile-home trailer. Nobody came or went. And as the salmon-colored glow of sunset faded from the clouds, turning the sky a mottled violet gray, no lights came on in the trailer.

The shadows felt heavy. The weight of Darcy’s focus gave everything a hard edge.

Wally wasn’t sure how big the yard was. Maybe the secret club was deeper inside. Or maybe there was a secret entrance, like a trapdoor, and it was underground. The junkyard would be a swell place to hide something like that. The entrance could even be in one of the cars, maybe the trunk. That’s what he would do. He decided to keep an eye open for big cars that hadn’t been squeezed into boxes.

They eased out of Wally’s car. Wally threw the driver’s-side door closed a half second before noticing Darcy had been careful not to make any noise with her door. She winced at the noise.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

They tiptoed to the gate, which was chained and padlocked. Wally pinched a chain link in both hands and gently twisted it open. But the squeal of tortured metal wasn’t much quieter than it might have been had he simply snapped the chain apart. Darcy winced again.