Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

He wasn’t driving fast, and he didn’t think he was driving carelessly, but suddenly there was a sigh and a shudder from the car’s front end. Jolted back to attention, Billy yawed the Cadillac to the side of the broad, desolate street and got out to inspect the damage. It was nothing more than a flat tire. He felt angry at first, and then inexplicably melancholy. The pancaked rubber suddenly seemed like the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Then again, a flat tire was encouraging somehow, suggesting that the night was going to peter out in trivial annoyance rather than high drama. That was to be welcomed. If the road gods had really been against him, wouldn’t the car have burst into flames, wouldn’t he have died in a ball of fire?

He was in the middle of nowhere, by the skeletons of some old silos and an abandoned greyhound track. He’d have to change the tire himself, which only confirmed his lowly status: he couldn’t see Wrobleski doing something so banal. He opened the trunk to get at the spare and the jack. He found a woman’s shoe jammed in the wheel well — Carol Fermor’s, he supposed — and he tossed it into the gutter before manhandling the tire out of the car.

It was a long, awkward task: difficult to position the jack, and even harder to loosen the wheel lugs. As he examined the flattened tire, he noticed a small hole in the sidewall that looked suspiciously neat, as though somebody might have made it deliberately, to create a slow puncture that would ensure he’d be brought to a halt long before he got home. Did that make sense? Maybe he was being paranoid. And did it make any difference? He still had a tire to change. And only when the job was done did he realize he had oil, rubber streaks, and road gunk all over his new suit. Fuck it. You were so much better off wearing leather: the more you abused it, the better it looked.

For the rest of the drive home he tried to keep his mind on the road: that was a better place for it than any other he could think of. Sanjay would still be there, guarding the lot, keeping an eye on Carla. Poor guy, he didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. And yet as Billy approached the lot, there was no sign of him. There was a folding stool lying on its side by the front gate, and there was a book tossed on the ground some feet away. That didn’t look right. But nothing else seemed amiss: the security lights were on, the gates, the subcontractors’ trucks, the trailers appeared the way they always did.

“Sanjay?” he called, not too loud, not too insistently. He didn’t want to wake Carla.

He thought he heard a groan, something feeble but close at hand, and then as he moved toward it, in the direction of the trucks, he saw Sanjay lying on the ground, the pristine pink and black of his clothes now smeared brown and red. His body was twisted into a position no body could easily adopt, legs tangled at improbable angles under him, head sagging against the truck with the CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES sign. Sanjay had been mashed, pulped, beaten with his own baseball bat. He was scarcely conscious, but he was still able to look at Billy, twist his lips into a sad smile, half-raise a pointing hand, and say, “Carla.”

Billy Moore looked toward Carla’s trailer, and he saw that the door was open, and not simply open but broken wide, dangling from its buckled hinges. He ran across the lot, having just enough time to wonder which was the greater terror: that Carla would be there and in the same state as Sanjay, or that she’d simply be gone. He stepped inside the trailer. It was the latter: silence, stillness, disorder, emptiness. There was broken glass, a kicked-over chair, skewed carpet. Carla had not gone quietly. Well, Billy had never thought she would. He was searching around the interior, looking for something that would tell him what had happened, when he saw that Sanjay had dragged himself all the way across the lot to the trailer door.

It seemed he could barely speak, barely breathe, but he said, “I think, sir, they didn’t kill me, sir, because they wanted me to give you a message.”

“Who’s they?” demanded Billy.

“Several men, one of them of African heritage, who did most of the talking.”

“Akim.”

“We didn’t exchange names, sir.”

“Keep it simple, Sanjay,” Billy said, but simplicity wasn’t Sanjay’s way.

“This man told me to tell you that your daughter is temporarily in safe hands, being looked after by somebody named Laurel.”

“My daughter’s being looked after by a tattooed whore?”

“That I cannot say, sir. But the rest of the message is that ‘Mr. Wrobleski would like to see you again when you’ve changed your mind about the job.’ Does all that make sense, sir?”

His voice dribbled away with pain and exhaustion.

“Sense is one word for it.”

“Now, sir,” said Sanjay, “I wonder if you might be good enough to call an ambulance for me, sir?”

“I’ll drive you there myself. We’ll talk on the way.”

Sanjay readied himself to do some more talking.

Zak Webster had never given much thought to dynamite, but if he had thought about it, he’d have assumed that today’s mining and demolition engineers, such as those blasting the tunnels for the Platinum Line, the ones parking in Billy Moore’s lot, would have something rather more sophisticated, more modern, in their trucks. Billy Moore, repeating what he’d very recently learned from Sanjay on the way to the hospital, was able to tell him he’d have been wrong about that.

Billy had gone from the emergency room back to the lot, and then to Zak’s apartment, and even though it was the early hours of the morning, he found Zak all too awake, twanging with anxiety, debating if he should try to call or text Marilyn, wondering if he should go over to the Telstar Hotel, where he assumed she now was. Billy was able to tell him he was wrong about that too. He explained what needed explaining, that one way or another — and he knew it was wrong, and it was largely his fault, and he took full responsibility for his part in it, and yes, he was kind of ashamed of himself — both Marilyn and Carla were now inside Wrobleski’s compound, but terrible though that was, he had a plan for getting them out.

“You see, Zak, there’s no big mystery about dynamite,” said Billy. “My man Sanjay just enlightened me; it’s stuff geologists know, apparently. It turns out dynamite is just sawdust and nitroglycerin, stuffed into a tube, with a blasting cap and a fuse added.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Zak asked.

Billy Moore pulled a single stick of dynamite from the inside pocket of his newly reinstated leather jacket and placed it gently in Zak’s less than willing hand. Zak looked at it with some disbelief, amazed by the absurdity and what felt like the danger of the situation, even as Billy explained that the stick was harmless until the blasting cap and fuse were in place. As Zak held the stick, he felt a little like Wile E. Coyote, and the dynamite itself had an unreal quality about it. It looked so rudimentary, so provisional, wrapped in buff paper like a homemade firework, though the warnings printed on the side looked authentic enough.

“You place the stick,” said Billy. “You walk away, you detonate the dynamite, and you’re in business. I think we can do those things, can’t we, Zak?”

“I can certainly walk away. I might even run.”

“You actually don’t have to walk all that fast. We’re not talking about lighting the fuse, throwing it, and hoping for the best. See here.”

He handed Zak a device that looked like a cross between a cell phone and an antiquated channel changer.

“It’s a remote electronic trigger,” said Billy. “Self-explanatory, yeah?”