Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (12 page)

“Don’t you care what might have happened to Ungaro, then?” Bernal said. “Or Muriel for that matter?”

“No. I’m done. I’ve turned the case over to you, my friend. Go to Ignacio’s junkyard, talk to my prison buddy, whatever. I ask only one favor.”

“What?”

“Don’t keep me updated on the case. Thanks for the help on the fence, and good luck.”

Inside the office of Ignacio’s Devices and Desires, two men, one middle-aged, one young, but both with the look of calm satisfaction car guys always seemed to have, briskly processed customers from behind a counter laminated with old repair manuals. They produced, in short order, a cam shaft for a bushy-haired Latino in creased trousers and a NASCAR T-shirt who rejected offers of help, put the thing over his shoulder, and walked deliberately out; a power-steering pump for two largechested black guys in golf shirts; and an air-conditioning compressor for a tensely fit middle-aged white woman in a red dress, who asked about its provenance, maintenance record, and efficiency before finally accepting it. Bernal admired her calves as she walked out.

Bernal went up to the desk. The young guy was alone, the older one having vanished through the door into the yard.

“I need to talk to Patricia,” Bernal said.

“We handle car parts here.” He was tattooed with a mixture of slashing monochromatic tribal patterns and delicately shaded, almost Pre-Raphaelite images of knights and damsels. “Other stuff too, by special appointment. Cyclotrons. Whatever.”

“I just want to—”

“Look.” His gray eyes were intense. “You guys come in. All the time you come in. Try to fix her. Help her out. I think some of us might have tried it, too. But she’s not interested in your help.”

The older guy slid back behind the desk. He looked back and forth from Bernal to the young guy. “What’s up?”

“This gentleman is worried about Pat,”

“I just want to ask her a question!”

The older guy blew out his cheeks. “We don’t want trouble. We got a business to run.”

Bernal had an inspiration. “It’s about a cooling problem. If you know what I mean.”

The two men exchanged a glance. “Not that Freon shit again.” The young guy was irritated. He pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette and put it behind his ear. “I’m tired of it.” He walked out.

“It’s just that Pat and the boss have an arrangement.” The older guy pulled out some brochures advertising a car show and made a show of fanning them out on the counter. “To others, it seems to be broken. But it works for them.”

“I’m not interfering with anything. I just want to talk to her.”

The guy paused, glanced behind him at a door, then shrugged. “If anyone asks, you snuck in through the automatic gate when a delivery came through.”

A man wearing a cashmere sweater with a hole in the elbow came up to the desk.

“Um, my car’s pulling to the left. It’s a Honda. Accord, ’04.”

“Okay.” The counter guy was noncommittal.

“It’s when I put on the brakes. Sometimes it’s pretty sharp. My wife’s worried about it.”

“Your wife’s smart.”

The man pulled out a piece of paper with a long drug name logo in purple across the top, and a penned list of parts. “I know what parts I need.”

“Take it to the shop. I can recommend a couple of good ones. Buddies of mine. Won’t gouge you too bad. And you won’t get killed next week. Good deal.”

The doctor’s manhood had been challenged. “I’ve already got it up on floor jacks.”

The counter guy sighed. “Be a few minutes.” He took the list and disappeared through the door, leaving it half open. Late afternoon sun spilled through.

The doctor sat down on a recycled bucket seat with Smurf decals on the back, pulled out a Chilton’s, and opened to a grease-stained page. He stared intently at a photograph of a disassembled brake.

Bernal waited a few moments, then went around the counter and through the door.

_______

He found Patricia
 in a narrow area surrounded by stainless steel medical refrigerators plastered with biohazard warning signs and yellowing doctor/patient cartoons, many of them featuring large-breasted nurses. The politically incorrect cartoons showed the age of these refrigerators. And the age of the dangerous but still-marketable chlorofluorocarbons inside them.

“Thanks for helping me out last night.” Patricia Foote stacked compressors on something that looked like a golf cart. She clicked something with her toe and the golf cart whizzed off, without driver or other guidance.

Bernal thought he could see where guide wires had been buried in the ground.

“You’re welcome. I hope it worked out.” He thought about Ignacio’s coming back here to have sex with his abused employee.

“Oh, it worked out fine.”

“I have a question for you.”

“What?”

“Yesterday, when you towed that Hummer—” 

“Haven’t you already asked me about that?”

Bernal was startled by her sharpness. “I wasn’t going to ask you about that. I just wanted to know, do you guys deliver stuff there?”

“Nah.”

“Oh.”

“That lady there, Ungaro. She comes here to pick up. Come on, I’ll show you.”

He followed her out of the dead end with the medical refrigerators and past a rack of massive pumps, the hex nuts that held their flanges the size of walnuts. The yard was amazingly trim and well-organized. Parts lay on racks, bar codes stenciled on their sides. They passed the dismantling area. Bent, torn, and flame-blackened cars, the gouges of their final accidents still shiny, snuggled against each other with the easy familiarity of the damned. Several had already been eviscerated. Another driverless golf cart scooted by, this one holding a box full of electrical cables.

Patricia sucked a breath through her nose, and Bernal realized that she was crying. “Why? Why all this shit? It’s stressful. I got a spot, you know? A good spot. I’m 
good
 at this shit. Learned it from a boyfriend, in high school. Not ... I wasn’t in high school anymore. Should have been, I guess. But after the accident and everything . . . well, no one expected much of me after that, and I don’t guess they got it. Merrick knew cars and shit. Really knew ’em, but he wasn’t one of these guys like around here, it wasn’t like he ran carnival rides in the summer and scared kids. You know?”

“I think so.”

“He, like, knew what things were like, underneath, inside. Why they did the things they did. Not people. No. People were, what did he call them? Dark boxes?” 

“Black boxes?”

“Yes. Right!” And in her pleasure at his getting the right answer, a smile almost made it to her face. Almost, but it glanced off some invisible obstruction and sank again. “Like your head is shut in a black box, and it can’t see nothing or hear nothing when you try to think about how people work. I know that. I know that feeling now. I learned how to do all that stuff. Fix cars and computers and lawnmowers and shit. Couldn’t do anything at school, but I had the way for that. So I don’t... I don’t want to lose this place, you know? There’s a lot of shit, sure, but what place in the world doesn’t have a lot of shit? It’s all a matter of how you handle it. How you take it on.”

She led him to a back area, where random gear lay piled on pallets.

“Your friend Muriel came around asking about the woman in that lab where I met you. Ungaro. Her company’s always been a good customer here. Picked up a lot of interesting stuff. Merrick would have loved that stuff she needs.”

“‘Would have’?”

“Merrick’s dead.”

“How?”

“Merrick pulled some leaf springs off an old truck. Those things are whippy. He made ... I don’t know why, it wasn’t like for a history project or anything, he usually didn’t care about stuff like that... a crossbow. Big-ass thing. His parents never seemed to care much, but his mom did say that it made it hard to park the car in the garage. She was always worried about scratching the paint. But they didn’t ask what the thing was for.” 

“What did he use for arrows?”

She gave him an appraising look, and he wondered if his choice to be practical rather than sympathetic had been the right one. “Those green fence posts, the kind you string square mesh on. They have flanges, like rockets. Merrick, he... they said suicide. Screwup, is what I think. He cocked the thing, just to see, you know, what tension you need. He went to readjust something at the piece of plywood he used as a target, and some bunch of crap fell down, set the crossbow off. His parents always packed the garage with shit, you know? Magazine, cans—anyway, something dropped. The fence post went. . . right through him. I ran away from home the next day. Maybe they still think I had something to do with it, I don’t know. I had other things to worry about.” 

She gestured at a shelf. “Take a look at it. This is Ungaro’s stuff. She’s late getting it. Maybe you’ll learn something. I’ll be right back.”

He watched her swing off. Whatever had happened between her and Ignacio the previous night had increased the confidence of her movement. He didn’t want to think about what that might have been. His own sexual needs were pretty much straight down the middle. He wasn’t embarrassed about that. But sometimes what other people did for pleasure still startled him.

The shelf was loaded with tiny metal nozzles. The tubing that had once connected them lay neatly coiled next to them. At the end of the shelf was a pair of large compressors. From what Bernal could tell, all hooked up, they would have pushed air through the tubes and out of the nozzles. Something from a Jacuzzi? It seemed excessive, though they might have been for a very large one. The compressors were marked Aker Finnyard.

Madeline Ungaro hadn’t picked this stuff up. That was interesting, but didn’t really add much to what he already knew.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mr. Independent Testimony.” Bernal turned to find Ignacio behind him, staring at him with gray-green eyes.

“I came to see if Patricia was all right,” Bernal said. 

“Okay. And is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. What would it take for you to know?”

“I don’t—”

“Maybe a few hours with her bare skin and a magnifying glass? Would you like a chance at that, eh?” 

“What’s this stuff for?” Bernal pointed at the nozzles and compressors.

“Eh?” Ignacio seemed taken aback by the change of topic. “Looks like icebreaker hull stuff ... hey. Hey. You planning on buying them? No. No, because they’re already under consignment. Never mind what they are.” 

Some icebreakers used bubbles to break ice adhesion on their hulls. It looked like Ungaro had been planning some extensions to Hesketh’s body plans. “So, you maintain client confidentiality?”

“Sure do. People got their business and like to deal with those as don’t blab about it. You got any questions I might feel like answering?”

“You ever see a woman named Muriel Inglis around here?”

“I don’t do much direct customer work. I leave that up to my employees. But there are some kinds of stuff I like handling myself.” He stepped a few inches closer.

“Older woman. Nice dresser.” Bernal inclined his head at Ungaro’s icebreaker gear, not wanting to set things off by moving too much. He was terrified of the other man, but he would be damned if he’d show it. He’d never been able to dominate other men physically, though he could give a good account of himself if absolutely necessary.

“More poking around!” Ignacio was outraged. “I know just who you mean. She sauntered in, just like you, and—”

“Ignaz—” Patricia had returned.

“Don’t call me that!” He closed his eyes. “I hate it when you call me that.”

She thrust out her chin. “I’ll call you what I want.”

“What?
”

“Bernal’s here to help me. To get away from your shit. So I can call you what I want, Ignaz.”

“Come here.” Ignacio’s voice was now quiet.

“No .. . I ...”

“Come here.”

Bernal wanted to yell at her to run but wasn’t sure that was quite the right thing to do, and she stepped forward before he could think of what would be better.

Without any windup, Ignacio slapped her. He was standing right next to Bernal, and the rest of his body barely moved. The sound of the slap was loud among the shelves. Her head jerked, but she didn’t put a hand up to her reddening cheek. Instead, she just looked at Ignacio. Just him, past Bernal, as if Bernal was not even there.

Before Bernal could move, Ignacio had shoved him back against the shelves. His arm was like iron.

“Go back to work, Patricia.” Ignacio spoke gently. “I got some things to do. We can talk this over a bit later.”

Patricia turned and walked away.

Bernal stared after her, unable to suppress a feeling of betrayal.

“Not a great idea,” Bernal said.

“Don’t talk to me about my ideas. You broke into a dangerous industrial area. I mean, you could end up in a car that gets picked up by the magnet, dropped in the compactor. And wearing a nicer jacket than when you gave me shit last night. A real pity.”

Bernal tugged at his leather collar. “Jesus. Don’t you think they’d investigate you? Shut this place down? And don’t ask what it would do to your insurance rates.” Bernal tried to play it light. But he knew that people could kill you, even when it didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

“ Yeah. The human body is such an annoyingly 
physical
 thing, isn’t it? Just another form of toxic waste, really. And you’re right about those premiums. Eat you alive. Come on. Let me ... escort you out.”

They walked through the narrow aisles between the car parts.

A cell phone played the first few bars of 
The Flying Dutchman.
 Ignacio stopped near a stack of wheel rims and pulled it out. He put it between his ear and his shoulder. With his other hand, he pulled out a savage-looking serrated knife and pressed it against Bernal’s throat.

“Yeah?” As he talked, Ignacio looked off down the wide aisle.

“Those things have decent magnets on them.” He was all business. “But, I don’t know, that mercury . . . Look, you know as well as I do that they use security as a way of getting out of taking care of their waste. Look at that crap from Area 51. If they 
did
 have aliens there, they’d have died from the PCBs and the heavy metals.” He laughed. “And it’s these bastards from Liverwurstmore ... I mean, they’ll try to sell you a coffee maker and tell you it’s an industrial annealer. Am I right, or am I right? So you got to be careful... look, tell you what. I’ll take four of them for, oh, two thousand each, and check them out. Take ’em apart, run some tests. We’ll spread the risk. Sound good?”