Terminal (5 page)

B
obby had done his checking. And when he called, I’d been ready for his questions:

“All I got is this, Bobby. One of them, big guy, he did some work. Delivering money.”

“For her?”

“With
her. Bodyguard work.
”

“We do that…” he mused, thinking.

I waited.

“You never joined us,” he said. Not an accusation; a fact.

“I joined
you,”
I reminded him. Again.

When I pulled into the shop a few days later, Bobby was waiting. “The other guys are out back, Burke. Okay?”

“Okay. You want me to leave Pansy out here?”

“Fuck, no! She might eat one of the cars.”

Bobby led the way, me following, Pansy on my left, just slightly in front of each stride.

There was only one car in the back—a Mustang. And three men—two a few years older than Bobby, the other more like my age.

They all had prison faces. The older guy had a regular haircut and was wearing a dark jacket over a white shirt, sunglasses hiding his eyes. The other two were much bigger men, flanking the guy in the sunglasses like they were used to standing that way. One was blond, the other dark, both with kind of long hair, wearing white T-shirts over jeans and boots.

The blond had tattoos on both arms. In case anyone could miss where he got them, he had chains tattooed on both wrists. Black leather gloves on his hands. The dark one had calm eyes; he stood with his hands in front of him, right hand holding his left wrist. On the back of his right hand were the crossed lightning bolts.

I stopped a few feet short of the triangle. Pansy immediately came to a sitting position just in front of me. Her eyes pinned the blond—she knew.

Bobby stepped into the space between us, speaking to the older guy in the middle.

“This is Burke. The guy I told you about.”

The older guy nodded to me. I nodded back. He made a “come closer” gesture. I stepped forward. So did Pansy.

The blond rolled his shoulders, watching Pansy. “The dog do any tricks?” he asked.

The hair on the back of Pansy’s neck stood up. I patted her head to keep her calm.

“Like what?” I asked him.

The blond’s voice was half snarl, half sneer. “I don’t fucking know. Like shake hands?”

“She’ll shake anything she gets in her mouth,” I told him, a smile on my face to say I wasn’t threatening him.

The older guy laughed. “Bobby vouches for you. That’s enough. If we can help you, we will.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “And I’m willing to pay my way.”

“Good enough,” he said. “What do you need?”

“I know you,” the blond suddenly blurted out.

I looked at his face—I’d never seen him before. “I don’t know you,” I said, my voice neutral.

“You were in Auburn, right?” he said, as if daring me to deny it. “I saw you on the yard.”

I shrugged—Auburn was a big place.

“You mixed with niggers,” the blond said.

“I mixed with my friends,” I said. “Same as you did.”

“I said
niggers!”

“I heard you. You hear me?” I said, knowing the price of showing weakness to one of his kind.

The blond rolled his shoulders again, cracking the knuckles of one gloved fist.

“B.T., I told you what Burke did for me,” Bobby put in. No anxiety in his voice, just setting the record straight.

“Maybe you like niggers?” the blond said, a step away from chesting me.

No point keeping my voice neutral any longer—he’d take it for fear. “What’s your problem, pal?”

The blond looked at me, watching my face. “I lost money on you.”

“What?” I said, honestly confused.

“I fucking lost money on you. I remember now. You was a fighter, right? You fought that nigger. I forget his name…the one that was a pro light-heavy?”

Ah.
That
nonsense. The black guy had been a for-real contender before he beat a guy to death over a traffic accident. I don’t remember how it got started—although I still figure the Prof for the culprit—but it ended up with a bet that I couldn’t go three rounds with him.

I remember sitting on the stool in my corner waiting for the bell to start the first round, the Prof whispering in my ear. “Send the fool to school, Burke,” reminding me how we had it scripted.

I was a good fifteen pounds lighter than the black guy, and quite a bit faster. Everybody betting on me to last the three rounds was expecting me to keep a jab in his face, bicycle backward, use the whole ring. Make him catch me. That’s what he expected, too.

When the bell sounded, he came off his stool like he was jet-propelled. I threw a pillow-soft jab in his general direction and started back–pedaling to the ropes. The black guy didn’t waste any time countering. He walked through my jab and pulled his right hand all the way down to his hip, trying for one killer punch that would end it all.

That was when I stepped forward and fired a left hook. Caught him flush on the chin as he was coming in, and down he went.

But then the plan came unglued. He took an eight-count, shaking his head to clear it. He got to his feet so smoothly that I knew I hadn’t really hurt him. The black guy waved me in, grinning. I took him up on the offer and pinned him to the ropes, firing shot after shot. But he wasn’t just a tough guy—he was a pro. He blocked almost everything with his forearms, picking off my punches until I realized I was running out of gas.

I leaned against him to get a breath. He buried his head in my chest, loading up an uppercut. I collapsed all my weight on his neck, stepping on his toes, not giving him an inch of room to punch. The guard in charge of the bell rang it early—he’d bet on me, too.

I let him chase me through the second round, still an easy step faster than he was. He wasn’t going to bull-rush me again, so he just took his time, taking what I gave him, pounding my shoulder, my forearm, whatever I blocked with, waiting for my hands to come down. He hit like a hammer. My arms ached so much from blocking I could hardly lift them.

He caught me good at the beginning of the third round—I felt a rib go from a right hook. He doubled up, catching me on the bridge of the nose with the same hand.

“Grab him!” I heard the Prof scream. I brought my gloves up over his elbows, pulling his hands under my armpits, until the referee finally forced us apart. He butted me on the break, aiming for my bloody nose. I staggered back, letting my knees wobble to get closer to the ground.

When he came over to finish me, I threw a Mexican left hook—so far south of the border that I connected squarely with his cup.

The black guy dropped both hands to his crotch, and I launched a haymaker at his exposed head—missed by a foot and fell down from the effort. The referee wiped off my gloves, calling it a slip, killing time.

He came at me again. I couldn’t breathe through my nose, so I spit out the mouthpiece, catching a sharp right-hand lead a second later. I heard the Prof yell, “Thirty seconds!,” just before another shot dropped me to the canvas.

I was on my feet by the count of six, with just enough left in my tank to dodge his wild lunge. He went sailing past me into the ropes. I drove a rabbit punch to the back of his head and slammed my shoulder into him at the same time, pinning him to the ropes with his back to me. He whipped an elbow into my stomach and spun around, hooking with both hands, knowing he was almost out of time.

I grabbed his upper body. He blasted at my ribs. I drove my forehead hard into his eyes, not giving him room to punch. If I’d let go of him, I would have fallen for good.

I was out on my feet when I heard the bell. It took four men to pull him off me. We won almost six hundred cartons of cigarettes that day. The State even threw in a free bridge for my missing teeth—I’d have to wait for my go-home to have the deviated septum repaired.

“If you lost money that day, you bet on the other guy,” I told the blond. “The bet was that I couldn’t last the three rounds.”

“I bet on you to win,” the idiot said. Fucking sucker had gone for the fifty-to-one shot.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“You didn’t even try and beat that nigger,” the blond said, like he was accusing me of treason.

“I was trying to survive,” I told him reasonably. “Look, pal, it’s not a big deal. How much did you lose?”

“Three fucking cartons,” he said. Like it was his sister’s virginity.

“Tell you what I’ll do. That was a few years ago, right? Figure the price has gone up a bit—how about a half-yard for each carton? A hundred and fifty bucks, and we’ll call it square?”

The blond stared at me, still not sure if I was laughing at him.

“You serious?”

“Dead serious,” I told him, slipping my hand into my coat pocket.

The blond couldn’t make up his mind, his eyes shifting from Pansy to me. The guy with the sunglasses finally closed the books. “Let it go, B.T.,” he said. The blond let out a breath.

“Sure,” he said as he walked over to me, hand open for the money.

Pansy went rigid. Her teeth ground together with a sound like a cement truck shifting into gear.

“I’ll give it to you when I leave,” I told the blond. Even a genius like him got the message. He stepped back against the fence, still flexing the muscles in his arms. Pansy was real impressed.

“Can we do business?” I asked the guy with the sunglasses.

He waved me over to the side, against the fence by the Mustang. I flattened my hand against Pansy’s snout, telling her to stay where she was, and followed him over. I lit a cigarette, feeling Bobby against my back.

“One of your guys did some bodyguard work. Delivered some money to a day-care center. Money was in a little satchel, like a doctor’s bag.”

I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses; he had his hands in his pockets—waiting for me to finish.

“There was a woman with the bodyguard. Maybe he was protecting her, maybe he was guarding the cash, I don’t know.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“The woman, she’s no youngster. Maybe my age, maybe older. And she has a house somewhere outside the city. Big house, nice grounds. Has a guy who works with her: a big fat guy. And maybe a school-bus-type vehicle.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” I told him.

“And you want to know what?”

“All I want to know is who this woman is. And where I can find her.”

“You got a contract for her?”

I thought about it—didn’t know if the bodyguard work was a one-shot deal, or if the Brotherhood was part of the operation.

“She has something I want,” I told him, measuring out the words as carefully as a dealer dropping cocaine on a scale.

He didn’t say anything.

“If you’ve got something working with her…then I’d like to ask you to get this thing I want from her. I’ll pay for it.”

“And if we don’t?”

“Then I just want her name and address.”

He smiled. It might have made a citizen relax; I kept my hands in my pockets. “And for us to get out of the way?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Exactly.”

The blond moved away from the guy in the sunglasses, his back to the fence. Pansy’s huge head tracked his movement as if she was the center of a big clock and he was the second hand.

“B.T.!” Bobby said, a warning in his voice. The blond stopped where he was. He’d be a slow learner to the grave.

“What is this thing you want?” the leader asked.

“It’s nothing you’d want.”

“I don’t know where her stash is.”

“It’s not dope I’m after,” I told him.

The leader took off his sunglasses, looked at them in his hands as though they held the answer to something. He looked up at me. “You’re a hijacker, right? That’s what you do?”

I held my hands together and turned my palms out to him, putting my cards on the table. “I’m looking for a picture—a photograph.”

“Who’s in the picture?”

“A kid,” I told him.

He looked a question at me.

“A little kid—a sex picture, okay?”

The leader looked at the dark-haired guy standing next to him. “I thought it was powder,” he said. “I never asked.”

The leader nodded absently, thinking it through. “Yeah,” he said, “who asks?”

I lit a cigarette, cupping my hands around the flame, watching the leader from the corner of my eye. He was scratching at his face with one finger, his eyes behind the sunglasses again.

“Bobby, you mind taking your friend inside for a couple of minutes? We’ve got something to talk over out here, okay?”

Bobby put his hand on my shoulder, gently tugging me toward the garage. I slapped my hand against my side, telling Pansy to come along. She didn’t move, still watching the blond, memorizing his body. “Pansy!” I snapped at her. She gave the blond one last look and trotted over to my side.

Back in the garage, I opened both front doors of the Plymouth and signaled Pansy to climb in.

“B.T.’s okay, Burke,” Bobby said. “He’s just a little nuts on the subject of niggers, you know?”

“No big deal,” I assured him.

We waited in silence. Pansy’s dark-gray fur merged into the dim interior of the Plymouth. Only her eyes glowed—she missed the blond. I closed the door, but didn’t click it.

The garage door opened, and they came inside. The leader sat on the Plymouth’s hood, leaving his boys standing off to one side.