Everything but the Squeal

27

She went home.

That was a surprise.

Home was a house north of Sunset in Beverly Hills. Only downtown Tokyo was more expensive. I'd had to fall back a block or so after she turned her tidy little fifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes left off Sunset. There wasn't enough traffic to cover us. As extra insurance I doused Alice's headlights, hoping the Beverly Hills cops weren't anywhere around. No question whose side they'd be on.

As the neighborhood got better, the Mountain got worse. We were out of his element. “Maybe we should have bought a map to the stars' homes,” he grumbled. We'd passed half a dozen kids flagging the night air with folded pieces of paper directing the credulous to the homes of people who'd been dead for years. “Long as we're up here, we could drop in on Jane Fonda. She could tell me how to get down to half a ton.”

We were parked across the street and half a block up, still hoping for no cops. The Mountain was listing movie stars in no particular order, clearly disgruntled. He'd gotten to Leslie Nielsen, so it had been quite a while.

“Leslie Nielsen?” I asked in spite of myself. “Is he the one with the aqualung?”

“That's Lloyd Bridges,” he said with infinite scorn. “His kids probably live up here too. There's all sorts of people live up here. What I want to know is, why the fuck are we here?”

“She's the one,” I said. “Just shut up and sit back. Work on your cellulite or something.” The air was ripe with Mountain's pong. “And roll down the window, if you don't mind.”

“Can I smoke?”

“You can light fire to your feet if you want to.” I hadn't known that the Mountain smoked. Now that I thought about it, it made sense. You didn't get to be his size without a lot of bad habits.

He pulled a crumpled pack of some unidentifiable off-brand cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit up. Wreathed in smoke, he gave out a relatively comfortable sigh. “Why don't we just kick the door in?” he asked.

“They're not here,” I said, my nose twitching toward the smoke. Ancient yearnings arose within me. “It doesn't make any sense for them to be here. She gave them to Birdie.”

“Birdie?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Give me one of those.”

“You?” he said. “I didn't know-”

“Just give me the fucking thing.” He tossed me a cigarette and I let it dangle uselessly from my mouth. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Rub my legs together to make a spark?”

“Jesus, you're touchy,” he said, handing me a book of matches. “Want me to kick you in the chest to get it going?” He coughed up a blubbery woof of laughter.

I lit the cigarette, my first in two years, and sucked in the smoke, feeling my uvula knocking in protest against the top of my tongue. The nicotine navigated my defenses without apparent effort and filled my lungs, and I got light-headed immediately. All the problems of the world fell away; it was a crossword puzzle and I was a dictionary. I was as definite as Noah Webster. “She'll come out,” I said, blowing smoke, “and we'll follow her, and then we're home.”

“So what's she doing in there?” the Mountain asked. “Lining up her shoes?”

“She's making calls,” I said with absolute certainty. Until that moment I hadn't known what she was doing. “She's freaking out, and she's getting the kids together so she can move them.”

“Move them where?”

“Out of L.A. She has no idea what's going on.”

“Me neither,” said the Mountain, lighting another one. He had apparently eaten the first. “Maybe you'd like to explain.”

I explained, finishing my cigarette and bumming a second in the process. I could quit later. In the meantime, nicotine seemed promising.

“Holy shit,” the Mountain said after five minutes of concentrated explanation. “Let's french-fry her.”

“What's the first thing you do when you make french fries?”

“Chop,” he said. “First you have to chop up the potato.”

“Dibs on that,” I said. “I get to chop. You get to drop the pieces into the fat.”

He exhaled enough smoke to guarantee chemotherapy to most of the Midwest. “So you're saying we wait.” He tried to cross his legs under Alice's dashboard and failed. “The world is too small for me,” he said. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.

By the time she backed her car out of the driveway, it was almost nine. The sun was long gone, the moon was taking a nap behind the clouds, and the straight nine-tenths of the world was heading for bed. The little Mercedes scooted out backward and turned downhill toward Sunset.

I started Alice. “Told you,” I said. “She's got to go somewhere. And where she's going is where they are.”

“Hey,” he said, “if I didn't believe you, why would I be here? Shit, I could be having a great old time mopping tables at the Oki-Burger.”

“Thanks for Apple,” I said, thumping his knee. “Let's turn it around, okay? If I didn't believe you, why would you be here?”

“So okay,” he said. “We're both champs. Just keep her in sight.”

In fact, I nearly lost her as she swung east onto Sunset. The light went yellow and I accelerated through it anyway, hoping she didn't have one eye on the rearview mirror. Some cowboy getting a jump on the red tooted a little Fiat's horn at us with a pipsqueak flatulent sound and swerved around us, making operatic Italian hand gestures out the window. I passed him on the left, hoping Mrs. Brussels hadn't heard the horn, and the Mountain leaned out of the passenger window, made clawing motions toward the guy's throat, and roared at him. The guy driving the Fiat took one look at the Mountain and braked abruptly, then made an immediate right to get out of his vicinity.

“Focus,” I said as Mrs. B. made a right down Doheny. “The enemy is up ahead.” I followed her, gunning Alice's engine to decrease the distance between us as the Mountain subsided into mutinous mutters in the passenger seat.

“Little wop cars,” he grumbled. ”Rinky-dinky little Tinkertoys. How come people don't buy American?”

Since the trade deficit was not the issue at hand, I concentrated on Mrs. Brussels. She drove fast and well, with an aristocratic disregard for lane lines and yellow lights. I'd had to run two more reds by the time she turned left onto Pico, heading east.

“My father works in Detroit,” the Mountain volunteered out of nowhere as we crossed La Cienega. “Thirty-year man. For thirty years he's been putting the same fucking fender on the same fucking car all day long. Then he goes home and drinks two six-packs of Stroh's and falls asleep on the couch with his shoes on. Where do you think she's going?”

“As I already said, where the kids are.” I braked to avoid a head-on as yet another Italian car, driven by someone whose driver's license probably noted that he'd had a pre-frontal lobotomy, turned left in front of me. “But, Jesus, don't let me interrupt your autobiography.”

“What I mainly remember about my mother,” the Mountain continued serenely, “is that she could get his shoes off without waking him up. I thought it was terrific. Now I think about it, I realize she probably could have amputated his legs without waking him up. How many kids you think they'll be?”

“Depends on how many are in L.A. They're selling them in about four states.” A spate of drizzle misted the windshield. Alice's wipers would only have made it worse, so I just locked on the red blurs of the Mercedes’ taillights and kept driving.

“She's turning,” he said.

And she was. She was making a right, turning south onto a little street with a name that might have meant something to the people who lived on it. There were more people on the sidewalks here, and more of the faces were black. The people gathered in front of immaculate four- and six-unit apartments and sat on the fenders of five-year-old cars and watched the world drive by.

“Heartbreak city,” the Mountain said, glancing out the window. “Nobody going noplace.”

“There's something to be said for staying home,” I said. The Mountain greeted this hand-stitched homily with the silence it deserved, and Mrs. Brussels made a left onto Jefferson Boulevard. She lost a little traction on the newly wet road, and her taillights did a brief shimmy. With one of those abrupt transitions that make L.A. the world's most schizophrenic city, we found ourselves in an industrial area.

Here there was no one on the sidewalks. In some blocks there were no sidewalks. The streetlamps layered the damp landscape with a bluish light that turned the Mountain's lips purple. It was not an improvement. Warehouses hunkered down, dark and featureless, behind chain-link fence topped with razor-wire. Behind the fences Dobermans roamed, snapping at moths and waiting for something bigger.

“Nice neighborhood,” the Mountain observed. “What happens when we get there?”

It was an extremely good question. “We park and wait and watch, and when we're sure that we can take the guys inside, we go in and take them,” I said. “Then we set the kids loose.”

The Mountain said nothing.

“Then we go home,” I said lamely.

He lit a cigarette and passed it to me, then lit another for himself. “Boy,” he said, “that's some plan.”

I dragged smoke into my lungs. “It's a little short on details,” I admitted.

“Short?” he said, exhaling a cumulus cloud. “It sounds like a political platform. What are all these guys supposed to be doing while we win the war? Multiplication tables?”

“That's where you come in,” I said as Mrs. Brussels pulled into a driveway. “What we have here is a classic division of labor. You're going to sumo them, and I'm going to finish them off.”

“Great,” he said. “I hope some of them are fat.” I passed the driveway and pulled over to the curb. The drizzle had let up, but the night was darker than Junko's eyes. On the whole, that was good.

“What we're going to do now,” I said, dragging feverishly at the cigarette, “is we're going to count to twenty. Slowly. Then we're going to get out of the car and walk around the block, in the direction away from the gate she just drove through. We're going to count doors and windows. We're going to look for another gate, anything anyone could drive a car through. We're going to keep our mouths shut until we're back at the car.”

“And then what?”

“Then we're going to figure out what to do.”

“I was wondering when we'd get to that,” he said. He waited a moment. “How far have you counted?”

“Sixteen.”

He tapped the dashboard three times, very rapidly. “Twenty coming up,” He said. Then he tapped again and opened his door. Before he got out, he turned back and held out a hand. I found it in the dark and took it. It felt like it was made out of asbestos. “It's been nice knowing you,” he said. Light from somewhere glinted off what might have been teeth.

“Let's total the fuckers,” I said. We got out of the car.

With the Mountain to my left, we paced the sidewalk. He broke stride to step on his cigarette, and his hand went automatically to his pocket. I slapped it away and took the box of wooden matches from his hand. I shoved them into the pocket of my shirt.

“No matches,” I said. “Nothing that anyone might see.”

“Okay if I suck on it?”

“You can jam it into your tear ducts. You can chew it and swallow it. Just don't light it.”

“Falafel,” the Mountain said aggrievedly. “You'd think the man had a plan.”

The warehouse occupied a whole block. It was an extremely dark block. The streetlights had all been put up somewhere where they could keep rich people from tripping over the cracks in the sidewalk. We turned right onto a street named Detroit, a fact I suppressed because I was afraid it might prompt the next chapter of the Mountain's life. I was getting seriously worried.

“What you didn't ask me,” I whispered, as though the oversight were his fault, “was who she was calling.”

“Getting the kids, you said,” he boomed.

I made little lowering motions with my hands, indicating that he should put a damper on the volume. “Question is,” I whispered, “who's delivering them? A bunch of shoe clerks or twelve Arnold Schwarzenegger clones?”

I stopped walking, wrapped the fingers of my right hand through the chain link, and turned to study the warehouse. There were lights visible through the five big transom windows I'd counted so far. The windows were about ten feet off the ground, not useful exit routes unless the floor of the warehouse were raised six or eight feet. As though it had been summoned on cue, a car turned in off Jefferson, pulled up to the warehouse door, and doused its lights. At a single toot of the horn, a door in the warehouse opened, emitting a rectangle of light, and someone who could conceivably have outweighed the Mountain got out of the car and walked around to the passenger door. Through the door of the warehouse came a short, skinny guy who stood behind the giant. The skinny one had something in his hand. The giant opened the passenger door, and two small figures emerged. They couldn't have been more than five feet tall. It was hard to see them, but they seemed to be wrapped in blankets. Thin, knock-kneed legs stuck out below. With the big guy in front of them and the little sharp one behind, the two kids went into the warehouse. The door closed again.

“One big one, one tweak, two kids,” the Mountain announced to the night.

“And no other exits,” I said, clinging to the routine I'd outlined. “So far.” The size of the big one had unnerved me slightly. And what had the skinny one been holding? I began to think longingly of calling the police.

“The kids are on our side,” the Mountain murmured. “We can take the other ones.”

We scouted the remainder of the eastern side of the building and then hurried along the side facing away from Jefferson. There was one big airplane door that you could have driven a Sherman tank through, but I just registered it as the first possible exit and hauled the Mountain along. There was also a gate in the chain link, but it was chained and padlocked from outside, so I ignored it. From this side, you couldn't see who or what was arriving.

The next shipment, as far as we could tell, pulled up to the warehouse after we'd turned right onto the third side of the rectangle that made up the block. There was the same single toot on the horn, and another walking whopper clambered out of the car and waited. The sharp skinny guy re-emerged from the warehouse with the same indefinite object in his hand. This time three small loosely wrapped people were shepherded inside before the door closed.

“Five kids, two oxen, and the same tweak,” the Mountain said, his face pressed up against the chain link. “Okay odds. Let's go get them.”

“There could be more coming. We don't want to lose some of the kids because there's a firefight going on inside the building when the next car arrives. Let's give it ten minutes.”

“Firefight?” The Mountain sounded surprised. “What firefight? I break their spines and you get the kids.”

“Listen,” I said, “we could wind up shooting.” I reached down to touch the little automatic I'd tucked inside the front of my pants. I did it without thinking about it, just to make sure it was there.

“I told you,” the Mountain said, “I hate guns. And there's kids in there.”

“Then go home,” I said. “What do you think, this is a movie? You think we're going to walk in and you're going to flex and they're all going to faint? People are probably going to get shot.”

“Well, fuck a duck,” was all he said. But he looked betrayed.

I pulled Alice's keys out of my jeans and held them out to him. “Go,” I said. “It wasn't a good idea to begin with. You should be at Tommy's, not here. Take the car and beat it.”

The Mountain took a step backward and looked down at the sidewalk. His face twisted and retwisted and then settled itself into an expression I'd never seen before.

“I can't drive,” he said.

The drizzle began again. “What’re you, Greenpeace? Everybody can drive. This is Los Angeles.”

“I can't.” He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the warehouse, at the pavement, at everything except me. I held the keys out for a moment longer and then recognized the look on the Mountain's face. He was telling a lie. It was the first time I'd ever seen the Mountain tell a lie. He was terrible at it.

It was my turn to back away. I felt like the Marquis de Sade trapped into a conversation with Florence Nightingale. I felt like the personification of corruption in a political cartoon.

“Let's call a cab,” I said. It was the best I could do.

“Skip it,” the Mountain said, looking at his left foot as though it had just appeared at the end of his leg-shoe and all-through spontaneous generation. “Just tell me what we're supposed to do, that's all.”

“We're going to wait,” I said, suppressing an urge to hug him. Like Apple, I couldn't have gotten my arms around him. “We're going to wait and see who else goes in, and then we're going to decide. Okay?”

“Sure,” he said without looking up at me.

“And I'll tell you what,” I added as a car turned in to the warehouse from the opposite direction, sweeping us briefly with its headlights, “we're going to wait across the street and sitting down. Okay?” I touched his arm.

“You're in charge,” he said negligently, trusting me with his life. Trusting me with his life was easier for him than telling another lie.

“And we'll count,” I said as yet another bruiser climbed out of the car in front of the warehouse. The same little sharpie came out to serve as rear guard to the little girl who emerged from the passenger side. “We'll count very carefully. Right?”

The two of us crossed the street. I sat on a strip of grass that paralleled the sidewalk.

“Right,” the Mountain said, still standing. “That's three fatsos, six kids, and the little coat hanger.”

“Who has something in his hand,” I said.

“It's probably a vitamin,” the Mountain said, sitting next to me on the wet grass. “Weensy little guy like that needs building up, probably worries his mother sick. You could X-ray him with a squint.”

A couple of urban crickets chirped in a ratchety fashion as we sat there. The drizzle continued. My confidence, such as it had been, was being washed away. We'd gotten them there, all right. If the ones we'd seen were the only ones coming, maybe we could handle them. Maybe. I'd have felt a lot better if the Mountain had been president of the local chapter of the National Rifle Association instead of a benevolent fat guy whose idea of mortal combat was throwing Jackie Gleason out of a six-foot circle.

Nonetheless, I worked on pumping my adrenaline. I'd just finished a deep-breathing exercise that Eleanor had taught me, the New Age equivalent of “Whistle a Happy Tune,” and was starting to stand up so I could go in and massacre everyone more than five feet tall, when the Mountain gave my arm a yank that almost dislocated it.

“Squat,” he said. “Somebody coming.”

Another car, the fourth that we'd seen, cruised through the gates and pulled up to the door of the warehouse.

“One fatty or two?” the Mountain whispered. “Five dollars says one.” The car's horn honked.

“Two,” I said. We shook. I lost. The coat hanger came out again, vitamin in hand, and escorted a single guy with the bulk of a mature elk, plus one child, into the warehouse. Same procedure: the fatty went first, the kid was in the middle, and the little guy brought up the rear, brandishing his vitamin.

“They've got it down,” I said. “They've done this before.”

“Give it three minutes,” the Mountain said, assuming command. Maybe he heard the uncertainty in my voice. “Then we move.”

Four minutes later we were running down the block and through the gate, heading toward the left side of the warehouse. We'd decided not to go for the door on the first pass. I didn't know whether it was locked from inside, and I also wanted to see whether there were people in there who might have arrived before we did. The finish line for our run was the second transom window, which had been propped open.

By the time we reached it, the Mountain was wheezing like a man in an iron lung. Nevertheless, he squatted down and held up his arms. I stepped onto his shoulders and he braced my legs with his hands, exhaled an imperial gallon of air, and stood up.

He rose so fast that I scraped my forehead on the stucco and almost toppled us backward by pushing myself away from the wall. Nothing bleeds like a cut on the head. I could feel blood running down my face as the Mountain steadied himself and I peered in through the window.

What I saw at first were trucks. There were three of them, big mothers, with the Cap'n Cluckbucket logo painted on their sides. They were standard refrigerated tractor-trailer semis, the same models that cart California lettuce to salad bars all over the continent. These trucks held kids: special orders being delivered in response to requests. The kids who traveled in the backs of the trucks were used to the cold. They'd been through obedience school.

It was hard to get a grasp of the internal geography of the warehouse. Bare bulbs under iron cones hung at the ends of wires here and there, creating islands of bright light that gleamed off the tops of the trucks. In the spaces between the splashes of light, it was dark. I felt the Mountain tremble beneath my weight as I waited for my eyes to adjust.

High up on the opposite wall was a large picture window. On the other side of the window was undoubtedly what had been the foreman's office when this had been a legitimate operation, a vantage point from which the highest-paid guy in the room had supervised the loading and unloading of the trucks. Lights were on behind the glass, but I couldn't see anyone. Then a child let out a shrill scream, and I followed the sound all the way to the right and found myself staring at a small circle of people gathered in a dark spot near the door.

There was a sudden disturbance at the center of the circle as people took a step back, and the child screamed again, and my heartbeat began to pound in my ears. Somebody laughed. It took all my willpower to ignore the screams and the laugh, and count the people.

Mrs. Brussels was the first one I spotted, still in her trendy wrinkled linen. She had her back to me. The children were probably in the middle of the circle, since I couldn't see them. I counted five grim giants on the circle's perimeter. That was one more than we had counted, so someone had arrived before we had. As far as I was concerned, that cinched it. We were outweighed, even with the Mountain in reserve.

I grabbed the edge of the transom window with one hand and leaned down to tap the Mountain's wrist with the other. At the signal he crouched, and I stepped onto solid ground. ‘There's another one,” I whispered. “That makes five. I don't know how many kids. I didn't see the little one, but I think he's hurting a kid.” Another shrill cry shivered through the window, and the features on the Mountain's face squeezed together, tighter than the knot at the end of a sausage. He started to move toward the door, and I put a hand on his arm.

“It's too many,” I said. “We've got to call the cops.”

“Forget it, asshole,” Max Bruner said from behind me. “They're already here.”