Shackles

I made a U-turn and parked in front of the building. Walking inside was like entering an incredibly cluttered hermit’s cave: gloomy, dank-smelling, jammed to the exposed rafters with shelves and piles and tiers of every imaginable kind of junk. There was nobody moving around in there; but through an open side door I could see someone maneuvering an ancient forklift in the adjacent yard. I could also see what happened to be a dimly lighted office over that way.

There were no aisles as such; I had to blaze a roundabout path to the office. Along the way I saw the remains of an ancient buckboard, a beat-up Chinese gong with a faded dragon painted on it, at least a thousand dust-laden and mildewed paperbacks on bowed shelves, a wine cask that somebody had made into a child’s playhouse, bins overflowing with age-crusted hand tools, a Rube Goldberg machine with arms and legs and wires and a use I couldn’t even begin to guess at, horse collars and pickle crocks and rows of cobwebbed mason jars and radios with broken cases and a Stop sign that had been used for target practice and a mannikin with a crumbling maroon velvet dress draped over it. The whole place had the look of a madman’s museum filled with exhibits that made no sense and that had lain unattended and unviewed for decades. There ought to have been another sign on the front of the building: WE HAVE IT, BUT NOBODY IN HIS RIGHT MIND WOULD WANT IT.

The office was a wallboard and glass affair, small and as cluttered as the rest of the place, the glass so fly- specked and grime-streaked that it was mostly opaque. One of the jumble of objects inside was a desk; another was a man in the chair behind it. “Fatter than me and that’s fat,” Mrs. Ruiz had said of Frank Tucker’s last visitor in Vacaville. Her description and the Cadillac Seville outside made that man and this one the same. He must have weighed close to 350 pounds, and in the weak light from a gooseneck lamp he looked like nothing so much as a huge toad sitting on a stump. Bald brown head, rutted and warty brown face, little half-lidded eyes that looked sleepy but would miss little or nothing of what they surveyed. When he opened his mouth I would not have been surprised to see a long, thin tongue flick out and snag one of the flies that moved sluggishly through the air around him.

The only part of him that moved when I walked in was his mouth: It curved upward at the corners in a professional smile-a moneylender’s smile. He said in a deep, throaty toad’s voice, “Howdy, friend. Thanks for stopping in. Tell you right off you picked a good day. Bargain specials galore, no reasonable offer refused. What-all you interested in?”

“Elmer Rix, for starters,” I said. “Would that be you?”

“Sure would. You got business with me?”

“With someone you know.”

“Who would that be?”

“Frank Tucker.”

A change came over him, the subtle kind that you might miss unless you were looking for it. Outwardly, nothing at all happened; the smile stayed fixed, the expression otherwise blank and the eyes half-lidded. But beneath the surface he got hard, rock hard: Fat turned to stone so suddenly that he might have gazed upon the face of Medusa. Those amphibian eyes measured me, dissected me with the same emotionless precision a biology teacher uses to dissect a real toad.

He said with false geniality, “Hey, do I look like the missing persons bureau? I sell junk, not information.”

“Are you telling me you don’t know Frank Tucker?”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. I looked back, not giving him any more or any less than he was giving me. I had my hand in my jacket pocket, touching the butt of the.22, but it would have been a mistake to put him under the gun. Elmer Rix was no O. Barnwell; intimidation and threats wouldn’t work with him. The hardness was strength as well as stubbornness and probable veniality. A tub of guts with guts.

I said, playing it a different way, “Look, I need to talk to Tucker. As soon as possible. He won’t mind when he hears what I’ve got to say.”

“What would that be?”

“I’ve got a job for him.”

“That so? What kind of job?”

“Do I need to spell it out?”

“I’m a good listener, friend. Try me.”

“Muscle work.”

“Bodybuilding, that what you mean?”

“Come on, Rix, let’s cut the bullshit, okay? We both know what Tucker hires out to do.”

“Man in my business gets to know a lot of things,” he said. “Point is, how do you know?”

“Somebody I know knows Dino.”

“Dino who?”

“Friend of Tucker’s,” I said, and I didn’t have to feign the impatience in my voice. “The word I got was that if I wanted to talk to Tucker, I should come over here and see Elmer Rix at the Catchall Shop. So here I am. Now do you point me to Tucker or do I find somebody else to give my dough to?”

He watched me a while longer before he said, “What kind of job and how much you paying?”

So far, so good. “I own a trucking outfit in Winters. For a while I didn’t have much competition; now I got heavy competition and I don’t like it. I want the competition to close up shop, go somewheres else. I want Tucker to fix it so that happens.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Rix said through his smile. “You didn’t say how much.”

“Top dollar. Plus a bonus if my competition is gone within three months. I’ll work out the exact numbers with Tucker.”

“Uh-huh. You know my name-what’s yours?”

I said, “Canino. Art Canino.” And I thought: If he asks for ID, I’ll have to put him under the gun after all.

But he didn’t ask for ID. He said, still smiling, “Well, you sure do tell a wild story, Mr. Canino. If I did know somebody named Frank Tucker, and I ain’t saying I do, I don’t know as I could recommend he take on a job like the one you’re offering.”

“Suppose we let him decide that.”

“Sure. If I knew him and how to get hold of him.”

Now I saw what he was after. Still a little slow on the uptake; still a little rusty. But the important thing was that it meant I had him hooked.

I asked, “How much do you want?”

“Some of the stuff you see in here, I’m selling it for somebody else. On consignment, like they say. I get ten percent.”

“From Tucker? Or from me, extra?”

“From the customer,” he said. “Always.”

I put up a mild protest to make it look good. “What the hell? That means I got to pay a hundred and ten percent.”

“Everything costs these days, Mr. Canino. You want a job done right, you go to the best people. You go to the best people, you pay high prices right down the line.”

“Okay, okay. But I’m not putting up any cash until I see Tucker and we settle on a price.”

“Hey, nobody’s asking you to.”

“So where do I find him?”

“Tell you what,” Rix said. “You go away someplace, come back here in an hour. No, make that an hour and a half.”

“How come so long?”

“I ain’t had my lunch yet.”

“Listen, this deal is important-”

“So’s my lunch,” he said, and he was dead serious.

“Will Tucker be here when I come back?”

“Ninety minutes and then you find out, right?”

We traded another long look, him with that amphibian smile pulling up the corners of his fat mouth. Only now it was genuine. Big toad king sitting on the throne in his cave full of decaying junk, holding court and enjoying every minute of it because in this place, this little kingdom, he made the rules and levied high tariffs for the privilege of his