desperate contortion and baked red-brown by the sun, swore he remembered a guy named Weed, an old guy who claimed he had come from a rich family in New York. No, he didn’t know his full name. A prostitute walked up in a short, dusty dress and asked us if we wanted a partner for a threesome. A patrol car gave us the once-over and drove away. We crossed the railroad main line a dozen times, going back and forth. So it went for an hour. Most police work was even more boring than this.
“Pull in there,” Kate said, pointing to a shady area under the overpass, “if you won’t put the damned top up. I need to check my messages.” She pulled a cell phone out. “Jesus, I can’t even see the phone display in this glare.”
I was sweating, too, so I drove slowly toward the shade, north from Lincoln, right onto what looked like an access road beside the overpass. It was really old South Seventh Avenue, which once crossed the railroad at grade, and was frequently blocked by trains. After the overpass was built, it was blocked off at the tracks, making a street that went nowhere. We hadn’t checked back here for a lead on Weed or whatever the hell his name was.
The area under the overpass was still seedy with industrial castoffs. I pulled back as far as the road went, letting my eyes adjust and feeling the temperature drop instantly when the sun went away. I slipped the car into park and looked at the lovely old mission-style building of Union Station, a hundred yards to the east and across the tracks. My grandmother had taken me there as a boy to see passenger trains like the Sunset Limited, the Imperial, and the Golden State. Now they were all history. The tracks were empty, torn out or sprouting weeds. It made me sad.
My eyes adjusted to the dark and I realized we had landed in a little colony of some kind. Groups of men watched us from a distance, men whose clothes and skin had all been turned the same color of brown-black by the sun. I counted a dozen I could see. We had landed in their world, cut off from the street grid, shaded from the sun. I couldn’t believe we were welcome.
Just outside my peripheral vision, I saw movement. I turned to see three men walking toward us from a squat building under the concrete pilings. They were younger, moving without the beaten down arthritic shuffle of the transients a block over. They weren’t walking past. They were walking toward us. Something in their expressions…
“What are you doing?” Kate closed her phone.
“I was a Boy Scout,” I said, pulling my Colt Python.357 magnum revolver from the locked console compartment and concealing it between my legs. “‘Be Prepared.’”
“You got the time?” asked a muscular black man in a white sleeveless T-shirt coming to my side of the car. I told him the time. He said, “Nice car.” I agreed it was. His buddies surrounded us. I couldn’t see each of them at once. I felt my heart rate take off.
“So what you want down here?” he asked. I kept my hands in my lap, covering the butt of the Python. He went on, “Score some crack? Never seen you before.”
His buddy said, “Lots of white folks come in from the suburbs to buy crack from the brothers, but we never seen you here before.”
Another voice, high-pitched, said, “Maybe they just lost.”
“Lost, my ass!” came a call from the gloomy periphery of the street.
The leader, Muscle Man, thought about that, looking at us intently. “You lost, we give you directions. But you got to pay the toll.”
The high-pitched voice behind me said, “Pay the toll to the troll.” Everybody laughed except Muscle Man. Even I laughed.
Kate flashed her badge. “Get lost, asshole. We’re busy.”
“Sure, Officer,” Muscle Man said. He walked in a small circle, breathing in and out deeply. He came to face us again. “You heard her, let’s get lost.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get lost.” This from the Tenor. I turned my head enough to take him in. He was the biggest of the bunch, a giant with walnut-colored skin, wearing a very long lime green T-shirt and long-short pants. He also sported a sideways green ball cap atop what looked to my unhip eyes like a skullcap. His sneakers were smaller than destroyers. In other words, he looked like every suburban kid at the mall. He walked over to Kate’s side of the car.
I let my eyes again take in our surroundings. The street around us was really not much more than an alley. Old warehouses rose up on either side of us. Traffic rolled over us on the overpass. In the distance I could hear jets taking off from Sky Harbor. A train whistle came from the west. We might as well have been a hundred miles from any help.
“You hear?” said Muscle Man. “We don’t want to get lost.”
“Maybe we’ll take this car, understand what I’m sayin’,” said the thin man.
It was a curious expression, “understand what I’m sayin’.” Was it born of unempowered people desperate to be heard, accustomed to the powerful classes failing to “understand”? That would be a fine politically correct paper to present at the Modern Language Association-my amused subconscious was actually thinking this. My conscious felt the heavy butt of the handgun against my concealing hands as the thin man walked up beside my door and leaned a dirty arm on it. He had large black freckles on his face, large, expressive eyes. His hands were scarred and sinewy.
“Maybe we’ll take her badge,” said the Tenor. “Badge like that bring some good money on the street. Shit, maybe we’ll take her.” He slouched against Kate’s side of the car, giggling “Pay the toll to the troll.”
Someone from the shadows repeated, “Pay the toll to the trolls.”
Another voice from the gloom: “Kill him and rape the bitch!”
This is how it was going to go down: the Muscle Man was on my side of the car, joined by the thin guy with freckles. On Kate’s side, the giant Tenor, his hat cockeyed. The chorus surrounded us at a distance, the monochrome street people watching the little drama, maybe ready to join in if we appeared weak enough.
I was watching the hands of the three surrounding the car. Nobody seemed armed, but I couldn’t really tell. I kept my hands in my lap, feeling a huge lump of panic in my middle.
A little bit of long-ago training bubbled up. I turned the ignition and put my hand on the gearshift. “’Bye, trolls,” I said.
But in that instant, Muscle Man dove at me. I wasn’t fast enough. Strong, rough fingers closed around my throat. I almost blacked out right there, but turned my head a little sideways, sucked in some air, and drove my arms up viciously to break his grip. He fell back. I heard an ugly murmur from the shadows, and before I could get out of the damned seat Freckles came at me. I slammed the heel of my hand into his nose and he snapped back, falling on his ass. But Muscle Man dove over the door, grabbing for the gun. He had all the leverage of a strong, standing man fighting a man who was pinned down in a car seat. I could feel myself losing the fight. Didn’t want to imagine the consequences. Couldn’t.
But I fought dirty. When he reached for the pistol, I grabbed one of his fingers with both my hands and torqued it in a direction nature didn’t intend. I felt the finger snap, heard the bone and cartilage separate. He screamed, lurched back, and fell out of the car, landing on his back. I rose right up after him, leaped out of the car-without even opening the door. I had a foot on his chest and the big Python in his face. Freckles was also in my field of fire, raised up on his elbows staring at me, blood streaming out of his nose.
Kate was being pulled from the car by the big guy. She had received a nasty blow to one eye, and I could see him reaching for her holster, with her desperately trying to keep his hands away. High-voltage panic shot up my spine.
There was no time for negotiation. I kicked Muscle Man in the nose to stun him, took a chance on Freckles staying down, and ran to the other side of the car for a clear shot. I got within five feet, dropped into a combat stance and leveled the Colt Python at the chest of the big Tenor. I did some quick arithmetic: six.357 hollow-point bullets, three targets, shaky hands, and my Speedloader reloading magazines were in the glovebox. And all that assumed nobody from the shadows decided to get a piece of us.
I was not articulate: “Die, asshole.”
He stared at me, stared at the gun. A large drop of sweat materialized on his forehead and ran to his eye.
He sighed. “Fuck.”
He let go, and Kate used her suddenly free arm to deliver a nasty haymaker. He sprawled on the asphalt, holding his face. I noticed Freckles was on his feet, thinking about intervening. When I moved my gunsights to his
