well, had heard it too often in too many places to mistake it for anything else. As they watched through the windows they saw the tiny red spot appear over the hill and float slowly toward the junkyard, sometimes sweeping smoothly for a time, then stopping, hanging in a swaying arc above the vicinity of the freeway and then moving on. As it approached, the noise grew louder, first to a high humming, then deeper and deeper until the growling noise of the engine could be distinguished from the beat of the whirling rotors. As they watched, the red spot paused, hovering, and a bright beam of white light shot downward to the ground, then swept a few hundred feet, and then flicked off. In the distance now they could see the red running lights of other police helicopters moving methodically back and forth over the roads. Now and then one would shine its searchlight on the ground, and a circular pool of light would transfix whatever was beneath in its glare, and then sweep on.
“Looks like Da Nang,” said Chinese Gordon.
“Here it is,” said Kepler. The helicopter hovered over the junkyard and turned on its searchlight. The disc of bright light shot around the fence, lingered for a second on the shack near the gate, and then moved on.
For a long time none of them moved. Two more helicopters passed overhead and then moved back over the road and followed its course to the northeast.
“GONE,” SAID KEPLER. “Now what?”
“Now we think,” said Chinese Gordon. “That poor schmuck back there must have been a lot clearer than we thought if they’re already making a sweep this far out. We have to assume he gave them some kind of description of the van, so they think they know what they’re looking for.”
Immelmann shrugged. “Three men in a white airconditioner repair van, armed and dangerous, et cetera.”
“I don’t like leaving the van,” Kepler said. “We might get lucky and the guy who owns this place won’t notice it for a day, but more likely he will. People who deal in worthless shit always think it’s great and hate to part with it, so they go around and visit it whenever they’ve got a minute.”
“We could smash it up a little,” Immelmann said. “We could open the safe here.”
“There’s the armor plate that Chinese bolted inside, and the gun,” Kepler said. “Everything about it says ‘Call the Police.’”
“We may as well get started,” said Chinese Gordon. “There are only four cans of that spray paint we used on the sawhorses. There’s tape in the toolbox. We’ve got to use everything carefully. Don’t waste it, don’t leave anything lying around. I’ll start taping the chrome and the windows. You two see if you can find anything around here that will change the way the van looks, even if it’s only hubcaps or some damned hood ornament.”
“You’re going to paint the van red?” said Kepler. “In the dark? With cans? Chinese, think about it. Pretend you’re a cop. You’ve been listening to the radio. Some hysterical parking guy says he saw a white van blow up his outhouse with an automatic cannon from an airplane. Then you hear the reason it happened was because the van is carrying the Gross National Product of Peru. Say you’re not some rookie, but a real honest-to-God twelve-year veteran. It’s three in the morning and nobody has seen the white van yet. What are you going to do if you see a red van coming your way?”
“At three in the morning, sure,” said Immelmann.
Chinese Gordon shrugged. “You said yourself we can’t leave it here. We can’t take it out as it is. We can’t do anything but change it and head for home in the rush-hour traffic tomorrow morning, when there will be more white vans on the road than there are police.”
Kepler and Immelmann moved into the darkness, carrying screwdrivers and wrenches. It was difficult to see at first, but as they walked among the battered shapes of trucks and vans, they began to discern the accessories, some practical, others vain: A truck had a trailer hitch, a van had a rack to hold its spare tire on the back door. Another had a set of spoke hubcaps and wooden door handles.
“This is sort of fun,” said Kepler as he unscrewed a set of mud flaps under a Volkswagen minibus. He heard Immelmann give a snort, and he supposed Immelmann was right. Then he heard Immelmann say something unintelligible. He rolled out from under the Volkswagen and looked up at Immelmann, who was standing in the empty path between the rows of car bodies, staring at something off in the darkness. He was muttering, “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit,” so quietly that Kepler could barely hear it. Kepler lay on the ground and peered into the silent shadows. Then he heard it, far away at first, and then louder and louder, a tick-tick-tick, faster and faster, and then he caught a glimpse of it.
It was the black shape of a huge dog, so big it seemed to brush its shoulder against the hood ornament on a ’57 Chevy as it passed, but he knew that wasn’t possible. It was just the distance and the darkness, but that made it even worse, because a dog that charged two men from a couple of hundred feet instead of stalking them was something worse than just big. Then he remembered why junkyards never have night watchmen, something that had slipped his mind when he’d been hiding from the helicopters and wondering why he always listened to Chinese Gordon’s schemes. Kepler lay on his belly and pulled the .357 Magnum out of his boot. He steadied the pistol in both hands and leveled it on the sound, the “huff, huff, huff” of the charging beast’s eager chest. He knew he’d see it, if only for a moment when it was about ten or twelve feet from Immelmann. It would jump high for the throat because it was surely that kind of dog, the kind the owner would starve and beat and abuse until it hated the smell of a man so much even he couldn’t go near it when he came to open the gate in the morning, so he had to lure it into an enclosure with food. There would be time for only one shot, but Kepler didn’t expect to need more. After it blew the dog apart, the slug from the .357 Magnum would crack the engine block on the car across the aisle.
He held the gun steady on the sound, waiting for another flash of vision, something to focus on. The dog sounded like a freight train—“huff! huff! huff!”—more than heavy breathing, and not a bark, more like the dog was talking to itself, maybe even laughing. He felt an instant of regret—the poor crazy animal, waiting all this time finally to sink his teeth into somebody, and—
“Don’t shoot it,” said Immelmann.
“What?”
Immelmann walked calmly across the aisle and stood beside an old bread delivery truck. He opened one of the back doors wide, climbed inside, and Kepler lost sight of him. Just then the animal appeared, dashing at terrible speed, taking eight or ten feet at a leap, its mouth open wide, its lips rolled back to bare a set of teeth from some nightmare. It overran the truck by some twenty feet in its insane ferocity, then seemed to turn in the air to scramble to the open door. It leaped inside, giving voice to a snarl that sounded like something being torn.
Kepler jumped to his feet and sprinted for the truck, but as he did, he saw Immelmann get out of the driver’s seat and slam the door, then walk around the truck and close the back door. An instant later the dog hurled itself against the door so hard the truck shivered.
“Pitiful,” said Immelmann. He looked in the window and said, “Sorry, you poor bastard.” The dog’s face pressed against the glass, its front teeth trying to bite the surface. The dog threw himself against the door again and again, making a booming noise and shaking the truck. Then he tried to bite the glass again, and his rage grew into a titanic frustration at not being able to open his jaws wide enough.
Immelmann looked at the dog’s face and said sadly, “He wants to bite the world, doesn’t he?”
Kepler stifled an impulse to shoot him through the glass. “Come on,” he said, putting the pistol back into his boot. “If we get out of his sight maybe he won’t hurt himself trying to get at us.”
They returned to the van to find Chinese Gordon al-already painting. He had taped paper over the windows and lights and was carefully spraying with an even, steady motion of his forearm, back and forth. Immelmann set down his burden of chrome and picked up a can of paint. They worked in silence for what Kepler judged to be three hours. After a little while Kepler stopped hearing noises from the bread truck three aisles away. He kept himself working, even after he judged the van was as red as it ever would be and Chinese Gordon insisted on doing all the cutting and screwing that was making his van look like a fire truck designed by a mental defective, by thinking about the owner of that dog opening the door of the bread truck. The man would arrive at seven-thirty and call the dog to its cage. He’d lay steak in sight, then wait. He’d whistle, he’d make every noise he could think of. At eight or eight- thirty he’d be sure the dog was dead or at least too sick to move. Then he’d come inside, walking on tiptoe. By then he’d have stopped being afraid and be thinking about a new dog—a puppy, probably, that he’d have to start teaching to kill people, start abusing and starving. But he’d still have to start looking for the old dog because a two-hundred-pound carcass rotting in your yard would be a horror. At some point he’d find the bread truck and open the door. Kepler leaned into the van, pulled a beer can out of the cooler, and popped it open. He poured a stream of beer down his throat and smiled to himself.
AS THE SKY IN THE EAST began to lose its purple and brighten into a metallic gray, Immelmann stood up
