wasn’t the same person who’d driven this car onto the lot just minutes before. He’d handed out the ticket stub, claiming he’d forgotten his luggage and would return shortly. He paid the minimal fare and drove away.
He would memorize the owner’s name and address off the registration; if stopped he could more than likely stonewall an excuse of borrowing the car from a friend, since it would not yet be listed as stolen in the police computers. While in the Army, he’d never let his Florida driver’s license expire. He would just have to be very careful, but then that was a natural trait. And since his fingerprints were on federal file, he’d wipe the car down with isopropanol when he was done with it.
Next he drove to an NTW in Laurel and had four new steel-belted radials put on the Plymouth. At the nearest service station, he topped the tank, and got a complete tune-up, oil change and lube, and brake inspection. He also purchased and filled two five-gallon jerry cans.
And after all that, he’d driven to the heart of Baltimore and gotten stuck in the worst traffic jam he’d ever seen.
Potholes here were as large as grenade sumps. On some streets he couldn’t avoid them no matter how expertly he zigzagged. He sensed in Baltimore a vast, graying state of decomposition, spiritual as well as physical. The city offended every angle of perception. Traffic noise clawed his nerves. Streets melded into a labyrinth of compressed gloom. Boarded, gutted row houses stood decrepitly, left to collapse. All around him were abandoned road repairs; packs of scavenging, gut-sucked dogs; garbage-filled alleys; and columns of high, drab buildings streaked by rust. Street people stared into space, swaddled in rotting clothes. Pedestrians traversed the sidewalks in a parade of leering, unfriendly faces. The city
Midday now, though it could’ve been rush hour. South Gay Street didn’t proceed—it
He threaded a maze of side roads and at last turned right onto East Baltimore Street. Here he was dumbstruck; the street was a vanishing point of adult bookstores and bottomless bars, colored lights in every window flashing insanely like Christmas in Babylon. PEEPS 25?, one sign buzzed. HOLMES, SCAT, FISTING, THE HOT WET BEST OF SHAUNA GRANT.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Sanders recited, amused. But he’d seen much worse. “What a garbage heap.”
Baltimore Police Headquarters occupied the end of the block, the entire end. It shadowed the whole street, a huge Bauhaus square of polished granite and gun-slit windows. This was the ultimate irony, that the city’s nerve center for law enforcement existed on the same block as the porno-tenderloin drag. Sanders stretched the irony further, by parking his stolen car in the police visitors’ lot.
In the lobby a female admin cop smiled up from the other side of a long, curved counter. The grip of her sidearm had a notch.
“I’m looking for a guy named Jack Wilson.” He positioned himself so to hide his bad side. “He still works here, doesn’t he?”
“Sergeant Wilson runs the property office. He’s on duty till three o’clock.”
“I’d like to see him, if it’s all right.”
“Is this police business?”
“Well, no. We’re friends from the Army. I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
She picked up a phone. “Name?”
“John Sanders.”
Vivid, brightly colored paintings caught his eye; they were mural-sized, huge. She hung up the phone. Had she spoken to Wilson directly? He produced two articles of identification, then she signed him in and pinned a visitor’s pass to his collar. Her smile turned crooked when she saw the left side of his face.
He descended to the basement in an Otis elevator with a security camera in it. Caged light bulbs led him through several angles of corridors. Block letters over an arrow on the wall read, PROPERTY DISPOSAL. When he turned, he saw a figure in a doorway at the end of the corridor. The figure stood at parade rest.
It was a chilling, emotional moment.
“Somebody tell me I’m dreaming,” echoed a wiry, nasal voice. “I must be seein’ things.”
They shook hands in the darkness. Sanders said, “Good to see you, Jack. It’s been too long.”
“Yeah, it has. I thought maybe you’d bitten it. Come on in, check out my new PDY.”
Sanders saw that the years had not touched his friend. Wilson’s compactness still held the same scary qualities; Sanders had never known the man to be afraid, even the day he’d saved his life. Wilson’s hair was shiny dark blond and still service-short. His mustache, as it had always been, was much darker than his hair.
“Some things never change,” Sanders said. He seated himself on two banded cardboard cartons. “When are you going to shave off that soldier-of-fortune mustache?”
“When my harelip goes away. At least I can grow one. Haw, haw. Say, you still off the joy juice?”
“Not a drop since TuDo Street. Throwing up gets old fast. But I’ll rip the shit out of a case of soda water.”
Wilson sat behind a surprisingly clear desk. “Coffee’s my new deal. You know, I just read somewhere that the Vietnamese used formaldehyde to keep their beer from rotting. Fifty p a glass. We drank enough of that shit to fill a fuel gore.”
“At least we won’t have to be embalmed when we die.”
“You know it… So how long’s it been?”
Sanders looked to the ceiling lights. “Shit, I don’t know. ’75? ’76?”
“That’s it!” Wilson exclaimed and slapped the desk. “’76. Beautiful beautiful Bamberg in the snow. That was my last FTX.”
“Yeah, I remember now. The Canadians beat the shit out of everybody, 1st AD included. I couldn’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bass fiddle that day. Some war games they turned out to be.”
“Haw haw,” Wilson erupted. “And those crazy German pilots in their F-105’s; they’d fly so low they’d knock the balls off our antennas. You got it, some things
“That’s right. And bumfuck’s the word.”
“You’re not still in the pickle, are you?”
“With a haircut like this, are you kidding? I was medically retired, a couple shy of twenty.”
“Medical, huh? What for?”
“Bad back,” Sanders lied. Only because the truth wouldn’t work.
“Yeah, me, I put in my twenty and blew. Battalion CO at Aberdeen offered me E-9 to re-up for four more, but I said fuck no. When the Army went from starch to permanent press, I figured it wasn’t worth being in anymore. My record and MOS got me this job. Between my retired pay and the bread they give me here, I’m sitting on a fair pile. Got myself a house in Glen Burnie, too. Paid for.”
“Sounds like you’re doing all right,” Sanders said. Finally, “Aren’t you going to ask what happened to my face?”
Wilson squinted at him, then shrugged. “Hell, you and me always were a pair of ugly sons of bitches. Let me
