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.
“
“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?
“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.
