“I’m waitin’.”
“Here she comes.”
Homer sailed the bone high and long with his pitching arm. He hoped to get it all the way to those tall weeds outside the wire fence. Then he might have a chance. Either the guy would go look for it in the weeds and leave the ladder unguarded. Or, being fat and lazy, he just might take the easy route and believe what he wanted to believe. That he’d seen a gun go flying over his head and now he had an unarmed kid trapped in a forty-foot long coffin that was half-full already.
Most people, in Homer’s limited experience, believed what they wanted to believe.
“Smart kid,” Smokey finally said, still huffing and puffing just outside the truck doors. “Okey-dokey, son. I’m coming on up that ladder.”
Homer heard a grunt and felt the noticeable dip of the man’s weight on the bottom rung of the ladder. Big guy, all right. Heavy. He’d have one hand on the ladder and the gun in the other. Gun in the right hand most likely, if you trusted the law of averages.
Homer pressed his cheek against the cold aluminum siding as the smoker slowly mounted the steel ladder. He was crouched in the shadows. The ladder went up the right side nearest him. He could see the top rung. When they saw each other’s faces, hell, there wouldn’t be more than six feet between them.
Homer’s finger tightened in the curve of the trigger. He blinked a few times, and tried to swallow. He hurt. Cold sweat was stinging his eyes. He’d never killed a man before. Never fired a shot with his service revolver in the line of duty. He wasn’t even much of a shot. Smokey was almost to the top, grunting and wheezing. He saw white fingers curl around the top rung.
Homer Prudhomme, looking at his shaking gun hand, thought to himself, Son, you can’t win with a losing hand.
Eternity passed. His hand suddenly stopped shaking.
“Hey,” Smokey said, near the top rung now. “Where the fuck are you at, boy?”
He could see the slotted top of the man’s cowboy hat. The top half of his face, his eyes.
“Hey! You hear me? I said. Where. You. At?”
“Waiting for you,” Homer said and fired twice at the whole head and shoulders now silhouetted against the dark blue sky.
The man’s head exploded and his body fell away, his fingers finally peeling off the top rung. There was a thudding sound like a big sack of potatoes hitting the dirt. Homer got to his feet and began stacking bones in the corner so he could climb out of this death trap.
He dropped to the ground beside the body. It was face down in the weeds, dead still, except for the right leg which was splayed out at a bad angle and twitching.
He got a hand under the shoulder and managed to get the man turned over onto his back. There was just enough of his face left to recognize him.
The man he’d killed? Mr. J.T.Rawls.
He waited to feel something. Fear, he guessed. Didn’t happen. Justifiable self-defense during a murder investigation? The man was going to shoot him, no question about that. He shook his head, trying to clear it of anything but the facts of his developing case. Mr. Rawls, bigshot Chevy dealer, had himself a little sideline business, seemed like. Mexican Midnight Auto Supply? No, something a whole lot bigger than that.
But, what?
49
H omer half expected the rear door of the warehouse to be hanging ajar, but it wasn’t. Rawls was dead as dirt, but he’d padlocked the door behind him when he’d come out to check out the noise outside. Homer walked around the building again and figured out the only way inside was still the fire escape ladder.
He reached up and pulled the ladder down, not worrying about the screeching noise anymore. You could make all the noise you wanted in a ghost town with a population recently dropped down to one. He went up the steps and climbed through the open window, shining his mini-flashlight inside first and seeing nothing out of the ordinary. It was an empty room, probably used to be an office. An overturned wooden desk was in the center of the floor.
There was single bulb hanging from a wire in the center of the room. Homer turned the switch but it was either burned out or there was no power. He saw a wooden chair facing the window. Scuff marks on the windowsill where J.T. parked his boots. Rawls was a rich man. Yet, this had been his office. His half-full Cowboys coffee mug was sitting on the seat where he’d left it when he’d heard something outside.
Or, maybe Rawls had his fancy office somewhere else in the building. Maybe he’d just been walking around having a smoke and stepped in here. Walked over to the window to get a little air.
On the floor around the upturned desk were some girlie magazines and some porno stuff. He picked one up. It was a calendar with a naked girl in a tire swing. The year 1988. At the bottom were the words, Courtesy of Rawls Chevrolet. J.T. had himself a dealership down here a long time ago. Never told anybody about it. Must have been successful though, size it was.
He dropped the calendar among the paper cups, and other garbage. Some old Burger Boy and Krispy Kreme sacks and wads of dirty paper napkins. The room still reeked of tobacco and the old sweat-stink of the dead man.
Homer thought he heard something beyond the closed door and stood stock still for a second. It was a faint, humming noise, like heavy machinery moving deep inside the warehouse.
He moved quietly over to the door and pulled it open.
He had no idea what he expected on the other side but it certainly wasn’t what he saw.
Which was nothing.
The whole building was empty inside. He was looking at a big empty box at least a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and four stories high. No floors. No windows. No staircases. No nothing inside. There was a roof up there overhead. Corrugated aluminum. The arched steel beams that supported it seemed to be fairly new. And the featureless brick walls were freshly painted white floor-to-ceiling on all four sides. There was a narrow steel catwalk beyond the door and he stepped out onto it. He was about twenty feet above the ground floor.
He flicked his mini-light on and played it down below. The spacious floor looked to be painted concrete, spotless and shiny. In the center of the floor was a circle. Just a faint line, really, with a diameter about sixty feet across, maybe more.
Homer moved left along the yellow-painted catwalk hung from the ceiling and extending all the way around four sides of the building. Across the way were two office doors like the one he’d just come out of. But he wasn’t curious about those doors.
What got his full attention was the fact that the Yankee Slugger cab he’d seen pulling inside this very building about an hour ago, had now disappeared. He certainly hadn’t heard that big diesel crank up, and he would have, wouldn’t he? Even when he was hiding out there in the boneyard, he would have heard that monster cranking up, backing out into the street and roaring off. He hadn’t heard a thing. But the Slugger was gone.
He saw that the catwalk had a single staircase leading down to the ground on the street side of the building.
He moved toward it along the narrow metal walkway carefully, not because there was anybody to hear him, the place was obviously empty, but because if he tripped and went over the rail, well, that would be all-she-wrote for damn sure.
He went downstairs slowly, keeping his light aimed on the steps all the way to the ground. The big main door, so cracked and peeling on the outside, was a shiny brushed steel on the inside. No handles or locks. It just slid up into the wall above it. He turned away from his inspection of it and looked at the faint outline of the circle in the center of the floor. Had it changed? It looked different than it had when he’d been up on the catwalk. He went over to check it out, kneeling down inside the circle to feel its outline with his fingers.
Now he could see that the big sixty-foot circular section was slightly lower than the rest of the floor. Like a tiny depression. The outline he’d seen from above was due to the fact that this section wasn’t flush. There was about an eighth of an inch of dull steel showing all the way around. Something, a sound maybe, made him lean
