Over the days since John Marichal’s melting body had been scooped up and taken out, the stench in the tin impound shack had begun to dissipate. But the room was still stiflingly hot, and every atom of oxygen seemed to carry a small piece of decayed flesh with it.
As soon as Shawn had sliced through the yellow crime scene tape and pushed open the shack’s door, he passed quickly through toward the rear exit. But before he could get out into the lot, Gus had stopped to peer around the small office.
“What are you doing?” Shawn said.
“Looking for evidence,” Gus said. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
Actually, it wasn’t. The real reason they’d come here after their long session in Chief Vick’s office was because they needed to find Tara. They had to turn her over to the police so they wouldn’t get blamed for any other assaults she might commit. But, as Shawn pointed out, Tara had a car and they didn’t, which meant that any attempt to find her was really just hoping for a lucky break. That they could do anywhere. Shawn’s first choice was an air-conditioned movie theater, preferably the revival house currently running a Jessica Alba film festival. Second choice was Eagle’s View, where Shawn and Gus could chill with Dallas Steele over a frosty Coca-Cola Blak. When Gus ruled out that option on several grounds, starting with the impossibility of getting there, the impound lot made a pretty good runner-up. Not because they actually expected to run into Tara there. But they had as good a chance of finding her here as anywhere, and this way they might also uncover clues to the murder of John Marichal. Solving that crime might buy them some goodwill with the department. At the very least, it would remove them from the list of suspects.
Gus ducked under the counter and swore under his breath. “The laptop’s gone.”
“We knew that,” Shawn said. “Lassiter said it was missing. And if it had been here, the cops would have taken it. Now can we get out of here?”
Shawn pushed open the back door and stepped out into the bright sunshine. He took a deep breath of clean, corpse-free air and looked out over the lot. It stretched out as far as he could see, acres of abandoned cars slowly rusting away in the salty air. In the center, the gigantic crane stood idle, iron jaws hanging open like a drooping flower.
“And what exactly do you think we’re going to find out here?” Gus said as he stepped up next to Shawn.
“For one thing, air.” Shawn took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “For another, the answer.”
“What’s the question?”
“That is a question.”
“What?”
“That’s another question. And where did it get us? Nowhere. Whereas I actually have an answer.”
“Fine,” Gus said. “Congratulations.”
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“I think you already know the answer to that one, too.”
“I can’t help but notice a small tone of hostility in your voice ever since we left the police station,” Shawn said.
“Why would I be hostile?” Gus said. “Just because you’ve gotten us mixed up with a psychotic stalker?”
“Gus, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that Tara would turn out to be crazy.”
“I could have,” Gus said. “And you know how I know that? Because I did. And I warned you. But it was convenient for you to ignore the fact that she was a raging psycho because she was doing your laundry.”
“And doing a good job, too.” Shawn rubbed the fabric of his shirt. “She really managed to get my clothes soft.”
“Maybe they’ll let her launder our prison uniforms,” Gus said.
“We’re not going to prison, because I’ve found the answer,” Shawn said. “Look.”
He pointed out at the crane in the distance.
“That’s not an answer-that’s a crane.”
“It’s both,” Shawn said. “It’s the reason John Marichal was killed.”
Gus stared at the crane. It stood on thin legs and had a yellow metal operator’s cab between the base and the jib. He tried to imagine it in action, the great jaws falling on a car, crunching through the windows as they lifted it through the air and dropped it into the crushing mechanism. He’d never seen one working in real life before, but he knew he’d seen one in a movie. It came to him in a flash: Goldfinger. Bad guys put another bad guy in the trunk of a car and sent it to the crusher. That was where Shawn had found his answer.
“There’s no way that fat creep was planning to rob Fort Knox,” Gus said. “And why is it that movie keeps coming up?”
“It’s a coincidence,” Shawn said. “Or maybe it’s enemy action. Anyway, you don’t need to jump all the way to the denouement to figure out what’s going on here. Stop at the ‘bad guy in the trunk’ moment. Imagine that as an ongoing business concern.”
“How many agents of the British Secret Service do you think there are out here?” Gus said. There just didn’t seem to be much of a market for such a service.
“He was disposing of bodies,” Shawn said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Let’s say you’re a killer. You knock off your victim, and you’re looking for a way to get rid of the evidence. You bring it down to Marichal, he sticks it into the trunk of an abandoned car, and crash, crunch, it’s part of a metal cube heading for the smelter.”
Gus had to admit, it sounded like a plan. But there were too many loose ends. How would you market a scheme like that? It was true, according to Chief Vick, that Marichal’s father was a crook, too, so there might be some old family friends in the business. But that was all the way across the country. Marichal had only been here a few months. It wasn’t like he’d had time to build up a large social network.
Still, as Shawn said, it was an answer. Maybe it would do for now. He looked over at the crane again, and his heart sank.
“Nope,” Gus said.
“What do you mean nope?” Shawn said. “I give you a perfectly worked-out theory, and all you give me is ‘nope’?”
“Yup.”
“I refuse to accept that,” Shawn said.
“Then maybe you should accept this.” Gus took off across the lot, leading Shawn through a maze of autos, first the recently impounded vehicles the police had towed in for repeated parking violations, then generations of dead cars, killed by head-ons, rollovers, and plain neglect. As they walked, shapes changed from soft curves to sharp corners and back to curves again. Colors came and went as fashions changed. It was like an open-air museum of automotive styling, as long as you could look past all the crumpled metal.
Finally they reached the area directly under the crane. Nothing here seemed to have been made after Richard Nixon’s second inaugural.
“Look at this,” Shawn said, peering at the license plates. “New Mexico, Utah, Florida, Minnesota, Delaware. It’s like cars from all across the country came out here to die.”
“More like to rest in peace,” Gus said. “And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for decades.” He pointed at the tires on a few of the cars. They’d decayed away until they were barely shreds hanging off the wheels. “They’re not doing a lot of car crushing here.”
Shawn looked so deflated, Gus almost felt guilty for bringing him out here. Shawn’s theory was good. The only real problem with it was that it wasn’t true. Not that that was going to stop Shawn.
“Maybe Marichal was planning to go into the body-disposal business,” Shawn said. “And a rival wanted to stop him before he got started.”
“Or maybe we should look for a new theory,” Gus said.
Something whistled past Gus’ ear. Metal popped behind him. At first, he thought Shawn had chucked a headlight at him. But Shawn was looking around for the source of the sound, too. He pointed at the trunk of a sixty-nine Ford Fairlane.
“Was that hole there before?” Shawn said.
Gus bent down to peer at the small round hole in the trunk just as the rear windshield shattered over his head.
“Duck!” Shawn grabbed Gus and pulled him down to the concrete behind a yellow sixty-five Thunderbird with Florida plates.
“Someone’s shooting at us!”
Three more holes blossomed in the cars around them. Shawn poked his head above the hood, then dived to the ground as the rearview mirror shattered.
“Who is it?” Gus said. “Could you see anything?”
Shawn shook his head. “He must be behind one of these cars. We’ve got to find a way to sneak up on him.”
“How can you sneak up on a guy when you don’t know where he is?”
Shawn thought that through for a moment. “One of us needs to stand up to draw his fire. The other one can see where the shot comes from.”
“Go ahead,” Gus said. “Stand.”
“I would,” Shawn said. “But he’s already shot at me once. He probably wants a new target.”
“That is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.”
“Really?” Shawn said. “I thought it showed some ‘outside the box’ thinking.”
“‘Outside the box’ is where we need to be,” Gus said. “We’ve just got to figure out where that box is.”
Shawn was about to answer when they heard the faint sound of a cell phone ringing across the lot. “That’s him!”
The phone rang again. Shawn pointed across the lot at the place it seemed to be coming from. Then he pointed to Gus and swept his arm around to the west. Gus would creep up on the assassin’s left flank. Shawn thumbed his own chest and indicated he’d go around the other way. They gave each other a grave thumbs-up, and each duck-walked in his chosen direction, making sure to keep his head below the level of the cars.
Gus crept forward, his knees screaming at the strain, using the sound of the cell as his homing beacon. As he squeezed through the gap between two rotting Cressidas, the phone stopped ringing. He froze. Now what? He was about to lift his head above the trunk line in hopes of catching a glimpse of the shooter when the phone started ringing again.
Gus started toward the noise. Now another question began to gnaw at him. Why didn’t the killer answer his phone? Or if he wasn’t going to pick up, why not just turn it off? Why did he let it keep ringing like this? For one triumphant moment, Gus realized they must have taken him out. But then he remembered that they had never returned a shot, and in fact didn’t even have a gun. It seemed extremely unlikely they’d scored any kind of hit, let alone a kill shot. Could it be a trap?
Gus poked his head between a rusted-out Accord and a newer Sonata. He was almost back to the shack. The ring now was loud and clear, but there was no one around. Gus crawled forward and froze. Now he realized where the ringing was coming from.
Gus reached up into the open window of his own beloved blue Echo and flipped open the glove compartment. He pulled out Shawn’s ringing cell phone and flipped it open.
“Shawn!” Henry Spencer’s voice nearly took Gus’ head off.
Gus glanced up to see that Shawn had made it over to the Echo. He handed him the phone.
“It’s for you,” Gus said.