Whorl Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WHORL

  First publication: November 2016

  Copyright 2016 by James Tarr

  All rights reserved

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission

  ISBN: 978-1539723783

  Printed in the United States of America

  WHORL

  James Tarr

  “Is Detroit going to turn things around? I could lie and tell you yes. But you know what? This city’s screwed. The only place I’ve ever been that looks anything like Detroit does now? Chernobyl. I’m not being funny, that’s the truth.”

  Anthony Bourdain November 2013

  PART I

  THE ONE-PERCENTERS

  “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”

  Heraclitus

  CHAPTER ONE

  David Anderson turned onto Third Street and pulled his beat-up Jeep Cherokee into the gravel parking lot. The lot was small, and enclosed by a rusty eight-foot chain link fence topped with menacingly shiny concertina wire. The electric gate was on rollers, but it was always left open. He doubted whether the motor would even work if they tried it, but they never really had any problems.

  Technically the lot was under surveillance, but he’d seen the black and white picture the camera on the roof fed to the TV in the control room. It might as well have been one of those ultrasound pictures of a baby in the womb. They looked like moonscapes; he could never see the baby, and in the camera’s fish-eye lens he couldn’t even recognize his own car on the TV screen.

  He climbed out of his car and stretched. The sun was just coming up over the buildings on Cass, and shadows still covered most of the ground around him. Outside the lot on one side was a building with impressive stonework that had probably been built in the twenties or thirties. It was now a blackened, windowless hulk that would look at home in a zombie movie.

  The vacant lot on the other side sported knee-high grass that would be a foot taller in a month. The city used to do a better job of mowing the vacant property, but there was just so much of it, and so little tax money coming in anymore, that pretty much anybody who could get out of the city was gone. Too much space, not enough money, not enough people, and the ones who were left…..

  Weeds grew along the fenceline, some of them nearly as tall as he was, and there were a few maple saplings growing in the corner. It was ironic; the closer Detroit got to death, the greener it became. In nature things usually worked the opposite way.

  There was only one person on foot that he could see, a woman heading west down the sidewalk. Deathly skinny, from her stained, crumpled sweatshirt and jeans it was hard to tell if she had been in a fight or just up all night. She wasn’t wearing a bra, he could see that, whether he wanted to or not. Mostly not. She took one look at him and his freshly laundered and pressed uniform shirt, and gun, and didn’t bother to proposition him. Dave was still young enough that being that close to a hooker, even one who looked like she had several infectious diseases, gave him a little naughty thrill.

  He waited for her to pass, then did a quick check for traffic. With hardly anybody living in the area the cars were few and far between, but in a city where the cops ran from one violent crime to the next speed limits were almost as big of a joke as stop signs. Street clear he headed across the street to the nondescript tan building. Two stories, concrete, with a single overhead door (closed) and a single pedestrian door. No company name or sign indicating what the business was, although all anybody had to do to find out was look into the fenced-off yard on the west side of the building. Or watch the trucks coming and going all day.

  Ten foot chainlink around the yard, no rust on this fence, topped with overlapping coils of razor wire. Whoever came in last, unless they were in one of the new trucks, had to park in the outside yard. In the summer it wasn’t bad, but in cold weather he usually had to scrape the ice and snow off himself. Though it was late May the early morning air was a little chilly, but he’d left his uniform jacket at home. It’d be eighty by noon, hotter inside the truck.

  With his fingers touching the handle Dave looked up into the camera above the door. After a few seconds of nothing, he hit the doorbell and grabbed the handle again. Whoever was manning the controls finally spotted him and buzzed him in.

  Inside the building resembled a warehouse more than anything, which made sense considering it was nothing more than a glorified garage attached to a big safe. The airy space echoed with the shouts of men and the revving of truck engines. Dave hurried up the gently sloping ramp just in case one of the scarier drivers was on his way out. There’d been a couple of close calls, on the ramp and in the loading area, but somehow nobody had been run over. Yet.

  He punched in, then looked around for Aaron. He found him at the window, checking out their load. Everything was locked up overnight in the vault. Outside the vault was the office, with the pass-through window. All the messengers called the small room where they picked up and dropped off their cash the Fault Room, because if their load was ever found to be short, that’s where it was discovered, and it was always their fault.

  “I take it I’m driving today,” Dave said as he watched Aaron counting the boxes of pennies on his steel cart. In the armored car business the messenger, and the messenger alone, was responsible for the money. He signed for the load in the morning, had to keep track of what he picked up or dropped off and get signatures for everything, and then turned whatever he had left into the vault at the end of the day. All the driver did was drive.

  “Fuckin’ Huntington,” Aaron said, kicking one of the penny boxes. “I thought I was going to have a light load today, until I saw their twenty boxes of fucking pennies.” Aaron, like most veteran messengers—the honest ones at least—had long ago stopped thinking of his cargo as money. To him it was just weight. Pounds, not dollars. Cash was good, he could do cash all day. Paper, paper, paper. It was the coin that killed you, especially around the holidays. Christ. First week of December, every day he had two hundred boxes of coins to deliver.

  “Are you done bitching?” Joe asked through the window. “I want to finish checking you out before I die of old age. Huntington cash, one, for four hundred thou even.” He hoisted the canvas bundle onto the steel shelf and shoved it toward Aaron, who spun it around so he could check the tag against his paperwork, then yanked it down onto the cart. All twenties inside, by the size of it.

  Joe was nearly six foot six and slightly older than God, at least if you believed what he said. He practically had to fold himself in two to look out through the vault window. A few wispy white hairs dotted his age-spotted skull, and he reeked of tobacco. His yellow and usually bloodshot eyes were huge behind Roy Orbison-looking glasses. He wore his uniform pants in true geezer chic style, pulled up into his armpits, revealing white, droopy socks and legs as skinny as toothpicks and damn near the same color. His uniform shirt had last been white sometime during the Nixon administration.

  “You’re going to outlive all of us, you pissy bastard,” Aaron said good-naturedly. He turned to Dave. “You’ll never guess what we’ve got today,” he said with a smile. It was a real smile, he seemed highly amused by something, but the look on his face would have scared most people away. Dave figured that was why Aaron had never been robbed -- he looked slightly insane.

  Jet black hair, a little too long so it touched his collar, and a true ‘70s pornstar moustache that needed a trim. Bad teeth -- not horrible, but two years of braces would hav
e done wonders for him. Of course, his mother had barely been able to pay the rent on the trailer when he was growing up, so braces were out of the question. So were regular visits to the dentist. Slightly buggy eyes, and an intense staring gaze that made Dave think of a serial killer. A real one, not a Hollywood archetype. One glare and even the freakiest-looking loiterer left the area when he was unloading the truck at a stop. Surprisingly Aaron wasn’t ugly but rather handsome, in a bad-boy sort of way, and could be very charming. He did his best to bed every teller better looking than a Rottweiler, and had succeeded more often than he’d failed.

  The two of them had never been robbed while working together. Dave figured it had to be because of the way they looked. Aaron glared at any male like he was wondering how their livers tasted, and Dave always paid attention and looked competent. “Short-haired college boy” is how he was usually described, with “suburban white boy” following a close second. Not only was he always wearing a clean, pressed uniform, whenever they were at a stop he actually scanned the area for possible threats. Not like some of the drivers the company had, that’s for sure.

  “I shudder to think,” Dave said.

  “A third man.”

  Technically, every truck, every day, should have a third man, a guard who would exit the truck and stand beside the messenger as he loaded his dolly, follow him wherever he went, but most customers didn’t want to pay for the extra service.

  “How do we rate?”

  “New guy, you’re supposed to train him,” Joe said through the window.

  “Christ. So am I driving?” Dave occasionally worked as a messenger, but because he was only part-time, and his schedule was the same every week, he usually worked with Aaron. Drivers weren’t supposed to get out of the vehicle, but Dave always wore body armor under his uniform shirt, just in case. Aaron wore a vest and plate, every day, religiously.

  “Yeah, I don’t trust this monkey in traffic, but he’ll do fine as a bullet-catcher,” Aaron said.

  “Jesus, Aaron.” Dave looked around to see who had heard him. “Where is he?”

  “Out at the truck. We’ve got the Beast again today.”

  “Well, at least it runs.” Even though it doesn’t have air conditioning, or a radio, or shocks, he added silently.

  “Runs, it’s fucking Christine, that thing’s never going to quit.”

  The vault door banged open, and one of the supervisors barreled out. “Jesus Reg!” Dave exclaimed, jumping out of the way just before the cart wheel would’ve run over his foot, undoubtedly breaking something. “What’s your hurry?”

  “Gotta be done by three, got Tigers tickets,” Reg called back over his shoulder. His chunky legs pumped behind the cart, heavily laden with coin.

  Dave left the fault room and stood looking for the truck. He spotted it near the back of the garage, and was pleased to see it’d been parked indoors overnight. The garage walls were painted grey over an odd shade of blue, except for the big patch at the back where Stuey’d run the coin truck through the cinderblocks. Drive, Reverse, whatever. Half again as long as the other trucks, the coin truck had a beefed-up suspension to handle its heavy load. Stuey and Jeff went back and forth to Ann Arbor every day with several tons of coin. The two of them were as unlikely a pair as Dave could’ve imagined, but had worked the run together for years without a hitch.

  Jeff came rolling by on a forklift, sporting a full pallet of $1000 quarter bags from the coin vault. Instead of counting the coins they just weighed the bags, and the scales were accurate to within +/- one quarter. The forklift beeped loudly no matter which direction it was heading, forward or back, but still about once a year somebody managed to hit it with a truck. Its yellow skin was scraped and dented like it’d been mauled by a dinosaur.

  Stuey was standing at the back end of his truck, watching as his partner raised the pallet up to the open door. He was a big black man, a heavy gut straining at the suspenders holding up his back-support belt. His “white” uniform shirt was uniformly grey, and his hair, always a bit too long, was spotted with grey to match. Dave had always thought Stuey looked a little like Don Cornelius of Soul Train fame, but the resemblance ended whenever Stuey opened his mouth.

  “Ey bi’ mannnn, whatcha at?” Stuey called out to Dave as he walked up. He had to shout to be heard over the forklift. “Lookin’ sharp, lookin sharp, gotta sweet mama waitin’ fo ya affa work t’day?” He cackled and looked to Jeff for a reaction. Jeff smiled but never looked away from the pallet as he threaded it through the doorway, and inch to spare on either side. Stuey’s unique speech pattern had been termed Alabama Marble-Mouth by Aaron, a description which hardly did justice to the abuse Stuey heaped upon the English language.

  “No, I’m all gussied up for you, you big teddy bear,” Dave said with a grin. He quickly scooted around the back of the forklift -- Jeff was notorious for abrupt changes in direction -- and kept on toward his truck. Stuey cackled even more, and glanced up at Jeff, who was lowering the pallet onto the enclosed bed of the truck. Even with the heavy duty springs the truck bed sunk two inches under the weight of just one pallet.

  “Teddy bear,” Stuey said with a smile. “Heh heh heh.”

  Jeff was in his late forties, a chain smoker with sandy brown hair going grey and a handlebar moustache. He would’ve looked more at home in a string tie and cowboy hat, and still had some of the twang, even though he hadn’t been back to Arkansas in twenty years. “Yeah, that’s just what you are,” he said drily, looking down at Stuey.

  “Bi’ black sessy teddy bear,” Stuey rolled on with a smile. “Good fo allll the ladies, givvum some a dat Teddy Bear blacksnake, da ol’ one-two, dey be smilin’ like it’s Christmas.” His deep voice sounded like gravel down a metal chute, and his three-pack-a-day habit wasn’t making it any clearer. Most people couldn’t even understand him, which was just fine with Stuey. He liked to be left alone as much as possible.

  Reg Coleman was throwing the heavy coin boxes into the back of his truck like a madman. It reminded Dave of news footage he’d seen of people frantically tossing sandbags onto the banks of a rapidly rising river. Pete, his regular driver, just stood out of the way, grinning. He gave a little wave to Dave as he passed. They were both part of the same sub-species at Absolute, white boys from the suburbs looking to get into law enforcement. Pete had his name on a couple of hiring lists, and would probably be working for one police department or another by the end of the year.

  Dave reached “The Beast” and looked around for the third man. Nowhere to be found. What a surprise. One of the oldest trucks in the company, 1555 was also the biggest, second only to Stuey and Jeff’s coin truck. Although the exterior had been recently painted, and the diamond-plate polished, the interior of it was as inviting as a turn-of-the-century jail cell. During winter the heater only worked when the truck was moving, and in summer the steel got so hot Dave couldn’t lean his forearm against the door for more than a few seconds. Anything over eighty-five degrees outside and the truck turned into a rolling oven. Technically the air-conditioning worked, chugging out cool wisps of air so faint they were imperceptible six inches from the unit, but there really was no recourse. The tiny gunports wouldn’t stay propped open when they drove, and armored car windows don’t roll down.

  Aaron arrived, pushing the cart. He tried the side door of the rear compartment and found it was open, and the two of them began transferring the cart’s load into the back of the truck.

  “I think I’ve been working here too long,” Dave told Aaron.

  “Why?”

  “I just had a conversation with Stuey, and I understood every word he said.”

  “Jesus Christ. Get out, get out now, while you still can.”

  Squatting in the open doorway Dave looked up and saw who had to be their third man approaching. He looked barely sixteen, but by law had to be at least twenty-one since he carried a gun. The fat gave him a baby face, and a build like Santa. He looked nervous and eager to please. Dave tapped Aaron an
d nodded at their third. Aaron turned around.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  A guilty look. “The bathroom.”

  “Well Christ, don’t just unlock the truck and walk away, we’re not delivering fucking milk you know.”

  “I--”

  “Forget about it. This is Davey, my partner. He may look like a brainless college kid, but he knows what the fuck he’s doing, which is more than I can say for most of the humps around here, so you listen to him.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Dave said. He saw the kid was carrying one of the company guns, a battered Smith & Wesson M&P revolver that had probably been new during the Truman administration, in a cheap padded nylon holster. Probably loaded with the company ammo, too. He shook his head. Kid would be better off with a baseball bat.

  “What’s your name? Mo? That short for something?” Aaron asked.

  The black kid squirmed. “Elmo,” he said, looking at the floor.

  “No shit? As in ‘Tickle Me’? Hey, don’t knock it, at least it’s a real fuckin’ name, not like Ikea or something.”

  Dave blinked and shook his head in confusion. “Ikea?” They’d opened up a big store not too long ago in Canton.

  “You want to bet money that there isn’t a little girl born in Detroit the last few years that ain’t been named Ikea?” Aaron challenged him. “I know someone at Wayne County, they can do a name search on the birth certificates. Fifty bucks on it? Hundred? No? How bout we limit it to the past two years?”

  Dave shook his head. “I’m not taking that bet.”

  “Bout the best way to shout ‘I’m stupid’ to the world, you ask me, give your kid a fucked-up name.”

  Dave stared at his co-worker. “You’re just a regular politician, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, I’m just a fuckin’ observer.”