“Almost got me that time,” I said.
“What you talkeen about?” she demanded. Mrs. Lee was as genuinely fussy and ill-dispositioned as they came.
“It was delicious,” I said, reaching across the counter and patting her hand. “See you later.”
The sweltering air outside seemed normal now. I pulled my tie down another notch and opened the door to the Ford. The pits were gone now; the parking lot was safe for humanity. I settled in carefully on the hot vinyl car seat, and after a few deep-throated rumbles that made the Escort sound like an Alfa, I pulled back out into traffic.
I headed up Gallatin Road toward Inglewood. This part of town has more junk stores, salvage warehouses, cheap liquor stores, and pawn shops per capita than any other place I’ve ever seen. Off to my right, Riverside Drive ran parallel a mile or so away, changed names, then curved left and intersected Gallatin Road just ahead of me. I stopped short of the light, turned left onto some side street I never could remember the name of, and meandered back into a really seedy part of town.
Maybe it’s not all that seedy; it’s just that I’ve never gotten accustomed to being surrounded by junkyards, body shops, illegal dumpsites, and motorcycle gang headquarters. Down the road, on the left, next to a concrete block building that housed Billy and Sam’s Expert Auto Maintenance on one side and the Death Ranger’s clubhouse on the other side, sat a faded, old mobile home in the middle of a desolate, closed junkyard. An eight-foot-tall chain link fence surrounded the lot, which was littered with the rusting hulks of generations’ worth of automotive dreams and overgrown with weeds and brush.
I pulled up in front of the gate and parked. I walked up, shook the gate to make a little noise, and waited for Shadow to emerge from wherever she’d been hiding out from the sun. Shadow, an aging black female German Shepherd trotted around from behind the trailer, ears at attention, a slight tilt to the left that came from age and the genetic hip displacement that seems to plague shepherds so badly.
She was slow, laid back, but I knew that was because I was on this side of the fence. If I crossed to the other side without either permission or recognition, she’d tear my throat out.
“Shadow,” I said, holding a hand, palm out, against the gate. “Hey, babe, what’s happening?”
She stopped about six feet away, sniffing, focusing. Then she approached slowly and ran her huge, wet, black nose up the chain link fencing to my hand. She sniffed a couple more times, then the tail started bouncing around like a clock unwinding. She whimpered a little, then backed away so I could open the gate. I lifted the chain off the hook, pressed the gate open a foot or two, and stepped inside the lot. Shadow was on my shoulders in a second, licking my face and nuzzling me. I reached inside my pocket, pulled out the napkin and unwrapped the chicken.
I took a step back; she was on the ground, jaws dripping.
“Speak. Speak to me, Shadow.” She brought up a gnarling growl that erupted into a bark.
“Good girl!” I squeezed the chicken into a ball, flipped it into the air. It was gone before it hit the top of the curve.
“Where’s daddy, Shadow?” I said. Why do dogs and babies make people talk so damn goofy? “Where’s daddy, baby?”
The sun was really baking now, the bare ground cracked beneath my feet. I looked over toward the trailer, and even with the rust stains and dull, weathered paint, the reflection hurt my eyes. I walked toward the pale green hulk with Shadow flopping happily along at my side. At one end of the trailer, an overworked window unit struggled to pull the humidity out of the air. I knocked once and opened the door.
Lonnie stood inside, back to me, bent over slightly, staring at something on the table. He whipped his head around, shushed me, then motioned me in.
“And for God’s sake, don’t slam the door,” he whispered.
Lonnie’s office and sometimes apartment was a clutter of papers, used automobile parts, scattered books, grease, tobacco stains, empty beer bottles. Lonnie was the smartest repo man I’d ever met, but he had strange tastes.
“What’s going on?” I asked, real low.
“Shhh,” he hissed. “Experiment.”
Lonnie was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. In his outstretched hand, he held a few straws plucked from an old broom. He moved slowly toward the massive wooden table that normally served as his desk, but which had been swept clean for the drama du jour.
I strained in the low light to see what that was. Behind us, from the other room, the air-conditioner chugged away like an old steam locomotive. He padded slowly forward, reached out toward the middle of the table, then turned his head around and blindly moved a little closer. I bent down, looking around him, just as the straws touched a tiny pile of what looked like dirty table salt on the wood.
There was a terrific boom and a flash of white, followed by an acrid stink that made Mrs. Lee’s Szechuan chicken smell as benign as Cream of Wheat. I jumped back, slamming against the door. I was blinded for a second, then dived on the floor with a yelp.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Lonnie yelled from the floor next to me. I looked over at his arm to see if I needed to start calling him Stumpy. “It works!”
His arm was intact, which was more than I could say for my ears. The smoke was dissipating. I stood up. A scorched circle on the wooden table outlined a gouge maybe an inch or so deep and a foot around.
“You jerk!” I yelled. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Damn, man,” he panted, standing up. “I didn’t know it would be that powerful. I mean, the book-”
“Damn it, Lonnie” I moaned. “Which one this time? The Anarchist’s Cookbook?”
He looked from the table to me, electric delight on his face. “No, man. I just got a copy of The Poor Man’s James Bond.”
I looked around the room. On the moth-eaten couch, a paperback about the size of a telephone directory lay open. I picked it up.
“ANTI?” I asked, reading the page.
“Ammonium Nitrogen Tri-Iodide. Stuff’s a pistol, man. In fact, it’s more a fulminate than an explosive. Easiest junk in the world to make.”
I scanned the article. “You trying to get yourself killed?” This was not the first time I’d walked into Lonnie’s Playhouse just in time to almost get my head blown off. The last time, he was making ersatz napalm out of gasoline and Styrofoam cups.
“No, man, this is great! All you do is soak iodine crystals in pure ammonia, then press the goop through a coffee filter. What’s left is ANTI. As long as it’s wet, it’s harmless. But when it dries, it’s the nastiest stuff you’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, great,” I said, dropping the book on the couch. “One of these days I’m going to have to come in here and scrape your ass off the walls with a spatula.”
Lonnie grabbed a greasy rag and wiped his hands. My ears still rang from his little demonstration, and my nostrils were filled with what I now recognized as the stench of ammonia with a faint burning tinge added. Sort of like being at the landfill the day they burn the Pampers.
Lonnie reached into a dented, thirty-year-old Kelvinator and pulled out a beer. “You going down to Shelby ville with me?”
“Ain’t got the time this time, bro.”
“I picked up the early edition of the Banner. Saw your name. You sure you don’t want to get out of town for a while?” Lonnie popped the top and passed it over to me. I held out a hand to decline. He shrugged, lifted the can to his lips.
“Not this time. I mostly came by for information.”
“Information?”
“Yeah. About the murder.”
“You got any sense, you’ll go to Shelby ville with me. Pick up that Trans Am. Drive back with the T-tops off. Have yourself a good time. Forget that murder shit. You look like death warmed over now. Don’t make it permanent.”