Gideon’s Sword

As the door began to open, Gideon ducked back around the corner, then fled to the outdoor wrecking yard he’d previously picked out as a hiding place. He climbed a stack of pancaked cars and lay down on top, watching and waiting.

“Hey!” shouted the guard at the threshold of the open door, looking about in a panic but not daring to venture outside. “Who’s there?” There was real alarm in his voice.

Gideon waited.

An alarm began to whoop — the guard had pulled it, right on cue — and within five minutes the cop cars arrived, three of them screeching up at the curb, the occupants leaping out. Six cops.

Gideon smiled. The more the merrier.

They began a search of the place, three taking the inside of the warehouse, and three searching the wrecking yard. Naturally, most of them being out of shape, they did not attempt to climb the stacks of crushed cars. Gideon watched them poking and shining their lights all over for about thirty minutes, amusing himself by reconstructing the complex bass line of the Cecil Taylor number he’d listened to the previous afternoon. They then inspected the perimeter fence but, as he’d figured, missed the carefully concealed gap he’d created.

Meanwhile, just as he’d hoped, the other three cops and the guard were coming and going from the warehouse without bothering to shut, lock, or alarm the door in their haste. Finally, search completed, the six cops gathered in the parking lot with the guard beside their cars, where they radioed back to the precinct.

Gideon climbed down the heap of flattened cars, ran out of the junkyard, flitted across the parking lot, and flattened himself against the warehouse wall. He crept up to the door, which was still halfway open, and slipped inside.

Keeping to the shadows, he found a new hiding place inside the warehouse, in a far corner behind two deep rows of chain-link cages, each protecting a car. It was stifling in the building, the muggy dead air redolent of gasoline, oil, and burned rubber.

Another fifteen minutes passed and the guard came back in, shutting and locking the door behind him and resetting the alarm. Gideon watched as the man walked the length of the warehouse and settled into a lighted area at the far end, replete with a chair and desk, a huge bank of CCTV monitors — and a television set.

And sure enough, the guard turned on the set, swung his feet up, and began to watch. It was some old show, and every few moments there was a laugh track. He listened. Was that really the penetrating voice of Lucille Ball and the answering bark of Ricky Ricardo? God bless the unions, Gideon thought, that had fought so hard for the right of municipal employees on night duty to have access to a TV set.

On his hands and knees, Gideon crawled along the row of cages, peering inside, until at last he found the wrecked Ford Escape. He removed the bolt cutters and a thick cotton rag. Winding the rag around the first chain link, he waited for the laugh track; made the cut; rewound the rag around the next link; waited for the laugh track; cut again.

He finished as the show ended with the usual burst of pseudo-Copacabana music. Opening the flap he’d created, he crawled inside.

The car was an absolute mess. It had been pried apart and cut into several pieces that were so mangled they were only vaguely recognizable as belonging to a vehicle. It was still drenched in blood and gore and smelled like a butcher shop on a hot summer’s day. Crawling around it, Gideon located the rear passenger area where Wu had been sitting and wormed his way inside. The seat was sticky with blood.

Trying his best to tune this out, he forced his hands into the space behind and groped around. Almost immediately he felt something hard and small. He grasped it, slipped it into a ziplock bag he pulled from his pocket, and sealed the bag with a feeling of triumph.

A cell phone.

21

In Roland Blocker’s four years of working the night shift at the warehouse, nothing had ever happened. Absolutely nothing. Night after night it was the same routine, the same rounds, the same comforting parade of late-night, black-and-white television sitcoms. Blocker loved the peace and quiet of the vast space. He had always felt safe, cocooned in the warehouse with its heavy metal doors and alarms and ceaselessly vigilant cameras, all safely enclosed within a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped by concertina wire. He’d never been bothered, no burglary attempts, nothing. After all, there was nothing to steal either inside or out — except wrecked cars, cars hauled out of the rivers with dead bodies in them, cars found with bodies locked in their trunks, burned-out cars, drug-smuggling cars, shot-up cars. What was there to steal?

But now, after the incident, with the cops gone, he felt spooked for the first time. That had been the strangest damn thing, that voice outside the door. Had he really heard it? A couple of the cops who’d responded to his alarm hinted around that maybe he’d been sleeping and had a dream. That pissed Blocker off — he never slept on the job. The surveillance cameras were always on and God only knew who might check the tapes later.

I Love Lucy had ended and the next show up was The Beverly Hillbillies, Blocker’s favorite of the night’s lineup. He tried to relax as the theme song started, the twang of banjos and the overdone hick accent always making him smile. He bent down to crank up the A/C and adjust the vents so they blew more directly on him.

And then he heard a sound. A clink—​as if a piece of metal had dropped lightly onto the cement floor of the warehouse. He dropped his legs off the desk and, fumbling for the remote, muted the TV set to listen.

Clank came the sound again, closer this time. Suddenly his heart was pounding in his chest. First the voice, now this. He sca

Should he pull the alarm again? No, the cops would never let him live that down. He considered calling out and realized that was plain stupid — if some intruder was in the warehouse, they wouldn’t answer.

Heaving himself out of the chair, Blocker unhooked his Maglite and headed in the direction of the second sound, moving cautiously, his free hand resting easily on the butt of his service piece.

Reaching the area from which the sound had come, he shone the light around. This corner contained stacked pallets of old shrink-wrapped pieces of cars, all labeled — evidence that had been cut from vehicles years before but couldn’t yet be tossed.

Nothing. He was just nervous, spooked by the earlier thing — that was all. Maybe rats had gotten into the warehouse. He went back to his little office and sat down, turning the sound of the television up, a little higher than usual this time. The noise comforted him. It was the episode where the banker fakes an attack of wild Indians on the Clampett mansion, one of his favorites. He cracked open a fresh Diet Coke and settled down to enjoy it.

Clank.

He sat up again, muting the television, listening intently.

Clank.

It was such a regular sound, u

Getting back to his feet, he yanked out the flashlight and shifted it to his left hand, unsnapping the keeper on his sidearm with his right and sliding out the weapon. He walked back to the corner from which the sounds had come and paused, hoping to hear it again. Nothing. He advanced, this time deciding to go behind the stacks of pallets to see if there was something or someone hiding between them and the wall.

He slowly walked down a long aisle between pallets, pausing just before the last one, listening. Still nothing. Weird.