I had stopped in a sort of canyon of discarded shipping containers. I’d been keeping to the left side of the passage through all the containers because it seemed darker on that side, as well as less cluttered with debris. There was a strong smell of diesel oil in the air now, but I couldn’t tell if I was standing in a puddle of it or it was just the rusting steel barrels oozing into the night air. It was nearly complete darkness where I was standing, but I could see a dim light flickering around the edges of the ten-foot-high steel boxes ahead.
Flickering?
Had I reached the hobo campfire already? It seemed too soon, but it was easy to become disoriented here in the darkness amid the jumble of industrial trash, wrecked containers, and other debris. The dogs had their ears up and appeared to be listening to something ahead of us. I tried to listen, too, but heard nothing but the low hum of the city behind me and the whine of semi tires out on Shipyard Boulevard. If that was the campfire area, the way to it was straight ahead on what was obviously a well-used path.
Too well used. It felt wrong.
So I retraced my steps until I came to the edge of a container, which I could feel more than see, and turned right to work my way around to a different approach. I’d be off the route Pardee and I had agreed upon, but I should have time to get to the margins of the campfire area before he came along behind me. Ten quietly crunching steps into almost total darkness and I bumped into the steel walls of another container that was blocking the way.
I was in a box canyon, literally. There were steel walls rising ten feet over my head in three directions.
There was a crack between the corners of the two boxes, through which I could now definitely make out the glow of a small fire reflecting off a two-high stack of ruined containers. I could see a few hunched shapes of the homeless guys silhouetted against the fire. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the shepherds were waiting for me back where I’d made the wrong turn. Lot of help there, I thought.
Then they both looked over their shoulders and disappeared.
I blinked and looked again. No dogs.
Keeping my back to one of the containers, I slid my way back to the entrance of my little detour, all by feel. I still had the steel pipe, but I laid this down in order to extract my. 45 and a high-intensity penlight from my coat pocket.
When I got back to the entrance to my dead end, there were still no shepherds. What in the hell had they gone after? Hopefully not a rat. The wolf genes in any German shepherd might not be able to resist a fleeing rat. Discipline would eventually intrude, but the reflexive reaction would be a snapping lunge. I should have put them on a down, but that would have involved speaking the command in the darkness.
I waited by the edge of the container. I could feel sharp edges of ripped metal digging into my coat. How long had I been stopped? Would Pardee come around the corner in a minute? I tried to visualize our planned route in. I’d diverted into the dead end, but now I was back at the edge of the way we’d planned. Maybe the thing to do was to wait for Pardee before approaching those huddled figures out by the fire.
Except my scouts had gone missing. I felt like Lee at Gettysburg.
I waited and listened some more. The air had gotten colder the deeper I’d gone into the tangle. I was hoping for any sound I could recognize that might tell me where they’d run off to. It wasn’t like them to leave me in the dark like this.
There was a solid wall of containers on the other side of the rough path. Firelight illuminated the very top edges. I stared at the containers, trying to make out what was different, and then figured it out. These were intact. Rusty, spray-painted with all sorts of hip-hop tags, dented and scratched, but otherwise intact. The three straight lift rods on the backs indicated working double doors. Three in a row, end on to the path, and sitting fairly upright, unlike the majority of the containers, which sprawled at all angles in the darkness. Everything around them was wrecked, but these three containers were definitely not wrecked. I decided to wait some more, hoping that Pardee would come creeping down the alley between the other containers. I had an increasingly urgent sense that I badly needed my backup, or what was left of it. Where were the damned dogs?
After another two minutes of just standing there, I got out my cell phone and keyed Pardee’s number.
It wasn’t Pardee who answered. It was Trask.
“Hi there, Lieutenant,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“Let me talk to him,” I said.
“Afraid he’s somewhat indisposed just now, Lieutenant. Not harmed, mind you, but not available for phone-cons. Sleeping. In your Suburban.”
“Sleeping.”
“Yup. A little whiff of ether and down he went. It’s a lot more efficient than whacking somebody on the back of the head. You never know what will happen then. Ready to palaver?”
“I suppose I am,” I said, looking around again. I had the sense that he could see me.
“Right in front of you are three containers,” he said, confirming my worst suspicions. “The middle door is the one you want. Watch your step.”
He broke the connection. Well, shit, I thought. We did agree to meet him in his jungle, not ours. We should have figured a way to come by boat. I put my. 45 away and slipped across the open space between my detour and the middle container. There were no locks on the operating handles, so I undid the latches and shoved the two halves open.
I flipped on my penlight. The container was empty, just a blank cube of space that smelled faintly of some kind of exotic animal dung. I tried to remember where I’d smelled that before. The deck of the container was about a foot above the ground level outside, so I stepped up and into the container, keeping an eye on those doors. If there was someone waiting outside to lock me in, I thought I’d have a shot at keeping one of the door halves open long enough to deal with him.
I stood there and searched the interior with the penlight again. I thought I heard a faint whimpering sound-the shepherds? I saw what looked like a big floor seam halfway down the container. Maybe there was a trapdoor of some kind? I took one more step in that direction and felt the floor sag under my feet. In the next instant, before I could step back, the half that I was standing on dropped down to a forty-five-degree angle and I went sliding down the plywood floor into serious darkness. The moment I hit bottom, the floor panel snapped back up behind me with a loud bang.
I’d managed to hold on to the penlight, which I quickly shone around into the darkness. Instantly two fuzzy shepherd faces pushed into view and then into my own face. While I was fending off an incipient love-in, lights came on in the ceiling. One of the dogs knocked the tiny light out of my hand, but I no longer needed it. The lights were bright enough to make me blink.
I found myself sitting on a dirt floor in an underground chamber. Actually, I realized, it was another container, submerged ninety percent under the surface level of the junkyard. For that matter, this might be the true surface level of the junkyard, depending on how old the place was. The walls and ceiling were made of what looked like aluminum or light steel; the only thing missing was a plywood floor. The air was dry and musty, but the ground smelled of damp. There were four small lights embedded in the ceiling, and an even smaller hole, maybe two inches square, at one end of the container, high up on the wall. It looked like there was a glass cover on that aperture. High on one side wall was a black circle about a foot and a half in diameter, which I assumed was an air hole. That was not a good sign.