Underground Airlines(29)

Angie nodded sure. Her cousin Addy, as it turned out, lived near there. Near Troy Avenue.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “No kidding.”

The warehouse address I’d pulled off my mapping software. Everything else was pure spun sugar, a song I was singing, finding the tune as I went. I talked as quickly as I could, gesturing a lot, charging my voice with exasperation. Angie was nodding, magazine forgotten. On the clock above her head, it became midnight in Abu Dhabi.

“Anyway,” I went on. “Easy gig. Just load it up, drop it off, nothing to it, you know?”

When I said that I gave Angie a smart look, like, Yeah, right, there’s always more to it, whatever it is, and she returned the look with a smart one of her own, shaking her head, Yeah, right. Angie and me, we were no dummies. We knew the score.

“Oh, hey, look at that,” I announced suddenly. “Loving those nails.”

She beamed, held ’em up. This stray compliment was just icing, just a little conversational texture, although I did mean it sincerely. Each fingernail was painted a different color, and together they formed a sparkling ten-finger rainbow across the faded yellow of the countertop. She spread her fingers for further inspection, which I supplied, whistling admiringly before getting to the heart of the matter.

“But so Monday morning Sully tells me about a job. Truck left the supplier sometime Sunday night, and now I’m supposed to go and do the pickup at a vacant lot on Twelfth Street, maybe two miles past the Speedway, almost out in Hendricks. Paperwork ain’t come in yet, he says, but I better get moving. Two barrels of pit-run gravel, two cubic yards to the barrel, we’re talking, like, a couple tons of this shit—sorry, Angie, there I go again.”

Angie cased my hand for a wedding ring when she thought I wasn’t looking.

“But so I pulled up the light truck Monday morning, to this lot, and guess what?”

“No rocks,” said Angie.

I slapped the counter. “No rocks! You believe that?”

She shook her head. She clucked her tongue. “Your boy messed you up.”

“That’s right.”

I tugged out my handkerchief and wiped my forehead, laying it on thick for sure at this point, but sometimes this is how you gotta do it. You make yourself an open face of need, you send out need like smoke signals. You let need billow out and fill up the room.

“Because now the boss,” I said, “Sully’s boss, Mr. Coleman, who is now my boss, he’s saying this is on me. He’s saying I better find out what happened to that shipment or it’s coming out of my check.”

Angie guffawed, incredulous. “And you haven’t even been paid yet.”

“That’s right!” I slapped the counter again, both hands this time. “That’s right!”

Angie smiled. I smiled. We smiled at each other.

“So I been going crazy, this is four days now,” I said. “All Sully knows is the name of the supplier, and I called them, can’t get a straight answer. Sully does not know the name of the truck company. Between you and me, Angie, my man Sully, we’re not talking about Albert Einstein here, all right?”

“I’m getting that.”

“So I been going around to the different shippers, you know, because I gotta figure this out or I ain’t even getting my first paycheck. I’m supposed to be Sherlock Holmes or something. I’m the dang pea-gravel police all a sudden!”

Angie laughed. I laughed. We laughed with each other.

“You got a packing slip number?” she said, coming down off the laughter.

“No.”

“Client account number?”

“No. Like I told you.”

“You got nothing.”

“Zip.”

I leaned forward on the counter, let my golden eyes brim with need. I pushed the cap back so she could see my whole sad, handsome face. I was a weary and sorry soul, but nice to look at. I knew exactly how I looked.

“Well, let’s see,” said Angie, and then, bless her beautiful free heart, she turned to her computer. “So Sunday…” she said and started typing. “What’s the name of the place?”

“Okay, now, that’s another little problem.”

Angie reared her head back and clucked, gave me a look: Are you serious? I grinned, sheepish.

“It’s Garden something,” I said, “I know that. Garden Store? Gardens of—oh, I don’t know. Garden something.”

“And you know where it’s coming from? Of course you don’t.”

“Alabama, maybe?”

Angie gave me a different kind of look, sharp and serious. Angry, even.

“Not Alabama. Not with us. We do south-south, and we do north-north. We do a little bit of north to south, but we usually contract those out. We do zero south to north. You want south to north you need a specialty shipper to make sure you’re clearing all the regulations and whatnot. Most S-N places, they only do S-N, because the other customers, they do not want to be dealing with that shit.” Angie did not apologize for the word. “Best believe I would not be sitting here shipping south to north.”

“Oh, right. Right.”

“Best believe it.”

Angie clucked. The very idea. Meanwhile, I was processing this. I had assumed, and Bridge had assumed along with me, that Barton had chosen Winston Bibb to blackmail because Whole Wide World could arrange a truck to go all the way—to bring Jackdaw from GGSI up to Indy. But this company didn’t move shipments north out of the Four: Angie was leaving little doubt about that. She was back to the computer, still shaking her head, typing rapidly without breaking her masterpiece fingernails.