little nudge to let him know it’s time to put a ring on it? Then again,” he allowed, “sometimes it’s easier to move on if we’re not carrying so much baggage. Turning tears into cash is our specialty.”
He was a shrewd one all right. Or was it that all women came to pawn shops with broken hearts. Jane decided it was safest to play along. The damsel in distress routine.
“I do have a problem,” she confided. “There’s this man -”
He nodded sympathetically. “I can’t remember when there wasn’t.”
“I don’t know who he is, but he won’t let me alone.” Switching to anonymous stalker routine.
“He may be crazy, but I can’t fault his taste,” Captain America said, tossing a gentle compliment into the mix.
“The police say they can’t do anything.” Building the drama.
“Budget cuts. What are you gonna do,” Pawn Shop guy commiserated. He straightened and hitched up his Levis. “Things ain’t what they used to be. If they ever were.”
“So I thought,” Jane said with a straight face, “maybe a gun. You know.”
“It just so happens that I do,” he said, and got down to business. “You’re a legal resident, I take it.”
“I tend to think of myself as a citizen of the world,” Jane said loftily.
“And do you have a concealed carry license issued by this state or any one of the 23 states with which we have a reciprocal agreement?”
“Is it a problem if I say no?” Jane gave him the doe-eyed treatment. Her global carry permit presumably had either died with her or been revoked when she and John were forced to go AWOL.
“Not if it lives in your lingerie drawer. Which is where this little cutie would feel right at home.” He pointed to the far side of the case. “Smith and Wesson Pink Lady .38 special. 12 ounces of aircraft-grade aluminum, fixed sights, 5 shots for just $449.95.”
“Oooh. That is just too, too adorable,” Jane cooed. “But someone suggested I ask about - what was it? A Sig 1911 Tacops Carry.” She was standing right over one. Captain America tilted his head and pursed his lips in silent approbation as he removed the gun from the case and held it out for inspection.
“Did someone also recommend a rosewood handle?” the pawnbroker asked, as suspicion began to dawn.
“Ergo grip,” Jane said, weighing the Sig and checking the action. “How many mags?”
“Comes with four. Ammo?”
“Two 50s. Remington if you have them. What’s the damage?”
He plunked two boxes of bullets on the counter. “$1299.95 with background check. An even $2K without.”
“That second thing. I have cash,” Jane said, peeling the bills from a short stack. “And aren’t you worried I’m a cop?”
“We prefer gold or cocaine,” Captain America declared, licking a thumb as he counted the greenbacks. “And the cops around here are all on the take. I go out of my way to have a healthy working relationship with all the local authorities. Cops, Feds, Chamber of Commerce. The only thing I got to worry about,” he punched a key on the old fashioned cash register, which opened with a loud ka-ching, “is UN-organized crime. You want a receipt?”
Some American wit once said ‘Thanks to the Interstate Highway System it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.’ Jane reflected on the truth of that statement as she bid Captain America adieu and eyed the traffic filing docilely past the pawn shop toward the on-ramp. Detroit was just an hour north. On the interstate again, she found the road darkened by recent snowmelt and the going rough, even though it was nowhere near rush hour. Trucks and semis way outnumbered passenger cars, barreling along at top speed. Over 250,000 people had fled the Motor City in the last 10 years as manufacturers killed factory jobs or sent them elsewhere; but trade still flowed hard and fast from Mexico to Canada and back again. All along this final leg of the trip, electrical transmission towers stood guard in an ominous unbroken line. It was almost a relief to duck through a series of tunnels and emerge in the city. After more than 600 miles of nothing but asphalt, signs, barriers, berms, bumpers, and more asphalt, the mind and eye craved freedom from the totalitarian uniformity of the freeway. However relief turned quickly to jaw-dropping dismay. “What the fuck?”
Even after two years in an EU under economic siege, Jane was not prepared for Detroit. A ghost, no, a rotting cadaver of a city. Post-Katrina New Orleans without the high water marks. A former Paris of the Midwest where blight now swallowed art deco skyscrapers and gilded age mansions alike. Block after block of busted out windows. Razor wire bristling around the carcasses of landmark buildings - hotels, office towers, a train depot as imposing as Grand Central Station. All derelict, all deserted. As Jane drove, she had the place to herself, wide thoroughfares practically devoid of pedestrians or traffic. The very street art pleaded for mercy: HUMAN$! PLEA$E!
A Mogadishu or Karachi in the making.
Funny. Her bailiwick had been the so-called Third World, her specialty the extra-judicial takedown of individuals unofficially judged to be behaving badly in less developed, resource-rich locales. How odd to find the landscape of a banana republic and the hallmarks of a failing state suddenly transposed to her own backyard. Then again, how would she have seen these things from her old haunts - 10,000 feet up in business class or the hushed corridors of power, where life played like a prime time TV commercial or a slick magazine ad. She had no idea how long entropy had been gnawing at the roots and fabric of these United States. But the destructive forces at work in Greece were recognizable in the metropolitan holocaust that was Detroit.
Her original intention was to flop at the safe house until the rendezvous coordinates were transmitted sometime after midnight. She had an address and a combination for a lock box. But she also had time to kill and as she drove, it occurred to her that there was one other stop that she could make. A visit she could pay. To a certain chop shop in the industrial southwest hinterland known as Delray.
If downtown Detroit was a disaster area, Delray was a post-apocalyptic war zone. A No Man’s Land minus the poisonous gas and trenches. Here and there a single dwelling or a cluster of commercial buildings still stood stubbornly intact next to an entire street of smoking or semi-bulldozed ruins. Strippers and scrappers had made the rounds, scavenging the carrion created by financial predators, ripping out pipes, gutters, appliances, windows, even aluminum siding. For rock-bottom resale and shipping off to Shanghai. Heavy industry still hogged the waterfront, polluting both river and air, but everything was highly mechanized now, so the work was gone and the working class enclaves collapsing apace. Like any vanished race they left much behind. Front yards and porches full of discarded furniture, black trash bags bursting with superfluous belongings at the curbside, battalions of stray dogs scrounging in overturned garbage cans, bald tires piled just anywhere for no obvious reason, the denuded skeletons of cars grinning at you from every direction, and a bewildering number of bass boats, rusting high and dry in vacant lots.
Sherwood Body Shop stuck out of its necrotic surroundings like a healthy thumb. A tidy green garage with six bays and some gas pumps, its surrounding streets and blacktop were overflowing with cars, buses, and SUVs in various stages of automotive therapy and repair. Further up the block, vacant lots had been commandeered for a community garden verdant with winter greens and heralded by a sign that read “One House, One Block, One Neighborhood at a Time.” Young people in neat green jumpsuits toiled in, on, or under vehicles, welding, sanding, spray-painting. On a gravel patch to one side of the garage, another gaggle of youngsters gathered around a picnic table and a smoker grill to learn the finer points of barbecuing a whole suckling pig. Their instructor was the object of Jane’s quest. The last time she had seen him, he was also thusly engaged - teaching a breathless circle of intensely focused recruits. Only back then the recruits were Special Forces types and the subject was not suckling pig. It was cobra
blood.
Before Jane could so much as roll down a window, the Colonel had spotted her. Tall, clean-shaven, with a little more gray in his close-cropped hair, he turned the training and the BBQ tools over to an obviously unready participant and strode briskly toward the car, his face grim. Porsches being a portent of nothing good in a part of the world where late model cars, once the coin of the realm, were now a rarity. A pace or two off, he stopped and did a double-take.
“Well, I’ll be a honky’s monocle. Will you look at what the Aristocats drug in.” Grim turned to grin as he leaned on the doorframe of the car a minute, drinking her in.
“Lady and the Tramp?” Jane quipped. He shook his head and opened the car door with a flourish.
“Lady and the Tiger, maybe.” He stood back and looked her over like she was some kind of prodigal son. “I ain’t gonna stand here and lie. After they missed you in New York, I was sure they got you in DC.”
“Maybe they did. Or maybe there’s something to that whole nine lives thing.” She stepped out of the 911 and they shook hands warmly, awkwardly. To cover the embarrassment of an emotion that had nowhere else to go, Jane transferred her gaze to her surroundings and took refuge in idle chatter. “But speaking of magic kingdoms - not too shabby,