Dead Street

For thirty seconds I got a blank stare, then she squinted her sightless eyes, seeing into a past a long time ago. She waited a little longer and said, “Fission.”

“What?”

“Fission,” she repeated. “Does that... mean anything to you, Jack?”

Silently, I mouthed a string of words that had nothing to do with my thoughts because things suddenly started to make a little bit of sense if you consider all the possible potential of that single word.

FISSION.

Nuclear devastation.

And only a retired cop and a blind beauty to stop it.

Chapter Six

Don’t mess with a bunch of pros.

They may have been low-paid cops, but they had been trained and were experienced and had gone through the muck and mire of the defects of society and been shot at and sometimes hit and sometimes killed and when they had something to contribute to the general welfare of the society they had protected for so long, you had damn well better listen to them.

Pudgy Gillespie, newly retired sergeant, who had gotten hit twice when he stopped a bank robbery, said, “Jack, I got hold of some information I think you’ve been looking for.”

“Oh?” I said to the voice on the phone.

“Bennie Orbach was released from prison four months ago,” Pudgy said. “He served out all those years for that attempted hijacking of that army truck that was transporting atomic materials to a new location. You remember that?”

That word atomic made my neck tingle.

I nodded, then said, “That truck was a dummy, wasn’t it? The real one got through.”

“The hell it was a dummy. That story came out only when it was found empty.”

“A cover-up,” I said.

“Like you can’t believe. All personnel connected to that affair were assigned to scattered outposts, kept from making contact until everything quieted down or they died, and until now certain Washington agencies have sat on this thing like it was Fort Knox’s gold hoard.”

I waited.

When he had his breath back, Pudgy added, “Benny Orbach went into deep cover as soon as he hit the street. He totally disappeared, never even attempting to contact his parole officer, but a couple of our hot shot trackers from downtown picked up a thread of information and followed it up.”

“They located Benny?”

“No, they found what was left of his body. Somebody had really worked him over and whatever he was holding out, he spilled. Nobody could have kept quiet with the kind of sticking he was given. It was almost like a living autopsy.”

“Damn,” I spit out.

“But they missed something,” Pudgy said. “They never found his personal stash.”

I squinted silently at that.

Pudgy told me, “You know how the cons hide their most necessary items, like narcotics?”

With the way prison shakedowns are held, I couldn’t imagine any way any con could hold out anything. After a few seconds I suggested, “You referring to rectal implants?”

“Exactly.”

“Hell, Pudgy, they would have found that before he was released. Their inspections are...”

“Come on, Jack. He was released. He used the implant after he got out. Whoever nailed him never even thought of that.”

“You don’t think he wouldn’t have talked, being carved up like that?”

Pudgy said solemnly, “One of our medics said pain and fear could have distorted his memory functions. In other words, he went out of his noodle.”

“Cut to the chase, Pudgy.”

“The condom up his ass had a note in it, only the thing leaked... but one word was still decipherable. It said Credentials.”

“Shit.”

“So to speak. Also a number, Jack: 4428.”

“How did you connect Credentials to me, Pudge?”

“I had lunch with Davy Ross the other day and he mentioned you, and Credentials came up. Almost like an afterthought with him.”

“But not with you,” I said.

“You know old cops, Jack. That’s why I’m passing it on. Maybe you can add it up.”

“Some things are standing tall enough to leave a shadow, pal.”

“Got you.”

When I hung up I stared at the phone. There was no way I could get any information from a government agency, even if I knew which one to tap. They ran their own railroad and didn’t share the engineer’s seat with anybody else; but something big had gone down and now it was coming back up again.

Benny Orbach had stolen a shipment of atomic material. It had been offloaded before the truck was found.

The load had to be put in a specially adapted vehicle.

It would have to be stored somewhere safe. No radiation emissions.

Who would be the ultimate purchaser?

Credentials was not a storage area... What was it used for?

What did 4428 mean?

There was an ambiguous side to the death of Benny Orbach — most likely any investigators would assume that the word “Credentials” in Benny’s implant would refer to identification in a drug deal.

But cops have their own sources of information too. Mine was a library where a cheery-voiced young lady was happy to research the affair of the hijacked Army vehicle that was transporting atomic material.