My question hung in the air in my living room. What the hell are we going to do?
Ernst Vielstich watched me for a moment, then shrugged, as if the answer were obvious to him but he wouldn't hold my lack of understanding against me.
"We stop him," he said simply.
"Right," I said. And that was it. Seeing this brittle septuagenarian casually willing to face overwhelming odds woke me out of my momentary lapse into psychological helplessness. There were always options and always possibilities for the resourceful. And I had a resource I had yet to call on.
I picked up the phone and dialed Sammy Moapa.
Five minutes later, I had Sammy committed to being at my apartment in an hour and a half. Ernst and I went back out onto the porch with Beth and the Gordell sisters to enjoy one of the last temperate afternoons before autumn set in.
** ** **
Sammy Moapa was a massive Pacific Islander -- half Tongan, half Samoan -- who had put his size to good and violent use throughout his high school days. After almost ending up in prison on his eighteenth birthday, he found Jesus, entered the Job Corps, lost Jesus again, and ended up with enough training to pursue a career in electrical engineering. In between subcontractor jobs, he sometimes hired himself out to me as backup muscle; it gave him an opportunity to crack some heads like in the good old days, while normally staying on the side of Truth and Justice.
Beth had pretty much adopted Ernst Vielstich as "Grandpa Ernst" by the time Sammy showed up, but she immediately showed her love for "Uncle Sammy" by running to him and trying to shimmy up his massive leg as if there were a treehouse built on his shoulders.
Ernst arched an eyebrow and smiled his half smile before I even introduced them. My choice of backup obviously met with his approval.
While Beth continued to conquer Mount Moapa, I explained the situation in simple sketchy terms. Not that Sammy was stupid or slow; quite the opposite. But he just didn't care. And he trusted me to be siding with the good guys, so that he wouldn't have to worry about ethical qualms in the middle of the brawl.
"Nazi Satanists, building a gate to hell in the Freeport Center," he said. "Stop them, wreck the gate. Got it." He cracked his knuckles.
"Good," I said. "We don't know exactly where we're going, so we better get going while we've got some daylight."
Ernst was already leveraging himself out of his chair when I laid a hand on his shoulder.
"You're sitting this one out, Ernst."
He looked at me, confused, halfway out of the armchair.
"But... you need me along."
"Not this time," I said. "From here out, the game is mostly busting heads and picking up pieces."
"You will need my help," he insisted. "You still need to find where Mueller is constructing the gateway. He will have placed sigils around the area. I can recognize them for you."
"So can someone else, I think." I flipped open my cell phone. There was a message from Philip Castler.
** ** **
I left Beth inside with the Gordell sisters when Philip Castler arrived, and the four of us met on the front lawn: Ernst, Sammy, Castler, and me. I could feel, almost hear, the tension running down Castler's spine as he tried not to react to the presence of a huge, dark man nearby.
"Here's what we know," I said. "Hans Mueller is building his gateway somewhere in the Freeport Center. According to Mr. Vielstich, he will have drawn signs on the building, sigils and warning marks -- not big or flashy, but something we should be able to notice." I pointed at Castler. "That's why you're coming along. You've seen the book, at least, and should be able to help us tell special symbols apart from normal graffiti."
"I really don't know much," Castler protested. "Mr. Vielstich is really the expert."
"Yes, he is," I said. "He's also in his seventies and has trouble walking fast and negotiating stairs. No offense."
"The truth is never offensive," Ernst said.
I checked my watch. "It's already almost five. We've only got a couple of hours of daylight, and a lot of ground to cover. Let's take Sammy's truck."
I waited until Castler had turned stiffly toward Sammy's twincab, steeling himself for the ordeal of riding in a dark-skinned man's vehicle. Then I said lowly to Sammy, "You loaded?"
"Rennie, whenever you call, I always come loaded. For bear."
** ** **
The Freeport Industrial Center started out, sixty years ago, as a military depot and worksite big enough to have its own ZIP code. Rows upon rows of identical warehouses were laid out in strict rows, with just enough space for worker parking between.
A few decades back, the whole thing was sold off to private investors, who further parceled out the warehouses to entrepreneurs for manufacturing and storage. For years, it was a booming center for industrial startups looking for a ready-to-move-into facility.
But the last decade had been hard on the Center. Although the electrical wiring was robust, the phone systems were jury-rigged and wimpy, and no one entity had the resources and responsibility to get the whole Center brought up to modern standards. The sudden importance of Internet capabilities to business meant that start-ups usually looked past the Center instead of at it. That, and general entropy, had left fully half of the warehouses untenanted, a proportion that was building up speed as the private connecting roads and parking areas went unmaintained and the whole Center took on an air of shabbiness and desperation.
In other words, it was a perfect place to find a spacious, unused facility for surreptitious activities.
We arrived just as the five o'clock whistles all blew at once, and blue-collar workers flooded out the doors and into their vehicles. It was a mini traffic jam, and we stayed on the side of the road just outside the main gates for fifteen minutes as a steady stream of homeward-bound laborers each tried to jockey for a good position in the outgoing flow. It was Friday, and for reason left to be discovered by better minds than mine, the day of the week made the same number of cars and trucks that much more disorganized and harried.
The time spent in Sammy's truck was silent with the unspoken tension between Sammy behind the wheel on my left and Castler on my right, though more of it flowed from right to left than the other direction.
By five-twenty, traffic had tapered off to the point that we no longer felt like salmon swimming upstream when we entered the main gates and started slowing driving between the long lines of warehouses, constructed identically, now individualized by time and age.
"There'll be some more going home at five-thirty," said Castler, "and some more at six, but the main quitting time is at five. I used to work in here, about five years ago."
"All right," I said, "you be our guide. When you were here, what section was the most vacant?"
He craned his neck, then pointed ahead and to our right.
"Make for that corner," he said. "There were a dozen empty buildings down there, and the roads were all going to hell. I bet it's still the same."
Sammy silently navigated through the square intersections until we found ourselves in the far corner of the Center. The vacant zone had, if anything, expanded since Castler worked here. Block after block of warehouses stood empty and unused, windblown debris collecting ignored in their doorways. Broken windows stared unboarded out into a street so pockmarked with potholes that we should have been driving a moon lander. The truck's windows were rolled up, so I knew it was only my imagination that the wind whistled between the buildings as in an old Western.
"Hey," said Sammy after we had crept along for another few minutes, not knowing what we were looking for. "I'm not an expert like you guys, but could that be something?"
We were driving north, so Sammy was facing the western side of the street. The low sun lingered just at the crest of the warehouses' roofs. Castler and I craned our necks and squinted in the direction of Sammy's finger.
The door of the warehouse beside us was corrugated metal, now zebra-striped with rainwater rust trails. In the center of it, in a scarlet tint only slightly brighter than the rust, was a spraypainted symbol. It was a variation on a swastika, with curved arms instead of square, and a dot of the same color inside the curve of each arm.
"That was in the book," said Castler. "That's where Hans is."
