Free Burning Midnight by Loren D. Estleman Page B

that was more information than she needed. I said good-bye and punched off.
    I had nothing waiting for me back at the office but a bunch of elderly files, not even a mouse to outsmart. When the light changed I made a broad U-turn in the middle of the intersection and drove back to Zorborón’s garage. If I told him Nesto had been seen in the neighborhood he might know where he would be likely to land.
    *   *   *
    The same Basque mechanic was sitting on a cement block in front of the open bay with a tire iron in his hand, prying a blowout away from the rim. The sleeves of his greasy coveralls were cut off at the shoulders and his biceps were as big as tether balls. When I asked for the boss he took a hand away from his chore long enough to jerk a thumb back over his shoulder in the direction of the office.
    On the way to the room in back I passed a Mexican with an air wrench spinning lugs off the wheels of a VW beetle on a rack and another who looked like his identical twin at a bench pounding the bend out of a driveshaft with a ballpeen hammer. I could make more noise driving a truckload of cymbals through the wall of a steel foundry, but I wouldn’t be able to keep it up. The air was thick with grease and blue with the haze of scorched metal.
    Glass partitions enclosed a corner, plastered with posters advertising discounts on brake inspections and tune-ups. The dates had expired on all of them, but they were mostly there for privacy. The office was inside the partitions.
    The doors to offices in commercial garages are rarely closed; some don’t even have doors. Zorborón’s was an exception. The business he conducted, in personal meetings and over the telephone, seldom involved transmissions and repair estimates, and everyone else was too busy to pay much attention to who might be wandering about with his ears open. I knocked, but if he heard it and answered, the whine of the wrench and the ringing of steel on steel drowned him out. The knob turned freely. I let myself in.
    I didn’t pay any particular attention to the smell at first. I still had traces of Domingo Siete’s charred beard in my nostrils, and the odors aren’t dissimilar. Whoever decorates those places doesn’t tamper with the convention. Miss March Muffler posed in a bikini and high heels holding an exhaust system on a calendar on the block wall at the back and there was the usual message board shingled over with yellow Post-its. Zorborón’s desk was made of sheet metal and black Formica. On it stood a flat-screen computer monitor surrounded by stacks of papers: insurance reports, work orders, and bills of lading. The Tiger sat at an angle to it in a hydraulic office swivel, wearing what looked like the same black T-shirt and gray slacks he’d had on the day before. He was in a slouch. The back of his head rested on the back of the chair, with his eyes closed and his lips parted. He wasn’t the siesta type. He had a black mole two inches under his left eye. It hadn’t been there before, and it wasn’t a mole.

 
    EIGHT
    I noticed the smell then. In a room that small, smokeless powder is as smokeless as silencers silent, and although the smoke had cleared, the stench was strong enough to be fresh. I confirmed it when I searched Zorborón’s neck for a pulse. There wasn’t any, but the flesh was still warm.
    I went back and locked the door, but there wasn’t much to see. He carried his cash in a gold-and-black-enamel clip with a tiger on it; nothing else in his pockets, not even keys. He had a driver, so no driver’s license, and that party or a bodyguard would open all his locks for him and likely carry his weapons. Eighteen hundred twenty-six dollars in crisp folded bills: walking-around money, if you cared to walk around that neighborhood with a roll that size. Zorborón’s reputation would have demanded no less. It eliminated robbery as a motive.
    I went