Chapter 39
Peter
The plywood over the door had a rough cutout for the knob and three separate deadbolts.
Peter tried the knob but it didn’t turn.
Without his green Chevy, he didn’t have the tools to get through the door.
He put his eye to a gap, trying to see inside, but saw only darkness.
How had Circuit Rider managed to pick up his tabs and registration?
There was nobody here to accept the mail.
And hadn’t been for some time, judging by the condition of the plywood.
Peter supposed the man could have gotten his tabs in person at the DMV, but to do that, he’d have to show a legal ID.
Which would defeat the purpose of the elaborate fake registration routine.
Circuit Rider must have been up to some nefarious shit to want to go to all this effort to hide the vehicle’s ownership.
At the far right end of the storefront was another entrance door, a steel security model.
The knob had been replaced by a metal cover plate.
He wasn’t getting in that way, either. But the door had a mail slot.
Peter pulled open the flap and bent to look inside.
A modest scattering of envelopes and circulars littered the floor. Somebody was still getting mail here.
He turned left, walked past the vacant neighboring building, then turned right and around the corner.
Ahead was the fenced-off railyard. But first came the entrance to a narrow lane that ran behind the row of attached storefronts.
He walked into the alleyway, the railyard fence to his left, rain pattering down on his jacket hood, boots crunching over weed-heaved blacktop and broken glass.
The back of the building was in worse condition than the front.
Dense weeds grew waist-high along the cinder block, which had stairstep settlement cracks big enough to fit his finger.
Two old steel divided-light windows flanked a single loading dock guarded by a roll-up door.
The windows were covered by steel exterior security bars and the glass had been painted from the inside.
He stepped into the wet weeds with his stomach against the cement lip of the loading dock, then put both hands on the corrugated metal door and pressed upward.
It didn’t move. And now his pants were wet.
Again, if he had his tools, Peter could have gotten inside.
He stepped back into the alleyway to survey other possibilities, shaking his head and thinking this trip to Tacoma was a fool’s errand.
Until, looking at the roll-up door again, he realized it had no handle.
So there was an electric opener on the inside. Where would the button be?
The most common location was directly beside the door.
Most people were right-handed, he thought, so it would most likely be on the right side.
Viewed from the outside, it would be on the left.
For reasons of building code going back at least forty years, the controls should be mounted forty-eight inches off the finished floor.
Glancing around to make sure he was unobserved, he bent and picked up a rock the size of a golf ball.
The loading-dock lip was roughly four feet off the alley pavement.
He eyeballed four feet above that, picked a pane on the left, stepped back, and threw—and was rewarded by the musical chime of breaking glass. The kid’s still got it.
The lip of the loading dock was less than a foot deep with no handholds.
It took him several tries to climb up and keep his perch.
Finally he stuck his arm out and gingerly plucked the remaining shards from the crumbling window putty.
When the twelve-inch opening was clear, he reached through, hooked his elbow, and began to feel around inside.
There. A familiar rectangular shape, with three square buttons. The top two would be green, the bottom one red. His dad’s shop had one just like it. Hoping the power was still on, he pressed the top button.
With the creak of breaking rust and the rattle of poorly lubricated rollers, the loading dock door rose. Peter took the .357 from under his jacket, took a deep breath to calm the static, then stepped carefully inside.