Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,27
not a victory of which Harmon was overly proud.
“Anyway, Morris, what are you doing here? ” Cranshaw asked. He was ten years younger than Harmon, had a jogger’s legs, and worked out at his health club twice a week. Nonetheless, the prospect of lugging a semiconscious lawyer out of this metal wasteland was not to Cranshaw’s liking.
“Looking for a fender for my car.”
“Fender-bender?” Cranshaw was ready to show sympathy.
“Someone else’s, and in days gone by. I’m trying to restore an old muscle car I bought back in the spring. Only way to find parts is to dig through junkyards. How about you?”
“Need a fender for the BMW.”
Harmon declined to press for details, which spared Cranshaw any need to lie about his recent hit-and-run encounter. He knew a country body shop that would make repairs without asking questions, if he located some of the parts. A chop shop wasn’t likely to respond to requests for information about cars with bloodstained fenders and such grisly trivia. They’d done business before.
Cranshaw felt quite remorseful over such incidents, but he certainly wasn’t one to permit his life to be ruined over some momentary lapse.
“Do you know where we are?” asked Harmon. He wasn’t feeling at all well, and just now he was thinking only of getting back into his little Japanese pick-up and turning the air conditioner up to stun.
“Well. Pearson’s Auto Yard, of course.” Cranshaw eyed him suspiciously.
“No. I mean, do you know how to get out of here?”
“Why, back the way we came.” Cranshaw decided the man was maybe drunk. “Just backtrack is all.”
Cranshaw followed Harmon’s bewildered gaze, then said, less confidently: “I see what you mean. Sort of like one of those maze things, isn’t it. They ought to give you a set of directions or something—like, ‘Turn left at the ’57 Chevy and keep straight on till you pass the burned-out VW bug.’”
“I was looking for one of the workers,” Harmon explained.
“So am I,” Cranshaw said. “Guy named Milton or something. He’ll know where to find our fenders, if they got any. Sort of like a Chinese librarian, these guys got to be.”
He walked on ahead, tanned legs pumping assertively beneath jogging shorts. Harmon felt encouraged and fell in behind him. “I thought I saw somebody working on down the ravine a ways,” he suggested to Cranshaw’s back.
They seemed to be getting closer to the crusher, to judge by the sound. At intervals someone’s discarded dream machine gave up its last vestiges of identity in great screams of rending, crumpling steel. Harmon winced each time he heard those deathcries. The last remaining left front fender for a ’70 Cyclone might be passing into recycled oblivion even as he marched to its rescue.
“I don’t think this is where I want to be going,” Cranshaw said, pausing to look around. “These are pretty much stripped and ready for the crusher. And they’re mostly Ford makes.”
“Yes. Well, that’s what I’m trying to find.” Harmon brightened. “Do you see a ’70 or ’71 Montego or Torino in any of these?”
“Christ, Morris! I wouldn’t know one of those from a Model T. I need to find where they keep their late-model imports. You going to be all right if I go on and leave you here to poke around?”
“Sure,” Harmon told him. The heat was worse, if anything, but he was damned if he’d ask Cranshaw to nursemaid him.
Cranshaw was shading his eyes with his hand. “Hey, you were right. There is somebody working down there. I’m going to ask directions.”
“Wait up,” Harmon protested. He’d seen the workman first.
Cranshaw was walking briskly toward an intersection in the rows of twisted hulks. “Hey, you!” Harmon heard him call above the din of the crusher. “Hey, Milton!”
Cranshaw turned the corner and disappeared from view for a moment. Harmon made his legs plod faster, and he almost collided with Cranshaw when he came around the corner of stacked cars.
Cranshaw was standing in the middle of the rutted pathway, staring at the mangled remains of a Pinto station wagon. His face looked unhealthy beneath its tan.
“Shit, Morris! That’s the car that I...”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Arnie. All burned-out wrecks look alike.”
“No. It’s the same one. See that porthole window in back? They didn’t make very many of that model. Shit!”
Harmon had studied photos of the wreck in preparing his defense. “Well, so what if it is the car. It had to end up in a junkyard somewhere. Anyway, I don’t think this is the same car.”