then he toed the weeds until he found the iron rails embedded in the ground. Either they had loaded the finished cars onto siding here and then moved them out to the main Missouri Pacific lines, or they had accepted raw materials here, or both.
By the time he got back to the exit door, Yarmark was there, his neck patchy with a flush.
“They said radio in every fifteen minutes.” He juggled the pepper spray and looked longingly at the Glock in Somers’s hand. “Do you think—”
“Not until you hear me fire a shot,” Somers said. “After what I saw today, that stays in the holster.”
“I’m a full officer—”
Somers rounded on him, and Yarmark swallowed and took two steps back.
Grabbing one of the flashlights Yarmark held, Somers headed into the building. He thought he sounded a little too much like Hazard when he muttered, “For fuck’s sake.”
The space immediately inside the building confirmed Somers’s initial impression: it was enormous, and it had obviously been where the final stages of the assembly process were performed. Sexten Motors had been closed for almost a hundred years, though, and in that time, scavengers—both sanctioned and unsanctioned—had stripped away anything that might have been of value. What was left was bleak: a brick shell with narrow, glass-block windows; a cracked cement floor, in places broken by weeds or, where water must have dripped down from the damaged roof, a nest of mushrooms; and trash. Someone had dragged an old mattress near one of the windows; next to the mattress, discarded needles and an empty tin of camp-stove fuel showed at least one unsavory habit that had been practiced within these walls during its century of neglect. A pizza box was propped open on the other side of the room, and next to it lay the broken-down cardboard packaging for a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. When Yarmark stumbled on an uneven patch of cement, something small and dark shot out of the pizza box, and Yarmark let out a cry and stumbled toward Somers.
“Rat,” Somers said quietly.
Yarmark wiped his face with the back of a hand—he didn’t have a choice because he was still carrying the pepper gel in one and the flashlight in another. After a moment, he nodded.
They moved deeper into the abandoned space. On a wooden sawhorse in front of one of the windows, an amateur gunslinger had shot up old bottles of Mad Dog.
“Uh, Detective,” Yarmark said, pointing at the broken shards and then at the starburst cracks in the glass blocks. “Maybe we should tag this. If the killer’s been practicing his shooting, it might tell us something about him.”
Nodding, Somers dropped into a squat and played his flashlight over the debris. “It’s a good thought. Take another look.”
After a moment, Yarmark nodded. “BBs.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh, shit. The dust. Even the broken pieces have been here for ages.”
“You had the right idea: check everything.” Then he grinned. “You want to see if the killer likes pizza?”
“Christ on the cross, no fucking way. I gotta change drawers when I get home.”
Somers stood and continued deeper into the building. They were reaching the end of the first large room, where an opening in the wall ahead communicated with the next section of the plant. Outside the building, the vegetation must have been thicker, because less light made it through the narrow windows. Somers hadn’t walked around the building; maybe trees had grown up, and that would explain what was blocking the light. The iron rails in the floor guided them deeper into the plant. Somers wondered why the metal had been left. Perhaps it was simply not worth the effort to rip it up from the floor.
“If, uh, you could not tell anybody,” Yarmark said in a quiet voice, his flashlight jiggling on the floor, his gaze fixed somewhere off in the darkness. “About, you know. The pizza box.”
Another grin broke out, and Somers fought to control it. “I had about six weeks on patrol when I got a call for a domestic. We were short that night, and I was working alone. I worked Smithfield, and—”
“Smithfield?” Yarmark’s head swiveled, and he was looking at Somers now. “Alone?”
“Different times,” Somers said with a shrug. “And, like I said, we were short that night. Anyway, I drove out there. Jesus, it was this little shotgun thing, barely bigger than a matchbox, weeds in the yard up to my waist, a chain-link fence