Thorazine Beach by Bradley Harris Page A

shape. Each morning I’d hide my lean-to, poncho and poles and a couple of lengths of rope, under the edge of a stack of debris, dig it out again at night. Rain pants, rain jacket, some cammo paint and cut-up pieces of ghillie suit to mask the shape and shine and silhouette of my gear. All of it surplus-store crap—yet another benefit to life on Summer Avenue.
    After the third night, I’d stopped relying on MacDonald to bring me, park me, pick me up, and had begun parking my car at an all-night Mapco I’d found three blocks along Raines, the other direction from the grocery. I gave the night guy ten each time to watch my car. Sweet deal, he thought. And I could use the exercise. I made up a story about going out for hours-long walks, about nighttime bird-watching. Silly, that—I needn’t have given him that, he likely didn’t give a rodent’s rear. But the story did explain all the gear I was lugging. I even tucked a birding book under my arm the first night, and passionately outlined my intense desire to photograph the secret mating rituals of the yellow-breasted corncrake. The guy bought the ten, if not the tale. And MacDonald appreciated, he said, my self-sufficiency. Which meant, I suppose, he appreciated the extra chances to be with
her
.
    My instructions from Mac were: Look for a full-size container from either of two specific container companies—Hanjin, and Hapag-Lloyd. Both common, though Lloyd a little the less so. Look for serial numbers that ended in certain three-digit strings: 481, 603, 709—there were a few others, long since committed to memory. Look for one of these containers that the crane plops in
this exact
position. Mac had drawn me a diagram: the position I’d be looking for was to be lined up under the left edge of the main container-yard building and, beyond that, the tallest radio mast on top of the hump yard control tower. Then, look for the gang graffiti.
Specific
gang graffiti, spray-painted right under or right beside the container company’s name. Then: two more things. One, look for a fifty-three-foot trailer, a Crete, way on the left, darker end of the trailer lot, near the south gate, where they hardly ever parked anything. Two, if I saw the Crete there, call MacDonald. Stat.
    Funny symbol, that gang thing. Didn’t look like any Memphis gang’s, or any gang I knew of, but then MacDonald or any cop would tell you there’s a new gang a week in town. This one MacDonald had once called “Three-six-gamma,” the shape he’d drawn on the yellow stickie no one was ever to see:

    Circles and crosses appear all the time in gang graffiti. I’d sat through MacDonald’s own seminar on the subject, a couple of years back. The symbols were mostly more complicated than this one. You’d get a circle cut up by an X, numbers would mean addresses, dates, times of gang meetings, and whichever quadrant the number was in would tell you which—address, date, or time.
    When he’d first shown me, I’d been suspicious about the gamma-thing. “Gangs do Greek letters?”
    “Has been known,” he said. “But not generally, no. They’re not desperately literate. Not so much interested in your classical languages and lit.”
    “Not a Memphis-based gang, Mac. Is it?”
    “Umm…no. Least…I don’t think so.”
    “Where from, then?”
    “Uh, Seattle, we think.”
    We, indeed. I’d already made a bet with myself that, if I were to call the Seattle gangs unit—Tacoma, Vancouver, anywhere up that way—they’d tell me they’d never heard of anything called three-six-gamma. I could have called, could have faxed, would have got
some
kind of an answer, even without being a cop. But if I got that answer, I’d know MacDonald was lying. I was willing to know that. But not to
know
it. Not beyond a reasonable doubt. Not beyond that point where every guy in the firing squad gets to believe
he’s
the one who got the blank round.
    Sat. Watched. Coffee from my thermos. Sat. Tuna sandwich. Sat. Watched.