Well, he could always get more cash.
Kurtz pulled on his baseball cap, slipped the.38 into his belt, and headed down to the Pinto. He had someone in Lackawanna he wanted to see.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As the market for American steel declined, the heaps of slag near the Lackawanna mills grew higher, the skies grew darker and filthier, the worker housing grew more grim, and the pension plans ate up more and more of the companies' profits, but the idea of steel still flourished in Lackawanna. By the late 1960s, the unions had grown too strong, the technologies had lagged behind, corporate accounting practices had become mossbacked and lazy, and the mills themselves were obsolete. The unions still received huge packages. The managers gave themselves raises and bonuses. The companies diverted profits to shareholders rather than reinvest in new technology or pay for managerial changes. Meanwhile, Japanese steel and cheap European steel and Russian steel and Thai steel were running their industries with cheaper labor, newer technologies, and slimmer profit margins. The steel companies in Lackawanna cried foul, cried dumping, diverted money to politicians to get protectionist legislation, and continued with the same pay scales and pension plans and obsolete machinery. They made steel the way their granddaddies had made steel. And they sold it the same way.
By the 1970s, the Lackawanna steel industry was on a gurney and hemorrhaging badly. By the mid-nineties, it was on a cold, stone slab with no mourners waiting around for the wake. Today there were more than a dozen miles of abandoned mills along Lake Erie, a hundred square miles of ghetto where workers' neighborhoods had once been, scores upon scores of empty parking lots that had once been filled with thousands of vehicles, as well as black mountains of slag heaps running back east from the lake for block after blocka cheaper alternative for the defunct mills than cleaning them upthus insuring that the city of Buffalo, with a third of its population fled seeking work elsewhere, would never spend the money to
develop these lakefront properties.
The neighborhoods in the shadow of the huge mills, neighborhoods that once housed German and Italian and some black skilled laborers, now boasted crack houses and abortion clinics and storefront mosques as even poorer blacks and Hispanics and Middle Eastern immigrants flowed into the vacuum created by the fleeing steelworkers.
Kurtz knew Lackawanna well. He'd lost his virginity there, lost any illusions about life there, and killed his first man there, not necessarily in that order.
Ridge Road was the main east-west street through the heart of Lackawanna, past Our Lady of Victory Basilica, past Father Baker's Orphanage, past the Holy Cross Cemetery, past the Botanical Gardens and Lackawanna City Hall, then over the narrow steel bridge built more than a century ago, then "back the Bridge," south, into the warren of narrow streets that dead-ended against the walls and moats and barriers bordering the mile-wide no-man's land of railroad tracks that ran south to everywhere and north into the grain-mill industrial area near Kurtz's Harbor Inn.
Parolee Yasein Goba's address was south of the old Carnegie Library and the nearby Lackawanna Islamic Mosque. The house was a leaning, filthy gray-shingle affair at the end of a littered cul-de-sac. To the right of and behind the house was the high fence of a salvage yard; to its left was the rusted iron wall and barbed wire fences marking railroad property. Freight trains heaved and clashed in the rainy air.
Kurtz backed the Pinto out of the cul-de-sac, swung it around, drove east a block, and parked it near Odell Playground, the only bit of grass and open space within miles. He made sure the Pinto couldn't be seen from the main north-south street, Wilmuth Avenue, or from Yasein Goba's house. Black and Middle Eastern faces peered at him from passing cars and from between sooty curtains as he tucked the.38 in his belt, took a long-bladed screwdriver from the glove box, locked the Pinto and walked the two blocks toward Goba's gray house.
Kurtz cut right a block and came at the house along the salvage yard fence, approaching from the north. The smoke and noise from the rail yards were almost melodramatic: steel couplers crashing, machines grunting as they hauled heavy loads, men shouting in the distance. More crashes and bangs came from the huge salvage yard beyond the fence.
Kurtz paused when there was nothing but open field between him and the house. Except for one small window on the north side here, all the house's windows looked east up the empty street or west over the railyards. There was no car parked next to the house and no garage, although several abandoned cars, wheels missing, littered the street.
Kurtz pulled the.38, held it loosely against his right leg, and walked behind the house.
The back door wasn't locked. There was dried blood on the steps, the stoop, and the door itself. Standing to one side of the glass, Kurtz opened the door and went in crouched, 38 extended.