Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  “Governor,” Harry Dobson said as they shook hands at the top of the stairs. When his turn came, Dan Reinhart didn’t say anything at all.

  “Just wanted to be on hand,” Doss said. “Let ’em know we’re all on board and doing everything that can be done.”

  “Which is exactly what we’re doing,” the chief said quickly.

  A momentary silence settled over the trio. “What do you think?” Doss finally asked. “What are the chances this threat is for real?”

  “I’ve got over a hundred dead citizens who can attest to the reality of it,” the chief said. “We have to treat tomorrow’s threat like it’s a done deal. We have no other choice.”

  Doss nodded and looked away. “Our esteemed mayor doesn’t want me to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard. What do you two think?”

  Dan Reinhart took the lead. “Between the city, the county and the feds, everything’s being done that can possibly be done. Having soldiers standing around on street corners isn’t going to make things better.”

  “Amen,” the chief said.

  “Speaking of the feds…” the governor said.

  Neither man blinked. “What about them?” Harry Dobson inquired.

  Doss offered a thin smile. “Because of you two, I’ve spent most of the morning with feds so far up my behind I could taste Brylcreem.” The governor waited for a laugh but didn’t get one. “Last I saw of them they were on the phone to the State Department.” He sighed and looked away again. What all three men knew had been left unsaid was that James Doss had spent the first half of his final year in office lobbying for a cushy ambassadorship somewhere in Europe where they made wine, and this wasn’t going to help his chances a bit.

  Before the mantle of guilt could be firmly fitted to his shoulders, the chief spoke up. “If they were on the phone to D.C. it must mean you refused to order the State Police to do their dirty work for them,” Harry observed.

  “Murchison would do it if you told him to,” Dan Reinhart said quickly. “Clint’s strictly rank-and-file.”

  “Yeah, and about five seconds later, that son of a bitch would issue a press release telling the world how appalled he was to have to do this, and that I gave him a direct order to do so.” Doss waved an impatient hand. “Besides…I’m not ordering anyone’s arrest on the basis of his middle name being ‘bin.’”

  He gave the pair a nod of appreciation and began to make his way through the crowd, shaking hands, gripping elbows and patting shoulders as he went along. Before his cologne had completely cleared the area, the mayor came trotting up the stairs. His eyes were bright behind small metal frames. His cheeks were flushed red. He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.

  “You fellas aren’t exactly making friends and influencing people,” he said while wiping his glasses with a hankie.

  “We start acting like the gestapo…the terrorists win,” Dan Reinhart said.

  The mayor nodded and held up an understanding hand. “You’re preaching to the choir. I’m on board here.” He puffed his cheeks and blew out a gust of air. “But don’t think I didn’t hear about it. Congressmen. Senators. Certain City Council members who shall remain nameless. Hell…I had Bernie Pauls on hold for ten minutes,” he said, naming the new head of the Department of Homeland Security. “I had to make him wait because our senior senator wasn’t through ripping me up one side and down the other about our refusal to cooperate with the D.C. crowd.” He gazed out over the ballroom. “It’s like the President said this morning…we can’t let them drag us down to their level. We’ve got to stand firm in the face of the pressure.”

  “Five minutes,” was shouted from the back of the room, ending the conversation, sending the three men back down the stairs and around the corner, out of view, where half a dozen tables offering coffee and cold drinks had been hastily set up for the dignitaries. Ben Gardener stood in the corner, half a head taller than everyone else in the room. Harlan Sykes was huddled up with Mike Morningway and a contingent from Emergency Management Services. The mayor was animated, emphatic with a clipboard. Out in the center of the staging area, Bernie Pauls was huddled with Doctors Belder, Abrahams and Stafford for a little photo op session. Watch the birdie.

  A sense of dread began to spread through Harry Dobson as he took in the melee. He watched intently as if something about the scene couldn’t be trusted. He sensed he was experiencing one of those rare moments when it becomes apparent that one’s senses cannot always be relied upon to relay information in an accurate and timely manner. Like a frozen moment in traffic when a glance out the side window of your car tells your central nervous system that your car is rolling backward. You stand on the brake, but the slippage continues…your leg pumps like a dog in a dream and still the car eases backward…until you realize it’s the bus in the next lane creeping forward, not your car rolling backward…and a nervous little chuckle escapes your chest. A chuckle that assures you this was just an aberration…the exception that proves the rule…because god forbid you should be that far off base on a regular basis.

  Harry Dobson’s foray into the Twilight Zone was brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of Colonel Hines at his shoulder. He’d broken out the full array of medals and military campaign ribbons for the news conference, but his expression said he’d rather be nearly anyplace else. “Not your cup of tea, Colonel?” the chief inquired.

  “I’d like it better if we were going to tell the people the truth,” Hines said while sizing up the crowd.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is…which is…this is a joke.”

  “How so?”

  The colonel made a rude noise with his lips. “We play at readiness. We create new agencies. We throw money at every new technology that comes down the pike. We do everything except what needs to be done.”

  “Which is?” the chief inquired.

  “Commitment,” Hines said.

  “To what?”

  “To the reality of the situation. To the fact that we don’t live in Mayberry anymore, Chief. To the fact that the rest of the world hates our guts and wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep if we all turned up dead one fine morning.”

  Hans Belder called from across the room, “Colonel Hines.” He gestured with a hairy hand for the colonel to come join in the photo session. Hines tried to demur, waved back and shook his head, until it became obvious that Belder wasn’t going to take no for an answer and so Hines excused himself and began to pick his way through the crowd.

  Dan Reinhart whistled under his breath. “Old boy’s got quite a burr under his saddle this morning.”

  “I hear it’s permanent,” said the chief.

  “Guy’s only slightly left of Attila the Hun.”

  “As far as Hines is concerned, Attila was soft on terrorism,” the chief whispered, sweeping his eyes across the crowd. Stopping his gaze here and there on one face or another, moving backward and then onward again until something clicked like a roulette ball falling into the slot.

  There she was. Lingering at the back of the crowd with a smile on her face and a cup of coffee in her hand. She’d been with the doctors yesterday. Same thing. Standing in the back. Keeping out of the spotlight. And then it hit him. This was the woman Corso had described from the bus tunnel. Wearing a tailored suit of an unusually warm fawn color and sensible shoes to match. He watched her for a moment. She had an air of competence about her. A sense that she was somehow above the proceedings.

  The chief stepped around Dan Reinhart and walked over to the entrance to the walled-off area. Over to the governor’s security chief, Tommy Shannon.

  He leaned in close. “Who’s the woman in the brown suit?” he asked.

  Tommy was an old hand. Without seeming to move his eyes from the crowd, he scanned the room, picked her out, took her in, then reached into his inside jacket pocket and came out with a laminated list. After a quick perusal, he said, “Irena Kahn. She’s with the Israeli delegation.”

 
“In what capacity?”

  “They list her as a cultural attaché. Diplomatic passport.”

  “Which makes her what?”

  Tommy Shannon rolled his watery eyes. “With the Israelis, you never know,” he said. “They’re only slightly less full of bull than the Russians. She could be anything from a personal nursemaid to a government spook.”

  He told Tommy thanks and was told not to mention it. Without looking her way, he sidled over to the edge of the enclosure. When he felt as if he was as alone as he was going to be, he pulled his hand radio from his belt, pushed the red button and spoke.

  “This is Chief Dobson. Patch me through to the Downtown Precinct station.” A yessir and a couple of clicks later, he had Lieutenant Carmen Pirillo on the radio. “Carmen,” he said. “I need a pair of plainclothes detectives at the Olympic Four Seasons. Five minutes ago,” he said.

  “On the way,” came the response. “Anything else, Chief?”

  “Hurry.”

  Harry pocketed the phone and quickly crossed the room, not wanting her to spend too much time out of his sight. It was no more than sixty feet from where he stood to where he had seen her last, but when he arrived, she was gone. He checked the back of the throng and then moved among the crowd, smiling and fondling elbows when necessary, but she had simply disappeared.

  That feeling of disassociation and uncertainty washed over him again, leaving him cold in his center and unsure of what to do next. He turned away from the crowd and swallowed several deep breaths. That’s when he noticed the coffee cup. Sitting on the starched white tablecloth. White on white, nearly invisible to the naked eye.

  He strolled over and looked down at the table. Frosted orange lipstick was smudged along the nearest edge. A brown eye of coffee stared up from the bottom of the cup. Instead of a saucer, the cup rested on a cardboard coaster, which had been flipped upside down and written on. He moved the cup and picked up the coaster.

  “Hey,” a familiar voice said.

  Harry pocketed the coaster and turned back to the room. Dan Reinhart had wandered over his way.

  “He got it from The Sopranos,” said the sheriff.

  “Got what?” Harry asked.

  “The line about tasting Brylcreem. Doss robbed it off The Sopranos. Uncle Junior said it to Tony a couple seasons back.”

  Harry looked incredulous. “You watch that crap?”

  “It puts me to sleep.”

  As if on cue, a great rush of noise filled the air, as the doors were opened and the press rushed into the room. The ambient noise, which, until that moment, had consisted of little more than a low buzz of conversation, suddenly sounded more like a herd of cattle on the prod.

  Harry watched from the corner of his eye as the other room filled, hoping to catch another glimpse of her. He’d decided he didn’t give a damn who she was. Or about her diplomatic passport either. Nobody but nobody was going to stick a needle into one of his officers and walk away with impunity. Nobody.

  “One minute,” was shouted above the noise of the arriving crowd.

  The governor adjusted his tie and smiled. The agency people began shuffling toward the stairs at the side of the stage. Tommy Shannon left his post at the bottom of the stairs to make a final sweep along the front of the dais looking for nuts who didn’t belong in the front row.

  Harry’s eyes rolled over the remaining crowd looking for the woman. No sign of her. He could feel the blood rising to his face.

  Harry reached into his pocket and pulled out the coaster. He was in the process of turning it so he could read the writing, when someone called his name.

  When Harry looked up, he found himself staring into the unblinking eye of a handheld television camera. Jim Sexton from Channel Five stood in front of the camera with a microphone grasped in his hand and a look of determination etched on his face.

  For a moment, Harry was confused. Jim was a stand-up guy. He knew the rules. What was going on here?

  “Press corps’s over there, Jim,” Harry said with a nod of the head. He could feel the hot lights on his forehead.

  Jim ignored him. “Chief Dobson. Were you aware that a county pathologist and her assistant were killed earlier today by the same virus that killed the people in the bus tunnel?”

  Harry felt the sheriff stiffen. He kept his face as still as stone, looked directly into the face of the camera and said, “Yes, Jim, as a matter of fact, I was aware of that.”

  31

  Patricia Mitchell pointed to a spot on her front porch. “The boy throws it right here every morning,” she said. “I’m usually still in bed, but I hear the noise.”

  Satisfied that Jeffrey now knew where the paper landed every morning, she marched down the front stairs and stood on her well-tended front lawn. She pointed at the house next door, a run-down Victorian whose gingerbread filigrees hung from the eaves in tatters, whose last paint job was either gray or some putrid shade of green, whose sidewalks were pierced here and there by clumps of dried grass and weeds growing up through the maze of cracks which time and inattention had etched into the concrete walks surrounding the dwelling.

  “It’s them,” she said. “Those Indian boys in there. You do your job…you investigate, and you’ll surely find out.”

  Jeffrey Unger had been a customer service rep for the Seattle Times for a little under three years, and in all that time, he had never ceased to be amazed at how seriously people took their morning newspapers…especially the old folks, who seemed to have their daily lives programmed and who took any variance in the plan as a personal affront. Miss Mitchell was that way. You’d think somebody’d shot her dog or kidnapped one of her kids or something the way she was carrying on. It was like she expected a forensics team to come out and work the crime scene or something. All for twenty-five cents a day and a buck and a half on Sundays.

  “How do you know it’s them?” he asked calmly.

  As he’d feared, she immediately went postal. “How do I know? How do I know? How could I not know? The minute those people move in there is the minute my paper starts to disappear every morning. It doesn’t take Philo Vance to figure it out, sonny.”

  Jeffrey Unger kept the smile plastered to his face. “I mean…have you actually seen any of these young men taking your paper in the morning?”

  She looked at him with a mixture of scorn and anxiety. “You’re not the brightest bulb in the box are you, junior?” she said, before moving her gaze half a dozen houses up the street, where a couple of guys seemed to be canvassing door-to-door.

  “Those nutsy goddamn Jehovah’s Witnesses again,” she said. “We oughta give ’em the mail to deliver…long as they’re out there anyway.”

  Unger, ignoring both the personal insult and the religious slur, instead held up an idea finger. “Tell you what we’re going to do,” he began. “I’m going to have your carrier deliver the paper just like he always does. And then, on his way home for the day, I’m going to have him deliver you another. Just to make sure. That way we can both be sure you’re getting your paper in the morning.” Her facial expression suggested she was not altogether pleased. “How’s that?” he asked.

  She thrust her lower jaw out. “Crappy,” she said.

  He took a deep breath and asked the question he’d hoped to avoid. “What would it take to make you feel better about this thing? The Seattle Times is determined—”

  “I want you to march right over there and tell those people to leave my damn paper alone. That’s what I want. I want you to tell them how lucky they are to be here at all…to be going to a school like the University of Washington. I want you to remind them that being here is a privilege…not…not…some…” She sputtered her way to silence.

  Unger held up his hands in surrender. These were the moments he dreaded. When his job forced him to face what cops had known forever…that confronting people, regardless of how you went about it, was a risky business. You just never knew what kind of a reaction you were going to get. “Okay,” he said. “
But you’ve got to let me handle this.” He looked at her for agreement but didn’t find it. “Okay? You’ll let me handle it?”

  She gave a grudging nod and folded her arms across her pigeon chest. Kept them that way across the yard, around the hedge and up the front stairs. The porch needed to be swept; Jeffrey Unger could feel crunching beneath the soles of his shoes as he mounted the stairs and pushed on the doorbell. Miss Mitchell stood glowering, one step down.

  Seemed as if the door opened instantly. No gap whatsoever between his finger pushing the button and the door springing open a crack.

  The darkness of the man’s complexion could not obscure the flush in his cheeks. Unger reckoned the man to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, thick as a brick, with a flat emotionless look in his deeply hooded eyes that reminded Unger of certain fish he had kept as a child. “Can I help you?” the man asked.

  Jeffrey Unger offered one of his business cards. The man looked at it like Unger was trying to hand him a turd. “Can I help you?” he said again.

  “Oh…yes. I certainly hope so,” Jeffrey Unger said. “This is Miss Mitchell…she…ah…lives next door here and she’s…we’ve been having a bit of a problem with her newspaper disappearing in the morning. I was hoping we could…”

  “We could what?” the man demanded.

  “Talk things over. I was hoping we could talk things over.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “I was hoping…” he began, and then bit it off when he felt the rickety stairs move as Miss Mitchell stepped up onto the porch beside him.

  “Talk about them stealing my newspaper every morning,” she said. “That’s what in heck we want to talk about.”

  “I’m sure we know nothing about any such thing,” the man said. “We have nothing to hide here.” With that, he opened the door allowing them to see into the front room where five young East Indian men sat sprawled all over the furniture. The one in the red jogging suit had a wicked scar running down the entire side of his face. Another had a bad eye…looked like it had been burned with acid. The pair wedged into the armchair together looked as if they might have been brothers, or, if the languid tangle of their legs were to be read another way, perhaps even lovers.