by G. M. Ford
Brett’s family had flown in from the East Coast. Mom and Pop, looking old and thin, and three sisters, two who brought their families, eleven of them altogether. Wasn’t until I lost my focus and looked out over the youngest sister’s head that I spotted the pair of them, standing inside a small copse of ornamental cedars, passing a bottle back and forth.
I made eye contact with Rachel Thoms as I skirted the mourning multitude and made my way over to George and Nearly Normal Norman. George was hunkered down inside his collar. Normy had his left arm in a bright blue sling. They offered me a pull of the world’s worst whiskey, but I waved it off. “Been there, done that,” I said.
“I didn’t think you was coming,” George said.
“Neither did I.”
The Ward family was shaking the pastor’s hand, thanking him for his services and probably slipping him a few bucks. Everybody else was headed for the cars. Everybody except Rebecca, who was headed my way. Back over her shoulder, I saw Iris standing along the edge of the road, next to the limo, a scowl on her flinty face and her mouth clamped tight as a leg trap.
I met Rebecca halfway.
She wore a gray wool overcoat and a black skirt that came down past her knees. Hair piled on top of her head. No jewelry.
She waved, but not to me. “Hi, Georgie,” she called.
Then toodel-ooed with her fingers. “Norman.”
When I peeked back over my shoulder, the bourbon brothers were grinning from ear to ear.
We came to a stop about a yard apart. I don’t know what I was looking for in her eyes, but it wasn’t there. Neither was she. At least not all of her. Her ordeal had dimmed her flame a bit. Her slate-gray eyes lacked their usual steely focus.
“I just wanted to say thank you,” she said.
“No need.”
“I’m guessing there is,” she said evenly.
“I was but a pawn upon the playing field.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
I was guessing she’d used her SPD contacts to find out what the cops were saying about it, a story which probably bore scant resemblance to the carefully contrived bullshit Jed and I had been feeding the media for the past week or so.
“Sorry for your loss,” I lied.
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
Cars were starting all around us. People were heading home.
“Maybe…,” I began. “You know after a while…a suitable interval…maybe we could…”
She said, “We’ll see,” when what she really meant was, “I don’t think so.”
Neither did I.
“Becca,” Iris’s voice grated from afar.
“We’ve got a reception,” Rebecca said.
“Go. We can talk later.”
But we both knew we wouldn’t. Some things in life you just have to erase. If you’re going to go on with your existence, you have to drop them into a deep dark well somewhere in your soul, and trudge onward as if they never happened.
Otherwise, you end up too lacerated to go on, like George and Normy over there finishing up that fifth of rotgut whiskey. You end up with a hole you can’t plug and a pain even an ocean of cheap booze won’t cure. Seemed like a certain amount of self-delusion was prerequisite to what we collectively defined as happiness.
I watched Iris shepherd Rebecca into the back of the limo, and climb in after her without so much as a backward glance. I turned away. I wasn’t looking for one of those, “and their eyes met as the car slowly pulled away” scenes. No way.
Half-a-dozen mourners lingered around the grave. Professionals, I guessed. Part of that odd fraternity who attend funerals as a hobby. Standing cheek by jowl at the foot of the grave, a trio of middle-aged women looked as if they might have come to the service together. A bald-headed black guy, fingering a set of rosary beads; a big dude, with his back to me, wearing a blue Helly Hansen parka shell; and, over by the tree, a thicker specimen in a black hoodie sweatshirt.
Out on the cemetery road, a gold Acura pulled to the curb. The window slid down. Rachel Thoms was behind the wheel, looking at me with those green eyes of hers.
“You need a ride?” she asked.
I gestured with my head toward the deadly duo lounging under the trees. “We’re gonna get a little fresh air,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
She was smart enough to know that the fresh air part was probably a good idea.
“Give me a call,” she said.
“Wouldn’t that be conflict of interest?”
She shook her head. “Rebecca’s not my patient anymore. I referred her to someone I know.” She anticipated my next question. “I do family and relationship counseling.”
“Ah,” I said.
She rolled up the window.
I stood where I was and watched as the car slid soundlessly out of sight, then strolled over toward George and Norman. The bottle was history. They dropped it on the grass. Just another dead soldier.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll walk out to the entrance and call a cab.”
Twenty minutes of stumbling through the shrubbery brought us to the front gate. The sky was oozing a steady drizzle, as George and Normy lurched over to the cemetery offices and disappeared into the men’s room. I pulled out my phone and ambled uphill.
Out on Fifth Avenue the cars hissed along inside shrouds of mist, wipers slashing to and fro, headlights darting over the wet pavement. Not even five o’clock and it was dark as night. Visions of sandy beaches flitted through my brain.
I guess I had a lot on my mind, which probably explained how somebody had managed to shadow us across Holyrood Cemetery without me noticing.
I was about to speed dial Yellow Cab when a rustle of fabric pulled my head around. He was ten yards away. The guy in the black hoodie, from back by the gravesite.
I figured he was probably another reporter who wanted a story. I’d been ducking and dodging the press for over a week, so I assumed this was a scrivener looking for an exclusive.
“Listen, pal,” I said. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but if you’re…”
The black hoodie fell back the second he propelled himself in my direction. Jordan Koontz had shaved his head to stubble and was coming at me like a locomotive.
It’s hard to describe the high-pitched keening sound that escaped his chest as he bounded in my direction. Something primitive and pre-language.
On my best day, and this sure as hell wasn’t it, I wouldn’t last a minute in the octagon with Jordan Koontz. The best you could say was that I had a puncher’s chance—that I was big enough and strong enough that if I happened to get lucky and catch him with a haymaker, I might be able to put out his light.
As he rushed forward, instinct sent me diving for his ankles. I missed. He drove a knee into the top of my head. My vision swam. Felt like my neck was broken. I rolled over onto my back in time to see the bottom of his boot descending toward my upturned face. I rolled right. The boot powered down onto the grass with a resounding thud, missing my face by inches. He backed off, bouncing on the balls of his feet, grinning that snake grin of his.
“Get up,” he said. “Gonna break you, boy,” he hissed. “Gonna break you open.”
I scrambled to my feet. My arms felt paralyzed, my knees weak and unsteady. I had no doubt he was going to beat me to death. Right here. Right now.
And then, suddenly, he stopped bouncing, the reptilian smile was replaced by a quizzical expression as he dropped to his knees. I watched in wonder as an exit wound the size of a quarter bloomed like a flower on his forehead. He hiccupped once and fell facedown on the grass. His body twitched once and he didn’t move again.
As my brain tried and failed to process what was going on, the big guy in the Helly Hansen parka stepped out from behind a massive rhododendron. A small-caliber automatic dangled from his right hand. He used his left to pull the hood from his head.
The big Colombian from the other night.
I watched as he walked over, bent at the waist, and put
another round into the back of Koontz’s head. The sound of the report was swallowed by the roar and hiss of the traffic. He dropped the automatic into his coat pocket, fished around and came out with a wicked-looking curved blade with a wooden handle. He dropped to one knee and carved a seeping X into Jordan Koontz’s forehead.
Satisfied with his work, he got back to his feet. His black eyes met mine. “People gotta know,” he said.
I kept my mouth shut. He sensed my terror.
“It’s over,” he said.
I nodded.
I watched in silence as he pocketed the knife and walked out through the gate. A dark green Mercedes sedan pulled into the mouth of the driveway. The door opened and he disappeared inside. “It’s over,” I said under my breath.
“I made up a new word,” Ralph was saying.
“What word is that?” I asked.
“Kari-aki.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Singing with your mouth full of chicken,” he said.
They yukked it up. Rocking back and forth and pounding the table with the flats of their hands. It had been a tough few days for George and, although I’d heard the joke a dozen times before, I was happy to see him having a good time.
The cops had turned us loose early that morning. I’d given the Colombian a two-minute head start and then, instead of calling a cab, I dialed 911. Under Jed’s watchful eye, I told the cops that Jordan Koontz had knocked me cold, and that when I woke up, there he was, lying on the grass with a couple of bullets in his head and an X carved in his forehead, all of which were a complete mystery to me, as I’d been unconscious at the time and had absolutely no idea who or what had done that to him. That was my story and I was sticking to it. Needless to say, the cops had been dubious.
They kept the three of us for half a day while they searched the area for the murder weapon. Dogs. Metal detectors. The whole nine yards. Two spent cartridge cases from a Beretta .765. That was it. They swabbed our hands for evidence of gunshot residue, and when we came up clean, had very little choice but to turn us loose, despite not believing a word of what I was telling them.
First thing in the morning, before I’d rolled out of bed, Detective Sergeant Roddy called from Vancouver. They’d found Junior Bailey out on Vancouver Island. An unpronounceable Indian reservation. Their medical examiner said he’d been dead for at least a week. Four bullets in the head will do that.
“Colombians cleaning up after themselves,” I mumbled.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
Something in his tone got my attention. “Any reason not to?” I asked.
I could almost hear him shrug over the phone line. He cleared his throat. “The murder scene used to be one of the safe houses Billy kept for his drug mules. Way the hell out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yeah?”
“Quite an elaborate security setup. Motion detectors, high-tech security cameras, every camera with a backup. The whole ball of twine, so to speak.”
“And?”
“And not only are all the security tapes missing, backups included, but there’s also absolutely no sign of forced entry.”
“So whoever showed up, Junior must have let them in.”
“So it appears,” Roddy said.
“Hard to imagine him opening the door for a Colombian hit man.”
“As you say, hard to imagine. And whoever it was must have been familiar with the design of the security system,” he added. “Way too elaborate for somebody to just get lucky.”
“Really?”
“No flourish either. None of the usual signs that they leave.”
Like X’s carved into foreheads or the horrific “Colombian necktie” of song and story, wherein they slit the victim’s throat from ear to ear, reached in and grabbed his whole tongue assembly and pulled it through the hole, leaving the stiff with something akin to an organic ascot.
“Just doesn’t look like their work,” Roddy said.
I thought it over as I put my feet on the floor. I remembered the faraway look in Billy’s eyes as he gazed out over the Strait of Georgia from behind his desk and wondered how bad things had to get before you had your own son killed. Kind of made me wonder about my old man. About how far I would have had to push him before he decided I was just too much of a liability to keep around.
“You don’t suppose Billy Bud finally had enough, do you?” I asked.
“We’ll never know, will we?”
The Zoo was quiet, mainly because half of the usual suspects were missing. Norman had taken the bus to Harborview to get his arm dressing changed. Big Jack, Heavy Duty Judy, Large Marge, and Little Felix had gone along for the ride, leaving a skeleton crew to man the bastions of bacchanalia.
Red Lopez played eightball with Billy Bob Fung and a couple of locals. Yelling and screaming every time he made a shot. The jukebox was hammering out “Whip It” by Devo when Rachel Thoms walked in the front door. All of a sudden, I could hear my pulse. She stood for a moment, as everyone does, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then strode confidently along the bar, moving toward the commotion in the back of the room.
I had no idea how she knew to look for me here, and, unless I was mistaken, the Zoo wasn’t her kind of place at all. She spotted me sitting in the mezzanine and walked in my direction. As she passed the pool table, somebody said something. She hesitated and turned toward whoever had spoken to her.
I read her lips. “Excuse me?” she said.
That’s when I heard the magic words.
“Ain’t it a beauty?” Red inquired.
The bar went freeze-tag silent. No chuckles or clicks or bangs or bells or whistles. The assembled multitude remained frozen in place, waiting for the moment to play itself out. They’d seen this movie before. This was the end of Act Three. The part where whoever found herself gazing down at Red’s appendage ran screaming into the street. A shiver of morbid anticipation ran through the room like a funny-bone current.
Only, inexplicably, that’s not what happened. Instead of staging the oft-witnessed elbows-and-assholes retreat, the gorgeous Rachel Thoms looked vaguely amused and steadfastly held her ground. As she leaned forward and peered myopically into Red’s palm, the crowd leaned forward with her. After a nearly unbearable interval, during which she gazed at the organ from several angles, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her reading specs. Settling the red half-glasses onto the end of her nose, she once again peered down at Red’s now puckering package. After yet another uncomfortable moment, she raised an eyebrow, nodded knowingly, and waved a stiff finger at the rapidly retreating rod. “You know…,” she said, looking Red in the eye, “…that looks just like a penis…but much, much smaller.”
For the briefest of seconds, it was as if the air had been vacuum-pumped from the room, leaving the throng bugeyed, collectively gasping for oxygen that wasn’t there.
Then the place came unglued. People slid out of chairs and rolled among the gum wrappers and peanut shells littering the floor. Billy Bob Fung threw himself onto the pool table, where he rolled from rail to rail like a beached whale, scattering the brightly colored balls hither and yon as he thrashed about, spouting his laughter to the ceiling. Back by the front door, somebody pounded on the bar and brayed like a donkey. A glass shattered on the floor as the wave of laughter and derision rose to the rafters like a tsunami.
Just as things began to settle down, somebody repeated the punch line at top volume. “…but much, much smaller,” he bellowed, and the place erupted again.
By that time, Red had packed himself back into his jeans and beaten a muttering, head-shaking retreat to the men’s room. When I looked over at the narrow stairway, Rachel Thoms was standing there. “Nice crowd here,” she commented.
“Never a dull moment,” I assured her.
I offered her a seat. She nodded past my right shoulder, where Ralph leaned against the wall. Together, we watched him nod off with his mouth so wide open you could have
dropped a pool ball inside. His brown and broken teeth reminded me of those old pilings sticking up from the Hylebos Waterway.
“How about someplace we don’t have to shout?”
I swept my arm across the room and grinned. “But you’ve achieved full icon status here today,” I said. “They’ll talk about this for years.”
She grinned back. “I’ll have to remember to include it in my bio,” she said.
I wobbled as I got to my feet. She noticed.
“I shouldn’t be driving,” I admitted.
“I’ve got a cab outside,” she said, and let her smile loose on me.
I kept my feet, but just barely. “Pretty sure of yourself,” I managed as she turned away.
She smiled and started down the stairs. “You coming?” she asked, without looking back.
I said I was.
Photograph by Skye Moody, 2004
G.M. Ford escaped teaching English at a community college to write full time. He never (well, rarely) suffers fools, and he enjoys music, cooking, eating other people’s cooking, boating, golfing, and arguing about everything under the sun. He is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Cast in Stone, The Deader the Better, Red Tide, and Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca?