Hot Shots (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  Willows had eaten all of his eggs and bacon and most of his potatoes when the woman drifted by with a pot of coffee and a handful of creamers. She had been over by the window, looking out at the parking lot. He said, “Got any idea what’s going on over there?”

  “No idea at all. Somebody had an accident, I guess.” She smiled at Parker. “You two come over on that cute little ferry?”

  Parker shook her head, no.

  “How late do you stay open?” said Willows.

  “We close at four.” The woman glanced at her watch, as if for confirmation.

  “That’s pretty early, isn’t it?”

  “We’re open at eight. I’m here by six-thirty. That’s a long enough day for me, mister.”

  “Do you own the restaurant?”

  “Such as it is.”

  “Are there any other staff?”

  “Why, you going to make me an offer?”

  Willows smiled. “Was the car there when you closed last night?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Absolutely.” She gave Willows a closer look. “You a cop?”

  “Was it there when you got to work this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said that was about six-thirty?”

  “Twenty past.”

  Willows checked his watch against the clock on the wall over the doorway leading to the kitchen. “Anybody else around?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Is anybody living on any of those boats down there?” said Parker.

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Then the woman said, “Not that I know of.” Willows and Parker exchanged a quick look.

  “Could I have your name, please,” said Willows.

  “Edna. Edna Weinberg.”

  “There was blood in the car,” said Parker. Willows frowned at her, but she ignored him. “We think someone was shot,” she said. “Maybe murdered.”

  “Try the Norwich,” said the woman. “Or La Paloma, the big green one down there berthed in the far slip. Don’t tell them I sent you.”

  Willows reached for the last piece of toast. Parker beat him to it.

  “Next time,” Willows said, “you can buy your own damn breakfast.”

  Parker licked crumbs from her fingers, grinned. No Girl Guides stuffed in the trunk of the Pontiac. A free meal. Maybe it wasn’t going to be such a bad day after all.

  6

  Alan Paterson was the kind of guy who liked to spend money, buy nice things and look at them and think, that’s mine, I own it. He was forty-two years old and had lived for the past ten years in a great big rambling house in West Vancouver’s prestigious Caulfield Cove area. The house had five bedrooms and two fieldstone fireplaces and four state-of-the-art bathrooms, a kitchen his wife still hadn’t entirely figured out. The backyard was mostly solid rock; a gentle waterfall of granite dotted with patches of grass, wild ferns and a handful of evergreens. There was a view of the ocean from almost every room — an ever-changing seascape that didn’t stop until it bumped up against the horizon.

  Alan’s plum-colored sixty-thousand-dollar Porsche Carrera stayed warm and dry in the attached heated garage, next to Lillian’s beige thirty-thousand-dollar Turbo Volvo wagon, the one she used to drive their three kids to school in the mornings. There was also a cute little Cal 29 moored down by the Bayshore Hotel, in the city.

  Alan hardly ever used the sailboat, but he got a big kick out of talking about it, putting his arm on your shoulder, looking you straight in the eye and telling you he believed it was a sin to live near the water and never go out on it.

  He kept a .22 calibre Ruger Mark 2 Bull Barrel on the boat. The gun and a box of ammunition had been given to him several years ago by a businessman from Texas, who hadn’t realized or cared that it was illegal to bring a pistol across the border. Alan had shot up a few beer cans, lost interest and more or less forgotten about the weapon.

  Until recently.

  At the moment, he was thinking about jumping in the Porsche and heading downtown, climbing aboard and using the pistol to blow his stupid brains out.

  Paterson owned a computer software company. He had five thousand square feet of downtown office space, a dozen employees, a yearly gross in the neighborhood of six million dollars.

  But what he also had was an increasingly competitive market, rising interest rates, an antsy bank manager who was going through a mid-life crisis or maybe just smelled blood. Mortgage and car and personal loan payments that were eating him alive, and several major creditors who suddenly weren’t answering the phone.

  Six months ago, he’d owned a business that just wouldn’t stop growing. Now he was facing almost certain bankruptcy. He still wasn’t sure how in hell it had happened.

  He turned to look over his shoulder, back up the slope of the deserted beach towards the Porsche. A great little piece of machinery. But his payments were almost a grand a month, and at the moment he was two months in arrears. Any day now, the bank would turn him over to a collection agency, they’d repossess and he’d be almost ten thousand in the hole with nothing to show for it. Worse, they’d wholesale the car to a dealer for maybe thirty thousand and he’d end up riding the bus, stuck with the difference. Another twenty thou in the hole and his credit rating shot all to hell. He jiggled the keys in his hand and thought about tossing them in the ocean and then jumping in after them.

  A terrific idea, except he’d already cashed in his insurance policy, so where would Lillian get the money to pay for his funeral?

  It was Monday, seven o’clock in the morning. He’d told Lillian he was going to work early, and it was the truth when he’d said it. But then he’d come up against the depressing reality of twenty minutes spent sucking exhaust fumes just to get across the bridge, the crawl through the park and down Georgia Street, the Porsche chugging along at maybe ten miles an hour, tops. And at the end of it all a long day in a dying office. Looking at the traffic, he’d lost heart and decided to take a walk on the beach, clear his mind.

  It had been sunny and warm all weekend, but during the night the weather had changed, a cold wind coming in from the west and bringing with it a damp chill, the smell of ocean, dark, lowering clouds and the odd shower. The beach was gray, empty. A depressing landscape. Why the hell had he come down here, anyway?

  He’d been sitting on a log near the water’s edge. He stood up and went down to the shoreline, watched the waves slap against the stones, fall back, surge forward. The tide was on the rise, almost at its peak. He bent and picked up a stone the size of his fist, threw it as far as he could. There was a white splash and then the water settled and it was impossible to tell where the stone had hit.

  He picked up another rock, tossed it in the air and caught it. When he was a kid his father had taught him that there were two kinds of stones, skippers and plunkers. Skippers were smooth and flat, like coins, and when you threw them they bounced across the surface of the water until they lost momentum. Plunkers were what was left over. When you tossed a plunker in the water, that was the sound it made when it hit, plunk. All his life he’d thought of himself as a skipper, born to stay afloat. Now it looked as if he was about to sink without a trace.

  He turned his back on the plum-colored Porsche and began to walk down the beach, along the tide line, on a course parallel with the water. Even with the sound of the waves on the beach and with his back to the bridge, he could still hear the hum of the traffic, tires on pavement, the roar and throb of engines, every once in a while the screech of a horn.

  Distance gave him perspective. He saw tiny little cars full of tiny little people, everybody racing along, blindly confident that today was going to be exactly like yesterday and tomorrow was going to be exactly like today, that life would just go on and on and on.

  A wave splashed over his shoe. He danced away from the water’s edge, sand and stones grinding under his feet. A gull picked at something half-buried in the sand. As he drew nearer the bi
rd flapped its wings and shuffled away from him, studying him with beady yellow eyes.

  He continued to trudge along the beach, tried to focus his mind on his problems, find a way out. He couldn’t seem to concentrate, kept drifting away. His beautiful house, his cars. Bang & Olufsen stereo system. Solid oak dining room suite, fridge that gave you cold water and ice cubes when you pushed a button. The education he’d promised himself he’d give the kids. Down the drain, all of it. He owed on everything and he was going to have to kiss it all goodbye. What was going to happen to his family? They depended on him. Christ, the bastards would strip Lillian’s Rolex right off her wrist.

  Lost in his thoughts, Paterson was almost right on top of the boys before he saw them. There were two of them, one about ten and the other twelve or maybe thirteen. Both wearing sneakers and jeans and identical T-shirts, white with a row of bright orange palm trees. Brothers. The boys were squatting on the sand a few feet from the water and they were so still and quiet that his first thought was to wonder if one of them had been hurt.

  Then he saw the gleam of the garbage bag, the ragged hole they’d torn in the shiny plastic and the smaller plastic bag they’d pulled through the hole. The second bag was about the size of an overnighter suitcase. The kids had ripped that bag open as well, and it in turn was full of smaller bags, clear plastic ones filled with a powdery white substance that looked like sugar. They’d opened one of the small bags and the older kid was shaking the powder on to the sand, poking at it with a stick.

  The sound of the waves must have covered the crunch of his footsteps, or maybe they were so intent on their game that they simply didn’t hear him. He was only a few feet away when the boy with the bag looked up, startled.

  Paterson was six feet tall and weighed two hundred and ten pounds. He glared down at the boy, using every inch of his height and every pound of his weight. His heart thumped in his chest. He’d already worked out what he was going to do, and how he was going to do it.

  “Police,” he said. “What the hell do you kids think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  The smaller kid stood up. The older boy dropped the bag on the sand, wiped white powder from his hands.

  “You know what that stuff is?”

  “Cocaine?”

  “Icing sugar,” said Paterson. “Did you taste it?”

  The boys shook their heads.

  “You know what a stakeout is?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well that’s what this is. A stakeout. And you just fucked it up.” He looked at his watch. “Your parents know you’re down at the beach all by yourselves?”

  The ten year old’s face sagged. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

  “We’re supposed to be at the mall,” said the older boy.

  “I wish you were, kid. Because if you’d done what you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have screwed up the stakeout, ruined my whole fucking day.” Paterson scooped up the bag full of smaller bags of white powder, slapped it with the flat of his hand to shake the sand from it. He gave the two boys a cold look and started across the beach towards his car.

  The bag was heavy, had to weigh at least fifteen or twenty kilos, maybe even more. He wondered what the powder was. Probably the kid was right, it was cocaine.

  How could he find out? He’d seen the stuff once, at a party. Walked into the upstairs bathroom and found a couple of secretaries and a guy he knew, a programmer named Ribiero, hunched over a few lines laid out on a magazine on the sink in front of the mirror. Ribiero had looked confused and then smiled and offered him a snort. Alan had said no, and that was that. He’d heard the stuff made you feel terrific and then really down, that it gave you energy and took away twice as much. Also that it was expensive, ripped up your nose and could give you a coronary. So he’d said he thought he’d stick to rye and ginger, thanks anyway.

  A jogger wheezed past, a guy in his late twenties wearing baggy shorts and a red sweatshirt, brand-new running shoes. What if it really was a stakeout? The strength drained out of him. The jogger glanced at him, seemed to slow down, then picked up speed.

  Why hadn’t he taken Ribiero up on his offer, bent and pinched shut a nostril and sucked up a line, so he’d know what he was doing now? He unlocked the Porsche, got in, tossed the bag on the backseat. He glanced down the beach as he drove out of the parking lot. They were watching him, one of them standing on a log for a better view. He wondered if they’d thought to get his licence number. Doubtful, and anyhow, he was too far away for them to read the plate.

  He gave it a little more gas as he turned out of the park, drove past the municipal police station, a queasy feeling building in the pit of his stomach.

  The little bastards didn’t need to know his licence number. All they had to remember was the plum-colored or mauve or even call it a purple Porsche. West Van was a small community. It would take the cops about an hour to find him, once they started looking.

  So what he had to do was get rid of the evidence. Hide it. Put it somewhere safe. The house was out. So was the office. That left his sailboat, the Cal 29 moored down at Coal Harbor.

  If the cops did come after him, he’d tell them the kids had been watching too much TV. He hadn’t said he was a cop, for one thing. And the powder was a yellowish color, not white, and had been in plastic bottles, not bags. He’d say he’d taken it from them because he thought it might be dangerous, industrial waste, toxic chemicals, something tossed off a freighter. What had he done with it? Dumped it in a municipal litter bin. No, he didn’t remember which one.

  So what would they be looking at? A solid citizen with one wife, three kids and a dog. And not a doberman or a pit bull, either, but a goddamn dinky little toy poodle who got clipped twice a month at thirty bucks a pop and wore a goddamn rhinestone collar. Jesus, his nose was so clean he could do a Kleenex commercial.

  Plus he paid almost five thousand dollars a year in municipal taxes. If that didn’t keep them in line, nothing would.

  So if the kids did tell mommy about the man on the beach, and mommy bothered to phone the cops and the cops bothered to follow up on it, how hard would they push?

  Not very hard at all.

  He’d been driving along without thinking about where he was going, reacting automatically to the traffic. Now he found himself on the bridge, heading into the city. He reached behind him and pushed the bag down on the carpeted floor, flattening it and making it harder to see.

  On Georgia, he took the first left and drove down towards the harbor, past the Bayshore Hotel. He parked the car, turned off the engine and got out and glanced casually around. There were a few people down by the water, but nobody he knew. He grabbed the bag and wrapped his jacket around it, locked the car, walked rapidly across the lot and down the ramp to the aluminum boathouse that sheltered the Cal 29.

  There were a dozen places on board where he could hide the coke, if that’s what it was.

  He tossed the bag up on the forward deck and grabbed a stanchion and hauled himself aboard. The boat swayed gently on the water. He unlocked the louvered mahogany door. He hadn’t taken the boat out since early July. Inside, pale gray light filtered through the small oval windows, and the air smelled musty and damp. He put the garbage bag down on a small folding table. Found an ashtray, lit a cigarette, took the smaller bags out of the bigger one.

  There were eighty bags. He used a fish scale to weigh one. Call it half a pound. He found the bag that had a rip in it, licked his finger and tried a taste.

  Maybe he wasn’t going to turn into a plunker after all.

  *

  The younger boy flicked at the sand with his stick. He waited until Paterson had climbed into the Porsche and then said, “That’s no cop car.”

  “It’s a Porsche,” said his brother. “A Porsche Carrera.”

  “He sure swore a lot.”

  “Maybe he was trying to scare us.”

  “You think he really was a cop?”

  “He lo
oked like a cop, didn’t he?”

  The younger boy nodded. “Yeah, but all adults look like cops, when they’re mad.” He dug at the sand with his stick. “What if that stuff really was drugs? Maybe we should tell mom about it when she gets home from work.”

  “We’re supposed to be at the mall, remember?”

  “How can we be at the mall when it doesn’t even open till nine-thirty?”

  “If he’s really a cop, how come he drives a sports car?”

  “All narcs drive expensive cars.”

  “On TV,” said the younger boy.

  “What’s the difference?” said the twelve year old. But at the same time, he had to admit that maybe his little brother had a point.

  7

  Inspector Homer Bradley’s office was on the third floor of 312 Main. The office was furnished with a large cherry wood desk, one leather chair and two plain wooden ones, a pair of battered three-drawer filing cabinets. The floor was gray linoleum, the walls and ceiling a drab, crab-apple green. The office had only one window. It was small, but afforded a wonderful view over the roof of the adjoining building. On a clear day Bradley could catch a glimpse of the inner harbor, the smoky green bulk of the North Shore mountains.

  He finished his brandy-laced coffee, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and chewed on a breath mint. Nobody had to tell him that drinking on the job was a bad idea. He had a cold, was all. The alcohol helped clear his sinuses. He sniffed the empty mug and detected brandy fumes, slid open a lower drawer and pushed the mug in next to his Smith & Wesson Police Special.

  There was a knock on the door, a light tap. He ran his fingers lightly across the barrel and cylinder of the revolver. The metal was cold, clammy. He slammed the drawer shut.

  His office door swung open. Parker was wearing a cream-colored blouse and dark green suit, Willows baggy black cords and a black shirt with bright red buttons, black leather Reebok walking shoes. Willows looked as if he’d just told a joke, and Parker looked as if she wasn’t quite ready to stop laughing. Bradley popped a breath mint, chewed and swallowed. What the hell was going on, what was so damn funny? Did they know about his cold, his developing penchant for an early morning drink? He put the thought aside. If Willows walked into the office and found him stark naked and dead drunk, he was confident no one would ever hear a word of it.