Past Crimes

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “See anything?” Davey said.

  “The lights here suck,” I said.

  “Told you we should’ve gone for the valet lot.”

  He turned in where the flashlight guy was pointing and drove past the open parking spaces, across the middle lane, and into the next row. I kept scanning the cars.

  “What are we looking for?” Davey said.

  “German.”

  “Ja, mein Führer. There’s a Beemer.”

  “Too old. Hit the next row.”

  We circled through two more rows before I spotted a Mercedes CL500. This year’s model, I was pretty sure. “Make another pass,” I said, reaching down into the toolbox on the passenger-side floor. I took out half a dozen plastic Mercedes key fobs hooked together on a loop of twine. None of them had keys attached.

  As we circled past the car again, Davey let the Corolla roll. I pointed the first key fob at the 500 and clicked it, then the second.

  “Shit. Are we gonna have to do this the hard way?” Davey said.

  I tried the third one, and the parking lights on the Mercedes blinked once.

  “Nice,” Davey said. He accelerated, and we drove across the lot to park in the next row. We put the seats back and relaxed a fraction. The moon roof of the Corolla was a big light gray rectangle in the darker gray of the car.

  “Where’d you get the new keys?” Davey said.

  “From Luis. He said they should cover about half the cars coming off the line.”

  “Not bad. You get to keep ’em?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” he said.

  “Three hundred for one hour’s work. That’s fair.”

  “I still think we should hit something with a better profit margin.”

  I grinned at him, not that he could see it in the dark. “Profit margin? Didn’t Missus Gramercy give you a D in econ?”

  “Fuck you,” he said cheerfully.

  “Parts work is easy. And safer. On a custom job, Luis tells me what car he needs and I have to run all over town and find it and wait for my shot at it. I don’t want to waste a whole week sneaking around country clubs.”

  “Sneaking around Dono, you mean. You still ticked off at him?”

  “No.”

  Davey snorted. “You are too.”

  “No.” Davey knew that Dono and I had fought. I’d told him Dono was making me work construction over the summer.

  What I was really pissed about was Dono not taking me with him to Portland.

  I had spent a lot of time during the past two weeks reading through news articles online. One story in particular, about a dot-com billionaire in Hillsboro who had his collection of sculpture stolen from right out of his massive garden. The billionaire had been quoted as saying he was trying to create a postmodern Luxembourg, whatever that meant. The papers called the theft “brazen,” which was their way of saying it happened during the daytime and someone should have been watching.

  Statues, for fuck’s sake. It must have taken six or eight guys and a couple of front-loader machines to pull it off. I could drive a loader.

  “Where’s the gate guy?” I said to Davey.

  He raised his head to look out the hatchback window. “Gone.”

  “Can’t be gone. Keep looking.”

  “All right, stay calm. Maybe you need a hit more than I do.” He craned his neck, squinting across the shadowed field of parked cars. “There’s the shithead. Talking to his buddy with the glow-in-the-dark dildos. They’re still too near the exit.”

  I reached up and clicked the overhead light to the OFF position. “Where’d you get the joint?” I said. “From Bobby Sessions?”

  “Fuck me. Don’t start in on that again, Grandma.”

  “Some of that ditch weed he claims he imports from BC?”

  “Like you’d know. The fuck is wrong with you and him?”

  “Not a thing. He can sell all the dandelion stems he wants. And you should let him.”

  “I know people he doesn’t know,” Davey said. “I can move it with no risk.”

  “What about the risk on Bobby’s end? He tries too hard. Someday he’ll try to sell to the wrong guy. He’ll say your name before the cops even finish cuffing him.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not if. It’s when. He’s a fuckup, Davey.”

  “I can handle Bobby Motherfucker Sessions.”

  We sat and stared out the moon roof. The edges of it were starting to blur as the overcast sky outside darkened.

  “Let’s go,” I said, opening the car door and slipping out. I had the Mercedes key fob in one hand and the toolbox in the other. A handful of latecomers making their way from the parking lot toward Hec Ed, and no one down at this end. I kept my head low and walked quickly along the cars until I reached the Mercedes.

  I knelt on the asphalt and looked back toward the entrance gate. No sign of the two attendants. I waited. After a minute I spotted them, midway along the lot, sharing a smoke.

  I clicked the key fob and heard the clunk of the Mercedes unlocking behind me. The flash of parking lights didn’t attract a look from the attendants. I opened the door and got in.

  It was nice inside the car. Tan-colored leather, fake hardwood dash. The owner had removed the faceplate of the stereo and taken it with him, or more likely tucked it in the glove compartment. Didn’t matter. The wheels and seats and engine components were worth a whole lot more than his Blaupunkt.

  I took a cordless power drill and a flathead screwdriver out of the toolbox. I’d fixed a slim tungsten bit in the drill before Davey and I had left the house. I lined up the bit with the keyhole, just slightly off center, and pushed it hard as I drilled out the first lock pin. The whine of the drill was rock-concert loud in the car. The first time I’d drilled a lock, I’d been sure everyone from two miles away was going to come running. I drilled it again, and then once more, wiggling the drill a little to make sure the pins were toast. I put the metal end of the screwdriver in and turned it, and the engine rumbled politely to life.

  I switched on the lights, and Davey immediately pulled out of his parking space, taking point. I followed him from the lot, each of us waiting for the long wooden arm to rise and let us pass.

  When we were farther down Montlake, we stopped at a red light before the onramp to 520. I was already dialing Luis to let him know we were on the way. I looked up and saw Davey in the Corolla. He’d turned around and was grinning at me out of the hatchback window. The joint was between his teeth, glowing bright. I gave him the finger, and he laughed and turned around to face the green light and floored it, leaving a yard of Goodyear rubber on the boulevard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE ROUGH FEEL OF the cobblestones underfoot in Pioneer Square brought back a memory from my childhood. My mother had brought me along while she shopped or maybe visited friends who worked somewhere nearby. I didn’t recall many details—I couldn’t have been more than five years old.

  It wasn’t too many months after that when an evening commuter, in a hurry to get home at the end of a long day, hit the wrong pedal and jumped the curb and took her out of my life forever.

  But the visit to the square had been a good day. I remembered my mother pointing out the intricate ironwork on the tall pergola that curved gently around the western side of the square. It may have been a weekend. There were a lot of people, or it seemed like it to me, and dogs on leashes, and the flocks of pigeons I chased without malice around the cobblestones.

  At one point I think my mother picked me up—probably to get me to settle down a little—and through the long strands of her straight black hair I could see the exuberant colors of a dozen kinds of flowers, all set out for sale in big plastic buckets along the sidewalk.

  That was the sum total of the memory, just people and birds and flowers. And my mother’s hair, lifted on the breeze. I could remember the feeling of her nearness far better than I could recall her face, on that day or any other.

  Julian
Formes lived in a three-story brick building at one of the corners of the square. A nice address for a paroled felon. An art gallery took up most of the street level, with the upper floors given over to loft apartments. The building retained some vestige of style from a century ago, with arched porticoes and ornamental carved stone between each story. But the modern Plexiglas-and-steel entrance spoiled the look, like welding a Caterpillar tractor grille onto a Rolls-Royce.

  The day was overcast and drizzling. Regular folk rushed along the edges of the little piazza with its ironclad benches and massive black totem poles. The interior of the park was surrendered to the homeless. Most of them sat quietly and stared into space or muttered to themselves as they slumped low against the insistent damp mist. The more energetic ones tried prospecting spare change from the stream of citizens walking past.

  If Formes had been the man who’d clocked me with the shillelagh at Dono’s house, then he would know me by sight. I risked walking past the building to get a closer look. The door required a key card for entry. Past it was a foyer with old-fashioned brass mailboxes on the wall. Pendleton Court was painted in old-timey script across the leaded glass of the inner door.

  A young guy in a conservative blue suit and striped tie under his Burberry raincoat came out of the building in a rush. He stopped suddenly and checked for something in the messenger bag he had slung over his shoulder and pivoted around to go back in. He took his wallet out of his coat pocket, swiped it on the key-card reader, and disappeared inside.

  I kept walking to the end of the block and turned around to walk back. When Burberry came out again, running even faster, he slammed right into me.

  “Sorry, dude,” I said.

  “Jesus,” he said, and raced off.

  When he was out of sight, I took his wallet from under my jacket and removed the key card from it. The card worked just as well for me as it had for Burberry. I dropped the wallet into the mail slot next to the brass mailboxes. A glance at the boxes showed one near the top: FORMES—309.

  The lobby of the building was heavy on the historic ambience. The stairs were marble and the banister thick oak, maybe even original from a century ago.

  I took the stairs to the third floor. Number 309 was just off the elevator. It had better locks than its neighbors, heavy Schlage bolts. I knocked softly. No answer.

  Even with Dono’s excellent set of picks and a little snap gun to force the lock, it took me five minutes of careful work before the second bolt gave up the fight. I was out of practice. Rangers use less subtle methods to deal with stubborn doors, like shotguns loaded with breaching rounds.

  It was an open and airy space, with broad windows getting the most out of the overcast day’s sunlight. Sparse. There was only one chair in the living room, a low-backed green thing that had seen better decades. A large table with a dust cover thrown over it was against the wall. The built-in shelves in the room were bare, as were the kitchen counters.

  I closed the door behind me and locked it again. I went into the kitchen and checked the trash. Easiest way to guess if anyone was in residence. The plastic can was two-thirds full, mostly with take-out food containers from different restaurants.

  I gave the bedroom a quick toss. Formes lived like an especially poor but tidy college student. One heavy coat in the closet. A few pairs of pants and shirts, each neatly folded and tucked away in the single dresser. A small TV, angled so it could be watched from the meticulously made bed.

  I was starting to think Formes did all his work somewhere else until I tried the hallway closet. The only thing in it was a large red metal tool cabinet on wheels, three feet tall. The kind mechanics use to keep every wrench close at hand. I tried the top drawer and found wires in multiple gauges and soldering gear. In the large bottom drawer, a dozen new off-the-shelf cell phones, still in their packaging. The brand was the same as the ones used in the bugs at Dono’s house.

  Bingo. Julian Formes, you are about to have a very bad day.

  A glance under the dust cover on the table in the living room yielded even more. A large Mac laptop, closed and sleeping. A disassembled transmitter, with delicate tools laid out in orderly rows next to it. And a thick black leather carrying case.

  I unzipped the case to find rows of thumb drives, each tucked into its own little pocket. Some of the small metal rectangles had a letter or two written on them in blue permanent ink.

  Three of the drives were labeled DS. Two others CL.

  Dono Shaw. Cristiana Liotti.

  I powered up the computer and plugged one of the DS drives into its port on the side. The computer pinged happily, and a window popped up, asking me for a password to the drive.

  Encrypted. Son of a bitch. My sudden fantasy of listening to the audio recording of Dono’s shooting, of finding the shooter and maybe the diamonds, too, in one swoop, vanished as quickly as it had come.

  I thought about my options. The smart thing to do was turn around, pretend I hadn’t been there, and tell Guerin to unleash his hounds on Formes. The police had plenty of computer-forensics wizards. They could break Formes’s encryption. And Guerin could probably break Formes, too, getting him to spill on who’d hired him.

  Then again, maybe not. The warrants and computer work would eat up a day or two at minimum. Formes could hide behind his lawyer at every step. And maybe destroy the evidence. The whole process could take weeks and might be a dead end. I had four days.

  I didn’t care too much about whether Julian Formes ended up back at Walla Walla State Pen. I wanted the man who’d put a bullet in Dono’s brain, and the more I learned about Formes, the more he looked like just a hired hand. He didn’t even seem to own a gun.

  Guerin could eventually paint Formes into a corner, but I could do it faster.

  I found an empty duffel bag in the bedroom closet and filled it with Formes’s laptop, the thumb drives, and the more expensive tools from the rolling cabinet. I replaced the dust cover on the table. With a black marker from the cabinet, I wrote “TRADE YOU” in big letters across the fabric, with the cell number of Dono’s burner phone below it.

  I was about to leave when another idea popped into my head. Formes’s bug was still in my jacket pocket. I took it out and glanced at it.

  The bug’s battery had a full charge. It could work.

  I dialed my own number into the keypad on the bug. My phone beeped, and when I answered it, I could hear the ghostly echo of my own movements in the room. In Formes’s tool cabinet, I found duct tape. I taped the phone to the underside of the table.

  It wasn’t nearly as slick as Formes’s work in Dono’s house—I could listen only so long as I didn’t hang up or until the battery on the bug gave out. But until then I could hear everything in the room.

  See how you like it, you little fucker.

  I locked the door behind me and left the building out of the alleyway door.

  Keeping a close watch on Formes’s building was going to be a problem. There were no restaurants or bars or other handy places to hang around within spitting distance. If I stayed in a single place on the street, I’d stick out like one of the totem poles.

  Unless I could blend in.

  I jogged back to the pickup truck in the parking garage across from the square to drop off the duffel bag loaded with Formes’s laptop and other gear. I took off my barn jacket and grabbed a paint-stained hoodie out of the bins in the backseat.

  There was a trash bin in the alley, its lid left unlocked. I spent two minutes grinding the hoodie into the muck and slime of the bin’s interior. The garbage smelled like rotten cabbage and spoiled meat. So did the half-shredded Mariners cap I found in it. With the cap on and my hood pulled up, I was ready for the red carpet, Pioneer Square style.

  Only one bench had a view of both the front and alley doors of Formes’s building. It was occupied by a semiconscious Chinese man with spittle at one corner of his mouth. I stood ten feet from the bench and stared at him until something in his slack mind recognized the signals of poten
tial danger and he slowly got up and moved away, closer to the others.

  Van Shaw, tough guy. Just another tiny debt I could mark on the tally, waiting until I got my hands on whoever’d shot Dono. Maybe I would have the chance to tune the bastard up a little before I served him to Guerin.

  And I was going to turn him in. I’d worked too hard to create a life away from all this crap with guys like Hollis and Corcoran and Willard. No matter how much I might like to see the shooter fry, killing him myself would just be stupid.

  Might feel good, though. No harm in thinking about that.

  I had an earpiece plugged into the phone. If anyone passing by noticed and thought it strange that the smelly homeless guy had cell-phone service, they didn’t remark on it. The white noise of the empty apartment on the open line threatened to become hypnotic. I kept alert by scanning the face of every person who walked past the apartment building.

  After about twenty more minutes, I spotted Formes. My burglar, no question. The curly white hair was distinctive and longish, like a little cape over his ears. He was short and stooped, and wore a red Puma football jacket over jeans with high-top sneakers. His skin had an unhealthy-looking yellow undercoat, his lined face resembling crumpled parchment. Too much time hidden from the sun.

  I watched as Formes went into his building. Soon I heard the clunks and clicks of him opening his locks.

  I had made sure Formes would see my writing on the table cover from the doorway. Through the bug I heard footsteps, and then a high, clear voice said “Fuck” very distinctly. That sentiment was repeated many times, with increasing force.

  Welcome home, Julian.

  A lot more footsteps. Pacing and fast. He was figuring out what to do. Call me at the number I’d left? Get help? Flee town?

  After a few moments, silence fell. I heard something like water running, maybe from the kitchen. A creak. Then a bump of furniture, very close. Maybe he was sitting down in the chair at the table, looking at all the nothing I’d left him.