by Earl Emerson
“Brown will be back,” I said. “If not him, then the next guy.”
“I’ll take care of the geezer,” Tronstad said. “Just give us the bonds.”
“You’re going to have to give me another day or two.”
Tronstad waved his hand in the air. The lids of his eyes had become heavy. “I guess if you were going to run out on us, you’d be somewhere else by now. South America or wherever.”
“I like it here.”
“My question to you, Tronstad,” Johnson said, “is why is your truck packed full of stuff?”
“Moving my girlfriend.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend,” Johnson said.
“Fuck you. Fuck you both. I got into a beef with the landlord. Is that okay with you?”
“Why lie about it?” I asked.
“Because I knew how you two anal retentives would react.”
“You’re leaving town as soon as you get your share,” Johnson said. “Aren’t you?”
“I don’t even know why you care.”
“Because it’ll point the finger at us,” I said. “Once you vanish, they’ll start looking more closely at us.”
“Why would they look for me? I lost my lieutenant and resigned. That’s not so strange.”
“Bullshit,” said Johnson.
After it was decided all three of us would show up for work in the morning, Johnson and I walked back to our vehicles in the dark. I said, “I hope he doesn’t kill himself with booze and drugs.”
“Maybe you should hope he does.”
28. KISSABLE
I LET JOHNSON leave first, then reversed onto Beach Drive and backed into the neighbor’s driveway, where I shut off my lights and engine and took my foot off the brake. Except for the pinging of my aluminum engine block as it cooled, the neighborhood was hushed.
Something about the way he’d sent us off made me wonder about Tronstad’s intentions. The whole time we’d been inside he’d made no effort to get up from the dining-room table. For someone as nervous as he habitually was, that in itself was noteworthy.
Although we were going about our business as if everything were hunky-dory, I knew nothing would be the same between the three of us. Once you were involved in another man’s death, you thought about it when you woke up, when you waited at a stoplight, in line at the grocery store, and at night brushing your teeth. Not a day would go by that I wouldn’t think about Fred and Susan Rankler, Russell Abbott, and Sweeney Sears—and what I might have done to keep them alive.
The most depressing aspect of it all was that I was aware of the magnitude of our collective folly, while the other two saw only dollar signs. Flash a few million in front of your average Joe-Blow Americano, and all electrical impulses to the nut shut off.
I waited in the car until well after eight o’clock. I couldn’t help thinking people had been hidden in the house when Johnson and I were inside—Tronstad’s biker buddies with rusty pipe wrenches—and that if I waited long enough, I might see them leave.
At a quarter to nine, a vehicle on Beach Drive stopped directly in front of me in the street. At first I thought it was somebody who wanted the driveway I was in, but the lights moved on and the vehicle pulled in next door.
The vehicle was a black SUV, a Nissan Pathfinder, dirty from a recent road trip. A minute later I walked to the property and spotted, barely visible through the muck on the truck windows, a red IAFF union sticker: International Association of Fire Fighters. The Pathfinder was vacant, the door unlocked, so I got in, picked up some of the papers on the seat, shuffled them, and found the words to the hymn we’d sung at Sears’s funeral yesterday afternoon. He will guide my pathway, e’er I trust his staff.
The Pathfinder had belonged to Sweeney Sears. I detected the faint aroma of perfume, the fragrance Heather Wynn wore.
Feeling the guilt that comes with pawing through a dead man’s belongings, I went back to my car and watched the house through the wrought-iron fence. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. Surely, once she saw how potted he was, she would bail out.
When she still hadn’t come out by nine-fifteen, I fired up the Subaru and left.
FIVE MINUTES LATER I found myself parked on Alki Avenue, across the road from the bike shop. I was only blocks from the Pederson place up on the hill. After a few minutes I went around to the back of my car, took out my in-line skates and helmet, and was soon relishing the hard sound of the plastic wheels on concrete as I launched onto the path along the beach. Because Alki Avenue was lit up like a circus ramp, you could skate there all night without bringing your own light.
I skated east to the viewpoint across from downtown Seattle, then rounded the point and headed south toward Salty’s. Across the water, the high-rises were lit up and looked stark and clean against the dark horizon. Even though the path extended another mile or so, I turned around at Salty’s in order to avoid Friday night drunks in pickup trucks crossing the trail as they came out of the restaurant parking lot.
On my second lap, I stopped at my car, doffed my jacket, swigged half a bottle of green Gatorade, and resumed skating. I hadn’t gotten any exercise in a couple of days, and my pent-up energy propelled me to speeds that made my legs ache and my lungs feel as if they were bringing up blood. I skated for an hour. I wanted to skate all night. I wanted to skate for the rest of my life.
The weather was cool, and the stars winked in black patches of sky where the clouds separated. I saw a pair of heavyset women on the path. An old man wearing so much body armor he looked like something out of a Monty Python movie. A few other skaters.
There were people who skated everywhere with one arm behind their backs. There were those who refused to lift their feet. Those who picked up their feet as if walking through deep snow. Some skated upright. Others in a racing crouch. Others took on an odd rhythm with their hips. All of that was fine for a recreational skater, but economy of movement was key for speed, and most of an individual’s identifying characteristics were imperfections of style. Ten expert skaters, it was hard to tell them apart.
A slight tailwind had boosted my speed just before I spotted a woman skating a quarter mile in front of me. I closed the gap, watching her move, thinking I knew who she was.
She was headed the same direction I was, and as was her habit, she wore wrist protectors but no knee pads and no helmet. I pulled alongside, dragging a skate with a rattling noise that startled her. “You?”
“You, too,” I said.
She wore the same short-sleeved shirt she’d had on at the house a couple of hours earlier with grass stains on the knees of her jeans. If you looked only at her face with her wind-tousled bangs, she appeared to be around ten years old, yet she had a woman’s wide hips to go with that bony frame and a good rhythm to accompany the coltish movement of her arms.
She sped up as if to skate away from me, but I paced alongside her easily, then behind her, on the other side, in front. I did a hop and a twist and skated backward ten feet in front. Showing off.
“You down here for the exercise, or are you following me?” I said.
“I didn’t have anything else to do.”
“No hot date? It’s Friday night. I would think you would have a hot date.”
“I had a date. I whipped his ass and sent him home.”
“Ouch. That hurts.” We skated in silence for half a minute. “What do you do?”
“I’m a cop for the City of Seattle.”
“Funny, I work for the city, too.”
“I know. You’re a fireman.” She accentuated the “fire” as if it were hilarious.
“You really a cop?”
“One thing I’m not is a liar.”
A liar was the least of what I’d become in the last month. Maybe in the end Sonja Pederson would be the one to arrest me. Why not? She’d already beaten me up.
I flipped around so that we were facing the same direction. Skating side by side, we reached the end of the path a few blocks from the lighthouse and turned around, he
ading northeast toward the city again, forging into the breeze. We glided along for a minute or two without speaking. When we passed my car, I noticed her Miata parked next to my WRX. She said, “I didn’t come here because you were here. I came despite the fact that you were here.”
I didn’t know if I believed her. I flipped around and began skating backward again, did a couple of backward crossovers. It occurred to me that she couldn’t hate me too awfully much or she wouldn’t be here.
“How’m I doing?” I asked, just as a skate hit a rock and I almost went down.
“Nice recovery.” She increased her cadence, trying once again to pull away.
She got up a good head of steam and held it while I turned around and skated alongside. She wasn’t breathing that hard, but then, she didn’t appear to have any reserves, either. “You’re in good shape,” I said.
“Not good enough, obviously.”
“You have slow wheels. I could switch the bearings out for you. I’ve got a faster set in the car. They’d be a lot nicer to skate on.”
“Fast enough to get away from you?”
“Oh, you’d never get away from me.”
“Maybe some other time.”
“Your father get pissed at you for having me there?”
“No. It’s just that I don’t bring people around very often.”
“Your dad sticks a gun in their faces, I can see why. I don’t remember you from the day the pig went through the roof.”
“I only stay over once in a while. I have a house out in Maple Valley. Funny you should mention it, though, because my dad told me he was so shook up after the pig incident he couldn’t remember if I was in the house or not.”
We were moving along at a pretty good clip now; not as fast as I’d been traveling on my own, but a steady pace. We passed an old man limping alongside a dog that appeared to be as old as he was. Sonja looked at me. “Would you answer a question?”
“Of course.”
“What do you want out of life?”
“That’s a strange question.”
“It’s the first thing people should ask each other. You find out a lot.”
“Why ask me?”
“Because when I told Iola I knew about you two, she said something I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. She said you were sweet.”
“As in, maple syrup sweet?”
“And as in stupid sweet. I think she was profoundly disappointed in you because you were a nice guy.”
“Let’s not talk about her.”
“Fine. Tell me what you want out of life.”
We skated for half a minute before I said, “I want my life to be what it was a month ago.”
“And what was that?”
“Simple. Wonderful. I had a job that allowed me to help people. I had my car, my skating. Friends. We didn’t climb mountains or race yachts, but it was a life I felt comfortable with.”
“So you had a near-perfect life a month ago and you want it back?”
“I had an ordinary life a month ago. I didn’t realize what it was until I lost it.”
“What happened?”
“You don’t want to know.”
She thought about that. “Was she right? Iola? Are you sweet?”
“She told me I was naive.”
“I think sweet’s a better fit.” Even though she’d tried to skate away from me and had beat me up twice, I took her words as a compliment. I couldn’t help thinking we had an easy manner between us that I hadn’t encountered with a lot of other women and wondered if she had it with everybody, or just me.
As we headed around the point, I got in front of Sonja and told her to keep close. She’d never drafted before, but after a few miscues, she picked up the technique. In skating, most of the work involves pushing the wind out of the way, so that a skater following close on another skater’s heels uses significantly less energy. I caught her hand and rested it on my hip so she could maintain balance and position more easily. “Watch out for cracks in the pavement. I’ll point them out to you.” We got going fast enough that I heard her breathing increase. After a minute, I said, “Want me to slow down?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve never gone this fast. It’s incredible.”
We worked hard for twenty minutes before I felt her flagging.
We took it easy on the stretch back to the cars, and she rolled to a stop against her Miata. She unlocked it and sat in the passenger side, unbuckling her skates while I did miniature backward figure eights.
We talked about city politics, global warming, and a recent police shooting in downtown Seattle that had caused a stir in the media but which I hadn’t paid much attention to. She told me she’d once applied for a position with the fire department and been accepted but had changed her mind at the last minute. “Why?” I asked.
“I guess I found something I liked better.”
At that moment I would have given anything not to have screwed her stepmother into delirium so many times. I’d run into Sonja three times now, but because of my relationship with Iola, the odds of another meeting were negligible.
“Why’d you stop here tonight?” I asked.
“I told you. I needed some exercise. Beating up guys is just not that taxing.”
“You saw my car parked down here and wanted to see me again.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“I’m glad you showed up. I was in a pretty sour mood until you got here.”
“What were you looking for at my father’s place?”
“My sanity.”
Seated in her low-slung car, she looked up at my face for a good long while. I stopped the figure eights and held her look. “What the hell were you thinking with Iola?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it just sex? Was it . . . What the hell were you thinking?”
I shook my head.
I’d been thinking it was a lark. A sexual romp. An escapade. I’d been thinking there wouldn’t be any consequences. That Iola wasn’t married. That she wasn’t damaging me with her sharp tongue and derogatory comments. That she hadn’t been treating me alternately like a sex toy and a doormat. Someday I would look back on it with disbelief, knowing the only thing I’d accomplished with Iola was to bollix my chances with this woman.
Sonja’s face was flushed from exercise, her hair combed roughly by the wind. I’d never seen anyone more kissable. She walked around to her driver’s-side door and got in. I skated behind her, my throat so dry, I nearly choked on my words. “Can I see you again?”
She laced up her sneakers. “Sonja Pederson. Maple Valley. It’s in the book.”
It wasn’t as if I had a future. Sonja Pederson was a glimpse through a window I would never enter again, a world I’d stepped out of when I agreed to hide the bearer bonds. If my affair with Sonja’s stepmother failed to obliterate my chances with her, getting arrested in a high-profile federal case and being carted off to prison would probably do the trick.
29. WE’RE BUFFOONS
ROBERT JOHNSON, Ted Tronstad, and I were waxing Engine 29 in the sunshine behind the station, a David Byrne tune blaring through the open apparatus bay as we took advantage of what we suspected would be one of the last sunny afternoons of the year. Just three multimillionaire murderers polishing a rig for the city.
Johnson was up to his old tricks, playing a joke on Tronstad by waxing his helmet while Tronstad worked on the other side of the rig. A dirty, battle-scarred helmet is a point of pride to any firefighter, so it was a testament to Tronstad’s state of mind that he didn’t react or comment at seeing his helmet, now shiny and clean, in Johnson’s hands, looking as though it had never seen any action. Not being able to get his hands on the bonds had put Tronstad in a foul mood; he’d been hectoring me about it all day.
There wasn’t much conversation, partially because the music was so loud—an infraction Tronstad committed to deliberately nettle the irascible neighbors—an
d because we were about talked out.
So far our shift had been relatively quiet, all the excitement and nightmares occurring in other people’s lives, which was the way it was supposed to be when you were a firefighter. You went to other people’s excitement and remained calm and unruffled because the trouble wasn’t yours, and because you’d been trained to handle it dispassionately.
As expected, Tronstad came in hung over and throughout the day took catnaps when he thought he wouldn’t be missed. The only reason Tronstad had come to work was to make sure I didn’t blow town with the bonds.
One way or another, we wouldn’t be working together again, and we all knew it. Tronstad would take his money and abscond. Johnson still hadn’t made up his mind whether to run or to stick around and attempt to fake normalcy. Me? I was going to get arrested. Whatever else happened, whatever I decided to do, they would be coming for me. Sometimes you just knew when the jig was up, and I’d lived with this premonition for some time now.
Our temporary company officer, Lieutenant Covington, was a dull man with a bald head and a passion for growing roses and breeding Scottish terriers. Covington had been with the department twenty-two years and spent most of his free time at work in front of the television.
It was almost three in the afternoon, and some of the neighborhood kids were walking past the station with a soccer ball. I tried to savor what was probably my last day on the job.
“We meet again,” came the booming voice.