Soul Survivor

by G. M. Ford

  PRAISE FOR G.M. FORD

  “G.M. Ford is must reading.”

  —Harlan Coben

  “Ford is a witty and spunky writer who not only knows his terrain but how to bring it vividly to the printed page.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “G.M. Ford is a born storyteller.”

  —J.A. Jance

  “He’s well on his way to becoming the Raymond Chandler of Seattle.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “G.M. Ford is, hands down, one of my favorite contemporary crime writers. Hilarious, provocative, and cool as a March night in Seattle, he may be the best-kept secret in mystery novels.”

  —Dennis Lehane

  “G.M. Ford has a supercharged V-12 under the hood.”

  —Lee Child

  “G.M. Ford writes the pants off most of his contemporaries.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  OTHER TITLES BY G.M. Ford

  Nameless Night

  Threshold

  Leo Waterman Series

  Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca?

  Cast in Stone

  The Bum’s Rush

  Slow Burn

  Last Ditch

  The Deader the Better

  Thicker Than Water

  Chump Change

  Salvation Lake

  Family Values

  Frank Corso Series

  Fury

  Black River

  A Blind Eye

  Red Tide

  No Man’s Land

  Blown Away

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by G.M. Ford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503903999

  ISBN-10: 1503903990

  Cover design by Ray Lundgren

  To my friend John Walsdorf

  A man to match the mountains and the sea. You will, now and forever, walk this path with me.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Art Fowler came to me on the last day of January while I was sitting in my front parlor drinking coffee and watching a blizzard blow in from the south.

  Out in the orchard, the drifting snow had harlequined the trees black and white. Looked like every apple and pear had one stubborn leaf, a sole survivor, waving like a drowning sailor as the skeletal branches were slapped to and fro by the wind.

  Those were the profundities I was dwelling upon when the gate buzzer went off and turned everything to nofundities. I took my sweet-ass time getting to the front door, hoping whoever it was would either freeze solid or get lost. When the buzzer sounded again, I winced, leaned my ear to the speaker, and pushed the button. Like most everybody, I’m sick of peddlers and religious fanatics showing up unbidden on my doorstep, so the most polite response I could muster at eight thirty in the morning was, “Yeah.”

  “Leo . . . that you?” Long pause. “It’s Art Fowler.”

  Took me a minute to put a face to the name. Hadn’t seen Art since my father’s funeral . . . fifteen, sixteen years anyway. Guy had to be at least eightysomething by now. One of those city functionaries who’d hung around my old man during the last years of his life. I’d never been clear what it was he did for the city, but he’d occupied one of the imaginary uncle positions of my adolescence. In those days, anybody who was always around the house and older than I was got designated an aunt or an uncle. We all knew it was horseshit, but it was our horseshit.

  “Yeah, Art . . . here . . .” I pushed the gate button. “Come on in . . .”

  I opened the front door and watched the gate plow snow as it slid open. Art was wearing an old-fashioned fedora, with a thick, red-and-white-striped scarf wound around his neck like a Seussian python. I watched as he hunched his shoulders and began shuffling up the drive. There was enough snow that most people would lift their feet to avoid tromping in it, but it didn’t seem like he could manage that much effort. Looked to me like a big wind gust might have sent him to his knees. I closed the gate behind him and hoped like hell he made it to the front door, ’cause I surely didn’t want to have to go out there and fetch him from the storm.

  When he stumbled to the stoop, I took him by the elbow and helped him up the fieldstone stairs. Took his hat and coat from him, stashed them in the hall closet, and then led him into the parlor.

  “Cup of coffee?” I asked as I got him seated on the gold brocade couch.

  “If you got some ready,” he said.

  “How do you take it?”

  “Just milk.”

  I told him to hang in there and headed for the kitchen, as much to give myself a chance to think about why Art Fowler would be showing up at my door in a blizzard, as for the sake of my world-famous suburban hospitality.

  When I got back with the coffee, Art was wiping his face with a pocket handkerchief and looking around the room. “Your mother used to serve me tea in here once in a while,” he said as he stuffed the hankie into the side pocket of his houndstooth sport coat. “Real formal lady she was.”

  “Room’s just like she left it,” I said. “Mostly I walk past it on my way to the front door.” I shrugged. “Except when it snows.”

  “Yeah . . . don’t look much like you or your dad,” he allowed.

  One of the unfortunate side effects of coming into money is that it changes the way you look at the world. After enough people you haven’t seen in decades show up looking to separate you from some folding money, you start to question nearly everyone’s motives. Sadly, the only reason I could imagine that would explain Art Fowler’s presence on my mother’s brocaded couch was that he needed cash so bad he was going to try to trade on his long-ago relationship with my old man.

  He buried his face in the coffee mug. I sat back in the wing chair and waited for him to get around to whatever he had come for.

  Took a while. Finally he looked up over the rim of the mug and said, “I suppose you heard about Matthew.”

  “Matthew?”

  “Martha’s boy, Matthew. Matthew Hardaway.”

  I remembered his daughter Martha. A few years behind me in school. Always part of a big gang of girls. Dark hair. Always wore a headband. Different color every day. And then, years later, after she’d grown up and moved away, her son . . . Matthew. Him . . . him I really remembered.

  Way back when, I had a friend who worked at a car dealership in Renton. On nights when none of the dealership brass was in the mood for baseball, he could get us Mariners tickets directly behind home plate. I mean like row one. Which, I suppose, was why my old man asked me if maybe I couldn’t get the tickets and take Martha’s husband (I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name) and their son, Matthew, to a game. In those days, I was always good for a ball game and generally owed my old man more than one favor.

  Matthew was seven or eight at the time. The twitchiest kid I’d ever seen. Seemed to be uncomfortable with just about everything in the universe. Stairs. Escalators. Crowds. Being alone. Being so close to Felix’s fastball. The sound it made when it hit the catcher’s mitt. The guy in the seat nex
t to him. You name it—it bothered Matthew. A true stranger in a strange land, that boy.

  We made it through the game, Matthew ordering things he didn’t eat and flinching at every pitch. When it was over, the family went back to wherever it was they’d come from; I filed it under T for takes all kinds, and that was the last time I’d seen or heard from any of the Fowler clan, until this morning.

  “No,” I said, “I . . .”

  “The shooting up in Everett. Last week. The politician guy.”

  I felt like I’d been flash frozen. My brain couldn’t come up with anything more articulate than Holy shit. Holy shit.

  “Matthew killed the guy,” Art said. He looked as if he were begging me to tell him he was delusional, that he’d made it all up, and this was all a bad dream. “Walked into a city council meeting and shot the poor fella in the head.”

  “And Matthew?”

  He hung his head. “The cops shot him in the hall outside . . . on the floor.”

  A swirling gust of wind and snow rattled the leaded windows. As I turned my head and watched the storm, shame rose up in me like an overflowing toilet. I felt my cheeks getting red. I’d made it a point not to know. Made it a point to ignore a front-page killing that had occurred less than a week ago, barely forty miles north. I’d hurriedly scrolled by it at least a dozen times on the Internet and changed the channel whenever it had come up on the boob tube. I felt saddened about how I was able to shrug it off and go on with my life, secretly thankful that, once again, I wasn’t one of those poor bastards whose only sin was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Jesus,” escaped my throat.

  “I gotta know, Leo.”

  “I’m sorry, Art. Man . . . such a thing. Is Martha . . .”

  “She’s all right . . . you know . . . considering and all. Phil too.” He sighed and looked out the window. “I went up there . . .” He let it trail off.

  I clamped my jaw and waited for him to go on.

  “She—my daughter—she told me I was just making things worse. Told me to go back home.” He threw an exasperated hand into the air. “I stuck around anyway, got a hotel room downtown. I tried to . . . she wouldn’t see me . . . the police . . . they’re getting death threats. People are blaming Martha and Phil for what happened.”

  He looked at me like one of those abused dogs in those harrowing TV spots. I knew better. Knew this was the point where I ought to keep my mouth shut . . . but I couldn’t do it. Story of my life.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  Yeah . . . I knew better. This was the point where they tell you they need a hundred thirty-five Gs to pay a lawyer, and you have to tell them how you’d like to help but how that just ain’t gonna happen. I knew the drill, but if there was something else I could have said at that point, I sure as hell didn’t know what it was.

  The situation was made worse by the fact that I had the better part of three hundred Gs sitting in the office safe. The proceeds of a sketchy land sale I’d made down in Arizona several months back. As the parcels officially belonged to one of my old man’s dummy corporations, and the buyer, for his own reasons, had insisted on paying cash, I was still trying to decide whether to claim it on my taxes and open my father’s long-ago finances to even further official scrutiny or to just leave it in the safe.

  “I gotta know, Leo,” he said again.

  “Know what?”

  “How . . . how that little boy . . . how he could have turned out . . . how he could have done something like . . .”

  “I’m lost here, Art. Wadda you need from me?”

  “Well . . . you know . . . you being a detective and all . . . I thought maybe you could . . .”

  I held up a stiff hand. Waggled it back and forth. “First off, Art, I don’t do that kind of work anymore.” Before he could open his mouth, I went on. “Secondly, even if I did, this isn’t the kind of thing I was ever, in my best day, competent to handle.”

  He was giving me that hangdog look again, so I kept talking. “The world’s gonna be all over this one, Art. Everything about this is going to be put under the microscope. People are going to write shitty books about it. Whatever there is to learn is going to be dissected ad nauseam. I’m guessing that before this is over you’re gonna know more about it than you want to.”

  “I got to know, Leo,” he said again. “Somebody musta . . .”

  “Musta what, Art?”

  “Musta . . . you know . . . musta done something that changed him . . . somebody . . .”

  I’d like to tell you I cut to the chase to spare his feelings, which was part of it of course, but mostly it was to spare mine. “I can’t help you here, Art. I’m not a private detective anymore, and even if I was, this kind of thing is way, way out of my league.”

  Art set his coffee mug on the table and pushed himself to his feet.

  “Your father . . . he could fix things, you know. I thought maybe . . .”

  “Different times,” was the best I could come up with. “These days, about the only thing I can fix is coffee.”

  “How do you go from being a sweet little kid to somebody who shoots somebody? I don’t understand.”

  Part of me wanted to tell him that the boy I’d spent a single evening with had quite obviously needed professional mental health services, but somehow, this didn’t seem to be an auspicious occasion for a reality check.

  “Wish there was something I could do,” I hedged.

  He nodded, as if to say Me too.

  I followed him out into the hall, retrieved his coat and hat from the closet, helped him into everything, and then pulled open the front door.

  The storm had gotten worse. The wind raked the freshly fallen snow, filling the air with a glittering curtain of ice. I stood in the doorway and watched Art short step it back up the drive until the swirling snow made him fade to white.

  I closed the door, stifled a sigh, and ran a hand through my hair a couple of times. I don’t recall how long I stood there leaning against the door, with those big, wrought-iron hinges digging into my back, wishing I was somebody else, doing something else, somewhere else.

  Next thing I remember, I found myself sitting at my desk asking Google to tell me everything it knew about young Matthew Hardaway. Surprise, surprise. Musta been a thousand pages of it.

  When you waded through it and eliminated the opinionated assholery for which the Internet was both the cause and the repository, and then compared it to the fragments of film that various bystanders had taken on their phones, the facts, as nearly as I could ascertain, were these:

  Last Thursday, at 8:34 in the evening, seventeen-year-old Matthew Hardaway had walked into Everett City Hall, strolled through the metal detector without so much as a chirp, and lucked into a vacated seat at the rear of a contentious Everett City Council meeting.

  At 8:59, Matthew rose from his seat, walked toward the front of the room, shouted something that included the words “communist bastards,” and then proceeded to shoot Ricardo Valenzuela, a city councilman whom the article described as Everett’s only City Council socialist. Hit him more or less between the eyes.

  In the American spirit of fixing the blame rather than the problem, early media speculation obsessed on the question of how Matthew had managed to smuggle the weapon through the building’s metal detector, with the general consensus being that he must have stashed it in the building on some earlier occasion. When and how was a matter of fevered conjecture.

  By Saturday morning, however, a check of the building’s security records showed conclusively that Matthew Hardaway had never been in city hall prior to the night of the shooting, and that it had apparently taken him twelve minutes to get from the security station to the council meeting room, a journey that, in the worst of times, took no more than three, leaving open the question of how he’d spent the missing nine minutes. A conspiracy theorist’s dreamscape.

  After shooting Valenzuela, Matthew had sprinted back down the aisle and backed out t
he double doors, red faced and screaming, waving the gun like a conductor’s baton, and then disappeared into the corridor, where, according to bystanders, he was confronted and then shot dead by an unnamed city security officer. Witnesses in the hallway also agreed that the security officer had demanded that Matthew drop his gun, and had been equally clear that the young man had instead begun to raise the weapon. There’d sure as hell be an official inquiry, but from what I could see, it was a righteous shooting if ever there was one.

  The rest of it was the kind of non-news that passes for information these days. Unconfirmed bits and pieces of Matthew’s life story, most of which, due to his age, consisted of school and medical records to which the media were not privy, which of course didn’t stop them from speculating their little hearts out. Whispers of emotional problems, problems in school, it was all grist for the rumor mill. Attempts to interview Matthew’s parents had yielded nothing more definitive than a stiff “No comment” from their respective attorneys.

  I kept my nose buried for most of the day. The only thing I found out for sure was that the gun was a Sig Sauer P320 and had belonged to Matthew’s father, Phil Hardaway, who was both the proud owner of twenty-seven registered firearms and the newly crowned poster boy for irresponsible gun ownership. The final news photograph was of a throng of antigun protestors waving picket signs and trudging back and forth in front of Phil Hardaway’s Everett townhouse.

  By the time I gave up, I could barely push myself to my feet. I stood, leaning on the chair, stretching, groaning, and thinking about how a person’s life—how the millions of individual events that make up a life—could, in an instant, not matter anymore.

  Two days later, Art Fowler shot himself in the head. According to the police report, his wife, Sandy, found him in the bathtub when she got home from church at a little after one on Sunday afternoon. Supposedly he’d left a note, but so far nobody was revealing the contents.

  The first ten seconds of the news report were about his death and how he used to be an official in the Seattle water department; the next fifteen minutes were about his grandson, Matthew Hardaway, and the shooting in Everett. Gore Vidal once suggested that the only things people were actually interested in were sex, death, and money. I’d like to imagine our range of interests is a bit wider than that, but were I forced to place a bet, I’d wager ol’ Gore was right in the ballpark. Gotta keep those ratings up, and murder sells.