by G. M. Ford
I felt him tense up, knew what was coming, and tightened my grip. He began to throw himself around like a marionette having a seizure. Didn’t matter. I kept surfing him forward, his feet chattering for traction as we slid toward the street. On about his third convulsive escape try, he inadvertently raked the microphone across my face. That was all it took. It had been a tough few days. I could feel blood rushing up my neck as I slammed him face-first into the gate.
He huffed out a great gust of air and whimpered. I reached up and pushed “Open.” The gate began to move. I pushed him harder. The steel rails played bongos on his face as, one by one, they slid by. I was enjoying the catchy rhythm when a movement in my peripheral vision pulled my eyes to the right.
The camera guy was tiptoeing my way. Red light winking. The gate clanged open. I grabbed talking head’s collar and propelled him out into the street like a lawn dart. I watched as he took a couple of off-center steps and then sprawled facedown on the pavement.
I pushed “Close.” The gate’s metal wheels hissed like a gas leak. I pointed at the cameraman. “You’ve got five seconds before you’re gonna be locked in here with me, and if that happens, you’re gonna need a proctologist to get that fucking camera back.”
He took me at my word, scampering out the opening like a scalded rat. I watched as he set the camera down on the street and then began to help microphone man to his feet. The guy came up in sections. When he was finally standing on both feet, waving back and forth like a willow in the wind, I turned and walked away.
As I hopped up onto the driver’s seat, I heard car doors slamming and an engine ratcheting to life. I nearly smiled for the first time in a week.
I locked the Tahoe in the garage and, just to be sure, walked around the house to check the front gate again. Mercifully, the news van was gone. I stifled a sigh and let myself in the front door.
I lived in the downstairs of the house. I’d renovated it a few years back, right after my old man’s pile had finally found its way into my pocket. Took out a few walls, went from eight rooms to five, and updated everything in sight, except the big front parlor. As Art Fowler had noticed, it was pretty much just like my mother had left it thirty years ago. My old man never saw any reason to mess with it, and neither had I. The two upper floors looked like the Addams Family was away on vacation. The only people who ever went up there anymore were the Merry Maids, who shuffled the dust around a couple of times a year and then sent me a bill.
The mind is a strange thing. It was like my brain had had enough stress for one day and switched on the cruise control. I wandered into the TV room and made myself a Manhattan. Two sips in, I knew I was too depressed to enjoy it but that I sure as hell was gonna drink it anyway. And a couple more too.
And then I was moving, walking around the house like I was taking a tour of Graceland or something. Walking up the central stairway. Second floor. Rooms I hadn’t entered in years greeted me with empty faces and ghostly furniture, but for some reason, I kept moving forward, traipsing through doorways and sipping at my drink, trying to remember the last time I’d stood in that spot.
Wasn’t till I ran out of booze on the third floor, after I’d eaten the cherries and sucked up the last few drops of rye, that I found my way back downstairs to the bar. That’s when I noticed the message light on the landline blinking. The mystery line. The one where my old man must have known somebody in the phone company and had it installed on the sly. Never even got robocalls. The line I never got a bill for, and once, when after my father’s death I’d tried to have it removed, I was told by the phone company that no such line existed. Who was I to argue?
Only four people had the number. Rebecca, of course. George Paris, who along with a few other chronic degenerates constituted the last mortal remnants of my dad’s political machine. Carl Cradduck, who handled my IT work when I had any, which wasn’t often lately, and Tim Eagen, a lieutenant in the Seattle Police Department, whose acute fondness for Rebecca had more or less forced us into an uneasy alliance over the past few years.
I turned my back on the message light and made myself another drink. Used up the last of the vermouth making it too. Shit. Checked the ceiling for falling anvils and wondered where my Acme jet-powered roller skates could possibly have gotten to.
I lasted maybe ten minutes, thinking about anything and everything except that friggin’ landline, before I set my drink on the bar, angrily crossed the room, and picked up the receiver. First message was from Carl. “Nice,” he growled. “Leo Waterman, the scourge of suburbia. In case you missed your newest fifteen minutes of fame, I emailed you a link. Nice work, jerk.” Wild laughter. Click.
I shuffled over to my desk and hit the space bar. The iMac glowed to life. I checked the mail program. Half a dozen sales pitches and a message from Carl. Sure enough. Nice! was all it said, with a link to the King 5 website.
I waited a long moment and then double-clicked the link. Big red letters at the bottom of the screen. BREAKING NEWS. The talking head’s lips were moving, but I had the volume turned all the way down. As I reached for the volume control, the screen changed from the studio to . . . to . . . Oh Jesus . . . Art’s funeral . . . just as the first of the picket signs bobbed up over the top of the hill. Then the screaming Goth girl came into view as I shouldered my way past the cameraman, filling up the screen with my back as I fought for traction on the hill.
Then the camera backed up, and I was standing in front of the father, trying to get him to let the funeral service finish, when his wife stepped between me and the cameraman just at the moment when hubby began to lose his footing and I reached out a steadying hand.
I groaned out loud at the sight of the husband hitting the ground like a sack of feed. I stopped it. Rewound. Started it again. Same thing. Holy shit. With the wife between the cameraman and me, it looked as if I’d hauled off and coldcocked the guy. I rewound again and watched it twice more. Looked exactly the same both times.
The part where the wife bravely came to her husband’s rescue only to be hurled down into the muck by the beefy bad guy was particularly cinematic. They ran that footage twice. You know . . . in case anybody missed it the first time. They finished with a still shot of the wife caked with mud, blinking into the camera like a breaded veal cutlet.
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. The landline started to ring. “Fuck,” I bellowed, into the empty room. My first inclination was to tear the phone from the wall and fling it across the room. Instead, I took a couple of deep breaths and snatched the receiver.
“What?”
Long pause.
“I guess you’ve seen it,” Rebecca said.
“In living color.”
“Really looks a lot like you hit him.”
“Watched it three or four times, and it looked like that every friggin’ time,” I said. “I especially liked the slow-motion shot of me body slamming the wife.”
“You want me to come over?” she asked.
I thought about it and couldn’t see any sense in spreading the misery around. “Nah,” I said. “I’m not very good company right now.”
“You sure? It’s still early.”
“Thanks for the offer, but . . .” At which point I ran out of words.
Another silence.
“The best-laid plans . . . ,” she said finally.
A short, bitter laugh escaped from my chest. “Yeah,” I said. “If today was closure, I think I’d opt for a lifetime of regret.”
“Look on the bright side,” she offered. “The news cycle is very short these days. Won’t be long before some celebrity does something stupid, and everyone will move on and forget about you.”
“Boy . . . don’t I feel better now,” I snapped and immediately regretted it. “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”
Pin-drop moment.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said finally.
“Yeah,” was the best I could do.
I did what I a
lways do when my life starts circling the bowl. I got busy. Crazy, batshit, OCD busy. Taking care of six months’ worth of things I’d either ignored or postponed. No matter what anybody tells you, money changes everything, and despite a lifetime of power-to-the-people, egalitarian babbling, I’d turned out to be no exception to the rule. These days, I hire out anything I don’t feel like doing, or, more likely, simply ignore it, telling myself that even if it gets worse, which it unquestionably will, I can afford to have it fixed. Yes sir . . . a real man of the people I am.
The TV assholes made a nuisance of themselves for a day or so, parking out in the street and wearing out the gate buzzer, which I’d long since turned off, but as Rebecca had predicted, they lost interest sometime on the second day and disappeared into the ozone.
On days three and four, I excavated an old pair of coveralls from the basement and personally cleaned out the garage. A trip down memory lane it was too. Shit that had been stowed in there since my father’s time. Piles and piles of rusty chains. Tools so old I had no clue what they were intended to accomplish. Took two full days and produced enough trash so’s I had to call two guys and a truck to haul it all away.
Rebecca stopped by a couple of times in the evenings, soothing my soul with her silky enchantments, but mostly I was just killing time, waiting for Art Fowler’s carcass to get far enough behind me on the sidewalk of life.
Day five. The security system’s floodlights had about eight bulbs out, so I called Home Sentry and had them send out a crew and a cherry picker. By that time, I wasn’t even local news anymore, which might be why I was so spaced out, watching the two guys in the basket bobbing about like kites in the wind, when the unmistakable rasp of a skateboard pulled my head out of my hindquarters.
Now a skateboard isn’t something you hear a lot up where I live. This is Old Moneyville up here. Way more likely to hear the hum of pacemakers than the grind of a skateboard. Besides which, this was the top of Magnolia Bluff. Anyone attempting to skateboard down the hill to Interbay either had a death wish or real good health insurance. I stepped out into the street for a better view, kinda like people go to NASCAR races to suck down corn dogs and wait for a wreck.
He was half a block up the street. Long hair fanned out behind him. Red headband and a pair of cargo shorts big enough for a water buffalo, blasting down the middle of the street like an Olympic downhiller, cutting back and forth. I watched admiringly as he caught sight of the orange traffic cones that the Home Sentry guys had put out in the street, grinned, and veered my way.
He was flying now, arms out for balance as he rocketed around the first cone, shifted his weight, and danced, wheels screaming, around the next and the next like a speed-crazed hootchy-kootchy dancer. I was certain he was going way too fast to make it around the next cone, when he suddenly dug in, ground a wide arc way out into the middle of the street, and then came rolling at me like a bullet train.
The cherry picker was in the entrance to the driveway. The gate was open. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide, so I stepped quickly to one side, putting one of the stone gate pillars partially between the skater and me.
When I peeked around the corner, he had the front wheels off the ground and was grinding to a halt. Two seconds later, he was standing in front of me with the skateboard tucked under his arm.
I couldn’t help myself; I gave him a standing ovation. I was still putting my hands together when he stuck his hand out. I stopped clapping and took it. “Tommy,” he said as he used his free hand to transfer his backpack from his back to his front.
“Leo,” I said.
The crocodile smile should have alerted me right there, but I guess I was pretty much brain-dead at that point. I watched as he pulled an envelope from his backpack and then looked over at me.
“Leo Waterman,” he said.
Brought me up short. “Who wants to know?” I asked.
He slapped the envelope against my chest. Instinctively, I reached for his wrist, but he was too quick for me. All my hand ended up with was the envelope.
“King County wants to know,” he said. “And of course, inquiring minds,” he added. “You’ve been served, sir.”
When I looked up, he was filming me as I stood there openmouthed with the court paperwork in one hand and my dick in the other. Figuratively.
“You know, kid . . . I used to do this,” I said.
He backed up a little, ready to hotfoot it up the road.
“Do what, sir?”
“Back in the day it was called serving process,” I said. “My old man knew some fleabag ambulance chaser downtown. Had me serving divorce papers, repos, evictions, all the stuff people really, really didn’t want to see.”
The kid looked me over like a menu. The crooked grin that bent his lips told me he had his doubts.
“I was a bit more lithe in those days,” I felt compelled to add.
“How long did you last?”
I thought about it. “Couple of years . . . on and off, whenever I wasn’t pretending I was going to college.” I shrugged. “It was quite an education, in its own right.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“I got slower.”
“The ravages of time,” he allowed as he turned and walked away.
“I’m being sued.”
“For what? By whom?” Rebecca wanted to know.
“That couple from Art’s funeral. They’re suing me for three million and change, saying I not only assaulted them but that I interfered with their constitutional right to peacefully demonstrate, which they’re claiming is a hate crime and therefore worth an extra million or so.”
“Call Nancy.”
She was referring to Nancy Pometta, the attorney she’d used when she’d been wrongfully suspended for dereliction of duty. Nancy was a junior partner in my friend Jed James’s law firm. Ever since Jed had been appointed to the Court of Appeals bench, he could no longer personally bail me out of whatever mess I’d gotten into, so he had somebody else in the firm do it. Nancy being one of those.
“You still have her number?”
She gave it to me. I stored it in my phone.
“Seems like you’re in a bit of a trough,” she said.
“An abyss,” I corrected.
“Well . . . ,” she began.
“Let’s not,” I said quickly. “I’m gonna call Nancy.”
Another pin-drop moment.
“I’ll call you later,” she said.
“Hey . . . ,” I said as we were about to break the connection.
“Uh-huh.”
“Thanks for putting up with me,” I said. I thought maybe I heard a derisive snort. “Say hi to Nancy for me,” was how we left it.
So that’s what I did. Nancy was in a meeting and had to call me back. Half an hour later we were exchanging pleasantries. I started to tell her the story. She interrupted to say she’d seen the TV footage. More than once. Said she’d get somebody on it right away and would call me whenever she had any further info.
So it was a real brow creaser when, two seconds after I hung up with Nancy, my phone started chirping again and Rebecca’s mug showed up on the screen. Seemed like we’d already said what we had to say.
“Hey . . .”
“I need you to come to my office.”
Gotta admit . . . I was instantly relegated to mouth breathing. We’d long since established that seeing my lady love elbow-deep in rotting cadavers was not to be counted among my preferred entertainment options. I’d seen her at work, of course. You can’t make whoopee with the King County medical examiner for twenty plus years and not witness autopsies; but you know, given my druthers, I can do without watching somebody get parted out like a Buick station wagon. Color me with a squeamish crayon if you want, but that’s the way it is.
“How come?” I asked.
Somebody said something to her. I heard a door opening and closing. Sounded as if she’d stepped into another room.
“Martha Fowler is sitting in my office,” she
hissed.
“Why would Martha Fowler come to see you?” I asked.
“Because she couldn’t get in touch with you. You’re not answering your phone. She says she spent a whole day sitting outside your gate. So she figured . . . you know . . . everybody knows about the two of us . . . so she came to the office.”
“What’s she want?” I asked.
“She wants to talk to you.”
I considered the matter. “Listen . . . ,” I began. “Tell her—”
“No.” Like a gunshot. “You tell her. I’ve got work to do.”
Like I said, you spend a couple of decades with another person, if you’ve got any brains at all, you get to know the lay of the land. I recognized this tone of voice. We were in nonnegotiable territory here. The place where you couldn’t change Rebecca’s mind if you put a gun to her head, so you may as well save your breath.
Then, of course, there was the fact that she was right. My life had slopped over onto hers, which was not part of the general armistice agreement. I grabbed my leather jacket from the hook and headed for the back door, with the phone jammed against my ear.
“I’m on the way,” I said. “Probably take me half an hour.”
“I can’t just leave her sitting there in my office,” she snapped.
“Call the parking lot. Have ’em let me in. That’ll save some time,” I said and let the kitchen door slam behind me.
Twenty-four minutes flat. When I walked into Rebecca’s corner office, Monica, the receptionist, was sitting behind Rebecca’s desk. Monica wore pink. Everything pink. All the time. Nice enough girl, but looking at her always made me feel like I was trapped inside a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
She jumped to her feet. “Leo,” she blurted. “Whenever Ms. Fowler is ready to leave, I’ll show her out.”
Orders from the boss, no doubt. Here in the land of the dead, they frowned upon the living wandering about the building.