Soul Survivor

by G. M. Ford

  The loyal opposition was all peace, love, and inclusion signs. Funny, though, how the hate in their faces looked so similar to one another.

  I typed “white power symbols” into the iPad’s browser, scanned the headings until I saw one that looked promising, and opened it up.

  Halfway down the page, I found what I’d been looking for. I was still sitting there openmouthed and drooling when Gabe came hobbling out of the ER.

  “What?” was the first thing Gabe said after getting a look at my face.

  I turned the iPad in Gabe’s direction.

  Gabe leaned on the crutches and squinted down at the screen.

  “Well . . . well.”

  “It’s called a Crosstar. White power groups use it in place of a swastika.”

  Gabe nodded. “Swastika will get you just the kind of attention you ain’t lookin’ for.”

  Gabe looked me over again, adjusted the crutches, and said, “Let’s gather up the sheep and get the flock out of here.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were in a booth at the 8th Street Ale House having lunch. I was about a third of the way through my steak sandwich when Gabe swallowed another section of a club sandwich whole, dusted a pair of greasy lips with a napkin, and looked my way. “So whatcha think?” Gabe asked.

  Once again, my first instinct was to make like I didn’t know what Gabe was talking about. Except that would have been the old he knew that they knew, that he knew that they knew that he knew . . . or something like that.

  “We seem to have swapped roles,” I said. “Must be time to go.”

  “Your body’s good to go.” Gabe waggled a handful of club sandwich. “The head I’m not so sure of.”

  “Me neither,” I admitted.

  “Don’t bullshit me. You’re gonna go lookin’ for trouble,” Gabe said.

  Instinctively, I covered my chest with my free hand. “They took something from me. Something I need to get back.”

  “And you’re gonna either get it back or die trying.”

  “I can’t just let it go.”

  “I know.” Chomp. A shard of tomato fell onto the table. Gabe picked it up and swallowed it. “What about Rebecca? You gonna tell her?”

  “I won’t have to,” I said. “She’ll know.”

  Usually I like to be right. Always seemed a lot more fun than being wrong to me, but this was the exception. That evening, I called Joey, told him we were on our way back, got the name of the realty office where we could return the keys and so forth.

  Then I spent a useless hour trying to dream up a plausible excuse for not calling Rebecca—for just showing up on her doorstep unannounced. When I couldn’t come up with a believable scenario, I took a deep breath and made the call.

  I tried to tell her everything was under control, that we’d pack up in the morning and drive back to Seattle, but she wasn’t having any of it. No . . . she was on the way. Gonna help us gather anything up and then get me settled back into my house. God knows I tried to tell her we had it handled, that Gabe could still drive, and any other damn thing I could think of, but no . . . she was on the way.

  And I got it. Things hadn’t been good with us lately. We were more like wary strangers than longtime lovers. Seemed like this might be just the thing we needed to put this episode behind us, and she wanted to milk it for all it was worth. A symbolic reconciliation. I got it.

  She pulled up to the house at about quarter to ten. One of those nights when it seemed as if there were way more stars than there used to be. Gabe had already crutched it upstairs for the night. I walked out and met her on the porch. Took her bag from her with one hand and hugged her with the other.

  She put her hands on her hips and took me in.

  “Look at you,” she said.

  “The Paul Bunyan of the Pampas,” I joked.

  “How much weight have you lost?”

  “Seventy-three pounds,” I said.

  She shook her head and smiled. “You don’t look even remotely like yourself,” she said with amazement. “With the long hair and the bushy beard, I wouldn’t know you if I passed you on the street. Honest to God. I’d walk right by.”

  “The paleo-hipster look.”

  “Have no fear, there’s a Great Cuts in Aberdeen. Not only that, but your maid service went through the house just a couple of days ago, so everything’s spiffy and waiting for you.” She gave me a big hug. I returned the favor.

  We’d reached one of those moments in life when every fiber of your being wants to lie, to postpone, to equivocate—anything except to say what you’ve got to say, because that seems suicidal. Except I was old enough to know better. I knew that none of that petty shit was going to make the situation better and that coming clean was never going to be less painful than right at that moment.

  “Think I’ll leave the hair on for a while. I’ve gotten sort of used to it,” I said.

  “You’ll be the talk of the neighborhood,” she said as she let me go and walked into the living room.

  “I’m not going home right away,” I said to her back, trying to sound like I was talking about the weather. “Got a few things I need to take care of first.”

  She stopped in her tracks and slowly pirouetted. I didn’t have to say more.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  “You know what Art Fowler said to me?” I asked.

  “No, and I don’t give a damn. This isn’t about Art Fowler. It’s about you. It’s about me . . . or us . . . assuming there’s still such a thing.”

  “He said he had to know . . . And you know, at the time, I thought it was a dumb-ass question.” I pulled up my Mariners T-shirt. “Look at me. I look like a fucking road sign. There’s little strings of my flesh lying around on the ground someplace . . . presuming the rats haven’t eaten them by now.” I waved an angry hand and tried to keep from raising my voice. “They took something from me, and I’m never gonna be whole again unless I go get it back. And I’m gonna. Come hell or high water.”

  I had more material, but that was as far as I got. Rebecca snatched her suitcase from my hand and stormed out the door. I stood on the living room floor and listened to her roar off. Sounded like she hit the main road in a full power slide. Out at the end of the driveway, a startled blue heron rose from the tide flats, flapping its massive wings in indignation and splitting the night with its fractured cry.

  Right away, I had two problems. First, Gabe had heard me making a bunch of phone calls the following morning and had a pretty good idea what I was putting together. True to form, Gabe refused to be left out. Said there was no way, broken ankle or not, I was going to fly solo on this. Gabe made a call to Joey and told him it’d be a while. Joey was good with it. Period. End o’ story. Secondly, I couldn’t go home. Couldn’t let anybody see me in my present configuration. The whole plan depended on my new look, so I couldn’t take any chances of my cover being blown. So I went to Carl’s.

  It was after three in afternoon when I pulled around the back of Carl’s house on Crown Hill. Twenty years ago, Carl Cradduck had been America’s most heralded battlefield photographer. You could find him in Time, Newsweek, Life, and every other big-time photo rag of the era. He walked through a couple of wars without a scratch and was at the top of the charts when a chunk of Bosnian artillery shrapnel severed his spine in the fall of 1993.

  Paralyzed from the waist down and forced to reinvent himself, Carl had taken his photographic expertise and turned it into a highly successful surveillance business. For the better part of two decades he and his hired hands did all of my peeper work for me. Your lawyer needed a glossy of the hubby humping Flossie, Carl was your boy.

  That only lasted until no-fault divorce reared its ugly head, a supposed cultural refinement which damn near put us both out of business. Carl refused to work industrial espionage, and so when marriage dissolution lost all commercial luster, he moved into the information business. Cradduck Data Retrieval specialized in skip tracing: finding felons, freeloaders, an
d deadbeat dads. He was the Duke of the Database. If he couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there. All pretty much on the up-and-up.

  Except when it came to the kind of records that were legally confidential. When that happened, Carl knew people who knew people. His Jamaican caregiver, Charity, always had a cousin who had a cousin who could get you what you needed. For a price, of course. Over the years, I guesstimated I’d probably bought him several new cars.

  We were the last to arrive. Charity was stirring a pot on the stove when I opened the kitchen door and then stepped aside to let Gabe crutch by.

  I leaned over and sniffed the pot. My nose began to run.

  “Curried goat,” Charity said with a malicious grin. He looked me up and down. “Don’t hardly know you, mon.”

  Charity and Gabe shared as much of a hug as anybody with one leg could manage. Charity looked at me over Gabe’s shoulder. “Who this guy?” he asked Gabe.

  “Swamp thing,” Gabe joked.

  “I’m reinventing myself,” I said.

  I gave Charity a pat on the back and followed Gabe out into the main room, which most sane human beings would use as a front parlor—you know, where you take guests to sit down—but which Carl had outfitted with wall-to-wall computer monitors and various electronic crap, most of which I couldn’t tell you the purpose of. The room smelled like nobody’d opened a window in twelve years.

  They’d called out the taxi squad for this one. Carl was rolling around the room at warp speed. Tim Eagen was helping Gabe into an old morris chair. An SPD lieutenant and a professional pistolero. Strange bedfellows indeed.

  Across the room from me, sitting on the sagging sofa, Charity’s cousin Maxie was drinking a Red Stripe beer and gnawing away at a big blue can of salted nuts. A few years back, a couple of dirtbags had tried to cave Carl’s head in. Ever since, at least one of the Jamaicans was with him 24/7. Mostly more than one.

  And George was there, and Harold and Ralph. When my old man keeled over on University Street, the stones of his empire almost immediately began to tumble. Within forty-eight hours, the sky had opened, and it had begun to rain grand jury indictments. Of those closest to my father, George Paris, Harold Green, and Ralph Batista were the sole survivors. Many never made it out of prison; others couldn’t cope and took the easy way out. All the others had died of old age by now.

  George had been in charge of laundering my old man’s money. At the time of my old man’s untimely demise, George was a prominent member of the local banking community, with a society page wife, a couple of preppy kids, and a four-bedroom condo on Maui.

  When the excrement hit the cooling device, George was canned by the bank, divorced by his wife, and then almost immediately convicted of misappropriation of public funds. He served eighteen months in the county lockup before being blown back onto the streets like airborne litter. He’d been at large on the bricks ever since.

  Ralph Batista had been my father’s Port of Seattle connection. If you believed the cops, Ralph had been in charge of falsifying the paperwork so’s hundreds and hundreds of illegal Chinese could be smuggled into Seattle. The cops had kept at him for a week but couldn’t put together a case, so they’d let him go. The bad news was that, while they were grilling Ralphie like a cheeseburger, fourteen Chinese nationals were locked in a shipping container on Pier 23, in ninety-five-degree temperatures. Six of them died of dehydration.

  Ralph was broken by it. As far as he was concerned, those six lives were on him. And thus began one of the great drinking binges in the history of Western civilization, wherein Ralph had reduced himself to a shambling, bewildered husk of his former self. If George weren’t looking out for him, he’d surely have long since been dead.

  Harold Green’s only sin was being my father’s sign on the dotted line guy. Unfortunately for Harold, he’d signed on way too many lines, unwittingly making himself de facto CEO of several offshore shell corporations my father had used to hide his dough, a misstep that cost Harold the better part of three years in the lockup and whatever self-respect he may have still been in possession of at the time.

  Over the years, I’ve often wondered where life would have led them if they hadn’t been caught up by my old man’s machine. Probably wouldn’t have included being hammered before ten every morning, which likely explained why, after all these years, I still made it a point to keep an eye on them, to make sure they had at least a little of what they needed. Generational guilt and all that.

  By the time I’d reconnected with everybody in the room, Charity had dished out the curried goat into mismatched bowls and found some old silverware, and we’d all made our way to the table.

  Over the past several years, I’d gotten used to Charity’s cooking. Particularly the curried goat, which was a big favorite around here, so as we settled in to chow down, my focus was on those poor bastards who’d never experienced Charity’s brand of Caribbean cuisine. ’Cause I’m tellin’ you . . . this shit would light you up.

  What was interesting to me was how spicy food brought out the macho moron in people. How nobody wanted to be the wuss who let on that the curried goat was firing up his oral cavity like napalm. Five minutes into the meal, Eagen, George, Harold, Ralph, and Gabe were sweating like draft horses and looking for refills on the iced tea.

  I helped Charity load the dishwasher and then walked back to my seat and settled in. Everybody was gawking at me. Ball in my court.

  I looked over at Tim Eagen.

  “So what’d you think?” I asked. “Can we pull it off?”

  He waggled a hand. “Maybe,” he said. He ran his eyes over to Carl and Charity. “Assuming the reggae twins here can work up the paperwork, which I’m bettin’ they can . . . I don’t see why not.” He threw a hand in my direction. “You look nothing like you used to, man. I wouldn’t know you from friggin’ Adam,” he said.

  “Looks like he’s eatin’ a muskrat,” Ralph threw in.

  Eagen almost smiled. “And then there’s the fact that you’ve pulled this kind of asshole stunt before . . . and gotten away with it.” He sat back in his chair. “I saw your security tape. Ran it by the SWAT commander. They’re amateurs, all four of them. No professional training at all.” He raised a finger. “And there was two sets of them, two nights apart, so either they’re flying people in from the far reaches, or they’re from right around here someplace. The kid shot a city councilman up there. They found the Range Rover up at Paine Field.”

  “You know anybody on the Everett PD?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “But your paperwork’s gotta be genuine, ’cause he’s an OCD little prick and is sure as hell gonna check.” He threw a glance Carl’s way.

  “No problem,” Carl assured him. “It’ll take about a week, but it’ll pass muster.”

  Charity agreed and added a proviso. “It will work until any of the news organizations conduct an internal audit of some kind. We got no way of knowing what kinds systems dey got in place, so we just gonna hab to take our chances dere.”

  Eagen wasn’t finished. “And . . . I ran those pictures of the assault weapons past the tech boys. They’re standard MP5/10s. Most popular weapon for SWAT teams everywhere. According to the manufacturer, supposedly stored in a military warehouse in Salem, Oregon.”

  “Can we check and see if they’re still there?”

  “Workin’ on it,” Eagen said. “They’re not cooperating.”

  I leaned over and tapped George on the shoulder. George and Harold straightened up. Ralph was power napping. “I need to know if anybody’s asking around, looking for me. You guys know where I hang out. Press some flesh. You know what I’m talking about. I also need somebody to go up to my house once in a while. Look around. I’ve got the security guys coming around a couple of times a day, but . . . you know the more eyes the merrier.” I reached over and handed George some money. “For expenses,” I said. He looked away. “We clear?”

  Grudgingly, “Yeah.”

  “You come up with anything, call Carl
. He’ll take it from there.”

  “It’s not going to take us long to wear out our welcome in a town that small. Way I figure it, we’ve got, at the outside, maybe a week.”

  The consensus was that a week was pushing it, and I agreed.

  Eagen looked in Gabe’s direction. “Cinderella going along for the ride?”

  I nodded. A smirk found its way to his lips. “Some crowd,” he snickered.

  “The army of righteousness,” Gabe said.

  Tim laughed and said, “Guy in a wheelchair, a couple of razor-toting Jamaicans, a professional gun monkey, an army of God’s own drunks, and a guy bent on revenge.” He showed his palms to the ceiling.

  “What could go wrong?” he asked.

  Last week in July. Steel wool skies. Wipers scraping back and forth across the glass as we splashed into Everett at one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. A sudden wind buffeted the car as I turned onto Pacific Avenue and headed west toward the water. At the top of the hill, a digital thermometer announced a blistering fifty-four degrees in the shade, and believe me, baby, it was all shade. Lots of empty stores, skaters, tweakers, shopping cart squeakers.

  Apparently hipster heaven hadn’t pranced this far north yet, and neither had the money. In Seattle, as long as you didn’t mind living in a neighborhood that looked like it had been designed by Fritz Lang, where everything was concreted and conceited, designer this and artisanal that, then you too could join the great techno paradise.

  Not so Everett. I could see it right away. Everett was pickup trucks and cut-rate bail bonds, teriyaki, closed-down paper mills, old people in the streets—and oddest of all, we passed several guys dressed like Uncle Sam waving American flags on street corners.

  These were the people for whom the economic system no longer functioned, folks who had voted for “something else,” because what they did for a living didn’t need to be done anymore. The people whose skills and aspirations were no longer a piece of the continent or a part of the main. People whose bedrock had thinned to mud.