Mercy River

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Dedication

  This one’s for Madeline.

  Truth be told? It’s all for Madeline.

  We love you, kid.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Neutral ground. The best choice for hostage negotiations, selling stolen goods, and meeting ex-girlfriends.

  Not that Luce Boylan and I were on bad terms. Our infrequent conversations had been cautious but sociable. Still, when Luce had called yesterday and asked to meet, I instinctively suggested venues away from her Pike Place bar and apartment, or my usual Capitol Hill haunts. Any other neighborhood in Seattle was open territory.

  Any neighborhood with an all-night restaurant, that is. Luce usually finished closing her bar around two-thirty in the morning. That suited me. I was keeping odd hours lately.

  Which was how I found myself at the 5-Point—we cheat tourists-n-drunks since 1929—at two on a Thursday morning, watching as the café filled with a staggered and staggering flow of customers kicked out of other joints. I sat at the counter and nursed a pint of Mac & Jack’s while I waited. And mused a little more about why Luce might want to meet. She’d avoided answering the question over the phone.

  She wasn’t looking to get back together. I took that as a given, and the fact didn’t bother me as much as it might have a few months before. Luce and I had different goals in life. Different perspectives. She wanted to leverage her ownership of the Morgen and the years she’d devoted to it into a very early and very profitable retirement.

  I understood Luce’s ambition. I might even have shared a piece of that future with her, at one time. Luce had practically grown up running the Morgen with her uncle Albie and his silent partner, the bar’s true owner. My grandfather Dono. Dono had treated the bar less as an investment than as a handy way to launder money from his real profession of stealing art and jewels and any other valuables that provided an adequate reward for the risk. He had been exceptionally good at it. So was I, when I was Dono’s teenage apprentice.

  Luce had imagined something better, something legit. Dono had slowly come to appreciate that. So she’d inherited Dono’s bar, and I’d wound up with his house, and for a while Luce and I had wound up with each other. Only the bar remained, from all those developments.

  Was she selling out? Seattle real estate had continued its insane climb toward Manhattan-level prices. Maybe Luce had finally received an offer too good to turn down.

  Business, I concluded. That was why Luce wanted to meet. She needed my signature on some tax form that still had Dono’s name on it, and she thought sending the papers in the mail would be callous, after our history. I didn’t mind. It would be good to see her.

  I idly observed the 5-Point’s patrons in the mirror. Under the moose head festooned with dangling bras, two couples sat shoulder to shoulder in a booth. One of the men was a cop. I could have picked him out of the crowd even without the mustache that stopped one regulation quarter-inch below the corners of his mouth. There was a foundational suspicion in the way any cop with a few years under his duty belt looked at everyone, even at his friends seated across the table. Like they might pass the salt with one hand and steal his wallet with the other.

  It must be close to three o’clock by now. I reached for my phone and realized that I’d left it in my truck. Crap.

  My empty pint glass became a paperweight for ten dollars. Luce wasn’t outside. I walked down the block to where my pickup waited at the curb. I’d plugged my phone into the cigarette lighter socket—the Dodge was that old—and stuck it into the center console while I ran errands and scarfed a bowl of pho noodles for dinner. Out of sight and out of mind.

  One voice mail, from an area code and number I didn’t recognize. I hit the button to listen.

  “Van. It’s Leo.”

  Leo Pak. A friend from the 75th Regiment. I’d been his sergeant in our Ranger platoon, during one of his tours in Afghanistan. Leo had served as a sniper and fire team leader during his time in our unit. He was a quiet guy by nature and had effectively led his team of four by example. I’d been disappointed when he’d rotated out of the company. Leo and I had fallen out of touch after that, until a year ago when he had unexpectedly turned up in Seattle, only weeks after I’d mustered out of the Army.

  On the recorded voice mail, Leo was breathing heavily, his voice strained. There was a sound of quick movement before he spoke again.

  “They’re coming. I can’t make it.”

  Whatever he said next was incoherent. An engine revved, high-pitched, a small motorcycle or something with similar horsepower.

  A muffled voice in the background yelled something like, Get on the ground. Then a sharp clack interrupted as the phone struck something, and another man’s voice came on the line.

  “Who is this?” the voice demanded in between gasps for air. Had they been chasing Leo? “This is the Mercy River police, who is this on the line?”

  Another moment passed before the call abruptly ended, mid-gasp.

  I checked the time on the voice mail. Leo had called me almost six hours ago. Son of a bitch. I called the same number back, twice. No answer.

  Leo had been busted before, for vagrancy and once for assault. When he’d turned up in Seattle last year, he’d been drifting. Sleeping in the wild, avoiding contact with people. Being indoors for even a few minutes had put him on edge. Desperate, he’d reached out to me, but before long I was the one who had needed help. And despite his own pain, Leo had pulled himself together long enough to get me out of a bad situation.

  I searched online for Mercy River. The closest place with that name was in Oregon, in the rural middle of the state. There was no direct line to the town cops, but the Griffon County sheriff had a station there. I called it.

  “Sheriff’s department. Deputy Roussa.” A woman, rough-voiced but sounding alert despite the late hour.

  “I’m looking for a man who may have been arrested in town earlier tonight. Leonard Pak.”

  “Are you a relative of Mr. Pak?”

  “I’m the person he called just before he was busted. I’m in Seattle. Is he under Mercy River’s custody, or the county’s?”

  “He’s here,” said Roussa. “The town doesn’t have a jail of i
ts own. What is your name, sir?”

  “Donovan Shaw. What’s the charge against him? If he needs bail, I can help.”

  “Suspicion of murder and armed robbery,” she said.

  I inhaled. “Jesus.”

  “Did Leonard Pak say anything to you over the phone about his situation?”

  “He left a voice mail. What happened there?”

  “We can’t release any details without—”

  “Just tell me what anyone in town would already know.”

  Roussa was silent for a moment. “One of our residents was shot and killed yesterday. Erle Sharples. You can save yourself the trouble on bail. I guarantee you that the circuit court judge will keep Pak in custody at the arraignment later today.”

  Which meant the evidence was solid enough to make them confident that Leo was the killer. And the victim being a local would make things ten times worse.

  “Has he asked for a lawyer?” I said.

  “He hasn’t asked for anything. He’s not communicative.”

  So Leo wouldn’t talk. Or couldn’t.

  “Is he injured?” I said.

  “He’s being looked after.”

  A moment passed. Deputy Roussa had volunteered as much as she was willing to say.

  When I spoke, my voice was as cold and even as a frozen lake. “If he’s conscious, tell him that I’m on my way. I’ll be there in the morning.”

  “Mr. Shaw—”

  I hung up before I said more.

  Christ, Leo. What the hell happened to you?

  I couldn’t let myself believe that Leo had murdered someone. His life had turned around during the past year. I’d helped him get placed in an outpatient program, and regular therapy after. Last I knew, he had decided to settle in Utah to be close to his family.

  But he could have relapsed. Gone back to living on the road. I wasn’t Leo’s keeper, or his shrink.

  There was nothing I could do now except get to Mercy River. Fast. I studied the highway map on my phone. The town was a tiny white dot on the map, about six hours’ drive from Seattle. Flying would take at least as long, even if I could find a connection through Portland or Spokane to central Oregon in the middle of the night.

  Driving it was. I could be at my apartment and packed within half an hour. And then—

  “Van.”

  It was Luce. Standing practically in front of me.

  “You okay?” she said. “You seemed a little lost there.”

  Her long blond hair was pulled back and held with a carved wooden comb. She wore a wine-colored coat, buttoned up against the autumn chill, which didn’t prevent it from showing off her figure. The sight of her knocked my mind off track for an instant before it found the groove again.

  “Hey,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Go? I’m sorry I’m late—”

  “It’s not that. Leo’s in trouble.” I told Luce the handful of facts I knew. “I’m driving down there now.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. Of course. Will you—do you know how long you’ll be gone?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What can I look after here?” That was Luce. Immediately, incisively practical. “What about Addy?”

  “Addy should be okay. She has Cyn staying with her this week.”

  Addy Proctor was my former neighbor. I still checked in on her every couple of days. She was about as self-sufficient as an eighty-year-old person could be, but eighty was still eighty. Addy had semi-adopted a young teenager this past summer. Their own brand of foster care. Cyndra helped with the house and Addy’s massive dog, and Addy kept Cyn fed and out of trouble, mostly.

  “I’d stay if I could,” I said to Luce. “We can talk over the phone, once I get down south.”

  She looked at me. Luce’s eyes could be the shade of rain clouds at times, but tonight, under the pale light of the streetlamps, they were the blue sky above the storm.

  “It can wait,” she said. “Call me when you’re back.”

  “Yeah.”

  She stood there as I started the engine. When I glanced out the window she raised one hand in a soft leather glove in farewell.

  Packing for Oregon would take so little time, I left the truck in the loading zone in front of my apartment building. A travel bag. Cash. Maybe a few specialized tools. I didn’t own much, not even enough to adequately fill my studio apartment near the rail station on Broadway.

  Some of what I did own was hidden behind the small refrigerator. I pulled the fridge away from the wall to remove the baseboard at the floor, and reached inside to pull out three gallon-sized Ziploc bags, each with their own contents. A .38 snub-nosed revolver. A tiny Beretta Nano, which I’d taken off someone who would never have use for it again. And a much bigger, much older Browning. I’d picked that up for sentimental reasons. Dono had owned a Browning Hi-Power. It had been one of the first guns I’d ever shot.

  All loaded. All untraceable. They could easily fit in the hiding space I’d made in the front wheel well of the Dodge. After a moment’s thought, I took the Browning and the little Beretta and set the revolver back behind the fridge.

  There was no solid reason to think I’d need a weapon. Or my lockpicks and other gear, already waiting in the rucksack. But the way Deputy Roussa had refused to tell me more about Leo’s condition had my blood up. How badly was he hurt? And who had hurt him? I might not need to play gunslinger, but neither was I going to stroll into Mercy River and count on a brass band playing to welcome me.

  Two

  I had one more stop to make in Seattle. All the way across the city in Briarcliff, a neighborhood on the little peninsula between downtown and the ship canal. Houses with views of the Sound went for multiple millions, a price that included amenities like stone walls and rolling gates with keycard entry. Keeping the working classes like me from driving through and lowering property values.

  At the witching hour, the security gate was unmanned. I picked the lock on the guardhouse and pressed the button to make the candy-cane-striped gate lift out of the Dodge’s way. It hadn’t required much more time than swiping a card.

  I found the right house, a long modernist structure, with two-story glass windows and artful illumination coming from low spotlights at each corner. Knocked twice, and rang the bell. Lights inside popped to life, and after a moment the lamp above me on the front stoop followed along.

  “Who is it?” a voice hollered from within.

  “It’s Van, Ephraim.”

  Ephraim Ganz opened the door. It was a large door, which made Ganz appear even smaller by comparison. He wore yellow silk pajamas, perfectly fitted, each cuff the precise length for his limbs. As if in contrast, his sparse gray hair stood up in electric tendrils from sleep. Brown eyes bright with anger under startlingly dark and hirsute brows.

  “Sorry to wake you,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you are. What the hell, kid?”

  I let him have the kid. Ephraim Ganz had been Dono’s criminal lawyer since before I could remember. Even now, edging out of middle age and into his senior years, Ganz had energy enough to power his whole mansion if you stuck plugs in his ears.

  “You remember Leo Pak,” I said. “He’s been arrested for murder and robbery in Mercy River, Oregon.”

  Ganz grunted. “Come in.”

  “Honey?” a woman called as I stepped inside the foyer. The very grand foyer, two stories and a staircase. Her voice had come from somewhere above. I glanced up past the railing to see a flushed and pretty face with ash-blond ringlets framing it. Her eyes widened at the sight of me and she tugged her blue satin robe a little tighter around her.

  “S’alright, baby,” Ganz said. “Just a client.”

  She didn’t seem reassured. Viewing the scene from her side—four o’clock in the morning, a big guy dressed like a handyman standing in my front hall, with scars like pale creek beds creasing one full side of his face—I wouldn’t feel too secure either.

  “Ma’am,” I said. She frowned a little deeper an
d disappeared into the shadows of the upper floor.

  “Third wife’s pretty,” I said to Ganz, too low to be overheard. “You are still on number three, right?”

  “Funny,” he said. “What’s this about your sniper buddy?”

  He did remember Leo. I told him the situation. He listened without expression, interrupting only to clarify exactly what the deputy had told me.

  “You’re on the bar in Oregon, right?” I said. “You had that big Portland case.”

  “And in California,” he said, his mind elsewhere. “Arraignment’s later today, the county cop said? That’s not a good sign. They think they can close this fast.”

  “Yeah. I need you down there.”

  He sighed. “Come on.”

  I followed him down a hallway and past a dining room large enough to host the entire platoon Leo and I had served in. The kitchen beyond wasn’t quite as ostentatious, only half the size of a tennis court. All of the appliances along the walls were of gleaming burnished steel, a match for the sleek lines of the house. It made the kitchen feel a little like a lab. Or a morgue.

  “Leo,” Ganz said as he took out a jar of instant coffee and two delicate china cups. “He’s the one with the troubles, right?” He tapped a fingertip against his temple.

  “He’s improved since you met him.”

  Ganz spooned out coffee into the cups and crossed the kitchen to fill them with steaming water from a slim faucet at the cauldron-sized sink. “And he’s been arrested before.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know how this is gonna look. Even if everybody in town hated the guy who got himself shot, you take a suspect with a record, with a history of mental instability, that says something.”

  “He’s got post-trauma symptoms. So do I, and so do half the guys I know, in one way or another. You didn’t know him before: He was rock-solid. Leo’s Army service record—”

  “—will just reinforce what the prosecutor wants. The guy is trained to pull a trigger. More than that, he’s among the best in the world at it, a Special Forces sniper.”

  “Special Operations. Forces are the Green Berets. We’re Rangers.”

  “Pardon moi.” He finished stirring and handed me one of the porcelain cups. Loose grounds swirled grayly on the surface of the mixture. I looked at Ganz.