Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  “You ready to roll?” I asked.

  Gabe favored me with a wry smile. “Which you is that? Singular or plural?”

  “Whatever works,” I said.

  “Ready when you are.”

  “We won’t be long,” I said, as I headed up the hall.

  I stopped at the nurses’ station and signed everything but the Magna Carta. Then took the corridor to the left, found the right room, and stepped inside.

  Rebecca had the bed cranked all the way up. “Hey,” she whispered as I walked in the door. She looked like she’d recently lost her lunch.

  I had a black trash bag full of her clothes slung over my shoulder like a homeless troll. “How you doing?” I asked as I set the bundle on the floor.

  “I’m fuzzy,” she said. “I’m having trouble holding a thought for very long.”

  “I’m guessing that’ll get better with time” was the best I could come up with.

  She shrugged but didn’t say anything. I’m not good with elephants in the room, so I just blurted it out. “Wadda you remember about yesterday?”

  She didn’t answer right away, which wasn’t like her at all. She’d always been the smart-ass in the front row with her hand up, while I was low-ridering it in the back.

  “There were two . . .” She stopped, took a deep breath. “Two guys in . . .” She brought a hand to her throat. Massaged it and swallowed hard.

  “UPS uniforms,” I finished.

  She nodded. Before she made me go through how I knew about the UPS guys, I staged a quick segue. “The cops are convinced you tried to kill yourself,” I said.

  She blinked several times. “Me? Suicide?”

  I held up a cautionary hand. “You gotta understand,” I said, “they’re working from the assumption that you’re guilty of all that shit you’re accused of doing. The way they see it, you couldn’t take the pressure and decided to take the easy way out.” I waited a beat, thinking maybe she’d jump in with a denial. Instead, she looked away again, so I kept talking. “And at this point it’s not gonna do any good to be telling the cops about the UPS guys either. They’re just gonna think you’re trying to cover your ass.” Her eyes told me she knew I was right and didn’t like it even a little bit.

  “Is that what Gabe is about?” she asked. “You’re afraid I might . . .”

  “Nope,” I said. I reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Not to worry, honey,” I said with a big grin. “It’s way worse than that.”

  “Do tell,” she said.

  I did. At length. About how everybody in the known universe seemed to agree that the case against her was a foregone conclusion. And then about the unfortunate woman they’d moved into her vacated ER room. About how somebody had stabbed the orderly and killed her dead as a herring.

  Furrowed brow. “And you think it was me they were . . .”

  “I’m not big on coincidences,” I said.

  She shook her head. “That’s quite a stretch.”

  “So . . . let’s go back over the past couple days,” I suggested. “Two fake UPS guys force their way into your condo, do their best to make it look like you tried to OD, and then disappear into the night. And then, the very next day, a woman in the same room you’d occupied a half hour earlier has a couple of hitters come in, turn off her ventilator, and stab an orderly in the process.” She started to say something, but I waved her off. “And to make matters worse, the cops not only don’t believe a damn word of it, but, as far as they’re concerned, you’re the worst kind of traitor. Somebody who’s about to be responsible for putting a bunch of felons back on the street. I know it doesn’t seem possible, but right now, they might actually dislike you more than they dislike me, which is sayin’ somethin’.”

  It got quiet again as she thought it over. “But why? Why would anyone want to do this to me? Why would anyone want me dead?”

  “I don’t know, but think about it. If you’d died the way they planned it, the whole damn thing would have been over in a heartbeat. She got caught. She couldn’t take it. She offed herself. End o’ story. Onward and upward.”

  Silence settled in. I watched as she leaned back against the bed and ran it through her circuits. I was watching the movement of her eyeballs behind the lids when the tick of raindrops on the window hijacked my attention. I watched as one of those Northwest maritime squalls raced over south Seattle, blowing hard and raining sideways as it rushed across the urbanscape. Sitting there in that rarified hospital air, my brain conjured the smell of wet pavement, equal parts hope and decay. Rebecca jerked me back to reality.

  “When you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?” she said after quite a while. She looked over at me, like now it was my turn to say something.

  As usual, I didn’t know my lines.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m scared, Leo,” she said in a voice I’d never heard before. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

  I didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep, so I kept my trap closed.

  When it got quiet enough, for long enough, my ears began to tune in to the building’s underlying hum—a matrix somewhere between a note and a hiss—that loitered in the hospital air like old cigar smoke.

  “Let’s get outta here,” I finally suggested. “We can hole up at my house until we figure out what to do next.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Like I’d figured, she hated the idea on principle. After twenty-plus years of keeping each other’s company, the one thing we’d always avoided was moving in together. It was as if maintaining separate spaces somehow allowed self-contained souls like us to experience the best of both worlds.

  She already knew the answer, but she asked anyway. “Why your place?”

  “It’s got a wall and a gate.”

  Also like I’d figured, that was a tough one to argue with. Like many politicians, my old man had made legions of enemies. Between his personal button man Frankie Ortega, a succession of beefy bodyguards, and the house’s architectural fortifications, he’d pretty much created the kind of privacy a man in his position required. A kind that came in handy at a time like this.

  “And I take it Gabe is coming with us?”

  “For the duration.”

  She nodded grudgingly and looked around the room. “I’m prepared to do a Lady Godiva if I have to,” she announced.

  I reached down and picked up the trash bag full of clothes. “Won’t be necessary,” I said. “Got a bunch of your stuff in here.” I dropped the bag onto the foot of the bed.

  She cast a jaundiced eye at the ugly plastic pile resting on her feet. “My clothes, I presume,” she said. “My mother would be appalled.”

  “Your mother was born appalled.”

  She slid off the bed and turned her back to me. I took the hint and undid the pair of ties holding her hospital gown together. She shrugged it to the floor, leaving her standing next to the bed wearing nothing but a pair of those little green hospital socks.

  “Nice booties,” I said with a smirk.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Was that singular or plural?” she intoned.

  The squeak of overhead footsteps jerked me awake. I held my breath and listened intently. A full ten seconds passed before my addled brain clicked into gear and I remembered. Gabe. It was Gabe. How, several hours back, we’d gone upstairs together, pulled the dust covers off everything in the guest room, and gotten Gabe settled in.

  The bedside clock read 2:47. Rebecca and I had talked our way through the situation six or seven times. I must have nodded off in one of the silences. Last I remembered, Rebecca was stretched out next to me, going over her suspension order line by line. I’d lost track of how many times she’d muttered “Bullshit.”

  I exhaled slowly, ran a hand over my face, and looked in her direction. She was leaning back against the headboard with her eyes closed. I figured she must be asleep, and, a
s usual, I was wrong. She opened her eyes and pinned me with an icy glare. Like she’d just been waiting for me to wake up.

  She said, “I don’t understand how anyone could pull this whole thing off. Or why. I mean . . . why those five files?”

  “No idea,” I admitted.

  “So that means . . .” She stopped herself.

  People faced with ugly situations very often can’t bring themselves to admit it out loud, so, human nature being what it is, they try to get somebody else to say it for them.

  Rebecca shook her head in disbelief. “I still can’t believe one of my guys swiped those files. I mean . . . putting aside the fact that I just can’t believe they would, or would have any possible reason to—how would they have done it? The files are either locked down in my office vault or they’re at the precinct that made the arrest. My vault is secure, and precinct evidence rooms are locked down tight. You have to scan your ID to take anything out. Another officer watches as you do whatever you’re going to do. Same thing when you return it. The guy in the cage checks it again and then scans his ID. How does anybody circumvent that?”

  That was pretty much what I’d been asking myself all along. Ever since the drug-crazed eighties, when kilos and kilos of cocaine regularly turned up missing from precinct evidence rooms, the SPD’s protocols and procedures regarding evidence room security had become absolutely draconian. No way anybody was walking away with anything. Union or no union, it was a no-appeal, firing offense.

  “And there’s more than one precinct involved,” she added.

  “How do you know that?”

  “They told me when they escorted me out of the building.”

  “So there’s no way whoever did this could possibly corrupt two different evidence locker cops. One maybe. More . . . no way.”

  Used to be that the cop inside the evidence room cage was always some ancient flatfoot waddling his way toward that gated retirement community in the sky. Guys more interested in the quality of their impending leisure time than they were in the integrity of the chain of evidence. These days it was a regular part of duty.

  She nodded at the pile of paperwork under my chin. “Anything useful there?”

  I shook my head. “A life misspent.”

  I could see the worry pressing in around her eyes when she asked, “So what’s your plan for morning?”

  I thought it over and then said, “Willard Frost’s the only one of them who’s still out on the street. According to his sheet, he got his ass arrested two or three times at the same address down in Pioneer Square. Figure I’ll mosey down there in the A.M. . . . kick over some paving stones and see what scuttles out. What about you?”

  “Well . . . I’m going to have to find an attorney.”

  “Call Jed. Ask him for a referral,” I said. Jed James had been my best friend and attorney, until they’d hauled off and made him a judge. He’s still my buddy, but his firm’s associates now handle my legal work. Conflict of interest and all that. He’d know exactly who Rebecca should call. Probably make the call for her, if I knew him.

  “But most of all, I need access to my files,” she said suddenly. “Without the files, there’s no way I can even look for a connection.”

  “So?”

  She folded her arms across her chest and frowned. “They took my keys. Just walked into my office, first thing on Monday morning, handed me the suspension order, demanded I turn over my keys, and then walked me out to my car. I’m forbidden to have contact with any member of my department until this matter is resolved.”

  “So you’re completely locked out?”

  “I’ve got backups of everything on the off-site, but I’m willing to bet they locked me out of those even before they served the suspension order.”

  “And?” There was an and. I could tell.

  “I’ve always made it my policy to keep a copy of my records outside the protocol.” She shrugged and looked a bit guilty. “Just in case,” she added. “You never know.” She shrugged again. “Life’s uncertain.”

  “A copy you obviously don’t think they’ll find.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose they’ll eventually follow my footprint and get there, but not right away,” she said. “It’s in an encrypted human resources folder.”

  I threw a crooked look in her direction. “Doesn’t the suspension order cover messing with digital stuff like that?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “They haven’t updated the suspension form in about twenty years. I read it top to bottom. There was no such thing as off-site data storage when they wrote that thing.”

  She was just the type to read the whole damn form too. A few months back, I’d trembled in awe as she read all the way through the Terms and Conditions for a new iPhone she was about to buy.

  “Then do it,” I said. “But make damn sure you get everything you need on the first try, ’cause as soon as they figure out you’ve been in there, that door’s gonna close in a big hurry.”

  “The system’s locked during nonbusiness hours, so if I don’t want to set off every bell and whistle they own, I’ll have to wait till morning and hope,” she said.

  I’d like to tell you how we lay there in bed and worked the whole thing out, kinda like Sherlock Holmes sitting in his rocker with his pipe, laying it all out for John Watson. I’d like to tell you that, but it wouldn’t be true, because before we rolled any farther down Detective Drive, the house’s intruder alarm went off, bleating its singsong screech from all directions at once. I snapped my eyes toward the hall just as the outdoor lights turned my end of the street into a film noir set.

  I rolled off the bed, reached into the bottom drawer of the bedside table, and found my little Smith & Wesson Shield napping under a pair of dirty socks. A stick-it-right-in-his-face gun that felt like a toy but packed the punch of a 9 mm. I checked the thumb safety and then started across the room. When I looked over my shoulder, Rebecca had one foot out of the bed and was throwing back the covers.

  “Stay here. Gabe and I can handle this,” I said.

  She hated it, but slowly pulled her foot back in. I turned and hurried out of the room. The hall was dark.

  Gabe was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, fully dressed, big black automatic in hand. I hustled down the hall, Gabe following in my wake. Just inside the front door, I pulled open the closet, leaned in, and checked the security control panel.

  What I’d expected to see was a blinking green light from one of the motion sensors in the yard. It happens whenever seagulls decide to land and do whatever dumb shit it is seagulls do. The lights drive my neighbors crazy, which is why I don’t generally leave the system on all the time.

  No blinking green light, though. Not this time. Red instead. Somebody had breached the gate. I reached in and turned off the alarm but left the yard lights on. I grabbed an old leather jacket from the closet and shouldered myself into it.

  “Front gate,” I whispered.

  Gabe nodded.

  I pulled open the front door and stepped out into a starless night. It wasn’t raining, but there was enough of an onshore flow to dampen your cheeks as you moved. Beneath my bare feet, the flagstones felt old and cold.

  Gabe and I fanned out on either side of the driveway. Gabe moved out into the orchard and began sliding from tree to tree, from shadow to shadow. I hotfooted it over to the stone wall that separates my property from the Morrisons’ and began to weave my way forward through the dense shrubbery.

  Up ahead, the cast-iron bars on the front gate threw prison shadows along the asphalt driveway. I swiveled my head as I weaved forward. Everything in sight was stark black and white, like I was walking in a life-size negative.

  Over to my right, Gabe had made it all the way to the front wall. I quickened my pace, slaloming through the flower beds, until Gabe and I were parallel with each other, backs against the front wall, guns at the ready. We made eye contact.

  And then suddenly my ears picked up the rhythmic thump of an engine. I listened
hard. Thought maybe I heard somebody answer, but couldn’t be certain. A car door slammed.

  I found Gabe’s eyes again, then reached up and pushed the button. The chain clanked. The motor began to roll the gate aside. As I stepped through the crack, I could sense Gabe coming hard my way.

  I held the Smith & Wesson in front of me with both hands as I swiveled on the balls of my feet and checked both ends of the street in the second before Gabe’s back was suddenly pressed against mine.

  My yard lights threw enough long shadows for me to make out the TV truck backed into the driveway of the vacant house across the street. “This way,” Gabe said from behind me. I craned my neck. Another TV remote was staging a K-turn up the street, digital satellite dish folded along the roof like a limp dick.

  The scrape of a shoe pulled my head back around. I stifled a moan and dropped the semiautomatic to my side. It was Harley “Snowdrift” Dawson, channel eight’s newsman on the scene for the past thirty years or so. One of those guys who started out in the Jimmy Olsen cub reporter role and somehow never quite graduated to the newsroom, instead spending his career reporting natural disasters from the side of the road. Thirty-six-foot snowdrifts, gas explosions, floods, flaming forests, droughts, infestations . . . Harley was there, squinting into the camera, hair on fire, teeth at full grit. “This is Harley Dawson reporting from . . .”

  “Sorry about that,” he shouted with quite a bit more jocularity than the situation called for. “We tapped the gate when we were turning the truck around.” He waved a dismissive hand. “And then the yard lights came on and all that.”

  I tilted my head and whispered in Gabe’s ear. “Let’s go.” We staged a U-turn worthy of the Rockettes and hurried back toward the house.

  “Excuse me . . . please . . . sir . . . excuse me . . . are you Mr. Waterman?” he shouted from across the street.

  I heard the slap of running feet. Dawson was heel-and-toeing it in our direction as fast as a man his age was able. “Excuse me, sir,” he panted. “Could you please . . .”