Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  I grinned. “Should be an interesting trip home,” I offered.

  The final image my brain stored was that of Willard Frost clopping naked down South Jackson Street on plastic paws, with his horsey tail bobbing in the breeze.

  “You seen this?” Eagen threw the Seattle Times onto my kitchen table. I finished chewing my Eggos and then flipped the paper open with a sticky finger. Gabe and I hadn’t rolled in till just after three thirty and were still sleeping it off when Eagen started hammering the gate buzzer about twenty minutes ago.

  Gabe fished four more waffles out of the toaster and slid them onto a paper plate. Eagen picked them up from the counter and sat down across from me, grabbed the butter and the maple syrup, and went to work.

  The headline read:

  Police Break Large-Scale Prostitution Ring

  “To protect and serve,” I said around a mouthful.

  Eagen picked up the newspaper and began to read out loud.

  “Twelve men and one woman have been charged with promoting prostitution following a wide-ranging investigation that resulted in the shutdown of twelve brothels in Bellevue and the seizure of two sex-trafficking sites in downtown Seattle, according to police and prosecutors. Information provided by the sex workers led authorities to Bellevue brothels that were operated out of high-end apartment complexes, where prostituted underage women from South Korea were forced to work often for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to pay off debts, according to Bellevue police chief Steve Mylett.”

  Eagen looked up from the paper. He nodded in Gabe’s direction. “Sounds a lot like something you and Goldilocks here might have pulled off.”

  “Makes it sounds like they’d been workin’ on it for months.”

  “Official spin.”

  “See . . . sometimes the good guys win,” I said.

  “They’ll be back in business in a month.”

  “One does what one can.”

  “They picked up sixty-three women and girls.”

  I grinned. Gabe slapped the table. Scared the hell out of both of us.

  “So what now? Cinderella here bodyguarding your ass now?”

  I shrugged. “Can’t imagine why Rebecca would need a watchdog now,” I said. “That ship done sailed. I was just about to take my friend Gabe here back to wherever it is Gabe wants to go.”

  “So . . . what now? You packin’ it in? Gonna let sleeping dogs lie?”

  We both knew better, so I told him about my trip out to Issaquah. About Charles Harrington and the Croatian UPS caretakers.

  “You’re sure it was the same two guys?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  He unhanded the waffles and leaned back in his chair.

  “Shouldn’t be hard to check,” he said.

  “If I hadn’t gotten real lucky, those Croatians would have offed my ass, right then and there, and buried me up on Tiger Mountain.” I caught his gaze and held up a scout’s honor hand. “Guy had eyes like charcoal briquettes.”

  He took my word for it. “How do you know they’re Croatians?”

  “Carl said the names were Croatian.”

  Eagen didn’t say anything. Just went back to cutting his waffles up. We both knew Carl’s history with the Bosnian War. If he said the names were Croatian, they were Croatian. End o’ story.

  Gabe joined us at the table.

  “Exactly where does one go to hire a pair of Croatian thugs anyway?” I asked.

  “Probably not on craigslist,” Gabe offered.

  Eagen shrugged. “Love to see those juvie records . . . but that ain’t gonna happen.”

  I just smiled. He picked up on it. “Don’t tell me.”

  I stuffed my mouth full of Eggos and chewed like a contented cow.

  “So?” Eagen pressed.

  Took me a while to chew and swallow. “So . . . I’m gonna go and visit Charlie’s sister. She’s a prof at Seattle U. Seemed to me there was a hell of a lot of tension between her and her mother when the subject of Tracy came up. Thought maybe I’d see if I couldn’t shed a little light on why that was.”

  “Losing a child, even a stepchild, is big-time traumatic, no matter how screwed up the kid is.”

  “This was way more than that. Crossfield’s got Charlie squirrelled away out in Issaquah and Mrs. Harrington don’t like the arrangement one bit.”

  I watched as Eagen geometrically dissected his waffles, moving the knife strictly in line with the little squares. Like he was performing brain surgery.

  “You can cut across them, you know,” I threw in. “You know . . . like diagonally.”

  He looked horrified. “But then they don’t hold the syrup.”

  I looked over at Gabe, who obviously agreed.

  “Even if he is a cop. He’s got a point,” Gabe said.

  Gabe dropped the Gladstone bag onto the floor mat and climbed in. “Gonna take the passenger ferry out to Vashon,” Gabe said. “Got a friend who’ll pick me up at the other end. Gonna take a few days of R and R.”

  We’d spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon doing just that. Cleaning ourselves up and doing a bit of laundry. Trying vainly to get the smell of charcoal lighter off me and my clothes. I’d settled up with Joey through the miracle of direct deposit, and was beginning to feel that my life was regaining some sense of order.

  “Pier Fifty?” I asked.

  “Yep. Leaves at four thirty.”

  I checked the dashboard clock. 2:17. “We’ve got time to burn; what say we do lunch?” I said as I started the car.

  The weather had taken its usual turn for the worse. What had started as a balmy morning had gone steadily downhill as the day had progressed. The wind was roaring through the tops of the trees, swaying the dark branches like skeleton fingers. A whirlwind of leaves swirled around the pavement as I rolled down the hill toward Interbay.

  “Soon as I get a few days off, the weather goes to shit,” Gabe groused.

  “Assuming it wasn’t already shit,” I countered.

  As we rolled down the face of the hill, intermittent rain began to splat on the windshield. By the time I pulled to a stop in front of Red Mill for a spot of lunch, it had worked its way up to a full, wiper-thumping deluge. We sprinted from the car to the front door, arriving at the counter in a full drip.

  Gabe went for the Red Mill burger. Six solid inches of steaming cholesterol on a sesame seed bun. Being a man of great restraint, I ordered a plain bacon cheeseburger. In deference to our girlish figures, we decided to split an order of onion rings.

  “You know, Leo . . . most of the time my job is like what they say about sailing. Hours and hours of boredom punctuated here and there by moments of extreme terror.” Gabe waved a half-eaten onion ring in the air. “But this one . . . this was about as screwy an assignment as I’ve ever been on.” The rest of the onion ring disappeared. “Usually, it’s just simple shit. Somebody owes Joey money. Somebody’s gonna pay up. Somebody’s bothering one of the girls. I convince them that’s an unhealthy thing to do. Shit like that. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

  I took a sip of iced tea, swallowed. “You know, I had a feeling we were just about to get something useful out of Willard when the cops showed up last night.”

  Gabe nodded. “Me too. Fido was gonna spill something. I could feel it.”

  I swallowed the last of the burger. “Maybe we should go ask him what it was he was gonna tell us,” I suggested.

  Gabe cocked an eyebrow at me. “You serious?”

  “I know where he lives.” I nodded out toward the car. “Still got the crowbar under the seat too.”

  “Unless the cops picked him up last night.”

  “Didn’t see anything in the news about them arresting anybody dressed like a puppy dog.”

  “If Eagen had heard about it, he’d have said something, for sure. He’s the type.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’ve got some time to kill.”

  “Nicely put.”

  “Yeah . . .
I’m quite the wag.”

  The door on 407 Walter Street was a piece of cake. One crowbar, one bump, one squeak, and we were in. Georgie’s friend said Willard lived on the third floor in the rear, so we didn’t have to waste time knocking on doors and then dealing with the denizens of the dark who answered the doors.

  A young Goth couple passed us on the stairs. Black all over. Ripped and torn, studded everything. More tattoos than teeth. The walking dead of The Walking Dead.

  Halfway down the third-floor hallway, an old woman in a flowered kimono pulled open a door and lurched out into the corridor. She looked from me to Gabe and back. “You don’t belong here,” she gummed.

  “You best go back inside, Mama,” Gabe told her.

  She was still grumbling when she pulled the door closed behind herself. Gabe pushed past me and started toward the door at the end of the hall. That’s when I noticed the CC camera up high in the corner. The door flew open before I could get my mouth in gear. I was in midshout when Gabe’s head jerked violently backward in the doorway. I watched openmouthed as Gabe tumbled backward onto the floor—twitching like a nerve, unconscious for sure.

  I thrust the crowbar into the open doorway. Something hit the metal bar hard enough to tear it from my hand. Before I could decide what to do next, Willard Frost came bouncing out into the hallway. Swinging from his right hand was an evil-looking spring-loaded sap. Looked like a piece of lead about the size of a hen’s egg, covered in leather and attached to a spring that let it wobble around like a skull-seeking missile.

  He looked at Gabe lying unconscious on the floor and sneered.

  “Not so fucking tough now, huh, bitch?”

  I took a step back. The sap wasn’t big, but I knew from painful past experience that it was going to break anything it came into contact with, so I had best keep out of range if I wanted to stay in one piece.

  Willard bent over and screamed in Gabe’s unconscious face. “Fuckin’ dyke,” he screamed. “You ain’t shit.” He raised the sap like he was going to flatten Gabe’s skull with it.

  What happened next wasn’t something I thought about; it just happened. I took two quick steps in his direction and then dove at him. Superman-style. And friggin’ missed. He skittered right and then raised the sap to cave in my skull. I saw it coming and rolled the other way; I hunched my shoulders and took the sap between the shoulder blades. A groan escaped from my throat unbidden. Felt as if I’d been shot in the back.

  For about two seconds, I thought I might be paralyzed. Felt like my body had suddenly turned to concrete. Pain and terror gave me the strength to keep rolling. I heard the lead ball smash into the floorboards about an inch from my left ear as I pinwheeled over to the back wall and climbed to my feet.

  Willard was shuffling my way, waving the sap out in front of him like it was the dangling dong of destiny. Gabe had managed hands and knees behind him, and the hall was suddenly full of gawkers, when Willard made his first mistake. If he’d kept trying to take my head off, the law of averages says he’d have eventually made contact, but for reasons known only to Willard, he decided he wanted to take out one of my knees.

  He dropped low and swung the sap at my left knee in a vicious arc. I jumped backward. The sap’s momentum sent it crashing through the ancient plaster, where it stuck for just long enough for me to launch a dropkick at Willard’s head.

  He rolled left and took three tries to yank the sap from the wall. I stepped in belly to belly, leaving him no room to wind up and bash me. He swung anyway. It looped around my body and crashed into my sternum. I grunted and head-butted him in the face. I heard his nose break like a Popsicle stick. He let out a yowl and stumbled backward, broken-nose blind, trying to backhand me with the sap and not coming close.

  I bull-rushed him, driving the top of my head into his already broken nose. He screamed like a mezzo-soprano. I kept coming, using my bulk to slam him into the wall and keep him there, while I groped for the hand with the sap. He managed one more weak blow to my right shoulder before I grabbed his hand and dragged him to the floor, where I used my weight to pin him down.

  On my left, Gabe was sitting now, back against the wall, openmouthed, forehead sprouting a purple knot the size of a golf ball. I put everything I had into a couple of major elbows to Willard’s face, the impact of which seemed to make serious inroads into his desire for further fisticuffs.

  Took me half a minute and a couple more elbows to get the sap away from him.

  I dropped it into my coat pocket, grabbed him by the hair, dragged him back into his room, and kicked the door closed after us. The place looked like he hadn’t taken out the trash in about eleven years. Shit was piled everywhere. Whatever he had for furniture wasn’t even visible anymore.

  “Jew busted my dose,” he blubbered.

  I pulled the sap out of my pocket and gave him a little love tap on the shin. He whinnied like a horse.

  “We’re gonna finish our little chat from last night,” I told him.

  “I tole you before . . . we was all in juvie when Tracy got killed.”

  I raised the sap. He tried to extrude himself through the carpet. “Okay okay okay,” he chanted. “I went back . . . tried to get a little more . . . tole ’em about the DNA thing. That’s right when things went to shit, man.” He waved his free hand. “Had guys coming around looking for me, all of a sudden.” He pointed toward the front of the building. “Guy in the front left come out and wanted to know what in hell they were doing in the hall. They said they was looking for me and then beat the fuck out of him. That’s why I ain’t been coming back here. Been staying over on South Main with Rico, but Rico and everybody else got busted last night, so there ain’t shit goin’ on till things cool down.”

  “What DNA thing?”

  “In juvie.”

  I raised the sap again.

  “Okay okay. You remember. That was like right back at the time when the cops decided to take a DNA sample from everybody who got arrested.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “So we’re all sittin’ in the holding cell when this fat-ass comes in and calls out for Gilbert the Greaser to come on out so they can take a sample from him . . . and Terry gets up and makes like he’s this Gilbert guy.”

  “And?”

  “And then Gilbert gets up and makes like he’s somebody else. The fat-ass cops don’t know nothing. This DNA shit was all new to them. They didn’t have a clue.” He shrugged. “We all did it. Everybody got tested under somebody else’s name. Except for that Charlie asshole and the guy who was passed out on the floor. They stuck a Q-tip in his mouth right there and wiggled it around. We just thought it was funny, man. You know, a little ha ha on the fucking cops.”

  “Lamar Hudson too?”

  “The Okie? Yeah, him too.”

  The only reason I was inclined to believe his story was because the whole damn testing program had turned out to be a little ha ha on the cops. While the notion of genetically testing everybody they pinched had seemed like a natural to law enforcement, it turned out to be big-time unconstitutional because it didn’t account for people who were wrongly accused or those who were acquitted. Everybody who didn’t get convicted of a felony wanted their DNA profile removed from the system. Cops said no. They had the DNA profiles and they were keeping them. After a hail of class-action lawsuits, the courts agreed with the citizens. If I recalled correctly, the whole mandatory testing thing lasted less than a year.

  “So you’re telling me that the DNA profile they have as Lamar Hudson wasn’t really his?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He started to crawl to his feet. I wobbled the sap in his face. “Just stay on the floor, Beavis,” I told him. “So whose DNA was it?”

  He shook his head. “Dunno, man. All I remember is Terry pretending to be this Gilbert guy. After that . . . I don’t remember who pretended to be who.”

  I took a threatening step forward. He wrapped his arms around his head. “I was higher than shit, man. We was just havin�
� fun. And then next thing I heard, the Charlie kid fried his brain, somebody offed Gilbert in the joint, and that Okie Lamar was doin’ hard time . . . there was guys lookin’ for my ass, man, it . . . it was like the whole fucking world came apart.”

  “What else?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ else.”

  I had the feeling I’d wrung everything out of him that I was gonna, so I lobbed the sap over into the far corner of the room and then put my face right up in his. “I’m gonna collect my friend and get out of here. If I were you, if, at any time in the rest of your miserable life, you see my friend Gabe there—I’d run like hell.”

  He didn’t say anything. Just sat there on his ass, bleeding onto the orange shag carpet as I backed over to the door.

  Gabe had managed to get upright but was the color of old oatmeal. I got a shoulder under and began to half walk, half drag us down the hallway. Gawkers scattered like chickens as we shuffled down the corridor cheek to cheek.

  The stairs were tough. One at a time, almost like Gabe had never seen stairs before. The fresh air massaged my sweaty face as we stepped into the street.

  We shuffled up to First Avenue like slow-dancing drunks and kept going for another block until we got to South Washington Street. As we turned the corner, the deep rumble of engines rose above the din of the city. Half a dozen tandem dump trucks were lined up end to end along the westbound curb, engines running, spewing diesel smoke into the air, each waiting for its turn to dump its load into the new seawall before making a run down to the barges at Harbor Island for a refill. A tight knot of truck drivers was assembled on the sidewalk, waiting their turns, smoking cigarettes and telling lies until they got the call.

  Gabe seemed to come around for a second. “The ferry,” Gabe said. “Gotta get the Vashon ferry.”

  I kept us moving. “Tell you what, partner. I’m gonna run us by the Harborview ER so they can have a look at your head,” I said as we shuffled along.

  “No . . . no . . . I’m okay . . . the ferry . . .”

  Half a block up, my car sat in the shadows of the viaduct. I adjusted Gabe’s arm over my shoulder and picked up the pace a bit.