by John Straley
Delaney turned slowly and stood up. He was looking down on George even though he was standing downhill. His jaw was set hard and he said nothing.
George dropped his hands to his side but he didn’t put the pad and pencil away. “Tom, we’ll find the guy.”
“With all due respect, George, you aren’t the man for this case. We’ll take care of this and the situation up in Everett.”
“You’re saying I’m not the man for this case because of what?”
“Again, with all due respect to you and your father, George, we’ve got this covered. We’ve got authorization. We’ve got the governor and the senator on this. Hell, they can get right to the president if we want. You don’t have to have it on your books and you don’t have to waste any of your officers’ time.” Then Tom Delaney reached over and flipped George’s notebook shut.
“They’ve brought this on themselves. You know it’s true, George,” Tom said almost tenderly.
The one thing George had inherited from his father was his hatred of private security goons. He hated their phony badges and he hated their air of superiority, particularly when the bastards knew nothing about being peace officers. Hell, they couldn’t resolve a dispute between two chained-up mutts.
“Brought this on themselves,” George muttered to himself, while he stumbled back up to his car. The Big Finn would have thumped that bastard Tom Delaney and dumped his body in a wood chipper. But George was a city employee. He would think of other ways.
He opened his notebook again and made a few notes. It was a body dump and Delaney had told him the killers had used Ben’s own gun. Usually George would work this from the ground up. He’d have men all over the city looking for the car and shaking down Ben’s contacts on the waterfront. But this was going to be different. George wasn’t even going to call the captain. He knew it was true. It was not much of an exaggeration to say that Floodwater could get Governor Martin to clear a revenge killing. George was not going to fight that war. It would cause him to have to make promises to his bosses that he had no intention of keeping. As he got to his car George knew he was going to have to work from the top down.
“I’m going to bed,” he said, then pushed the starter with his left foot. When the engine caught, George Hanson wheeled up onto the river road and drove home to his wife, his new electric icebox, and his nice, dry bed.
The next morning brought a break in the rain and cold. Sunlight sprawled through his kitchen as he drank his coffee. Kids were playing up and down the street, and his wife stood at the window staring out at the soggy patch of grass that served as a yard.
“You going to be able to pick up a cake at the bakery tonight?” she asked.
“They got it in our name?” he asked without turning his head toward her.
She nodded, and he stood up to put on his jacket.
“You sleep all right?” she asked, as he was heading for the door. “It’s like you didn’t sleep at all.”
George turned and looked at her, trying to recognize something in her tone, something that worried him.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just have something on my mind.” He walked to the door, and she turned back to the window where the sun dappled down mingling with the voices from the street.
“Okay then, just remember the cake. You want me to write you a note?”
“Naw.” He moved over to her, paused, and quickly kissed her neck, then turned to go before she had a chance to face him.
In an hour George was knocking on an unpainted door up on Queen Anne Hill. A massive round-faced man with sleep in his eyes came to the door.
“Fatty! Good to see you, boy!” George said as he shouldered past him.
“Christ, George, I just got to bed.”
“I’m sorry, Fatty, but you know us government workers. Regular hours and all that.” George stood next to Fatty’s chair, where his gun and Floodwater badge hung, glinting in the light. George absently fingered the heavy metal badge.
“You got any coffee?” George asked.
“I was asleep, I told you.” Fatty rubbed his eyes and shut the door.
“Don’t bother making any for me then.” George sat in the straight-backed chair and dropped his hat over the toe of his shoe.
“Listen, Fatty, I’m going to call in my marker.”
Fatty Miller was not just overweight. He had a fat man’s sad aura. He walked like a fat man, he breathed like a fat man, and he had the mournful slit-eyed countenance of a man whose personality was hiding deep down in his flesh. He padded across the bare wood floor into the bathroom, where he put on his pants and swung his suspenders over his undershirt.
“I know I owe you, George. But don’t ask me what I think you’re …”
“Tell me who you are going to finger for Ben’s killing.”
“Christ, George, you know I can’t do that.” Fatty was holding his socks from last night in one hand and scratching between his toes with the other. He had to strain to reach his feet with his arms fully outstretched.
“I know you can. I know you will. I still have the file, you know. Photographs I took down at the baths, witness statements, everything. It wouldn’t bother me at all to turn it over to the District Attorney. In fact it would help me out. You know, I get a call from that boy’s mother about every two months or so. She says he still walks funny. She says he can’t breathe right through his nose.”
Fatty didn’t bother putting on his socks. “Jury’s not going to believe that little fairy,” he muttered.
“It doesn’t really matter what a jury believes, Fatty. The people who know you …” George twisted a bit in his chair and made a show of polishing the shamus’s badge with his sleeve. “The people you work with are going to believe him.”
Fatty leaned back in the overstuffed chair, put his hands on his thighs, let out a long soggy breath, and didn’t say a thing.
“Tonight,” George said. “I’ll meet you outside the baths. Six o’clock. It will be a good reminder of our friendship.”
Fatty offered up some weak resistance as George walked out the door into the banana-yellow sunlight of a Seattle morning.
Three feet down the sidewalk, George winced. He had almost forgotten about picking up the cake for his wife, and the bakery was just down the hill. Not that he wanted the cake for himself, but she’d want to eat around six. She’d want to light the candles. She’d be sad of course but she’d still treat it like a birthday. She’d set the boy’s picture in his place. It was almost too much to think about. If he was going to meet Fatty at six, George would have to be late for dinner, the cake and the candles. Maybe that was all right. Maybe he’d go to the bakery before the meeting. He’d pick up something for the fat man. Christ, he thought, he didn’t want to go home.
Back at his desk, the first thing George saw was a letter from the captain saying that they had entered a memo of agreement with Floodwater Security regarding the murder of their operative Ben Avery. The death of Dave Kept would be handled by the Everett P.D., and George was directed to offer his “full and unqualified support in the joint effort to bring both cases to a quick and successful conclusion.”
He set the paper down on his desk. There was going to be no “successful conclusion” to Floodwater’s handling of this case. Until he got some news from Fatty, the best way to keep track of their investigation would be to watch the hospitals.
“There’s water coming in back here,” Ellie said without showing much concern.
Slip stopped rowing and grabbed a bucket from under one of the seats. The sockets for the oarlocks were sloppy and pulling loose from the rails of the dory. One oar caught the water and levered back into Slip’s chest, almost knocking him into the water.
“Here,” Ellie said. She stepped over Slip, grabbed the bucket, and started to bail. “Row, row, row,” she hissed.
Slip grabbed both oars again and awkwardly started to scissor the water, splashing the surface a few times until he gained purchase, and pointed the bow downwind so th
at the small boat wouldn’t make such a big target for the waves.
“Pull more to the left,” Ellie said softly, while she bucketed the water out of the boat and the girl pulled even deeper into her umbrella.
“You should call it port,” Annabelle said flatly from under her black umbrella.
“What?” Slip asked without turning around.
“When facing the bow, the boat’s left is called port and the right is starboard. It doesn’t matter whose left or right or what way they’re facing. It’s just the boat’s port and starboard.”
“Really?” Slip asked. “How do you know that?”
“I dunno. I read it somewhere, I guess.” Annabelle’s disembodied voice was floating out over the water. “P-o-r-t has the same number of letters as l-e-f-t and that’s how you remember that port is the boat’s left side.”
“All right. If you say so,” he mumbled.
Slip rowed through the rain for an hour and a half. They were around the first point, the clouds began to lift, and the rain tailed off to a light mist. By noon they could see distant mountains to the west and east. Puget Sound felt as if it were a broad river valley flowing north. He rowed in silence. Ellie sat in the stern wrapped in a tarp. Annabelle spun her umbrella and the yellow bird ruffled his feathers and squawked as if to register his disgust at the progress they were making.
George walked down the marble steps toward the morgue. His footsteps made a lonely echoing sound. The air smelled like iodine. Outside he could hear the rattle of a trolley rolling down the hill toward the water.
“When did he come in?” George asked. The attendant flipped through the sheets on his clipboard.
“I dunno, I guess a couple of hours ago,” he said.
“Who brought him?”
“Ambulance from Edmonds.”
“Edmonds? Why’d they bring him all the way down here?”
The attendant was a kid, maybe twenty, with his hair slicked back and a single spit curl in the center of his forehead. This kid was some kind of sheikh who only wanted to be done with work so he could get into his good clothes and dance down at Parker’s Dance Hall. He had listened to only a few, but already he was growing tired of George’s questions.
“You wanna just look through the paperwork yourself?” he said peevishly.
“Yeah, thanks,” George said, and grabbed the kid’s clipboard.
“Is this some kind of joke?” he asked the sheikh, who now had his attention on the inside story of a Police Gazette.
“What? I dunno,” he offered.
“They’ve got this guy Dave Kept listed as an accident victim?”
“I dunno, why?” the kid said without looking up.
“They found his body in the trunk of a car sunk in a slough.”
“Sounds like a bad accident,” the kid said.
Looking at the last page, George saw the signature line where Tom Delaney had signed off on the transport for the stiff.
Without asking, George walked back into the cooler where two bodies were laid out on metal tables with a two-inch lip around the edges. One was uncovered. The dead man’s mouth was wide open as if he were trying to gulp the harsh white light spraying down on him from above. The toe tag said it was David Kept, accident victim, the man from the trunk of the Lincoln found about a mile from the northern end of the interurban.
Dave Kept had been beaten with something heavy and fairly soft. There were the beginnings of large bruises across the side of his face and jaw. There were bruises on the hands and forearms. It looked like his wrists were broken and the thumb on his right hand was dislocated. Dave Kept had put up a good fight up until the last few moments when someone stepped up close to him and put a bullet through his brain. The entry wound was discreet and not big enough to collapse the skull or move a lot of meat around. The bullet was a fairly small caliber, probably a .38. The halo of powder stippling around the dark hole told George that the shooter had been standing close. The shooter had gotten everything he or she needed out of Kept before he was put down like a dog.
George made some notes and pulled back the sheet from the second body. Ben Avery’s eyes were shut and his mouth was closed. Someone had cleaned the mud off of him from the dump site. Ben had a small hole in his right hand and another just below his rib cage. George took his pencil and worked the point into the entry wound below the ribs. The flesh was cold and stiff as clay so it took a bit of doing to get the pencil in, but it told him the small-caliber bullet had traveled upward through the body and that Ben had probably had his hand over the barrel when the shot came.
He flapped down the sheet so that it settled slowly over the features of the corpse, the accumulated air gradually escaping, the harsh light making the floating shroud almost transparent. The compressors for the coolers buzzed and rattled, and George threw his pencil away.
“Hey!” the kid at the desk yelled from behind him. “You got to get out of here. I’m locking up. Don’t you guys have nowhere to go at night?”
“No,” George said. He bent down to grab his pencil after changing his mind about needing it. “Goodnight,” he said, and walked through the dirty swinging door.
The sun was going down behind the western mountains. The gray water of Puget Sound pulsed for a few moments with streaks of silver before a cool shadow eased toward the east. A brisk wind pushed the waves and the dory along. Everyone but Slip was asleep, curled on the floor of the boat and covered up with whatever they could find. Ellie was wrapped in the canvas tarp. Annabelle had pulled her umbrella down over the triangular seat in the bow and wrapped herself around the bird’s cage.
Slip pulled on the oars. His hands were bleeding now and his neck ached from craning around to look where he was going. After several hours, he stopped looking forward and only scanned the water to the stern. He kept the dory’s stern at right angles to the direction of the waves. If the wind shifted, so too would his course, but it didn’t matter to him. They were making headway, putting distance between themselves and the muddy riverbank in White Center.
Slip took off his damp wool mackinaw and laid it over his knees, hoping to let it dry out a bit. While he did this, he set the oars inside and the dory drifted in the waves. He pulled his tool kit closer so that he could wedge his feet against it and the boat as he pulled against the oars.
“You don’t like to get too far from your tool kit,” Ellie said with a sleepy voice. She sat up in the stern, pulling the green canvas tarp around her as if it were a mink stole.
“Nope,” Slip said.
Ellie’s hair was tousled and her eyes seemed to take on the gray of the sky. She took a long breath and formulated a question. Then she stopped and leaned back against the stern of the boat.
“I’m sorry for getting you mixed up in this,” she said. “But you know, you asked for a ride.”
“Let’s just get up the coast a bit and then we can go our separate ways,” Slip said.
“All right,” she said, and she wiped rainwater from her face.
“So who is this girl?” Slip nodded over his shoulder to the umbrella in the bow. “I can’t figure you for a mother.”
“I thought I told you. I had sister. She was sickly all her life. Then she got healthy and married an upstanding man, a minister in a country church. Then as goddamn luck would have it she and her husband died in a fire and Annabelle came to me.”
“Quite a family,” he muttered.
“Thank you,” she said, still smiling.
Ellie and her sister Beth had grown up on the northern Idaho border. Their mother had thrown her first husband out after he could not give up drink. Their stepfather was a sober man who raised horses and mules for the government firefighters and the army. As soon as she could sit astride a horse, Ellie had begun breaking stock. She went with the men to move the winter herd in from the lowland range and helped cull them out in the spring. Beth had spent summers hanging on fence rails and handing her father his shoeing tools when he was bent under a workhorse with
feet the size of dinner plates. The sisters had waded in the shallows of the nearby stream catching frogs in their hands and had built a swing that was long enough to carry them out over the deepest pool. The girls had not gone to elementary school, but their mother had managed their education by teaching them math while doing carpentry and memorizing poems from one of the leather-bound books she kept near the fireplace. Before she was ten, Ellie had been able to recite most of the first book of the Odyssey as well as the poems “Crossing the Bar” and “Hiawatha.” Their mother taught them some Latin and Greek even while they learned their letters in English.
Newspapers made it out to the farmstead in weekly packets and the parents read them by the light of guttering candles at the table. The world was changing so fast around them that they couldn’t imagine being able to keep their girls isolated on the shrinking island of their farm. They gradually came to the realization that the girls would have to go to school in town. They could be schoolteachers or nurses until they found husbands.
The two sisters reacted differently to the world beyond the farm. While Beth re-created the pastoral universe of her childhood by canning peaches for her timid husband’s flock, Ellie scandalized her family by openly smoking cigarettes and using slang. Ellie had heard Helen Flynn give a speech in Spokane and had stood with her mother as the dour suffragettes marched in rank down the middle of the main street, their sashes proclaiming a woman’s right to vote. She listened to the speeches and wasn’t moved by the ideas, for the ideas seemed plain and self-evident, but she was moved by the tone and the posture of the women who spoke.
By the time Ellie was seventeen she had run away with the barnstormer to an airfield in Spokane, and when the barnstormer moved on, Ellie’s mother had turned her wild girl out. Beth married the upstanding preacher and moved to Montana. Ellie rode a clattering freight train to the coast, looking for her biological father she had never met.