by Bill Cameron
DAY ONE
BILL CAMERON
Published by
TYRUS BOOKS
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
4700 East Galbraith Road
Cincinnati, Ohio 45236
www.tyrusbooks.com
Copyright © 2010 by Bill Cameron
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction.
Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3088-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3088-3
This work has been previously published in print format under the following ISBNs:
978-1-93556-209-2 (hardcover)
978-1-93556-208-5 (paperback)
To Jill
Born and raised in southern Oregon farm country, Ellie Spaneker flees her home and abusive husband, her trail dogged by a brutal ex-cop in the hire of her vengeful father-in-law.
In Portland, retired homicide detective Skin Kadash fills his idle days drinking coffee and searching for Eager Gillespie, a teen runaway of special interest as the only witness in a troublesome and long unsolved murder.
Eager, meanwhile, is on his own, grifting and working the angles in the homeless underground, oblivious to the unfoldingevents which will force him to face the consequences of a crime, and a longing, which has haunted him for years.
These disparate trails converge at a bloody standoff, the harrowing end of a string of violence that stretches from the high desert to the streets of Portland— committed by a perpetrator known only as Shadow.
Also by Bill Cameron
Chasing Smoke
Lost Dog
CONTENTS
PART ONE
The Idiot With the Pistol
Silly, Silly Shadow
Grass Fed and Pasture Raised
Local Farmer Found Dead
Get Yourself Some Sandpaper
None of Your Concern
Disturbance At Area Clinic
Roaming Eye Rolls
Thinking the Devil’s Thoughts
He Was a Cop
Gas Station Owner Found Beaten To Death
No More Fucking
Between Him and His Right Hand
Stay Away From the Kid
Sunlight in His Eyes
Police Investigate Two Deaths in Rural Klamath County
PART TWO
Whole Family Is Made of Butter
Not on the Schedule
When It’s Safe
Police Investigating Attempted Assault
The Color of Hay
You Can Call Me Hiram
Stuart’s Ellie
Just an Afterthought
Shadow Slinking
Woman Escapes Prowler By Fleeing House
Drop Everything
The Fleshy Part of the Thigh
Shared Minutes
I’m Your Man
Police Seek Assailant In Assault On Sleeping Woman
Pig Rode The Hot Breeze
That Crazy Bitch’ll Know Someone
Back Door
Stargazers Assaulted
Balls to the Wall
Somewhere Beyond Corn
Follow the Babysitter
A Long Way From Long Gone
Body Of Elderly Klamath Man Found By State Trooper
PART THREE
No One You Want to Fuck With
Shadow Ale
Know Nothing of Deserves
Miss Safe Sex Klamath County
Man Comes Out of the Trees
Sliding Rocks and Runoff
Balance of Power
Wade into the Storm
Sheath of Overdeveloped Contractile Tissue
Harvey Scott Watches
Civil Twilight
Long Past Time
S-s-s-shadow
Lucy-Loo
Forgotten
Find What You Find
I Can Do This
The Moose Comes Out of the Trees
Police Seek Help Identifying Man Found Dead On Green Springs Highway
Acknowledgements
FWCRIME.com
PART ONE
THE TRUTH HAS A WAY OF ELUDING CAPTURE
November 19 — 8:03 am
The Idiot With the Pistol
Eager Gillespie once told me he’d be more likely to shit a diamond than live to see his twenty-first birthday. I dumped his beer anyway and he wandered off, shaking his head at the cruel injustice of it all. It will be almost a year before I see him again, in the street out front of my house—still years shy of drinking age but just in time to catch a bullet with his face.
The police have surrounded the house across from mine, established a temporary command center in my living room. Doesn’t bother me, being a once-upon-a-time cop myself, though it might have been nice if they’d used the magic word before hijacking my Sumatra Mandheling and high-speed internet connection. Inside the target house huddles the man who’d fired the shot that scattered his family like a flock of juncos shadowed by a hawk. The police have emptied the adjacent homes, pushed onlookers out of the tactical sight lines. A cluster of press vans are double-parked a block away. The blades of the news chopper circling above beat out a staccato background music that seems tuned to the cadence of my heart.
Watching through my dining room window, I first catch sight of Eager among the crowd straining against the barricades the cops have erected. Near me, the negotiator speaks calmly into a captive cell phone whose mate has been tossed through the open front door across the street. The man with the gun—my neighbor for chrissakes, fellow named Mitch Bronstein—doesn’t have much to say. No one knows what set him off. His wife Luellen, a fifteen-years younger corn-fed trophy from down south is no use. She seems to be in shock. Aside from answering a question about their little boy— “he’s with his grandfather now” —she’s got nothing to say. I can’t tell if she’s pleased about Grandpa or not. The older boy, a sweaty eighteen-year-old with a video gamer’s sullen detachment, identifies the gun as some kind of revolver. “Something big.” Spoken with cold self-possession. “Maybe an S&W 500.” No other guns in sight. So the cops figure best case is four hammer-blow rounds in the cylinder, assuming the kid knows a Model 500 from his left nut. Next best is Mitch topped off after his wife and son fled. But maybe he has something tucked in his waistband too. Worst case could be pretty bad when you spun out the potential scenarios—gun shows make anything possible. Thus the captive phone, the command team in my living room, the calm-voiced negotiator.
Except Mitch appears at his front door. For a moment he seems baffled by the tactical tableau before him, but then his eyes find focus and his gun hand rises. Half a dozen cops or more open fire. Mitch gets the one shot off. It’s then I realize Eager has slipped through the barrier, somehow managed to get down among the clot of uniforms. No one is sure in the confusion, but it appears Eager is in the path of Mitch’s bullet. I hear Luellen scream as Mitch sits down in the doorway, peers at his bloody chest and prods one of the bullet holes like he’s investigating dry rot. I follow the cops out into the street. Eager looks like he’s weeping blood. He opens his mouth, but only gibberish comes out, something about Jesus. I’ve never heard him mention Jesus. Someone rushes over to him but he insists he’s fine, maybe a little headache is all. Still bleeding, a slow trickle—the eyeball bulging and red but otherwise intact. He sits on the fender of a patrol car and waves off the EMTs. Eager never cared for doctors, or anyone with half an ounce of authority— maybe why he likes me. From the porch, Mitch calls out, as
ks for a glass of water. He’s got five bullets in him. Eager has just the one, a .22 from what turns out to be a single-shot long-barreled pistol, a pup’s gun. Ten minutes later Eager has vanished, no one knows where or how, and Mitch still wants his glass of water. He has to settle for an IV as the EMTs pack his wounds.
Mitch will claim he found the pistol in his older son’s bedroom. Jase is the kid’s name, from Mitch’s first marriage. The initial discharge, the one that sent Jase and Luellen scrambling, was supposedly an accident. He’d barged into the kitchen to confront his son, fired a shot without meaning to. Anger and a too-tight grip is his story. When the others ran and the cops showed, he panicked, replaced the bullet with one he’d found in a box under Jase’s pillow. Ashamed he was such a poor parent he didn’t know his son even had a weapon, he couldn’t stand the thought of what that meant about who he was. The second bullet was for himself. Then the phone bounced through the door and the calm voice talked to him. Just come to me, friend, and we’ll work this out. And so he’d come walking through the doorway and lifted the gun to offer it to the calm voice. When the cops all started shooting he’d fired again. Another mistake, a reflexive clench. Bang. He never meant tohurt anyone. Just wanted to know where his son got a goddamn gun.
No one would be buying Mitch’s bullshit. His wife has a darkening bruise on her cheek she claims she got on the way out the door, but everyone knows it’s from the back of a man’s hand. Even worse, a kid took a bullet in the face. He’s a dipshit stray maybe, but one you couldn’t help but like the way you like any puppy anxious to please. Half the cops present have rousted or arrested Eager at one time or another. No one is gonna believe the idiot with the pistol. Especially when they get inside the house and find a bullet hole in the kitchen wall big enough to shove your fist through and blood spatter like a spilled jar of paint trailing out theback door.
But Mitch isn’t my concern. I’m more interested in what brought Eager Gillespie to my street this morning out of so many, and where he’s gone so fast with a bullet in his head. Jesus. And I can’t help but recall Eager had once complained to me that some asshole stole his piece, a single-shot .22 he carried for protection, right out of his bindle as he slept under the Burnside Bridge.
November 11
Silly, Silly Shadow
Shadow. That’s what he was. A shadow, cold and fluid. He moved like darkness sliding under the eaves at dusk. Like runoff pooling at the foot of a bluff. Like the chill that arrives a step ahead of bad news. It was who he was, though if you asked him about it he’d look through you like a man trying to read a sign in fog.
Shadow.
He loved the word, loved it like he loved his own name. It was his name, a word he could say, a sound half-breath, half-song. He rocked on his heels and gazed at the convenience store shelves around him, so many shapes and colors, like being lost in a box of crayons.
An old man came out of the back room and took up a spot behind the counter, fixed him with a cloudy gaze. A voice argued with itself from a radio on the counter. “How can I help you, son?”
“S-s-s-shadow ...”
The old man’s gaze flicked to the cloth wrapped around Shadow’s head and he frowned, puzzled. “Come again?”
“S-s-s-singing ... S-s-s-shadow.”
The old man seemed to deliberate for a moment. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray between the cash register and the need-apenny-take-a-penny dish. The old man reached for it, took a long drag. Coughed up a moist pillow of smoke. His eyes gleamed as though he’d figured something out. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.
“Where you from, son—the clinic? You got any family?”
He rolled his head ... not a shake, not a nod. He didn’t know how to answer the question.
“No one?” Flesh hung from the old man’s neck like a curtain and fluttered when he spoke, a streamer in a soft breeze.
“S-s-s-soft.”
The old man leaned back, eyes troubled. He seemed to come to a decision. “Soft all right.” His words were more breath than voice now. “Soft in the head.” He chuckled, weary, and started to turn away, to reach for the phone on the wall at his back.
Shadow didn’t think. Maybe couldn’t think. His hand shot forward, swift as a snake. The oldman’s larynx popped like an apple under a boot heel. A moment later, Shadow was behind the counter, singing over the fallen body. “S-s-s-silly, silly ...”
Three Years, Three Months Before
Grass Fed and Pasture Raised
Elizabeth Spaneker, Ellie to her friend and Lizzie to most everyone else, sat on the bus stop bench at 41st and Hawthorne, August something, Year of Our Lord ... Year One, as far as she was concerned. Day One. Her head rested against the blank brick wall at her back, her eyes on the building across the street. She didn’t feel like herself. A spattering rain fell, off and on, but she hardly noticed. She was thinking backto a day at Givern Valley Regional High School. Sixth period health class, ninth grade. A different Ellie sat next to little Stuart Spaneker—the boy from whom she would later get both her last name and the stiffness in her neck on cold, damp days. At the front of the room, the teacher gestured with smooth, long-fingered hands. “Listen to me, people. Are you listening? This is serious stuff here, information that could save your lives.” No one was listening. Whispered conversations hissed on all sides. Ellie was more interested in the rain outside, hoping it would stop before school let out. At the front of the room the teacher frowned, lips tight, as if to say, “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.” The skin of her face seemed dry and brittle. She was giving the condom lecture, a breathless flood of information she offered every April in a bid to mitigate the impact of hormones and spring fever, for all the good it did. In time, the lecture would get her fired as the increasingly lurid presentation collided with community standards, but Ellie would be graduated by then.
Stuart had leaned over to Ellie’s desk and dropped a half-sheet of folded notebook paper. She opened the note, face front as though she was listening to the condom lecture. Hey, Ellie. Do you prefer smooth, or ribbed for her pleasure? He’d signed it, Stu Baby.
Ellie crumpled the note. “Pervert.” She focused on the anxious teacher—Ellie, sitting at the bus stop, could no longer remember the woman’s name—but out of the corner of her eye she saw Stuart wink and make a smoochy face. He’d claim later it was in that health class that he’d set his sights on her, and Stuart had inherited the relentless drive and sense of entitlement that made the Spanekers first family of Givern Valley, Oregon.
“Everyone is talking about you and Stuart,” Luellen told her later. “They’re saying you two make a cute couple.”
Ellie thought about Stuart’s short, stocky form and ragged chestnut hair. “I don’t mate outside my species.”
“I think he’s kinda cute.” Luellen’s eyes gleamed. “He’ll spend money on you. His dad is rich.” She’d been Stuart’s target before Ellie, and seemed to enjoy the attention—and Stuart’s willingness to spend Hiram Spaneker’s money. Ellie gave her a look.
“Lu, please don’t tell me you’re jealous.”
“I’m just saying you might as well enjoy it.”
“Forget it. He’s a troll doll.”
Years later, a different Ellie would make excuses for abandoning her instinctive loathing of Stuart. She’d tell herself she’d been dazzled by the Spaneker money, which flowed like snowmelt when Stuart wanted to impress, or by the shaggy bangs that hung loose on his forehead, by the excess of confidence in his round, shiny eyes. Or maybe it was his sudden charm whenever she seemed primed to tell him to kiss off. But by the time she began to question her capitulation, it was too late; they were married and Stuart had knocked a baby from her womb.
A woman appeared out of the rain and dropped heavily onto the bus stop bench. She shook her umbrella, spraying Ellie with fine droplets. “Goodness! It’s been so rainy lately.” The woman looked away as she spoke, as if the comment was meant for someone else. Th
ere was no else. Half a block up Hawthorne a boy wheeled around on a skateboard, his t-shirt pasted to his shoulders by rain. Back in Givern, rainfall like this so late in August could make the difference between bankruptcy and a solvent winter for many families.
Ellie slid to the side to make room for the woman’s spongy hips and overstuffed canvas tote.
“It’s been wet this year, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know.” The sky hung dark and heavy. The weathered blue awning above the bench offered little in the way of shelter. She’d lost the umbrella Pastor Sanders had given her. Yet one more small thing left behind, like so much else.
“You’re not from around here?”
Ellie brushed her hair off her face. The woman looked at her. Ellie stared back, her eyes tracing the caked and flaking boundary of foundation makeup that ran along the woman’s chin and up the back edge of her cheek. Her grey, wiry hair seemed to want to fly off in all directions, a well-used scrub brush. The woman leaned back on the bench and clasped her hands across her bosom. Her fingers were long and thin, the skin smooth on the backs of her hands, younger than the crazy hair and pancake makeup suggested. Suddenly, Ellie could almost smell her health teacher’s perfume. Miss Layton, that had been her name. Lady Latex behind her back.