by G. M. Ford
“Thanks for the help,” I told him.
“Keep in touch,” he said. “We’re gonna have to get under the radar for a while here. Real low profile.” He jerked a thumb at the rear seat. “These guys tell me they’re feelin’ a bit homesick all of a sudden. Thinkin’ a little Caribbean vacation might be in order. Like immediately.”
“Wish I could go along for the ride,” I admitted.
Carl shrugged. “When they don’t find anything on you guys, they’re gonna be pissed as hell. Means all that taxpayer money they spent on security wasn’t worth a shit, but all that’s gonna do is slow ’em down. There ain’t all that many people with the chops or the equipment to pull this kinda thing off, and we’re right up at the top of the most likely list.”
“Keep in touch.”
“No fear.”
We shook hands through the open window. The reggae twins waved goodbye. I walked over and pushed the door buttons, waited for the door to rattle up, and then ducked through and let them out into the alley.
Gabe jogged down to the far end, checked the street. Motioned that the coast was clear. Carl eased the van forward. I followed along in its wake.
Gabe and I stood shoulder to shoulder watching the van motor up Hoyt Avenue, crest the hill, and disappear from view.
That’s when I noticed the air vents above the garage door. Three of them, in fact, evenly spaced across the opening. I stepped back into the alley and peered up. Screens on the inside to keep the birds and the bugs out, leaving about a one-foot-by-one-foot ledge on the outside of the building. I pointed upward. Gabe got it right away.
“Gimme a boost,” I said.
I pulled the thumb drive from my pocket, and then put one hand on the building to steady myself. Gabe gave me the old laced-fingers lift. I slipped the drive into the center opening and pushed it as far back as it would go. With seemingly no effort at all, Gabe set me back onto the asphalt.
The cop with the battering ram looked mighty disappointed. He’d dragged that sucker up nine floors only to find I’d left the hotel room door hanging wide open. Ya hadda love these guys. Open door or no open door, they came in in full combat mode. The black-visored storm troopers of the status quo. Pointing weapons this way and that, shouting at one another as Gabe and I sat side by side on the couch, hands on top of our heads, both of our weapons over on the other side of the room holding down our carry permits.
“On the floor . . . on the floor” rattled off the walls.
The cop I’d pushed the other night dragged me off the couch, knelt in the middle of my aching back, and handcuffed me tight enough to tow a butane truck. About the time they yarded Gabe and me back to our feet, Detective Shirley came ambling into the room like Caesar entering Gaul.
“Some people just won’t take a hint.” He smirked in my face. “Amazing how I know these things. I’m prescient, I guess.”
The day manager was trotting his name tag back and forth out in the hall, handing out passkeys like popcorn. I could hear doors being wrenched open, commanding shouts, lots of jackbooted crab walking, and then . . . all of a sudden, things got quiet. Twenty seconds passed.
Darth Vader with three stripes on his sleeve appeared in the doorway. He lifted his black visor and motioned with his head for Shirley to step out into the hall with him. Shirley sidled over. The SWAT sergeant bent down and whispered something in Shirley’s ear. A guy in civilian clothes, cradling a laptop against his chest, joined them. When he turned his back to me, I could see that he was holding a directional antenna in his right hand. He waved it around. Judging from the expression on Detective Shirley’s face, the news wasn’t good. I watched as his color drained. He slammed the door on his way back in.
“Where’s your friends?” he asked, with as much restraint as he could muster.
“What friends?” I asked.
“You rented four suites.” He checked a wrinkled piece of hotel stationery in his hand. “The two of you. Leon Marks and Shirley Temple here,” he said. “Carl Cosmic. Charity Freedom. And Maximilian Cousins,” he read. “None of whom, as it happens, actually exist, as far as I can tell.”
“They moved on,” I said.
“Moved on where?”
“To a better place,” Gabe chimed in.
“Where’s the equipment?”
“What equipment?”
Color flooded Shirley’s face with a vengeance. He caught me smirking at him and turned away. My favorite cop took a step in my direction and smacked me on the back of the head. Shirley turned at the sound of the crack. He pointed a stiff finger at the cop.
“No,” was all he said before stepping out into the hall. I watched him grab his phone and speed dial somebody. I could see his ears getting redder and redder as he tried to make some point with whoever was on the other end.
Officer Unfriendly ambled over by the door, leaned against it, and eased it closed with his hip. He turned back in my direction.
“Now . . . you smart-ass motherfucker,” he said.
Outside in the corridor, Shirley’s voice took on the urgent cadence of a man who’d called out the SWAT team and the cybercrimes guys, gotten some half-assed judge to sign a search warrant, and then come up stone empty on the other end. Not a good career move, I suspected.
The cop grabbed me by the hair and tried to lift me from the floor. I watched as he drew back a ham-size fist. I could feel it right away. A level of fear and uncertainty I hadn’t experienced for as long as I could remember. Hey . . . I’ve been hit before. Comes with private eye territory, but I’d almost never felt like this. Parts of me contracted like a dying star.
Gabe hopped up from the couch, rushed forward, and drove a shoulder into the guy, sending him staggering backward. In about two seconds, half a dozen weapons were pointed at Gabe and me. Nobody moved. The possibility of dying hung in the air like cannon smoke.
“You fucking freak,” the enraged cop bellowed. “I’ll kick your homo ass for ya, bitch.”
“Fuck you, asshole,” Gabe sneered.
Officer Angry launched himself off the wall at the same instant as the door burst open and Shirley stepped back into the room. It was like a Warner Bros. cartoon where a character hangs motionless in the air for a while.
“Unhook ’em,” Shirley ordered.
“Whaaa?”
“You heard me, goddamn it. Unhook ’em. And give them their weapons and permits back.”
They took their sweet-ass time. Pouting like schoolboys who’d been told there’d be no recess today. Once they had their handcuffs back in their handy-dandy handcuff cases, Shirley motioned them out into the hall, then walked over to where Gabe and I were massaging our wrists back to life and spoke in a low voice.
“I don’t know who you guys are or what you’re doing here, but you can bet your ass I’m gonna find out.”
We stood there on the carpet and watched him leave. Gabe wandered over to the fridge, pulled out a San Pellegrino, and made half of it disappear before offering me the other half. I poured it down my tightly constricted throat. It damn nearly bubbled back out. I stood still and swallowed, a trickle at a time.
“This thing is coming apart big-time,” Gabe said. “That cop starts asking the right questions, and he’s sure as hell gonna figure out who I am. I’m featured prominently in just about every cop database there is. And after that it ain’t but one short step from me to Joey and then to you.”
I nodded. “We better get out of here,” I said. I checked my watch. 4:25. “The kid . . . Dylan whatever . . . the night manager. Let’s wait for him to come on duty at six—that way we can check out without winding up with a police escort. We leave now, and that asshole downstairs behind the desk is gonna drop a dime on us in a heartbeat.”
As usual, Gabe caught my drift.
“We’re blown here, man. We’re right back where we fucking started. If there’s some mystery here, we haven’t even managed to get a sniff of it. Let’s get out of here.”
“Not quite yet,” I
said. “Not quite yet.”
I leaned on the doorbell. A long minute passed.
“Yes?” she called.
“Martha,” I said. “It’s Leo. Leo Waterman.”
Seemed like a full minute passed before the door opened a crack.
I bent at the waist and got eyeball to eyeball with her.
“It’s me, Martha.”
The door started to close. I blurted out, “You remember Billy Edlund’s party? The night he drove his old man’s golf cart into the pool?”
Long pause. The crack reappeared. “You’re not . . . ,” she whispered. And then she stopped herself. “It is,” she breathed. “By God, it’s you, Leo.” The door opened all the way. She was wearing a black Nike jogging suit. The red headband holding back her hair matched the red stripes on the suit. A coordinated ensemble it was.
“Look at you. I can’t believe . . . you’re so skinny, and all that hair. What are you doing here?”
“That’s what I came to talk to you about.” I motioned back over my shoulder, toward Gabe and the car. “Might be better if we could put the rental car in your garage.”
Her eyes got wary. “Is someone . . . I mean . . .”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. She took my word for it.
I followed her inside, while she rummaged through her purse and eventually came out with the garage remote, and then hurried back to the car.
Took Gabe and me maybe two minutes to stash the car, retrieve Carl’s thumb drive, and get back inside.
I introduced them. Martha wanted to feed and water us, but we said we were fine. She was still sputtering about my appearance when the three of us sat down in her living room. “I don’t understand, Leo . . . What . . . I mean . . .”
I told her. All of it. From the moment I’d spotted somebody tailing her in Seattle, to what happened in that alley, to hiding out and recovering down on the coast, right up to our second confrontation with the cops a couple of hours ago. The longer I talked the more wide eyed and slack jawed she became.
“They cut you?”
“They carved me like a Halloween pumpkin,” I said. “Took four separate surgeries to fix it, and I still look like the loser in a machete fight.”
Looked to me like she was going to cry. “Oh, Leo,” she said when I’d finished. “I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“You can sign a consent form allowing Suzanne Bradley to talk to me about Matthew.”
“Phil will go nuts,” she said.
“Good thing he’s your ex, then,” Gabe said.
She thought it over at some length. “Maybe . . .” She looked down at the carpet. “You know . . . sleeping dogs and all of that.”
“I think your father was right,” I said quickly. “I think somebody else had a hand in turning your son into something he otherwise wasn’t.”
“How can that be?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“We got, at the most, one more day before we’re gonna have to fold our tents and get the hell out of here,” Gabe said.
“You know a girl named Wendy Bohannon?” I asked.
“From the clinic,” Martha said.
“Yeah.”
“Poor thing. She found her mother hanging—”
“We know,” I interrupted. “We met the new mommy. Wendy told us that Matthew got a job. She said the job seemed to change him. Said he was never negative about other people until he started working at this place.”
Martha shook her headband. “I don’t know anything about any job. Back then . . . back when Matthew . . . you know . . . when it happened . . . he was living with Phil then.” She waved an angry hand. “He wouldn’t stay here with me anymore because I wouldn’t permit guns in the house.”
“Bickford something,” Gabe threw in.
Martha sat up a little straighter. “Bill Bickford, maybe. He’s a friend of Phil’s. Has some kind of store up on Evergreen. Up near the top of the hill. They belong to a gun club together. Way the heck out in Conway someplace. Matthew used to go out there with his father for weekends. Run around the woods. Do their little boy gun nut things.”
Seemed like we’d taken a left turn someplace, so I steered us back onto the road. “What about Suzanne Bradley?” I pressed.
She sat there, staring into space for a moment, and then got to her feet.
“She was the only one he ever talked to. We’d sent him to other counselors, but he just sat there and didn’t say a word. She was the only one he ever shared anything with. I’ll call her now,” she announced. I sat back on the couch and watched her cross the room, step inside what appeared to be her home office, and close the door.
Three or four minutes later, Martha reappeared. “She’ll be over in the morning, before she goes to the clinic,” she announced. “She’s very nervous about doing this, and I don’t blame her one bit. Phil’s sued people who even requested Matthew’s personal information.”
Gabe and I got to our feet.
“Where are you going?” Martha asked.
“Figured we’d sleep in the car if you don’t mind,” I said.
She shook her headband again. “You can use Matthew’s room.” I started to demur, but she was having none of it. She motioned toward the stairs with her head. We grabbed our stuff and followed her.
The door to the room was open, and the light was on, as if somewhere inside of her, some small part was hoping against hope he might still come home.
Posters on the walls, little wooden desk with an old iMac sitting on it. A cup full of pens and pencils. College pennants. Bunk bed. Teenage bedroom U.S.A.
Gabe dropped the bag on the bottom bunk.
“In deference to my bad leg, I’ll be takin’ the bottom,” Gabe announced.
I didn’t bother to argue the point. When somebody gives up six months of their life to help you get back on your feet and then volunteers to help you on a personal quest for vengeance, a little gratitude is pretty much de rigueur.
I was scoping out the top bunk, thinking it was gonna be like sleeping on a windowsill and trying to imagine the impact when I rolled out in the middle of the night and hit the floor, when Martha began to talk, as much to herself as to us.
“When we bought the bunk bed,” she began, “you know, we figured as he grew up . . . like kids do . . . we thought he’d have friends stay the night, you know, sleepovers and such.” She stopped talking and swallowed hard. “But he never had a friend . . . not one . . . not ever. He was always the odd number, the one who they bullied and teased.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” came out of me as naturally as if I were making an excuse for myself.
“I keep asking myself what else I could have done,” she mused. “How I might have handled things better.”
She looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. “I wish I could stop wondering.”
She straightened her shoulders and walked over to the closet and pulled the door open. The space was filled from floor to ceiling with packages and mail and FedEx envelopes and cookie tins and shoeboxes. Martha looked over at me as if dumbfounded by the sight of it.
“What’s all that?” I asked.
“People sent me things,” she said. “Bibles, teddy bears, toys, Christian self-help books, handmade wooden crosses. People sent candy too, and brownies, and boxes of chocolate, Bundt cakes. Food from all over the world. I didn’t want to throw away anything that people sent, but to tell you the truth, I was too scared to eat any of it. There was no way to be sure it wasn’t poisoned.”
She took several deep breaths, as if to steady herself. “They don’t even count him among the dead,” she said. “They say a man was killed. Like Matthew’s death doesn’t even count.”
She walked over and opened the door gently. “I’ve got some paperwork I need to finish,” she said. “If you need anything, just help yourselves. See you guys in the morning.”
She worked up a wan smile for me and then left the room, closing the
door behind. Neither of us said a word for quite a while.
“How do you not blame yourself for what your son did?” Gabe asked.
“You don’t.”
“How do you not remember him as the little kid he used to be?”
“I’m guessing that’s the hard part.”
“Don’t see how you could avoid it.”
“All you gotta do is remember what he ended up doing.”
Gabe crawled into the bottom bunk. The kid’s mattress folded around Gabe like a hot dog bun. I pulled the thumb drive out of my pants pocket. “I’m gonna see if maybe I can’t use the kid’s computer to read whatever Carl and the guys got. That gonna bother you?” I asked.
“Just douse the light, gonna take a little nap.” Gabe muttered and turned that broad back my way as I wandered over and pushed the button on the back of Matthew’s iMac. The bong serenaded me as I snapped off the overhead.
Sitting in Matthew’s chair made it clear that, despite my somewhat emaciated present state, my ass had grown considerably since middle school.
They’d managed to get a little of everything, but not all of anything. Matthew had no criminal record whatsoever. He had a valid library card. Had failed the written test for his driver’s license two weeks before his death. What was most revelatory were Matthew’s school records. As I had surmised from my brief encounter with him earlier in his life, his difficulties had not come upon him suddenly.
Matthew Hardaway had never been in the same area code as normal. He didn’t utter a syllable until he was three and a half years old. By the time he got to school, he was so hypersensitive to touch they had to cut the labels out of his clothes. In kindergarten, he’d been diagnosed with sensory integration disorder and had been put under the care of a school district speech pathologist, who summarily concluded that Matthew should be immediately considered for special education status, which is where Phil Hardaway entered the picture.
From that moment on, Matthew’s journey through the public school system was a series of speed bumps, school district attempts to meet his special needs, followed immediately by Phil Hardaway thwarting their efforts. It was like Martha said: Phil was totally unwilling to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with his son and apparently had both the means and wherewithal to put the kibosh on any attempt to label Matthew as being special or different or developmentally disabled in any way.