Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  The woman was large but not soft, and her face was set in a permanent frown. As if she didn’t get many visitors and liked it that way. She wore jeans and a faded blue man’s dress shirt. Ornate tattoos peeked out past the ends of her rolled-up sleeves.

  Behind her was a long wall with numbered slots, well over a hundred of them. The slots were wide enough for large envelopes, but Peter couldn’t read the numbers from the far side of the counter. He imagined an array of mail bins behind the slots. A vast low hum came through the wall behind her. The doors at the far end of the room would lead to the rest of the operation.

  “Hi there,” June said brightly, walking up to the counter. “I’m looking for a company called SafeSecure. One of their employees gave me this address.”

  The permanent frown got deeper. “I’d have to look them up,” said the large woman. She rolled her chair over to her computer and tapped on the keyboard. “Yep, they’re a customer. Although I don’t know why they’d send you here. We’re just a mail forwarding service.”

  “Where do you forward their mail to?”

  “We don’t physically forward anything,” said the woman. “We just scan everything and put it online. The customer logs on with a password.”

  “Can you give me a billing address?”

  The large woman shook her head. “Everything’s electronic, paid automatically by credit card. They could be on the moon for all I know.”

  Peter said, “What about a mailing address for the credit card?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” the woman said sharply. Her frown had turned into a scowl. “Our customers pay us for their privacy. It’s time for you to go.”

  “One of their people left something at our house,” said Peter. “We’re just trying to return it. Is the mailing address on the credit card the same as the mailing address here?” That’s how Peter would have set it up. A closed loop, leading nowhere.

  The large woman’s eyes dropped to the computer screen. “Yep,” she said. And she must have pushed a button somewhere, because the door at the end of the long room opened and a man came through. He was tall, dark, and ugly, and about three sizes larger than Peter. He wore a skin-tight T-shirt that showed off his muscles, and he glared at Peter like he was having a bad day.

  “Evah’ting okay, Trish?” He sounded like Ziggy Marley’s mean uncle.

  “These people were just leaving.”

  So they did.

  • • •

  BACK ON THE ROAD, June said, “Pretty slick back there, asking about the credit card.”

  “I was curious,” said Peter. “It seemed like something I might use someday.”

  “You never told me where you live.”

  Peter looked out the window. “I move around a lot.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “My mom and dad live in northern Wisconsin. No brothers or sisters.”

  Peter knew she wasn’t exactly asking about his parents. It was part of this thing they were dancing around. “My folks took in stray kids,” he said, “ever since I was little.”

  “What, like a halfway house?”

  “Nothing official. More like small-town gravity, an invisible force attracting troubled kids. A few were really wild, but most of them just had shitty parents. This kid Tommy, he was eight years old and his mom burned him with her cigarettes. He lived at the farm behind our property. And Deidre, she was fifteen and pregnant and her dad kicked her out of the house.” He shook his head. “January in northern Wisconsin, ten below and the wind howling off Lake Superior.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “Sounds like an education.”

  “Definitely.” He smiled then, remembering Deidre. “Pretty exciting for a twelve-year-old boy, having a pregnant teenager in your house. I fell pretty hard for Deidre.”

  She gave him a look. “This isn’t some kind of fetish, is it?”

  “No,” he said, laughing. “Part of it was knowing what she’d done to get pregnant, the whole idea of sex. But mostly she was just, you know, beautiful. The way all pregnant women are beautiful.”

  June kept looking at him, but differently now.

  “Anyway, my mom always had a big pot of soup on the stove, homemade bread in the oven. It was a small town, and word got around, not just our town but the ones around us, too. Mrs. Ash would feed you, would take you in. Her cousin was the county police dispatcher, and she made sure the word spread. So, once or twice a year, some kid would appear on the front porch, stay for dinner, and somehow still be there for breakfast. No questions asked, but sooner or later, they’d start to talk. If they stayed more than a few days, my dad and my uncle Jerry would put them to work on the Saturday crew, boys and girls both. Teach them how to do something useful, frame a wall or wire a light switch. Hang siding.” He smiled. “A couple guys stayed long enough to learn how to build cabinets. We were like the world’s smallest trade school.”

  “Didn’t people ever show up to take their kids home? I bet that could get ugly.”

  “Yeah, people get weird about their kids,” said Peter. “It’s an ownership thing. Tommy’s mom came by with an ax, a lit cigarette hanging out of her mouth. The burns on Tommy’s arms were barely scabbed over.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. My dad kept a shotgun by the back door. My mom has the cops on speed-dial. Tommy stayed with us a few more weeks. By then we’d found his grandmother in Green Bay.”

  “Your mom didn’t just feed them,” said June.

  “Oh, no. She was big on life skills. More like boot camp for early independence. Cook basic meals, keep yourself clean, keep the house clean. Boy or girl, that was the rule. Everybody learns everything. The older kids, she’d help find them jobs, start a savings account, even get their GED. And do something creative, always. My mom still teaches art at NMU, but that’s mostly for the health insurance. She’s really an artist, paint and watercolor. The last time I talked to her she was taking a welding class. My aunt plays about ten different instruments in bar bands all over three states. She always said if she had bigger hands she’d be the female Jelly Roll Morton.”

  “That must have been hard on you, with all those other people in the house.”

  “I learned a lot,” said Peter. “It definitely made me independent. I was pretty wild myself.”

  She snorted. “I can only imagine.”

  22

  Back on I-5, June took them through downtown, with Puget Sound shining gunmetal gray through the gaps in the office buildings and condo towers, then got off again at Olive Way. She headed east up a steep hill through a dense neighborhood with a funky jumble of mismatched buildings and a lot of construction, the whole thing evidently in a constant state of evolution. Cars were thick on the streets. Peter figured parking would be at a premium here. The narrow, disorderly roads tangled and turned according to the needs of the hillside on which they ran. People were out on foot and on bicycles undeterred by the wet weather. Rain gear seemed to be a fashion accessory here.

  “This is Capitol Hill,” June said, playing tour guide and pointing out the sights. “My neighborhood. That’s Glo’s, great breakfast. The Coastal Kitchen is up on Fifteenth, awesome breakfast. The Hi-Spot is down the hill in Madrona, maybe we’ll go there tomorrow for their green eggs and ham. And Caffe Ladro to the left, best coffee in town. Much better than Starbucks.” She knocked him with an elbow. “You’re not allowed to go to Starbucks unless it’s a national emergency.”

  All the landmarks she pointed out were food-related. Peter took mental notes.

  “Seattle was built on seven hills, or so they say.” She waved her hand behind her. “Queen Anne Hill is northwest of us, First Hill to the south. Denny Hill they bulldozed years ago, and used the dirt to fill in the tidal flats.”

  At the top of the hill, she got off the main drag and drove expertly through the residential side streets
lined with parked cars, often turning them into de facto one-lane roads. She turned left and right at seemingly arbitrary intersections that moved them through the streetscape at a much faster rate of speed than the main drag. She gave cyclists a wide berth, but played chicken ruthlessly with oncoming cars, forcing them over so she could continue at speed. It was about a mile to her place on the far side of the hill, she said.

  “Do me a favor and slow down,” said Peter. “Circle around, starting about three blocks out. I want to see every street around your place.”

  She raised her eyebrows and gave him a sideways look, but turned left and lightened her lead foot. “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Anything unusual.”

  “This is Capitol Hill,” she said. “It’s all unusual.”

  It was true, Peter had never seen a burly bearded drag queen wearing a transparent plastic raincoat over a leopard-print minidress with five-inch platform heels. Or a 1970s Lincoln Continental turned into a kind of dragon-car, with an elaborate toothy snout in the front, spines along the rooftop, and a tail up in the air at the back, suspended somehow by a cable from the roof. But was any of that more odd than a group of women in burkas out for dinner in Baghdad? Or a village of ice fishing shacks on a frozen Wisconsin lake when the temperature hit twenty below? People were weird everywhere. Weird was normal.

  “Let’s just say I’ll know it when I see it,” said Peter, his head on a swivel. He wasn’t worried about drag queens or art cars. He was looking for late-model vehicles parked with the engine running, or repeat viewings of men and women on foot, or work vans big enough to hold a surveillance team where there was no evident work being done.

  June drove in a slow spiral, closing in on her apartment. But Peter saw nothing unusual.

  Maybe they were clean.

  Or maybe the hunters were very good.

  June lived on a residential street in a converted three-car garage behind a big clapboard Victorian. Peter’s father had always called those houses “painted ladies” because of the elaborate, multicolored decorative trim. As June pulled into the driveway, Peter counted six different colors, bright tones that made the house seem to glow in the soft rainy light.

  She’d told him in the car that she had an unusual arrangement. She paid the rent for her little studio in cash, and there were no utilities in her name. It was unusual because, after decades of pretending these illegal apartments didn’t exist, Seattle now encouraged these “mother-in-law” units as a way to improve density in the urban sprawl, and also make the city more affordable for young people. But Leo Boyle, her landlord, hadn’t registered the place with the city, although he’d given June several different explanations why. Sometimes he said he was afraid that his taxes might go up. Sometimes he told her that he didn’t want his name in the database. It didn’t quite add up, but she liked the apartment.

  Peter stood stretching in the driveway, tight from the long car ride, while June unlocked the door to her apartment.

  His phone rang. It was Lewis.

  “Jarhead. You alone right now?”

  “If you ask me what I’m wearing, I’m hanging up.”

  “Man, you really should be open to new experiences,” said Lewis. Peter could hear the man’s tilted grin. “But that ain’t why I’m calling. Like you asked, I spent a little time looking up that woman who died, Hazel Cassidy.”

  June stood in the doorway, a question on her face. He covered the mouthpiece. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said. “It’s Lewis.”

  She went inside, leaving the door open.

  Peter said, “What’d you find?”

  “Mostly nothing. Did a little reading online. Found her obituary. Well respected in her field, smart as hell.” Lewis was enjoying himself.

  “You said mostly.”

  “You like things complicated, don’t you?”

  Peter’s platoon once had spent the better part of a week caught between two rebel militias who were also fighting each other. As it turned out, the militia leaders were brothers, and one had stolen the other man’s wife. So Peter knew that people usually killed each other for reasons that were, at their root, personal. And complicated.

  “Spit it out, Lewis. What did you learn?”

  “She had a restraining order against her ex-husband. For six years.”

  “Okay, good. Something to grab onto. Who’s the ex-husband?”

  “No idea.”

  “What do you mean, no idea?”

  “The name on the restraining order is ‘S. Kolodny.’ No address. You have any idea how many S. Kolodnys there are out there?”

  Peter smiled. “Can’t be more than a few.”

  “The software I got lists over a thousand people named Kolodny on the West Coast alone. But you’re really gonna like this. The restraining order form has a physical description. This guy is six feet eight and weighs two-eighty. A real beast.”

  “Weren’t you going to buy a plane ticket today? I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “You know I bruise easy. I’m thinking I might sit this one out. On the plus side, S. Kolodny’s in his late fifties now. So you can probably take him by yourself.”

  “Maybe with a baseball bat.”

  “I always been partial to a shotgun,” said Lewis. “Anyway, you want me to find out more about this guy, you gotta narrow it down. I need a first name and a location.”

  “I’ll work on it,” said Peter. “Call you later.”

  “Listen,” said Lewis. “About the money.”

  Peter sighed. “We’ve already had this conversation.”

  “I looked at the accounts, Jarhead. You haven’t touched the money. It’s like you’re embarrassed.”

  “Well,” said Peter. “We did steal it.”

  “Yeah, from a guy who stole it first. And he never would have gotten caught, ’cause if you can’t prove the conspiracy, his part wasn’t even fucking illegal. And everyone else was dead.”

  “Lewis.”

  “You don’t think we earned it, what we did?”

  “You earned it. It wasn’t your fight. For me, it was personal.”

  “Well, hell,” said Lewis. “Come down to it, I wasn’t in it for the money, either. I was in it for Dinah. But whatever the reason, we took a big fucking risk. The money just came with it, otherwise it’d be lost in that numbered account until the end of time. So you got nothing to apologize for.”

  “I’m not apologizing,” said Peter. “But that doesn’t mean I’d want to explain it to my parents.”

  Long silence. Then Lewis said, “I’m so glad we had this talk.”

  23

  June had left her boots on the mat. Peter stood in the doorway, the drizzle cold on the back of his neck, and looked inside her apartment.

  It was basically one big room, not exactly neat, but definitely comfortable. He saw a pair of cheap modern couches, a beat-up dining table that served as her work area, and tall, fully stocked bookshelves doing double-duty as partitions for the bedroom. Slate tiles were laid over the old garage floor, and June had covered them with a giant threadbare Persian rug in the living area. The roll-up garage doors had been replaced with wide sliding glass units that let in plenty of the watery spring light.

  June was buzzing around the room, stacking stray books and magazines, collecting clothes left on the back of chairs, tossing assorted miscellaneous outdoor gear into a corner closet. “I’d say this is messier than usual, but that wouldn’t be exactly accurate.” She flashed him a smile. “Life’s too short to waste it cleaning.”

  A bright red sea kayak was suspended on a pulley system from the ten-foot ceiling, and a pair of bicycles—one commuter bike, one full-suspension mountain bike—hung on a graceful cantilevered oak rack that elegantly exploited the laws of physics. The galley-style kitchen was simple but highly functional, a lo
ng row of salvaged Doug-fir cabinets and decent appliances paired with a broad island workstation and four mismatched vintage stools. The design details were crisp and clean, with two-piece baseboard and classic craftsman-style trim at the doors and windows. Peter had seen his share of crappy apartments in his time, and this was not one of them. Someone had put some care into this place.

  June stood at the long table and started unloading her pack. “Aren’t you coming in?”

  The white static fizzed and popped at the base of his brain. He thought of Don’s advice, gradual desensitization. “Sure.” He stepped through the door, the static foaming higher and his leg reminding him of its delicate condition. “Do you have any ice?”

  “In theory,” she said, waving him to the kitchen. “Plastic bags to the right of the fridge, second drawer. You see anything else you like, knock yourself out. Mi casa, su casa, baby.”

  He limped into the kitchen area. The medical boot did help, and the static was manageable for the moment. Maybe Don was right. Suck it up, Marine.

  Aesthetics aside, her kitchen was a desolate wasteland. The fridge was empty but for assorted condiments, a brine-crusted jar of green olives, eggs long past their sell date, and a half-eaten tub of yogurt that had turned into an uncontrolled science experiment. Her freezer had a half-full bottle of Grey Goose vodka, five partial pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, and a box of veggie burgers so frost-encrusted that you’d have to thaw them in a volcano. She was either on the road a lot, not much of a cook, or both.

  But there was plenty of ice. He loaded a Ziploc and stumped back toward the couch. He wanted to ask June about her father. Then he saw that she had her laptop open.

  “Hey, turn that thing off,” he said. “We don’t know what your hunters can do. If they could track you through your phone, they probably hacked your laptop, too.”