He emerged into Post Alley with his phone already in his hand but didn’t call his daughter’s house until he was halfway down the street, shoulders hunched against the rest of the world.
As he pleaded with the person who answered, getting her to accept the fact that he hadn’t yet been able to confirm the venue she’d specified, he didn’t notice a stocky, red-haired man coming out of the deli on the corner: a man who heard every detail of Todd’s phone conversation and quickly relayed it on.
In a hotel ten minutes’ walk away, a man sat on the end of a bed. He had been there most of the afternoon. It was not a nice bed. It was not a nice room. It was, all in all, not a great hotel. Shepherd didn’t care. He’d stayed in good hotels often enough. Unless you are in urgent need of spa treatment and don’t mind spending thirty bucks on breakfast, the difference isn’t very noticeable when the lights go out. You’re still just a man in a room in a building in a city, surrounded by strangers, hoping that tonight you will sleep.
His phone rang. He checked the number and did not answer it. It was Alison O’Donnell’s cell phone. Again. She’d left a number of messages during the day. Her husband, too. They were in an excitable state, having hooked up with some policeman in Seattle, one who’d had the sense to realize that the reason Shepherd had specified Alison should call him on her cell was that the alleged FBI agent who’d left his card with her would accept calls only from that particular number. Give a cigar to Detective Whatever-His-Name-Was: Evidently the SPD Missing Persons Bureau recruited from a higher IQ bracket than the sheriff’s department in Cannon Beach. Shepherd had no interest in talking to Mrs. O’Donnell now. Things were closing in. Not just the situation he’d brought about, but everything. He could feel it getting closer by the hour.
Behind him on the bed lay his suitcase. It had lasted four years so far. Before that there’d been one exactly the same, and another before that. How many had he gone through in his time? He had no idea.
The suitcase was full of money. This was what had made him accept the bargain and stick to it, a bargain that had seen him lending material assistance to someone who’d been declared far beyond the pale. The first thing the girl remembered on the beach was the money’s whereabouts. It had been arranged that way—with the 9-by-9 symbol as a trigger—and Shepherd had gone straight back to Portland to pick it up from the old Chinese woman to whom it had been entrusted. He’d broken the terms of the initial bargain because he couldn’t wait any longer. He needed the money now. It was to be his stake, his first birthday present, his head start next time. It was utterly forbidden to do this, but he wasn’t one of them, and he would not be even when he took advantage of the older deal, the one struck when he was twenty.
Work for us, that deal went, do our dirty work, and we’ll arrange that you, too, will be reminded, when you come back. Shepherd had not merely been present at deaths, after all; he’d been instrumental, as all who took the title were, in rebirths. He had arrived in people’s lives, sometime after their eighteenth birthday, and supplied the trigger they’d registered with the trust. A phrase, a piece of music, a picture or symbol, on a couple of occasions a specific flavor: memory joggers, carefully selected so as not to be something the person would run into by accident, before he or she was ready. Before someone like Shepherd was on hand to guide the subjects through the process of realizing that their current feet were not the first with which they had walked the earth.
Shepherd knew that if a count were made in his life, however, the deaths far, far outweighed the rebirths. He had become a specialist. People who found out something, however small. People who guessed next to nothing at all. And once in a while even one of their own. Someone who had become a threat to the system or had returned damaged in transit—either of whom was not then supposed to be helped to come back again.
Murders and motel rooms—in the end they all flattened into one. Now Shepherd could feel his legacy gathering around. With Anderson’s machine he might even be able to see them, if it had really worked. The people Shepherd had sent away grew thicker around him. Like invisible cats, but larger and far colder, rubbing insidiously against the back of his legs and neck. Waiting. How far away were they? Not far enough.
Shepherd needed this situation to be over with. Then he had to admit his condition to Rose and start putting things in place. He needed certainty, more than ever. Now that the time was approaching, he’d found himself prey to occasional doubt, to the idea that maybe there was no deal, that all those like him had been tricked. Perhaps this notion had come to him in a dream or a waking thought in one of the long night watches when he looked back over the things he’d done. Or perhaps one of the shadows that surrounded him had whispered it in his ear, not as a warning but as a taunt. Either way it occurred to him one night that he’d never met someone like him who had come back. Never heard of one from the others either, and he’d known more than a few like him who had died, after years of long ser vice. The man who’d recruited Shepherd, for example, who found a gangling youth in a small town in Wisconsin and made him a promise compelling enough to make that boy leave everything behind, even a sweetheart whom he loved. That man had died twenty-five years ago. Since then there’d been no sign of him, even though it had been agreed that he could get in touch with Shepherd once he’d been reminded.
But he must be out there somewhere.
The deal must be real. It had to be. These doubts were nothing more than a variation on those that every human felt when faced with the end of the road.
Shepherd could smell the bathroom from where he sat. His stomach was in near-constant revolt now, and yet still he tried to eat. It was a habit the body found hard to break. Like a wounded dog, viciously rejected, kicked for years, but still returning with cowed back to its hateful master or mistress, in the hope of love this time. He could remember his mother, in her last days, when he was thirteen. In the months of her slow death, she’d made little notes in a book, jotted down memories of her early life, as if gathering fallen leaves to her chest, to stop them from being scattered and lost by the coming winds. In the final few weeks, she stopped doing it. She merely sat in her chair out on the porch, reeking of cancer, and done nothing but wait, with increasing impatience, for the end. Ready to go home alone, to leave, waiting for her wounded dog of a body to finally lie down and die, so she could be free of its relentless needs and loves and demands.
At the time Shepherd had accused his mother of giving up. Now he understood.
After a while his phone rang once again. He looked at the screen, answered it.
“We’ve found who you’re looking for,” Rose said. “Arrangements for a meeting are being finalized.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
“When I call, be there fast,” she said. “This situation has to be resolved immediately, I’ve got a bad feeling about who this might be.”
“Who?” he asked, to see whether she’d gotten it right, making it sound like it didn’t matter to him.
“Someone we all used to know,” she muttered, and cut the connection.
Shepherd stood. She knew. That didn’t matter. It merely made it all the more important that Madison O’Donnell wound up dead, and that it happened fast.
He got his gun out of the suitcase and closed it up.
chapter
THIRTY-SIX
“I don’t see how we’re going to do this,” Gary said.
We’d spent five minutes inspecting the back of the building in Belltown, confirming that the windows were boarded from the second story up. Their condition was academic: The fire escape stopped ten feet from the ground, and I wouldn’t have trusted a cat’s weight on the rest. The ground-level door had a pair of Dorling bolts, which could be opened only from the inside. It would have taken time and a sledgehammer to get through the door from here, an endeavor that would arouse comment in the parking lot that ran right up to the back wall and in which we sat, peering up through the windshield. Patrons came and went, a
nd an officious-looking man was sitting in a booth. He’d already given us a long and suspicious glare. Nobody was going to be dealing drugs on this guy’s watch. Or smashing down doors.
We got out of the car and walked around the side to the road that ran along the front of the building. Crossed the street and stood looking at it from the other side. It was coming up to five o’clock. Passing road traffic was light and moving fairly fast. Nobody in a car was going to notice much. The problem was pedestrians. There was enough cause for people to be on their feet in this part of Belltown—a few battered bars, hopeful new ones, restaurants dotted here and there. Most people would mind their own business. Some would not.
“Go over and ring the buzzer,” I said.
Fisher went across the street. I watched the windows of the upper story as he leaned on each of the buttons in turn. The sky was overcast and dark enough that the reflections were muted, but there was no discernible change behind any of them. Gary looked back at me. I held my right hand up to my ear, nodded upward. He got out his phone, dialed. He shrugged. Nothing changed.
He walked back. “So now what?”
I went into a convenience store, and then we met L.T. outside the coffeehouse on the next corner up from the building, the one Gary had been sitting outside when he took his photos of Amy. L.T. was on the sidewalk with a friend, a tall guy who looked so disreputable you could have arrested him just for being alive and probably made it stick. He regarded Fisher and me with something between hunger and open hostility, but he probably looked at his own reflection that way, too.
“I said to meet inside,” I reminded him.
“Threw us out,” L.T. answered.
I offered him a cigarette, a folded fifty lying on top of the pack. He took the note, along with two cigarettes, winked at his friend.
“So?”
“Nobody come out,” he said. “They still inside.”
“You want to earn another fifty? Each?”
“Shit,” L.T. said, which I took as assent.
“Either of you holding?” They shook their heads. “No, really.” After a beat, both nodded. “You don’t want to be,” I said. “Stash it somewhere. Now.”
They touched hands with the lightness of magicians, and then the tall one trotted around the corner to hide their drugs.
“Okay,” I said when he got back. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” I pointed down the street. “I want one of you on each of those corners.”
“And do what?”
“Just stand in the middle of the sidewalk. Eyefuck anyone who looks like they’re heading your way, but don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Okay? I just want five minutes without too many people passing that building.”
“What this shit about?” L.T. asked.
“None of your business.” I gave him the money. “When you can’t see us anymore, you can go.”
L.T. took the cash, nodded at Fisher. “This dude ever say anything?”
“He’s choosy. Only talks to other narcotics cops. And he’s seen where you hide your shit. Understand?”
L.T. made the money disappear. “Don’t you want to know about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Little girl I told you about, man.”
“Not really,” I said. “Why?”
“See her again, last night. She come back later, go right up to the door. Keep pressing a buzzer. But there ain’t nobody answer. And then I see her later watching outside some new bar, a couple blocks downtown. Way after little-girl bedtime, you know?”
“Great,” I said. “Now go stand where I told you to.”
Gary and I waited as the two guys crossed the street. L.T. took the corner nearest us. His friend loped down to the other end of the block. Within a couple of minutes, most pedestrians were electing to cross to the other side rather than walk close to either of them.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I went across the street and straight up to the door of the building, Gary following right behind. “Get out your phone,” I said. “Make it look like you’re placing a call. Glance up at the building once in a while.”
I got out my key ring. I took it slow, trying to feel confident that the combination of a largely empty sidewalk behind me and a colleague who looked like he was trying to get hold of someone in the building to achieve legitimate entry, would make me invisible for long enough.
“Christ,” Fisher said after a couple of minutes. “There’s a police car.”
“Where?”
“Down at the intersection.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
I kept moving the tool. Trying just to feel the metal inside the lock, the balance of tensions, the ways the hidden components did and did not want to move. It wasn’t happening. I switched to a more flexible tool.
“Fuck—he’s gone,” Fisher said, looking up the street the other way.
“The police?”
“No—your friend. L.T. Just vanished, didn’t even see him go.”
“What are the cops doing now?”
“They’ve pulled over. Where that other guy is.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’s running this way.”
“Oh, crap,” I said. I glanced around and saw L.T.’s friend pounding up the sidewalk. One cop was running after him, the other stood at the car, on the radio.
“Stupid fucker kept L.T.’s drugs,” I said. “You can’t trust any one.”
“Jack, he’s heading toward us.”
“I know that. Put your back to the street.”
I turned to the door again, closed my eyes. I heard the sound of the foot pursuit, the cop shouting at the running suspect, but tried to concentrate only on the feel of the thin piece of metal in my hands.
“Jack—”
“Shut up, Gary. I’m nearly there.”
The sound of chaos got closer. “He!” someone was bellowing breathlessly. “He, there! He the man!”
L.T.’s friend had stopped running. He was twenty feet away, pointing straight at me. The pursuing cop was slowing, hand on his gun, figuring this new twist. His partner was heading our way, too, now. I could hear sirens in the distance.
“He,” the tall guy said again, jabbing his finger in my direction. The closest cop was approaching him warily, but casting looks in my direction. “He pay me, he tell me be there. I ain’t sell no shit to no one.”
The second cop had made the sidewalk now. While his partner grabbed the tall guy’s arm, he walked toward Gary and me.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said loudly. “You got any idea what this guy is talking about?”
“Sorry, no,” I said, looking at him with an honest citizen’s unthinking deference. There was a faint click at my hands as the tumblers finally fell. I pushed the door open behind me as if it were a twice-daily occurrence. “Is there a problem?”
The cop looked at me a beat longer, then lost interest and went to help his colleague subdue the tall guy, who was kicking and shouting and raising hell.
I stepped into the building, Fisher right behind.
chapter
THIRTY-SEVEN
After the door closed, we were in pitch darkness. I hadn’t wanted to fumble for a switch with the cops right there.
“Christ,” Fisher said. “That was…”
“…fine.” I said. “Keep your voice down.”
I pulled out the cheap flashlight I’d bought in the convenience store. I pointed it back toward the door, ran the beam along the wall at shoulder height. Saw a bank of switches. Flicked them one by one. Nothing happened. Pointed the light down at the floor instead. There was nothing lying there.
“No power,” Fisher said.
“But no mail or junk either. Someone picks up.”
We were standing in a wide, high-ceilinged corridor, peeling paper on the walls and an uneven floor. Once it had been tiled in a simple, businesslike way. Now many of the tiles were broken or missing. I made my way along it, treading carefully. The building sm
elled damp and fusty and old. Ten feet away a door hung ajar slightly, on the right. It opened into a long, narrow kitchen, the ser vice area of the coffee shop that had been the last occupant of the front part of the building. In the glow thrown by the lamp, it looked like the proprietors had left work one evening and decided never to come back. Broken cups, rusty machinery, the scent of rats’ passing, and beneath all that the smell of Seattle itself, old coffee and fog. This building was dead. It was like being in the hold of a shipwreck, hundreds of feet under the sea.
The two doors farther along the corridor were both open onto a wide, dark area cluttered with large pieces of display furniture, dating back to when the place had been a department store, moved out from the walls and left stranded in the space like more tall, abandoned ships.
I came back out and found a door in the back wall, too. I gave this a shake. It didn’t move at all. This must be the one we’d seen in the parking lot. There was another door around the back of the staircase. I opened it, looked down. Pitch-black and cold, with narrow wooden stairs leading to a basement.
I went back and headed up the stairs, climbed quietly to the next floor, shifting my weight along the banister until I was sure the treads of the staircase were sound. Fisher followed. When I got up to the second level, I gestured to keep him still and listened.
No sound of conversation or movement, no creaking floorboards.
All the doors on this level were shut and locked. The same on the next. Someone had gone to some trouble to make sure fire precautions had been followed, closing the doors to stop a blaze flooding from room to room. On the third level, I chose the door at the front of the building and quietly jacked the lock.
The other side was a wide, empty space, the full width of the building’s street frontage, faint lines of light around boarded-in windows. A flick around with the lamp revealed a few pieces of furniture, extension cords running the perimeter and up and down the walls, and a collection of rolls of mildewed backdrop tilted into one corner. Presumably this was the area that had been used as a studio. I tried to imagine a much younger Amy perched in one of those chairs, cradling a coffee, watching a shoot. I couldn’t.
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