Heaven is nice. Very, very bright, though.
Beep, beep, beep, beep…
Right, hospital, not heaven. Doctor, not angel. Or nurse. Could be nurse all in white with white light in white room. Maybe eyes do work and only white light to see?
Without warning, the beeping stopped, to be replaced by an overpowering silence, an emptiness, a nothingness of sound. Absolute stillness, in noise and in air.
Oh, crap! Now you’ve done it. You’ve gone ahead and died, that’s what you did. How the hell do you save Blake now? You freaking jackass! Didn’t even finish the job! Worthless jerk!
“If you’re through beating yourself over your concussed head, you might want to get up,” Martina advised. “You’re not dead, you melodramatic twit. Not physically. Brain dead, maybe, but that’s all.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha,” Ham intoned. “That is really funny. Har har har.”
“Well, at least he’s conscious,” a familiar voice announced. “Even if he isn’t making any sense.”
Confusion seized him, a staple of his recent life. “Drew?” he asked, thick tongue slurring the words. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”
“Yeah, Ham, it’s me. It’s all of us. And where else would we be? Are you going to be all right?”
“How the hell should I know,” he groaned. “Ask the doctor. Or the nurse. Or somebody else who knows something…Did my heart stop?” He sensed, rather than observed, uncertain glances tossed around the room. “The beeping,” he explained, “the heart monitor, it’s not going off anymore. How come?”
“That was the alarm. A door blew in, set the beeper going, a warning that you’ve got one minute to shut off the alarm before it blares for real.”
“Charlie? Is that you?”
“I think he’ll be okay, probably just woozy,” somebody announced. Blake, maybe, or Gordon. It wasn’t Russ. Was it?
“I guess Martina was right, then. I’m not dead.”
Drew’s puzzlement rang in her voice as she inquired, “Ham, what in blazes are you talking about?”
“Martina. She told me to quit acting like a jerk. That I wasn’t dead.”
“Martina’s not here.” Her voice sounded farther away as she turned and added to some unseen compatriot, “Maybe we do need a doctor. He’s really out of it, even for him.”
Ham sat up, this time without resistance or assistance, and waited impatiently for his swimming head to reach equilibrium. When it did, he noted with surprise, “We’re home? We’re not at the hospital?”
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” a concerned Drew asked. To Blake, she demanded, “Let me have the keys to whatever SUV you got ready to go.”
“No! No, I’m okay,” Ham assured her. And the rest of them. “Just a little fuzzy, but it’s getting better. How long was I out?”
“Just a couple of seconds,” Charlie informed him, her normally chipper voice coming across a bit subdued. “You had us worried.”
Ham blinked several times, managed to wobble his way to his feet and, with Drew’s help on one side and Charlie’s on the other, make his way to a nearby couch. “How is everybody else?”
“You were the only casualty,” Blake replied. “Unfortunately, you were under that thing and I guess it side-swiped you on its way down.” He pointed to an old anchor that had skidded across the floor, gouging out little chips as it bounced along. “That’s an antique, came from the SS Tahoe. It’s one of my pride and joys,” Blake told him. “Fortunately, it only clipped you or you would be dead. I guess it wasn’t my brightest idea to leave it unsecured. In my defense, of course,” he added dryly, “I hardly expected a mother loving explosion to blow it off its goddamn stand. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Russ agreed, “I do. What you mean is that our incompetent friends here are still screwing the pooch, that they still can’t sniff a clue out of their own butts, and that we get no more chances.” With a contemptuous glare that included Ham, Drew and Carson, he summed up, “Is that it, Blake, is that what you mean? Because if it is, I think you may be right.”
“What was the explosion?” Ham asked. “And what door blew open?”
Gordon, accompanied by Lindsey, came rushing in from the entrance foyer. “It was the damn limo,” Gordon puffed, “the damn thing just blew the hell completely, totally apart. Can you believe that?” he demanded. “I mean, can you freaking even believe it? What if it had been a half hour earlier? What then?”
“What then, indeed,” Ham mumbled.
“But it wasn’t,” Drew pointed out. “And I think we can assume it wasn’t meant to. Which means—“
“We know what it means,” Ham interrupted. “Someone who knew the schedule, someone who knew Blake’s routine, either that someone or someone employed by that someone set the bomb to not go off until we were safe.”
“He’s still groggy,” Charlie offered. “Either that or he needs a refresher course in logic. Not to mention grammar.”
Ham, through gritted teeth, replied, “What I mean is that this is deliberate. No one was intended to get hurt.” Turning to Gordon and Lindsey, he demanded, “Tell me. Is there a note?”
“Not that I saw,” Gordon answered. “You, Lindsey?”
“I didn’t look, for heaven’s sake. It’s a mess out there, Ham, which you probably could have guessed. We called the fire department. They should be here anytime and we’ll…”
Screaming sirens cut her off or, if not that, at least drowned out whatever else she might have said. Ham watched her lips form words but, lacking the talent to actually read her lips, let it pass and pushed past her on his way to the scene of the literal crime. He burst through the door just in time to witness an invasion of trucks, cars and vans speeding through the open gates in a cacophony of sound and lights that if not actually designed to confound the senses nevertheless did exactly that.
Ham counted two full size fire trucks, three smaller ones and maybe a half dozen marked and unmarked police cars pouring onto the property, up to and within approximately twenty feet of the flaming twisted debris of what had until recently been a beauty of a ride.
Drew’s voice came from just behind him. “Why was it here, do you suppose? And where’s the driver?”
From his left, he heard Blake reply. “The driver is in the guest house. When we get in this late, as late as we did, I always let them sleep here rather than send them back across the mountain, in midnight darkness, when you can’t see the black ice. Which is why the car is still here.”
“As our mysterious someone knew it would be,” Ham summed up. Turning to Blake, he sighed, “Are you now convinced it’s not some deranged fan? That it’s someone close to you?” Blake chose not to respond, merely staring off at the burning slag hogging his driveway and, Ham noted, appearing older and sadder than he had at any time since Ham had first glimpsed those famous features—time during which any number of horrifying and unexpected twists would slap a normal man senseless. The great Blake Garrett was anything but normal, true, but still, he was a man. Just a man.
Ham’s heart ached for that man, ached in a way that he had seldom let it suffer, more so even, he had to admit, than at the passing of his own father, the one with whom he shared a love-hate. But forget that, he shrugged, that wasn’t the point. The point, here and now, was that he pitied this man—this rich, famous, powerful man—more than he wanted to admit. By the sadness reflected in the mirror that was Blake’s face, a depth of sorrow that ran so deep it must surely reach into his very soul, Ham guessed that Blake would trade everything he’d ever accomplished, every single thing he’d ever accumulated over the course of that tabloid lifetime, for the simple knowledge that a loved one wasn’t after him. That a trusted confidant didn’t want him dead.
And with that realization, Ham wanted to be the one to kick himself for being the bearer of that news. He now knew why they used to shoot the messenger. Because he really ought to be shot, he was such a shit.
He was just doing his job, he argued
with his morally outraged conscious. It’s what he paid me to do! “Yeah sure,” Conscious replied, “but you never once tried to soften the blow, never once considered what it might do to a person, a sensitive soul particularly, to be so cavalierly stabbed. Because that’s what you did. You stabbed him through the heart with a metaphorical knife, and then, not satisfied with the damage, you rotated, turned and twisted it in until the tip broke off and shot through the heart, through the aorta and right on up to the brain, where it took up residence and crowded out the rest. Nice job, Ham. Really, really well done.”
Russ wrapped a brotherly arm around Blake and gently turned him toward the house. He shot a furious look at Ham as he cajoled his friend. “Come on, man, let’s get back inside. There’s nothing we can do here. Come fix me a hot toddy, how about. You still make the best in the state, bar none. Those dang bartenders at the chalets at the ski resorts could learn a trick or two from you, I tell you real.”
Russ still mumbled into Blake’s ear as he escorted him away from the conflagration in the driveway, and as Charlie sidled up next to him. Draping her arm across his shoulders, much like Russ had done for Blake, and perhaps, he thought, to offer the same comfort of friendship, she murmured, “Don’t blame yourself, Hamster. You had to tell it like it is. Anything less is not just a lie to Popster, it could get him killed. You just did what you had to do.”
Ham smiled wryly. “So you read minds? A trick, I take it, you learned from Martina.”
“Don’t be silly,” Charlie replied, deadpan, “she can’t read minds. That’s my thing and despite her desperate pleas, I refuse to teach her. Now come on. Back inside with you, too. But leave the mood out here. Popster doesn’t need that, and neither do I. Besides, you’re the one that’s going to have to talk to the cops, so we need you to pull yourself together here. Think less about you and more about Pop, okay? Now let’s go.”
Ham almost followed her, would have followed her, save for a commotion that chose that moment to catch his attention. Just inside and by the gate, an argument appeared to rage between a beefy and officious looking fellow—had to be a cop, Ham thought—and an even beefier, though less bureaucratic possessed visage. The bigger of the two furiously waved a manila envelope, even as he shouted into the officious man’s face. The cop, in turn, reached for cuffs attached to his belt and without a doubt would have employed them—if the big guy hadn’t decked him first.
Stunned, bemused, Ham raced to the scene, not sure whether his intent was to rescue the cop from the big galoot…or the other way around. As he strode forward, his gaze zeroed in on the envelope, within which he knew—with an intuition working overtime—he would find his one last warning, his one last chance. And maybe even, finally, hopefully, a reason.
Ham managed to overtake the big man before he could inflict more damage on the flattened policeman and, more importantly, before other heads turned their way. “What’s going on,” he demanded. “What have you got there? Why’d you hit the cop?”
Waving the envelope, he growled, “I’m supposed to deliver this to Blake Garrett. If I don’t deliver it, I don’t get paid. And this little prick decided he wasn’t going to let me earn a paycheck. So I decked him. Now where’s Garrett? Or do I deck you, too?”
“I’ll take it,” Ham responded. “If I were you I’d get the hell out of here before he comes to or somebody else comes to his rescue. Assaulting a cop, little prick or not, is a serious offense.”
The big guy hesitated. “I don’t know man. I’m supposed to lay it in his hands, nobody else’s. It’s good money and I’m kind of needing it right now.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll vouch for you, as will Blake if necessary.” The cop began to stir on the ground and Ham, not sure how else to handle it, slugged him back into unconsciousness. “That’ll hold him for a minute, long enough for you—and now me—to get away. Who gave this to you? Where’d you get it? When?”
The messenger explained that his instructions had come over the phone, from a private number, with money and the letter delivered by courier. He hadn’t bothered with trying to find out more than that.
“Okay, quickly, write your name and number on the envelope.”
“I wasn’t supposed to…”
“How am I going to vouch for you?” At the big man’s blank look, Ham nodded. “Exactly. Write it down and scram the hell out of here.”
Mere seconds passed before Ham had the necessary information and, with envelope clasped firmly in hand, dashed around and through the throng, the flaming mess and the massive confusion, straight through the front door and nearly into Blake’s back.
Blake glanced up with surprise but turned back to his task without a word to Ham. “Gordo, help me get this thing back where it belongs,” he ordered as he pointed at the old anchor. “Russ, can you give us a hand?”
“I’ll help,” Ham announced as he stuffed the envelope into his pocket.
“You just rest,” Blake said. “You got your bell rung, no use getting it rung some more. I’m going to need you clear and focused.”
“I’m fine,” Ham objected. “Like you said, just got my bell rung. It’s okay now.” Hefting one end of the treasured iron object, he nodded, “Gordo and I can handle this. Can’t we, Gordo?”
Gordon hefted his end, almost like a child picking up a weightless toy, and grinned. “Not a problem, boss. You want it back on the pedestal?” At Blake’s nod, he, in turn, nodded to Ham. “Let’s do it. On three. One, two…three!”
Ham stumbled a bit under the surprising weight—heavier than it had seemed when he’d first tested the heft, he realized—and, though Gordon appeared to hardly struggle with his share of the giant mass of iron, he struggled to swing his end back in its place of honor.
“Why in the name of heaven do you have some stupid anchor sitting out here in the middle of what otherwise is a pretty nice room, anyway,” Ham puffed. “Good grief, man, it ruins the whole décor.”
“Listen to him,” Charlie laughed. “Who would have guessed it? Ham’s got an inner interior decorator struggling to get out. Maybe we should show him some swatches?”
“It’s from the SS Tahoe,” Blake informed him. “It was in service across the lake from 1896 until around 1935. She was a beauty, one-hundred and sixty-nine feet long, could hold two-hundred passengers and had all the bells and whistles from that era, including leather upholstery, beautiful carpeting, hot and cold running water, steam heating, and marble fixtures throughout, including in the bathrooms. She carried freight and mail as well as passengers but became obsolete once the highway was built around the lake. She was finally scuttled in 1940, ended up with her bow at three-hundred and sixty feet, the stern at four-hundred and seventy. Only a couple of years ago the anchor was brought up and I bought it at auction. I just couldn’t resist the history.”
Ham shook his head, a look of annoyance tightening his mouth. “The question was rhetorical.” Yanking the envelope from his pocket, he ripped it open, taking care to avoid ruining the information written on the outside. “This came just a few moments ago and in a way that may cause us a few problems. Blake, you’ll have to—”
The pounding on the door, imperious and raucous, left little doubt that it was one very miffed cop on the other side. Ham strode to the door, swung it wide and with a gracious swing of the arm invited the smaller man in.
“You hit me!” he screamed up into Ham’s face.
“I haven’t any idea in the world what you are talking about,” Ham replied. “I’ve been in here helping Blake and friends tidy up the mess created from that explosion you may have noticed just outside the door.”
“You did too!” he screamed again. “Some guy tried to get through, he hit me, and then you hit me when I was going to get up. Admit it!”
“He admits nothing,” Blake calmly objected. “He’s been in here, with me and,” swinging his arm to include the others, “all of them. Now be a good little cop and go away. Don’t make me call Tommy. You know how he
gets when he’s awakened late at night. His mood won’t bother me, but sure as hell will you, understand?”
At the mention of his police chief, and the recognition that he was confronting the great Blake Garrett, for whom the entire town had a very tender regard and a very, very protective cover, the suddenly deferential policeman tipped his hat and bowed his way back out the door. “I’m sorry, Mr. Garrett. I lost my temper. I sure would like to get my hands on the punk that sucker punched me.” Looking at Ham, he glared. “Any idea who that might be?”
Ham just shrugged and none too gently closed the door on the retreating man in blue. “As I was about to announce,” he said as he turned back toward them, “we got ourselves a new missive.”
He gently pulled the paper from within and, treating it with a respect one might offer an explosive apparatus, slowly unfolded the single sheet of paper and read aloud.
You were warned to await instructions. You failed to do so. Your late and lamented piece of property is testament to this failure. Your next failure will not involve the loss of property. It will involve the loss of life. Blake Garrett’s.
You will wire deposit $12 million dollars into a bank account in the Cayman Islands. The account number will be provided 24 hours in advance of the deadline for deposit, such deadline to be Monday next at 4:00 p.m. This will allow much more than sufficient time for you to arrange the transfer.
Trying to hack into the account or backtrack origin is pointless and a waste of time. I guarantee that our talent exceeds any talent you might recruit, inside or outside law enforcement. Of course, you are free to do so but this will most assuredly cause you to miss your deadline and will thus be the cause of Garrett’s needless death. If he is to sleep with the SS Tahoe, let that be on you.
There will be one further contact, Sunday at 4:00 p.m, in which you will receive the account number. There will be no other instructions and no other warnings. Just payment or death. The choice is yours.
“They’ve been in my home,” Blake breathed. “They’ve been in my goddamn home! How else would they know about the anchor from the SS Tahoe? Huh?” he demanded of no one, of all of them. “How in the hell else, I ask you. How else?”
The Ghost of Truckee River (A Ham McCalister Mystery Book 1) Page 23