by Josh Lanyon
I stared at the two boys, trying to pick out Troy’s features in either of their youthful smiles. In their pre-teen androgyny, they reminded me of Samantha more than anyone else.
“Your dad looks nice.”
“He was,” Mac said. “Bill was his best friend. They used to tell all us kids stories about the hidden smugglers’ loot buried in the old tunnels beneath the buildings. Sometimes they’d even take us down there to dig around in the dirt for old beer cans. Made my mother hopping mad.”
“’Cause they were condemned tunnels or because of the risk of tetanus?”
“Probably both. Listen, I have to thank you for the excellent meal, Drew. Your best so far.” Mac smiled at me, and then his gaze slid toward the photo, preoccupied and slightly melancholy. I took this as my cue to go, and excused myself.
As I receded into the kitchen, I felt a cold draft flow over me as the door opened to admit a new table of customers. Except it wasn’t customers—it was the other deputy, Mac’s cousin Chaz. He was yawning in a dramatic fashion. Mac quickly pocketed the photo and napkin as Chaz approached. The two of them spoke only a few words, and then they both departed.
My disappointment at seeing him go was mitigated somewhat by Sam’s announcement that he’d left without paying.
Chapter Six
Sam locked the doors of the Eelgrass at nine p.m. and had her own work done by nine thirty—aside from never locating the elusive lettuce invoice. But that was probably long past recovering. We’d just have to trust our produce purveyor’s monthly bill when it arrived.
Danielle’s smiling face flashed up on Sam’s phone, accompanied by a retro-disco ringtone. Sam spoke to her briefly, then glanced to me.
“You don’t mind if I go, do you?” she asked.
This was a purely ritualistic interaction. I wouldn’t say no, however much I could have used her help. I gave a nod.
“Me and Lionel will be another hour at least.”
My statement elicited a groan from Lionel.
“See you tomorrow, then.” Sam whisked herself out the back door.
“We’re not really going to be here another hour, are we, chief?” Lionel tugged his yellow plastic gloves off.
“Why? You got somewhere to be?” I turned to start scraping char off the grill.
“Well…yeah. I was going to go with my friends to meet some girls.”
“What girls?”
“The fish-and-chips girls.” Lionel sounded exasperated. “You’re as bad as my mom. Hey, speaking of my mom, though, I was going to show you this the other day but forgot.”
Lionel crossed the kitchen and showed me a photograph on his phone: a white plate with a dark-brown cube on it. In the background I could see another crock like the one that had exploded in the Eelgrass’s basement the morning we discovered Dorian’s body.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“My mom made salmon. I cannot tell you how tiny and burnt it was.” Lionel pocketed the phone. “So I’m done with the dishes. Are you really gonna make me stay, ’cause I will, but those girls…”
Honestly, I had no reason for keeping him, except for the company. Not a good enough reason for depriving Lionel of the opportunity to court females.
“Go.” I waved him away. “Be safe.”
After he left, I tried to bury myself in rote tasks—making the prep list for the next day, rotating stock in the refrigerator—all the while aware of the building’s eerie emptiness and of the yellow police tape that still draped the back stairs.
Is it any wonder that my subconscious mind chose that moment to remind Mac, via text, that he had forgotten to pay?
The man himself arrived fifteen minutes later, ghosting through the back door and scaring the hell out of me when he seemed to materialize in the dry-goods storage area.
I did yell, yeah. And brandish a skillet.
Mac held up his hands in surrender.
“See, this is exactly why you should lock this back door,” he remarked. “Anybody could come in here.”
“Yeah, Evelyn already chewed me out about it.” I dropped the skillet back on the range with a clang.
“Is this door always unlocked?”
“While somebody’s here, yeah. Fire codes require it.”
“It is very, very unsafe,” Mac said. “I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve investigated crimes that could have been prevented by taking the preemptive step of locking the door.”
“Is one of those crimes dine-’n-dash?”
Mac’s cheeks colored, and he hung his head. “I’m sorry for that. The matter was urgent.”
“Was it to do with Dorian’s death?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” Mac pulled his wallet out of his pocket and started thumbing through the bills contained therein. He pulled out a fifty and handed it to me.
“That’s about ten bucks more than you owe—even accounting for the tip.”
“Call it an additional finance fee.”
I pocketed the money. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
“How long do you plan to stay here tonight?”
“I still have the fryer to break down. Then it’s just mopping. But I thought I’d stay to do some deep cleaning.”
“By yourself in the middle of the night?” Mac asked.
“You make it sound so creepy.”
“Hey—you said it, not me.” Mac observed the mop bucket Lionel had left behind. “I was planning on driving up to Top Hat Butte. It’s so clear tonight, we should be able to see the Milky Way right across the sky.”
“You’ve got a date?”
“I mean we in the general sense. We being the residents of Orca’s Slough.”
“The Milky Way, huh.” I placed my hand on the side of the fryer. It was still too hot to drain the oil without damaging the machine. “I haven’t seen that since I was a kid in Wyoming.”
“You should come see it, then—get yourself out of this building.”
“I just barely got back in here,” I said. “I think I’ll pass.”
“You’re really going to stay here alone?”
“It’s not like there’s someone else here to close down for me.”
Mac stood there for a moment, taking in the kitchen and then studying me. At last he said, “How about I help you out?”
“Doing what?” I asked, to stop myself from thinking too much about why he might be willing to abandon gazing at the open beauty of the Milky Way to spend his evening cleaning a commercial kitchen.
“I can mop,” Mac offered.
“Are you just worried that I’m going to violate the crime-scene tape and go downstairs?” I asked.
“To be honest, I’m worried that you won’t lock the door after I leave.” With that, Mac went to fetch the mop bucket. I stared after him, puzzled.
What was he playing at, anyway? If Mac hadn’t been a cop, I’d have known exactly what was happening because nobody—nobody—hung around mopping a restaurant floor just to be matey. If Mac had been a normal guy, I would have instantly known he was trying to hook up. But Mac wasn’t normal—even by cop standards. I supposed he could be trying to make friends. Or, was this some weird extension of being the “great cop” his dad had been?
I just couldn’t figure out what he was going to do. Or what his motives were.
Because there he stood, dressed in his street clothes, churning up the greasy mop water as though it was what he’d expected to be doing this evening.
Mac glanced up at me.
Embarrassed to be caught staring, I said, “You don’t have to do the dish room. Lionel’s already done it.”
“He has?”
“Yeah.”
“Not very well,” Mac remarked. “Your side isn’t too much better.”
“You’re killing me here.”
“My littlest sister mops like this.” Mac tipped the old gray mop water out into the mop sink and started to refill. “She also used to hide her dirty dishes under her bed for no re
ason I could figure out. Once a week I’d go looking under there for all the little plates and bowls she squirreled away.”
“How many sisters and brothers do you have?”
“There are six of us altogether. I’m the oldest.” Satisfied with the new water, Mac went to work swabbing the deck in an efficient, fast manner. “A house can get filthy fast with six kids in it.”
“Must be where you learned your sweet moves,” I remarked.
“You can just call me Mop King,” Mac said, then squinting into a dark corner, he added, “Lionel has a long way to go before he’ll be challenging my title.”
“Somehow I don’t think that bothers him.” I checked the fryer and decided that it had cooled enough to be cleaned. For the next fifteen minutes Mac and I worked in an oddly amiable quiet. He asked after my own family. I confessed to being the youngest of three sons. My mom often speculated that my defiant personality stemmed from constantly resisting my outgoing brothers. I didn’t tell Mac that.
Mac paused in his mopping. “I guess I can tell you that Lionel’s no longer a person of interest.”
“No?”
“As you said, he would have been covered—absolutely covered—in blood if he’d assaulted Dorian, and there wasn’t a drop on him. Photographs taken at the party show him wearing the exact same clothes he had on when we interviewed him the next morning, so lucky for him, he likes taking selfies with pretty girls.”
“And what about the girls themselves?” I asked.
“The girls from the fish-and-chips shop? They all have alibis—and not just with each other,” Mac said. “We’re working on running down the whereabouts of a couple stragglers who went back to Seattle.”
“That’s good news, I guess. About Lionel at least.” All at once I felt very light. Without being consciously aware, I’d been carrying that worry that Mac would arrest Lionel like an anvil lodged in my chest. But with the dissipation of that tension came a wave of fatigue. The idea of cleaning the restaurant all night no longer held that manic appeal.
“So how long will it take you to finish the floor?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“I’ll go get changed, then,” I said. “Do you think you could give me a ride home?”
Mac smiled. “Absolutely.”
***
Apart from the contents of his phone, is there any space more personal than a man’s car? My second-hand station wagon, for example, spoke of a life spent hauling giant boxes of paper towels and engaging in drive-through dining. The perennial occupants of my passenger seat were my unopened mail and stacks of industry magazines I meant to read someday.
In contrast, Mac drove a twenty-year-old silver Ford F-150. Very clean blue seat covers concealed what I could feel was cracked vinyl. But both seat belts functioned, and when he cranked the engine, the vehicle chugged to life with only a tiny hiccup. At midnight, the town of Orca’s Slough was mostly asleep. Here and there a couple of raccoons ambled along the sidewalk, their eyes flashing yellow-green as they watched us pass by.
“Business at your place seemed to be fine today,” Mac remarked.
“I’m pretty sure it was morbid curiosity,” I said. “Once that wears off, who knows. Maybe I’ll set up an ‘Orca’s Slough Underground Ghost Tour’ like they have in Seattle.”
“You are quite the schemer, aren’t you?” Mac said, giving a sideways smile.
“I like to call it the entrepreneurial mindset.”
As we drove, I grew relaxed and for a few seconds slipped outside my day-to-day. What would it be like to live life like a normal guy? To make time to go up and look at stars I’d already seen hundreds of times, in a tiny town on a little island in the middle of a dark sea? I found myself manufacturing a different trajectory for myself. Could I ever be the one going to barbecues I was not catering, attending weddings as a guest instead of staff? Paying for a room at a bed-and-breakfast instead of being the guy making breakfast? Regular activities that people with regular jobs did?
What was that like? How did people know how to behave socially without a function to complete? I almost asked Mac, but then realized it wasn’t as though Mac had a regular job either. Probably a fair number of people hated him just for being the law. And I knew he worked weekends and holidays just like me.
What had moved him to invite me on a stargazing trip, anyway?
He was probably lonely. He’d mentioned a couple of times that his brothers and sisters were all gone. Did he think of me as some little brother replacement? Or was he one of those guys who’d grown up and forgotten to make new friends?
One more turn in the road and then the trees on either side thinned, revealing the ratty trailer I called home.
“I guess this is me,” I said. “I’ve got an early morning. You?”
“I’m off tomorrow.”
“Yeah? Where will you be having dinner?”
“Not sure yet. What are you cooking?”
“Chicken Provençal—that’s with wine and mushrooms,” I said. “And butternut squash. Haven’t figured out the details yet, though.”
“Butternut squash, huh?”
“I promise that even though it’s a vegetable, you have nothing to fear.”
“Maybe I’ll give it a try.” Like a gentleman, Mac waited until I’d gotten fully inside to drive away.
It was only as I was watching his taillights recede that I realized I’d never told him my address.
But he would know that, wouldn’t he?
I drank beer in the shower, then at the last second remembered tomorrow was trash day. I struggled into a pair of sweats and took out my measly bag, only to discover my trash can had been stolen.
Chapter Seven
Monday I had a busier than usual lunch—now certain I was getting the rubberneck assist, but whatever; I was happy to take it if it meant revenue coming in—then got right into ordering food for the next week. I figured I’d get a bump in sales during the time of the investigation, just because people love to associate themselves with any kind of infamy, so I decided to increase my meat order.
I walked out to the alley to get a breath of fresh air while I placed the call. As I disconnected I noticed Lionel arriving for work. He hunched in the passenger seat of his mother’s green Subaru, looking miserable while she told him off in Korean. I stood gawking, impressed by the volume she managed to produce from her tiny body. She put to shame a couple of chefs I’d trained under.
When she noticed me watching, she changed her tone to chirpy English. “Okay, I love you, bye, bye!”
Lionel exited the car, dragging his feet like a condemned man. His mother sped off down the alley.
“What’s up with your mom?” I asked casually.
“She’s mad at me for blowing up Grandmother’s kimchee crock. Mom says it’s irreplaceable.”
“You used a family heirloom to make your bootleg pickle?”
“I didn’t realize it was an heirloom!” Lionel insisted, actually going so far as to stamp his foot. “How am I supposed to know that? Nobody tells me anything about cooking stuff except for you.”
To be fair to Lionel’s mom, she was a nurse, not a professional chef. But obviously, fermenting kimchee was another matter, especially if the crocks she used were heirlooms.
As I stood there, wondering if I was going to have to go find some Korean antiques dealer to repair my relationship with Lionel’s mom, a cop car drove up.
I’m not saying my heart skipped a beat, because then I would be a nine-year-old girl. But I can’t deny that a childish excitement lit within my chest as I walked over, expecting it to be Mac.
The man in the driver’s seat was not Mac. He was an older, shorter, more heavily mustached iteration of the Mackenzie line: Sheriff Michael Mackenzie.
Though I’d never personally had a run-in with the guy, he was well known in Orca’s Slough as a staunch supporter of the middle-class status quo. He liked to keep the town a peaceful event-free tourist haven, and if that meant ro
unding up the town’s few bums and personally ferrying them to Seattle to set them free, that was what he would do.
Like Evelyn, Dorian had hated him. It seemed sadly ironic that Dorian’s murder was being investigated by a man who, in life, Dorian had routinely referred to as the “laziest fucking cop in Washington State.”
Sheriff Mackenzie’s son, Chaz, rode shotgun, looking like he was going for gold in a mini-me contest. Not for the first time, I wondered if policing Orca’s Slough was some kind of hereditary position or if the dominance of the Mackenzies was just another gross display of small-town nepotism.
“Mr. Allison, how are you today?” The sheriff’s smile seemed genuine and warm. A dimple creased his cheek in exactly the spot Mac had his. And yet somehow on the sheriff the expression struck me as manufactured—a professional facade.
Chaz looked like he was about to fall asleep, which seemed to be his factory setting.
“I’m good,” I said. “How are you?” Out of the corner of my eye I watched Lionel slink into the safety of the building.
“Very well, thank you. I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to come down to the station for a little conversation with us.”
“We could talk now in my office,” I suggested.
“I’d rather we speak in private at the station, if you don’t mind.” The sheriff nodded to Deputy Chaz, who got out and opened the back door of the police car.
Now, I wanted to be cooperative—I genuinely did. But there was no way in hell I was getting into the back of a police cruiser unless I was under arrest.
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not right now.” The sheriff’s smile faltered slightly.
“Then I’ll meet you down at the station in ten minutes. I could use the walk anyway.”
“Ten minutes, then.” The sheriff motioned Chaz back into the vehicle, and the car glided away.
When I went back in to drop off my chef’s coat, I found Lionel lurking right beside the door.
“So I guess you already know that I’m going down to talk to the cops.”
Lionel nodded, his silence betraying his fear.