by G. M. Ford
PRAISE FOR G.M. FORD
“G.M. Ford is must reading.”
—Harlan Coben
“Ford is a witty and spunky writer who not only knows his terrain but how to bring it vividly to the printed page.”
—West Coast Review of Books
“G.M. Ford is a born storyteller.”
—J.A. Jance
“He’s well on his way to becoming the Raymond Chandler of Seattle.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“G.M. Ford is, hands down, one of my favorite contemporary crime writers. Hilarious, provocative, and cool as a March night in Seattle, he may be the best-kept secret in mystery novels.”
—Dennis Lehane
“G.M. Ford has a supercharged V-12 under the hood.”
—Lee Child
“G.M. Ford writes the pants off most of his contemporaries.”
—Independent on Sunday
OTHER TITLES BY G.M. FORD
Nameless Night
The Nature of the Beast
Threshold
Leo Waterman Series
Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca?
Cast in Stone
The Bum’s Rush
Slow Burn
Last Ditch
The Deader the Better
Thicker Than Water
Chump Change
Salvation Lake
Family Values
Soul Survivor
Frank Corso Series
Fury
Black River
A Blind Eye
Red Tide
No Man’s Land
Blown Away
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by G.M. Ford
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542041300
ISBN-10: 1542041309
Cover design by Pete Garceau
CONTENTS
Start Reading
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The door burst open and banged against the wall. Half a dozen men shuffled into the room, shaking rain from their coats as they jostled inside. The short man with the black rubber raincoat and Coke-bottle eyeglasses elbowed his way to the front.
“Show me,” he said.
“Right there, Mr. Marshall.” The technician pointed at his computer screen. He tapped a grainy image of a dozen or so men and women waiting in line inside what appeared to be some sort of public building. The man in question was considerably taller than the others in the line. Fishing charter T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops. Long hair and beard. Your basic turista. Extra-large variety.
“Quality’s not very good,” Marshall groused as he folded his coat inside out and draped it over his arm.
The technician shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Mexican equipment.” He tapped the screen again with an ink-stained finger. “Just a second here,” he said. “Wait till the line turns the corner.”
The tape jumped ahead. The tall man was now in full profile. Everyone in the room leaned closer to the screen, like the folding of a flower.
Marshall nearly touched his nose to the screen. Then he slowly removed his glasses, sighed, and straightened up.
“He’s about the right height, I suppose,” Marshall said.
Everyone waited for him to say something else. When he remained silent, someone blurted out, “We need to be sure.”
The little man hacked out a short, bitter laugh. “The understatement of the century.” He waved a disgusted hand at the computer screen. “We can’t have any more setbacks,” he said, “and a guy about the right height, in the right place, at the right time isn’t gonna cut it. That’s the kind of sloppy work that very nearly . . .” He stopped himself and massaged the bridge of his nose.
“Gonna have to send some people down to Greaserville,” the bald man in the corner said. “They can probably.”
Marshall’s voice rose a full octave. “Don’t talk to me about probably. Probably cost us nearly a hundred men and all the material we’d collected.” He slashed the air with his hand. “Years of work. Millions of dollars,” he screeched. He gave his anger a moment to sink in. “From now on, you just tell me what we know for certain, and nothing else.” He looked around the room. “Do you hear me?” he shouted.
Somebody cleared his throat. “There’s been money going in and out of his American accounts. Some of it paying taxes on his old house . . . insurance bills . . . things like that . . . but the great majority of it ended up right there . . . the Tijuana Rio branch of the BanRegio bank. We also know that in order to open a bank account in Mexico you have to show up in person. We checked the bank CC camera footage for the two weeks before the first transfer of funds. What we’ve been looking at here is footage from the same day the account was opened.”
The technician tapped the screen again. “Look at the person in line behind Waterman. It’s that freak he hangs out with. Always right at his elbow, but since Waterman disappeared . . .” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. Nobody seen that pervert motherfucker for months now.”
Marshall bent again and squinted at the screen. “We need absolute confirmation,” he said finally. “And it needs to be completely under the radar. No public presence at all. We are in no position to attract further attention.”
He started for the door. Stopped. Turned back around and wagged a stiff finger. “But . . . if that is that son of a bitch Leo Waterman, I want him dead and buried.” He started for the door again.
“Heavy on the dead,” he said.
The ocean has a primal call. A voice, deep and resonant, that beckons everyone, almost on the cellular level. The rich, the poor, the homeowner, and the homeless, it called them all, and they all came, living an uneasy cheek-to-jowl existence in Ocean Beach.
The last of the ungentrified surfer towns in California, Ocean Beach was a place defined by the variety of its lifestyles and its good-natured acceptance of all. O.B. was the kind of place where nobody was gonna bat an eye at a couple of new people in town. Or ask any questions about them either. So for a laid-back guy who’d been forced to go underground, it had seemed like the perfect place to chill out and disappear for a while.
I’d been holed up in O.B. for a little over seven months and had only recently stopped checking the sidewalk behind me. Truth be told, I was thinking about staying forever. Not just because of the perfect weather, although I’ve gotta admit that was a major player. What really attracted me was the fact that, like me, O.B. was a perpetual outsider. The redheaded stepchild of San Diego. A onetime mudflat campground of the terminally adventurous, Ocean Beach had refused to move beyond the sixties. Gabe came down later, after months of physical therapy made it clear that the piece of shell
casing that had shattered Gabe’s calf had healed as much as it was gonna, which, unfortunately, wasn’t enough for Gabe to function as full-time muscle anymore.
To a lesser degree, the same was true about me. Gabe and I had stumbled into something we weren’t prepared for, and both of us had emerged quite a bit worse for the wear. Gabe moved with a perceptible limp, and three spinal surgeries later, I had all the fluid mobility of a backhoe.
We found a two-bedroom rental on Del Monte Avenue, a block and a half from the ocean, settled in, and then, for want of anything else to do, got involved with the community. Gabe was taking a couple of art classes at SDSU and had started a three-times-a-week women’s karate class in Old Town. I volunteered for a beach cleanup crew and then joined the local citizens group that opposed any incursion of corporate culture into the otherwise homegrown commercial environment. Being around people who gave a shit about their town and their fellow citizens made me feel damn near as warm as the weather did. Life was slow and simple. Predictable. Just the way I liked it.
It was Thursday night. Beach cleanup night. Couple hours of daylight left when I wandered down Niagara to the foot of the pier and signed in. The crew had already started to fan out. I smiled and mumbled my way through the assembled multitude, picked up my bucket and my picker, and headed south, down toward Santa Cruz Cove.
In a good week, beach cleanup night was the only time I put on anything with shoelaces. You spend enough time wearing flip-flops and even sneakers make you feel like you’re clomping around with paving stones wired to your feet.
The beach, not surprisingly, turned out to be a miniature model of society. You only had to participate in one beach cleanup to figure out that the two biggest problems facing O.B. were the waves of homeless folks, who quite literally had no place else to go, and the rising tide of opiate addiction that was shredding their ranks like a wood chipper.
The beach crew had taken one neck-craning look at me and asked if I’d mind working the south end of the cleanup, down at Santa Cruz Cove, where the piss stairs would get you down to a small beach where the homeless and the drug addled wedged themselves onto sand ledges forty feet above the roaring Pacific and hoped like hell it wasn’t a plus tide, or worse yet, that the section of cliff they’d chosen didn’t decide to peel off and fall into the ocean, which it did on a very regular basis.
That’s also where you were most likely to run into the trolls. Those shuffling piles of rags and fury whose lives had spun perilously out of control, leaving them at the mercy of the sand, the sea, and the SDPD.
Because the stairs over at the Silver Spray Apartments were currently under reconstruction, I walked back to Bacon and took the sidewalk south. On the way I picked up a couple of beer cans and the remains of an empty pint of whiskey shattered on the sidewalk. Just before Del Monte I came upon a dead possum on the side of the road but decided that toting a stiff, malodorous marsupial around in my bucket was above and beyond the call of civic duty, so I left it there and kept walking.
My surgically repaired right knee hated going down stairs, so I paused at the top of the Santa Cruz stairs and reminded myself there was no hurry. Nobody was looking. I could short step it down the stairs like a gimpy geezer and nobody would be the weezer. A sudden onshore flow slapped my face with artisanal hints of piss and body odor, but I resisted the urge to hurry. Last thing in the world I needed was to take a tumble, so I kept my eyes focused on the stairs instead of all the little paths leading off into the undergrowth. I stopped a couple of times, shook out my balky knee, then moved on.
The exposed seabed on my right seethed with lime-green seaweed, swishing in and out with the tide, long and languid, like the floating hair of some long-submerged sea witch. Half a dozen beachcombers were spread along the largest crescent of sand. Couple more sitting on top of the tallest finger of rock. Right out in front of me, a kid in polka-dot board shorts had found a sand dollar and was yelling for his mom to come and have a look. A guy and a girl were snugged up under the lip of the cliff. He was scratching away at a guitar. She was staring into her phone as if the secrets of the ages were just a button push away.
Farther out, right at the tide line, somebody was seated in the full lotus position, becoming one with the sea. It happened nearly every night. Kind of an Ocean Beach tradition, watching the Technicolor sky sink into the Pacific until that final flash of ungodly green signaled the arrival of the night.
I started at the south end and worked my way north. Took me an hour to pick up all the crap. About halfway through, I had to find a flat rock and stomp all the beer and soda cans flat so’s they’d fit in the bucket.
By the time I’d finished, the sun was hanging over the edge of the world, burning like a rocket engine, and I was alone on the beach.
I picked up my bucket and my picker and started for the stairs. Nobody, including me, wanted to be down there with the trolls when darkness arrived. Shrieking of gulls tore at my attention. I kept my eyes glued on my feet and kept climbing. I threw a quick glance to my right. Half a dozen of them were squawking and flapping over something farther up the cliff, in the bushes.
I wasn’t looking for trouble, so I turned my face away and kept climbing the stairs, watching the waves tumble toward shore, zoning out to the sounds of the surf, when a pair of big California gulls came screaming and flapping across my field of vision. Fighting over a dangling scrap of food one of them was carrying in his beak.
Without wishing it so, I stopped climbing. I was watching the contentious gulls when a single word came to mind. Meat, my mind said. Looks like a piece of meat they’re quarreling over.
I stood still and gave myself a pep talk about how bringing any kind of attention to myself was not a good idea. Maybe even suicidal. About how I needed to keep strictly under the radar. Then I set the bucket on the stairs, grabbed the picker, ducked through the steel railing, and started into the scrubby cliffside foliage.
The scuffling gulls saw me coming and veered off. I carefully made my way across the grade. I slipped past a couple of empty campsites—burned-out fires and a blue sleeping bag with a red flannel lining featuring images of the cow jumping over the moon. Hey diddle diddle.
Fifty feet farther on, my knees began to rise toward my chest as the little sandstone plateau lost its battle with gravity and turned back into a cliff. Two forced steps and I was nose to nose with a nearly perpendicular piece of sandstone. I leaned against the rock, heaved a couple of labored breaths, and looked around.
Didn’t take a genius to see I had only two choices. I was either traversing back the way I’d come, making damn sure I didn’t lose my footing and go rolling down the shit-covered embankment, or climbing straight up into the stubborn tangle of ground cover beneath the condos above.
I might have given up right then except the gulls came back, keening and swirling over the same piece of ground cover, feathers floating to the ground as they roughhoused ten feet above where I was standing.
A big California gull floated past my face. His bright-yellow beak dripping red. I dug my feet in, forced a bunch of onshore flow into my lungs, and peered up the embankment. No question. This was gonna take four-wheel drive, so I leaned the picker against the cliff, grabbed a couple of bushes, and used both hands to inch up the grade, wedging my sneakers at the rooted bases of the plants, hoping like hell the slope didn’t come apart.
From this angle I could see the scrub was bent outward, as if supporting something of weight. Two more steps. My legs were screaming at me. I was looking down between my legs, focused on where I put my feet.
By the time I looked up again, I was face-to-face with the body. Could have kissed him on the lips. Upside down anyway. It was a kid. A boy maybe ten. Brown skinned. Wearing an impossibly white shirt. He was lying on his back with one leg twisted beneath him at an ungodly angle.
From where I hovered, he was looking right at me. Or at least he would have been if he’d had eyes in his sockets. I stifled a gag and turned my face away.
Tried to take in all the oxygen in the world in a single breath but found only the rank remnants of human decay. I gagged again and slapped a hand over my mouth. Took me a couple of minutes to settle my stomach.
I hung there for a long minute and ran the situation through my circuits. Seemed like the only sane thing to do was to go back down to Niagara, sign out so’s nobody would be looking for me, then go back home and call 911 on one of the burners I always used these days. Tell ’em where to find the kid and then lose the burner forever. Way I saw it, that was the only way I could do right by the boy without blowing my cover.
On my way back to the stairs, I cut a strip from the discarded sleeping bag and tied it around the steel stair rail about level with where the kid was to be found. I grabbed the bucket and hustled up the stairs a whole lot faster than I’d come down.
Wasn’t till I got back to Niagara and nodded my way through signing out that I realized I didn’t have the picker. A picture of me leaning it against the cliff flashed before my inner eye. I thought about going back for it, but all that would have accomplished was to bring more attention to myself. I silently cursed.
Ten minutes later, I was back at the apartment, rummaging around in the junk drawer until I came out with a pair of blue latex gloves, a claw hammer, and a brand-new burner. I took a couple of deep breaths while I wiggled into the gloves and then called 911. Years of working as a PI had taught me that the secret of leaving an anonymous tip was to keep it a one-way conversation. Short and sweet.
“There’s a boy’s body on the side of the hill at Santa Cruz Cove,” I said. “There’s a piece of blue cloth tied to the rail at about where the body is.”
“Sir . . . what is your—”
Bang. Broke the connection. Waited a long second and powered off the phone and then took it out on the small balcony off the living room and pounded it to dust. Then pounded the dust to talc. In the spirit of tidiness, I then swept up the mess, poured it into a ziplock sandwich bag, and just to be safe, walked the block and a half over to the parking lot behind the Olive Tree Market and rifled it into the dumpster. On the way back to the apartment, I dropped the latex gloves into an apartment house trash bin and mamboed back home.
