Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  “He’s dead,” Gabe said. “Died of complications following pneumonia at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, in 2013. Survived by nobody.”

  “Then who’s the guy running the Haller show?”

  “Pemberton was in Brushy Mountain for the last fourteen years of his life,” Gabe read. “Ran a red light drunk and got T-boned by a cement truck. His wife and six-year-old son were declared dead at the scene. He decided to act as his own attorney, which got him fifteen to life for negligent homicide. Like half the known world, he supposedly found Jesus while he was on the inside.” Gabe swiped at the phone. “He had nine different cellmates over that period. Charity’s cousin says he thinks the most likely candidate is named Walter G. Hall. Did four and a half for bank fraud and money laundering. Did the last three of it in a cell with Pemberton. Was released two weeks before Pemberton passed away. Looks like Hall saw the handwriting on the wall and used Pemberton’s name to sign up with something called Heavenly Forgiveness, a Torrance, California, charity whose mission is to get recently released inmates started on the path to redemption. They run an interstate prison ministry, half a dozen halfway houses around the West Coast, and a job counseling service. They’re the ones got Pemberton hired as a driver for Mrs. Haller, who was inclined to support second chances for guys like Pemberton. Supposedly, after her husband passed away, she gave jobs to dozens of them on the fishing boat fleet. Also there’s no paper trail of any kind for Walter G. Hall. Not one thing since the day he was released. Not a traffic ticket, not a library card. Never reported to his parole officer. Disappeared into the ozone.”

  “All of which gets us exactly nowhere,” Saunders groused. “We can’t even tell anyone how we came by this information, and as long as what’s-his-name has Mrs. Haller’s power of attorney, it’s gonna take a smoking gun to get anybody official to knock on that door.” She sat back hard into the seat. “None of which leads us any closer to what happened to that little boy, and all of which is very likely to mess up your personal witness protection program if we keep pressing.”

  “So what—lemme get this straight—the best we can do is to file an anonymous elder abuse complaint and hope they get off their collective social service asses and do something about it?” Gabe muttered.

  “That’s our only option,” Saunders said. I checked her face in the mirror, hoping to find at least a trace of irony in her expression, but came up empty. She believed in the system, which was way more than anybody could say about either Gabe or me.

  “So what you’re saying is that the best a couple of old pistoleros like me and Leo can do is to call social services on these jokers.”

  “They’ll demand to see Mrs. Haller. I know that from the workshops. They’ll notify whoever answers the phone that there’s been a complaint filed and then show up with a warrant. That’s the protocol.”

  “Sounds pretty limp dick to me,” Gabe muttered.

  “You might want to rephrase that,” I suggested.

  Gabe shot me an angry glare. “How the mighty have fallen.”

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” escaped my lips.

  “What if we . . .”

  “Don’t start,” came from the back seat.

  As we rolled up to the curb, half a block behind her car, I said, “Maybe we could . . .”

  Carolyn clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear this. I’m an officer of the court.” She popped the rear door and stepped out onto Niagara Avenue. She walked up and tapped on my window. I rolled it down.

  “We’re gonna check the camera later. Why don’t you stick around?” I tried.

  She was tempted, but the cop in her won the struggle.

  “I’m thinking that medical examiner girlfriend of yours back in Seattle might just have been right about you,” she said and then stalked off.

  I looked over at Gabe. “She’ll be back,” I predicted.

  Wishful thinking, as it turned out. We mostly wasted time until right after nine, when we decided to hop down to the OB Noodle House for a bite to eat.

  Lamar had planned to skip town. He really had. They’d stayed outside Waterman’s in the SUV all night, rather than driving over to sleep at the dog beach, because Chub, having located Waterman, didn’t want to let him out of his sight. Lamar had made one last attempt to convince him to stand down, and before he could leave, Waterman had done something shifty—and intriguing.

  They’d followed him uptown to the dog beach, then watched as he and some homeless kid had trekked over to a set of houses and condos on a cliff, where Waterman had later returned to rent a condo. Why did he need a place when he already had one? Waterman was clearly up to something. Suddenly, Lamar had an idea: If he could keep Chub from killing Waterman long enough to find out what the guy was involved in, maybe he could pass that info on to the Brotherhood and it would be enough to convince them to give him a pass for not killing Chub. Maybe he wouldn’t have to go on the run for the rest of his life.

  They’d followed Waterman around for two days. All the way up to Lemon Grove, to breakfast with his girlfriend, etc. All public places, and even Chub wasn’t stupid enough to go after Waterman then. They’d been spooked too by a Taurus that had been parked outside Waterman’s building, a guy just sitting inside. Looked like a tourist, but Lamar had managed to convince Chub that it might be an undercover cop waiting to move on them, or someone Marshall had sent. Chub seemed to buy that. Lamar had even started to relax a bit, thinking maybe he’d get out of this mess after all.

  But then Waterman had returned to this alleyway, and now it was all going to hell.

  Chub pointed out the front window and then popped his seat belt.

  “There they are,” he said, sliding out of the seat.

  “Maybe we oughta . . . ,” Lamar began, but Chub was already gone, double-timing it down Del Monte Avenue about half a block behind Waterman and the freak.

  “Fuck,” he muttered at the inside of the truck and then climbed down into the street and hurried to catch Chub, which was harder than it sounded, ’cause the big guy was really stretching them out. Lamar checked the Browning stuck in the back of his belt. Pushed it deeper and then broke into a dog trot.

  Garrett blinked twice, as if not believing his eyes. Looked like Zoo Parade. Waterman and his keeper leading the way down the opposite sidewalk. Greenway and Pope bringing up the rear, staying in the shadows of the swaying palm trees as they trailed them down the street. He lay down on the seat until they were well past, then sat up, got out, and followed along on the opposite side of the street.

  He’d cased the neighborhood hard earlier and was trying to recall any place secluded enough to do his work. Problem was, they were so close to the beach that space was precious. Everybody was jammed up tight to their neighbors. He just couldn’t bring to mind a place secluded enough for wet work.

  Wasn’t till they turned the corner onto Bacon Street that he finally understood. Greenway didn’t give a shit. He was out of patience. He was gonna do this wherever and whenever he could. The big guy was no more than twenty feet behind when they seemed to sense someone behind them. The freak turned first. Greenway kept coming. Like a boulder rolling down a hill.

  Garrett crossed the street, ducking behind parked cars as he moved in.

  “Hey,” the freak shouted at the sight of Greenway. Waterman turned quickly.

  Greenway swept the freak aside with an elbow to the head. The freak went down hard. Greenway grabbed Waterman in a bear hug and lifted him from the ground. Waterman butted him in the face. Greenway held on, pressing his huge red face into Waterman’s. “You killed my brother,” he screamed.

  Waterman pistoned up a knee . . . and then another. Garrett saw Greenway’s shoulders slump. Waterman slid out of his grasp and began crawling out of reach.

  Greenway’s partner arrived in the frame. Waving a gun around. Pointing it at the freak, who was rising from the sidewalk.

  “Don’t you move, motherfucker,�
�� the little turd was yelling.

  Garrett moved two cars closer. Waterman threw a straight right. Connected with Greenway’s face with a wet thud, actually drove him back a pace. All it seemed to do was piss the big guy off.

  “I’ll kill you, motherfucker,” the big guy screamed.

  Greenway had Waterman in a choke hold now. Waterman’s face looked like it was about to explode.

  The little guy stepped forward and put the barrel on the freak’s temple. “You stay there. You hear me . . . stay there.”

  Looked to Garrett like the smaller guy was trying to work up the courage to kill. Garrett slid past the final car, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and shot the guy in the side of the head. The big black automatic clattered to the sidewalk. Porch lights were coming on all over the neighborhood.

  Waterman’s eyes were closed. His arms and legs gone limp. Greenway had just about choked him out when Garrett slid the barrel along the side of Waterman’s head, rested it on top of his left ear, and shot Greenway in the face. Chub went down in a heap. Garrett walked over and put another round in his ear. He could hear shouting and the roaring of engines.

  When he turned back, Waterman was on his knees. Coughing, choking, spitting all over himself. The freak was struggling to get upright. Garrett checked the street.

  The freak looked up at him.

  “You guys oughta be more careful,” Garrett said as he picked up the black automatic, pocketed his own gun, crossed Bacon Street, and disappeared from view.

  The cops showed up about two minutes later. En masse. Gabe and I were waiting. We’d talked about maybe getting lost before the cops showed up but decided that was probably a bad idea. Since we were neighborhood regulars and neither of us were armed, we’d just claim we’d been attacked by the two guys lying dead in the street, and then somebody had stepped out of the shadows and shot them. We had no idea who the guy was. Some local concerned citizen perhaps. Maybe somebody else had seen him better than we did. “I don’t know” is hard to take issue with.

  We spent most of the following day getting tested for gunshot residue, lying to the authorities on a variety of subjects, and standing behind the one-way glass looking at all the suspects they’d rounded up the night before. Mercifully, the shooter wasn’t among them.

  We’d already talked it over. What do we do if the shooter is in the lineup? Gabe had asked. I thought it over.

  “He could have offed us too,” I said.

  Gabe had nodded. “Easy.”

  So even if he had been among those they’d rounded up, we wouldn’t have ratted him out.

  Back home several hours later, we put a makeshift dinner together from leftovers, spiffed up the apartment, and were still pretending to be upright, law-abiding citizens when eight o’clock rolled around.

  “Let’s go see if there’s anything new on the tape,” Gabe suggested.

  I’ll admit it. At some level of consciousness I knew it was a bad idea. Something in me understood that it might be better if we gave it a break and took it up again after we’d cooled down a bit and weren’t feeling quite so frustrated and flaccid. But God help me, I didn’t.

  Five minutes later we were walking up Del Monte Avenue under a full moon before hooking a quick right onto Cable and heading north. The wind had risen. The onshore flow had the palm trees swaying like ghostly dancers in the wet tropical breeze. Sounded like the sensual swoosh of a well-dressed woman in the dark.

  I slid the key into the front door lock and let Gabe and myself into the building.

  Up at the end of Narragansett, the usual collection of mystics and maniacs had figured out the sunset was over and were heading back to their burrows.

  We let ourselves into the apartment, pulled the lawn chairs over to the window, and rewound. We were fast-forwarding through the stuff we’d already looked at when something caught my eye. “Stop,” I said. “Go back to the part where Pemberton or whoever the fuck he is comes out and gets into it with the security guy. The part where he gets rid of him and puts another guy in his place.”

  Took us a couple of minutes, but eventually we found the spot I was looking for. We watched Pemberton’s face twist with annoyance as he stood on the front steps and watched the guy pretend to garden the pair of flower boxes. We watched as he told the first guy to get lost. When the banished guy disappeared between the house and the nearest shed, Pemberton stuck his head back into the doorjamb and said something. A minute later another security type came out the front door to take his place.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The first guy. The one who went between the buildings.” I pointed at the screen. “He didn’t come back out.”

  “So,” Gabe began, “unless they’ve got a Star Trek transporter room back there, there’s gotta be a way into either the house or the shed.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Assuming we were regular renters, what are we supposed to do about garbage?”

  “Dumpsters in the basement. Blue for recyclables, black for trash,” I said.

  “You ever been down there?”

  “Nope.”

  Gabe tapped the screen. Pointing to the single metal garage door at the rear of our building. “That’s gotta be the door where the super rolls the dumpsters out into the alley.”

  As usual Gabe had a point. Unless the super for some perverted reason chose to roll a half a dozen fly-encrusted dumpsters out through the front of the building and then down the alley, that door had to be where he set the trash out for the garbage trucks.

  “It’s only twenty or thirty feet from our back door to the alley between the house and the building,” I said.

  “They’ll make us in an instant,” Gabe pointed out. “And even if we make it to the alley, they’ll have us on tape trespassing.”

  When somebody knocked on the door, I assumed it was Carolyn Saunders come to join the party. Since I always like it when I’m right about something, I was wearing a big shit-eating grin as I pulled the door open, thinking she just couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on. I had an “I told ya so” at the ready, right up to the moment when I turned the knob and the door exploded inward, flattening my nose, bouncing hard off my forehead, sending me stumbling backward into the room, with my knees turned to rubber and my vision a Technicolor kaleidoscope spiraling through my skull.

  I remember catching sight of Gabe coming out of the lawn chair in Duchamp sections. The sounds of feet scuffling along the floor and a series of guttural straining noises. I brought both hands up to my shattered nose and they came away slick and thick and bloody.

  Behind me somebody bounced off a wall with a thud. A low keening sound, rhythmic and mournful, began to fill the room. With my vision all haywire, I aimed a fist at what appeared to a black hooded head, made solid contact, heard him grunt. As I spun toward Gabe, somebody bear-hugged my knees, trying to pull my feet out from under me. I jerked one leg free and pistoned up a knee with all the power I could muster. The sound of his teeth pulverizing each other ricocheted off the walls like castanets. He began to make noises as if he were grubbing for roots. I kicked the air out in front of me but missed everything and nearly fell on my ass.

  My vision was beginning to clear as I felt hands on my shoulders, swung an elbow back, and connected with something solid. Hooded figures were all over Gabe like wasps at a picnic. Something stung my shoulder. I lashed out in that direction but again drew thin air. The movement brought my head around in time to see the needle jammed deep into my right shoulder. I reached for it, yanked it out just as my already fractured vision began to shrink, moving inward, getting smaller one line at a time, until my last vision was a pinhole of Ronald Reeves stepping into the room wearing one of his mechanic’s shirts. EARLE, it said. My head felt as if it were about to explode.

  “Nice and easy. No marks,” he said. “Just so they’re not around on Thursday night. Anybody finds what’s left of them after that . . . don’t matter, ’cause ain�
��t none of us gonna be around after that.”

  Almost immediately, my vision sorted itself the rest of the way out. I wasn’t unconscious. Quite the opposite, I was wide awake and able to see and hear everything going on around me. It’s just that I couldn’t move any part of my body. I couldn’t even blink my eyes or keep the stream of drool from forming at the corner of my slackened mouth.

  Somebody solved my immovable eyelids problem by pulling a hood over my head. Smelled like a dirty pillowcase. Then they zip-tied me from stem to stern. Next thing I knew I was lifted from the floor by three sets of hands.

  “Let’s go,” I heard Reeves say.

  Had I been able to so much as twitch, I might have smiled as they carried us out through the same rear door Gabe and I had just been talking about and dumped us into the back of some kind of truck. Rough wooden floor. Roll-up door on the back. The door rolled down with a bang. The latch was set from outside. It was deep-space dark. A minute later the truck started to roll.

  I told myself to pay attention. To keep track of what direction we were traveling. How long the trip took. What kind of roads we were driving on. Sounds. Anything that might be of use to us later. Unless, of course, there wasn’t gonna be a later, which was the gruesome possibility I was trying like hell not to think about.

  I knew the O.B. area well enough to tell that the truck was moving north along Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and then onto Interstate 8 up past Nimitz. After that, I started counting, trying to measure out the minutes and the miles. My head felt as if it must have been bright red and visibly throbbing.

  We passed the southbound I-5 ramp and then Hotel Circle and the 163. East . . . we were headed due east on the 8 toward El Centro and the desert beyond.

  I was pretty much inert matter but managed to stay focused for the better part of an hour. When I lost count, I went back to listening, trying to store it all away.

  In what I estimated to be about another hour, we slowed down and swung in a wide arc to the right. Like we were getting off the freeway. Forcing myself to listen. Trying to form in my mind a picture of the world outside. The new road was rougher and sounded different under the tires, and . . . yeah, the swoosh of cars passing had all but disappeared. A pothole bounced my head off the floor. I wanted to scream in pain but couldn’t for the life of me find the scream button.