Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  “He’s a good kid.”

  “That’s not what you were saying the last time I saw you.”

  “Things change.”

  He thought it over and then asked, “What’s in Lewiston?”

  “True love,” I said.

  Downing barked out a laugh and hung up.

  Took me another two days before I was feeling human enough to be social. By then, I’d spent so much time in the hot tub, trying to soak away the ache, my skin had taken on permanent prune-like puckers. I made a mental note to stretch.

  Next night, Rachel came over for dinner. We whipped up a red pozole and made some jalapeño corn bread. We were snuggled up watching a rental movie named Headhunters when my cell phone rang. I reached for it with the intention of turning it off, but the Lewiston area code caught my attention, so I picked it up and wandered out into the hall.

  “Leo here.”

  “Waterman, this is Chief Wilder.”

  “What can I do for you, Chief?”

  “Fred Simmons was attacked in his office last night,” he said.

  “He okay?”

  “Middlin,” he said. “Took a pretty good beating. Says it was Rockland Moon.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “According to Fred, Rockland wanted your file.”

  “Why would Rockland Moon want my file?” I asked.

  “I’m guessing the way he sees it, you’re the one turned his world upside down. Everything he knows is gone. His papa ain’t no more. Three different banks started foreclosure proceedings on all his daddy’s properties this morning. Guy like Rockland Moon is gonna have to blame somebody. I’m figuring that somebody is you.”

  He was right. Rockland Moon was just the kind of dim-wit who liked things simple. No Jungian synchronicity for Rockland. Just something easy. Somebody he could point a finger at, and then go beat on.

  Good news was . . . Fred didn’t have my address. Just my P.O. box. Another posthumous victory for my old man.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said.

  “We’ve got a county warrant out for him. Got CC pictures of Rockland entering and leaving Fred’s building at the time of the assault, so it’ll hold up. Between that and the charges from the Hardvigsen fire, we ought to be able to keep him inside until he’s too damn old to cause any more trouble.”

  “Maybe you ought to keep an eye on Irene,” I suggested. “You know . . . just until this whole thing is settled.”

  “Way ahead of ya,” Wilder said. “I’ve had a unit on her ever since I heard about what happened to Fred.”

  He hesitated. I thought he was going to break the connection, but no.

  “Keith Taylor did real well on the county civil service exam.”

  “He’s a smart kid,” I said.

  “Think we’re gonna give him a chance at the deputy job,” Wilder said.

  “He’ll work out for you,” I said confidently. “I’m betting on it.”

  Another pause.

  “Funny thing . . .” he said. “But I just couldn’t get a straight answer out of his former supervisor as to why he left. That ol boy went around in more circles than a hula hoop.” He cleared his throat. “Something I ought to know?” he asked.

  I decided there was. So I told him, the whole story. If he was going to hand Keith a badge and a gun, I figured I owed him the truth.

  “Anything else?” I asked when I’d finished talking.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m still trying to work out how you two yahoos ended up with the two best-looking women in Nez Perce County.”

  “God protects fools and drunks,” I said.

  He laughed. “Keep your eyes peeled for Rockland.”

  I told him I would.

  When I yanked open the door of the Eastlake Zoo, Sly Stone was blaring off the jukebox about how all he wanted to do was take you higher, which, when you thought about it, had to be considered pretty much the theme music for this joint.

  Boom shaka laka laka. Boom shaka laka laka.

  I stood for a minute, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. Whoever said that everything changes and nothing stays the same had obviously never been to the Eastlake Zoo. The place looked exactly as it had twenty-five or thirty years ago. Don’t know why, but I found something comforting about that. Maybe it was that the older you get, the stranger and less familiar the world becomes, as people and things you just naturally assumed were gonna be around forever fall by the wayside and are replaced by something newer and supposedly better. I mean . . . they only take cash! How old school is that?

  Boom shaka laka laka. Boom shaka laka laka.

  The Boys had formalized the art of getting shit-faced into a system of unwritten rules second in complexity only to the U.S. tax code.

  The way they saw it, as citizens of the world, they could hardly be expected to face the rigors of yet another day in paradise without a bit of in situ fortification immediately upon regaining consciousness each morning. And while consuming hard liquor while still horizontal was considered somewhat poor form, a few beers before rising were more or less de rigueur, as they tended to iron out the wrinkles, so to speak.

  Boom shaka laka laka. Boom shaka laka laka.

  Once up and tottering, a morning phlegm cutter or two served to clear the pipes for their daily spate of hunter-gatherer activities, which included, but were not limited to, piteous begging, overly insistent panhandling, and the much-maligned but ever popular Dumpster diving, for which they were so rightfully renowned.

  Thus fortified, it was time for some exercise. A healthy citizenry is, after all, the backbone of a free society. So they stumbled from whatever flophouse they’d landed in the night before down to the Eastlake Zoo, where they further marinated themselves in a few mid-morning bracers, designed to firm both the chin and the resolve, before launching into coupla-three pitchers of beer while playing pool, followed, quite naturally, by coupla late-afternoon pick-me-ups and, of course, the obligatory aperitif before a dinner of peanuts, pickled pig’s feet, and beef jerky.

  From the sound of it, they’d started early today. Soon as I rounded the corner of the bar, I could see what the hoopla was about. Harold Green was back among the fold, after spending the past thirty days in the King County lockup on a failure-to-appear beef.

  That’s how it went with these guys. They’d get busted for some stupid misdemeanor, like pissing in public, get issued a citation, skip the court date, and get slapped with a failure to appear, so the next time the cops ran their name, there was a warrant out for them, which, when you can’t make bail, meant you did thirty in the King County slammer.

  Looked like Old Home Week. Everybody’d crawled out from under their rocks to welcome Harold home. Nearly Normal Norman, Bernardo, Red Lopez, Heavy Duty Judy, Large Marge, Billy Bob Fung, No Pants Paul, Tommy, and Nancy. Even Larry the Leper, who I hadn’t seen in so long I’d assumed he was dead. And, as always, George and Ralphie and Harold holding down the center of things.

  Somebody shouted my name. I signaled Mick the bartender for a round. The crowd went wild. Took me a full five minutes to work my way through the well-wishers over to where George was seated.

  “Nice to see you back,” I said to Harold.

  He lifted a glass to me. Tried to enunciate something, but couldn’t quite spit it out. I leaned in for a closer look. He was hammered out of his mind. Making up for lost time, I supposed. I patted him on the shoulder and then walked over and grabbed a chair from over by the snooker table and pulled it up next to George.

  “You want to make a little money?” I asked him.

  “Doin what?”

  “Keeping an eye on Jules’s mail joint.”

  This one was a natural. Eastlake Mail was on the same block as the Zoo. It was a little private post office, run by a guy named Jules Sparks, that catered to the local live-aboard community. Gave em someplace to swap parts, get packages, and buy stamps. Better yet, it was an insular little community, where everybody pretty much knew everybody else.
The kind of place where a stranger was sure to be noticed.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Guy’s gonna come looking for me. All he’s got is my P.O. box number.”

  “So he’ll stake out Jules’s joint and wait for you to come get your mail.”

  “That’s what I’m betting on.”

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Find him before he finds me.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Big ugly bastard. Real bumpy, oily face.”

  “Starting when?”

  “First thing in the morning. I think Jules’s is open from nine to seven.”

  “Nine . . . man. That’s the middle of the friggin night.”

  “Got to have it covered from open to close.”

  George made his beer disappear. Mick arrived with a fresh pitcher.

  I threw a hundred-dollar bill onto the table. “Get a couple of prepaid phones. Whoever makes him calls you. You call me.”

  “Ain’t too many places to blend in up there.”

  George had a point. Eastlake Mail sat on a little ingrown toenail of Louisa Street. Less than a hundred feet total. Perched up on the side of the hill overlooking Lake Union. Jules, two restaurants, a dry cleaner, a yoga studio, and a nail salon. The good news was that it was going to make it way easier to find Rockland. The bad news was that none of the businesses were about to let any of these guys hang around for more than, say, five seconds before they called the cops for a cuff-and-stuff.

  “You’re gonna have to do this on the fly,” I said. “Keep doing walk-bys. Nobody stays in one spot.”

  George poured himself another beer.

  “Don’t forget the rest of Louisa Street,” I said.

  “Can’t see who goes in and out from up there. I was him, I’d camp out in the parking lot behind the sushi joint.”

  “Make sure you tell everybody to be careful. This guy’s one sorry-ass excuse for a human being. I don’t want anybody getting hurt.”

  “Careful is our middle name.”

  At which point, Red Lopez applied a bit too much power to the cue ball, which promptly jumped the rail, banged onto the floor, and disappeared beneath the snooker table. George smirked. “Like I said.”

  Before heading back home, I made a dry run by the mail joint. I parked on Eastlake Avenue, down by Roanoke, and hoofed it back up the hill, checking cars, until I was satisfied I hadn’t already attracted any unwanted company.

  The girl with the Bettie Page bangs, whose name I could never remember, was working this afternoon. We squeezed off a pair of smiles; she handed me my mail and I headed back outside, where I sorted through a week’s worth of Dumpster lining material while surreptitiously scoping out the neighborhood.

  George was right. Anybody who wanted to see and not be seen would back into the last parking spot behind the sushi emporium and sit there making like he was waiting for his wife to get her nails done. Unless he planned to just walk up and shoot me in the head, whatever Rockland had in mind couldn’t take place here. Too many cars turning around in the cul-de-sac. Too much family foot traffic from Louisa’s restaurant. Buses rolling by on Eastlake Avenue every three minutes or so. Too much everything. Might as well just turn yourself in to the cops and be done with it.

  Not only that, but the Eastlake neighborhood was a natural bottleneck. Less than ten blocks wide, squeezed between the freeway on the east and Lake Union on the west, bounded on the north by a drawbridge and on the south by the Mercer mess, Seattle’s knottiest and most enduring traffic disaster. Getting out of here, if you didn’t know your way around, was virtually guaranteed to be a nightmare.

  I found what I was looking for in the mail. The title to Keith’s car. I’d had three or four calls already, but had stalled because I didn’t have the paperwork.

  On the bottom of the pile, a small white envelope. Not sealed. No stamp. No address. I turned it over in my hands. Ran my thumb over the surface. Good stationery has a feel of its own. What I knew for sure was that Jules must have known the person, or he wouldn’t have put it in my box.

  I started to open it, but stopped myself. I needed to focus, and wasn’t in the mood for surprises, good, bad, or otherwise, so I slipped it into my back pocket.

  The onshore flow rushing in from Puget Sound was so filled with water it made my cheeks damp as I dumped the junk mail in the handy receptacle, put Keith’s envelope into my jacket, and started down Eastlake Avenue toward my car.

  That was Wednesday. I got the call just before eleven on Friday morning, as I rolled along Western Avenue, heading for the Trader Joe’s in Ballard.

  George. Well along in his daily buzz.

  “Leo. He’s here,” he slurred. “Sittin out fronta Pomodoro.”

  Which was the little Italian bistro across the street from Louisa’s Cafe.

  “Keep an eye on him,” I said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Promises, promises. Traffic was gnarly. Had to drive all the way up to the Magnolia Bridge before I could turn around. I would have cut up over Queen Anne Hill and come down Mercer, but that route, of course, was under construction, so I just went blasting all the way up Western and fought the lights up Denny to Fairview.

  The dashboard clock said I’d been en route for seventeen minutes when I crested a little rise on Eastlake Avenue and the Zoo came into view.

  Rockland knew my car by sight, so I hung a hard right into the 7-Eleven parking lot and got out. The roar of the freeway filled my ears.

  As I hurried across Lynn Street, I pulled out my cell phone. Dialed 911.

  “What is your emergency?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a wanted felon sitting in a car on Eastlake Avenue,” I said, as I jogged over to the front of the Zoo.

  “What is your emergency, sir?” she repeated.

  “He’s got multiple felony warrants out for his arrest in both Asotin County, Washington, and Nez Perce County, Idaho,” I said.

  “This line is for emergencies only, sir.”

  “You mean to tell . . .”

  She broke the connection.

  I cursed and began to jog up the sidewalk.

  I was halfway up the block when Rockland Moon got out of his car. I flattened myself into the doorway of a real estate office. Pulled out my phone and dialed 911 again. They put me on hold. I cursed again. In this town, Uber would get you a Lincoln Town Car and a liveried driver way faster than you could get a cop. I stole a glance around the corner of the glass. Moon was standing by the street side of the car. I watched as his head swiveled back and forth, checking traffic in all directions, before starting to cross the pavement.

  I stayed put until he pulled open the door of Louisa’s Cafe and Bakery and disappeared inside. I leaned back against the window and took a moment to weigh my options. Such as they were.

  The doorways between me and the cafe were few and far between. If Rockland moved this way, he’d make me in a second. Worse yet, I was still way too beat up for scuffling with anyone more ominous than a coupla Campfire Girls. I’d been counting on the cops to do the heavy lifting. Never occurred to me that they wouldn’t be interested in a guy with multiple felony warrants. I cursed again. At myself, this time, for living in a world where Officer Friendly still came to the rescue.

  I considered junking the whole scheme. Calling the Boys off and going home, until I could figure a way to get the authorities involved. Tempting as bagging it was, though, that left Rockland Moon hanging over my head like a cartoon anvil, and that wasn’t something I was willing to live with. No . . . this thing needed to be settled, so my life could return to normal.

  So, I bolted across the sidewalk, slipped between parked cars, and mamboed my way to the far side of Eastlake Avenue. Soon as I hit the sidewalk, I stretched my legs out and began walking quickly. I rolled up my collar and hunched the bottom half of my head down into my coat. Looked like Bazooka Joe.

  I kept my face averted as I hotfooted it past Rockland’s re
ntal car and down to the corner of Louisa, where I picked my way across the lumpy cobblestones to the shrubbery at the near corner of the tennis courts.

  Up to this point, I think I can rightfully claim that things were more or less under control. Sure, we’d had a major setback, what with the cops refusing to show and all, but things were still fairly copacetic.

  I could see George now, peeping out from the back parking lot, and Large Marge lurking back among the ornamental cypress trees.

  I’d found a seat on a low concrete wall, with a nice piece of shrubbery breaking up my outline. Seemed like we were about as well-positioned as we could be. I tried 911 again. Got a busy signal. Cue the cursing.

  Lasted about three minutes. That’s when Rockland came out the door, holding coffee in a white Styrofoam cup. Instead of crossing the street to his car, Moon turned left and ambled down toward Eastlake Mail.

  I figured he was making a reconnaissance run. Scoping out the place to see if I was there, and then moving on by. No such luck. He stepped through the doorway and disappeared inside. I waited. Nothing.

  On the street, a tandem Metro bus came roaring by. When the diesel din began to fade, I heard heated voices. Angry shouting coming from Jules’s place. Two voices.

  I didn’t have much of a choice. Way I saw it, my problem had spilled over onto Jules, which made fixing it my responsibility, so I came out from behind my bush and sprinted across Eastlake Avenue.

  As I vaulted the curb, I could see that George had heard the same thing I had. He’d hustled up the sidewalk and was peering in the door. Shouting something now. Still yelling as he stepped up into the doorway.

  And then the doorway spit him back out like a watermelon seed. He came tumbling backwards, head over heels across the sidewalk, finally bumping to a stop against a sickly looking tree.

  Instinctively, the crash of breaking glass spurred me forward. When I got to the door, Rockland Moon had two hands full of Jules’s polo shirt and was pulling him over the counter. I put my head down and plowed into Rockland’s back, sending all three of us to the floor in a flailing, grunting pile of humanity.