by G. M. Ford
The pain from the impact left me dizzy and gasping for breath, so I’m not quite sure how Rockland Moon managed to scramble to his feet, but somehow he did. Just in time for George to throw himself onto his back, legs wrapped around Rockland’s torso, hanging on for dear life.
He shrugged George to the floor the way a dog rids himself of a flea, and then gathered himself and stumbled out the door. I looked up just in time to see Large Marge haul off and hit him in the mouth hard enough to send him staggering two steps backwards. He roared like a beast and backhanded her to her knees.
I pulled Jules to his feet. “What the hell is—” he started, but I was off and crunching, kicking my way through the debris toward the door.
By the time I reached the sidewalk, Red Lopez had joined the fray. He was a human whirlwind, swearing, spitting, swinging, and kicking, all at the same time. Rockland ran over him like a fullback crossing the goal line. Never even broke stride.
When I look at it now, I don’t think Moon knew I was part of the tussle. From his point of view, it musta seemed like a concerned citizenry had risen up against him.
And then, instead of heading for his rental car, Rockland Moon inexplicably turned left and began running down Eastlake Avenue, toward the University Bridge.
Wasn’t until I’d limped up to the corner that I saw why. Nearly Normal Norman was sitting cross-legged on the hood of Moon’s rental car. If you counted the foot and a half of red Ronald McDonald hair, he looked to be just slightly under twelve feet tall, and even from this distance, one could plainly see that this man was not watching the same TV channel as the rest of us. I’da run the other way too.
Large Marge was struggling to her feet, with a trickle of blood running down over her ragged plaid shirt and her nose pointing in a direction never intended by nature. Red was out cold on the sidewalk, his right foot twitching to the beat of some unheard song.
I turned back toward Jules. “Call the cops,” I yelled. Jules began pawing through the carnage, looking for the phone.
George appeared at my side.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. I handed him my car keys. “Get the car,” I said. “It’s up at the Seven-Eleven.”
George took off stumbling uphill.
I forced myself into an uneven lope, and started after Rockland. Don’t ask me why. It’s probably something hardwired into my DNA. Like cats and shiny things. If it runs . . . chase it. Wasn’t like I had any chance of catching him either. I mean . . . he wasn’t an Olympic sprinter or anything, but I was moving like The Mummy on dope. Orson Welles would have blown by me like I was standing still.
By the time Rockland passed Edgar Street, he’d left me in the dust. If he’d just kept running, and then ducked in somewhere, he’d have lost me for sure.
As it was, it seemed like hours before I lumbered past Hamlin and around the bend, where I could see the long straightaway running up to the University Bridge.
Rockland was all the way down by the Eastlake Bar and Grill by then, but he wasn’t running anymore. Nope. That would have been too smart. Instead, Rockland was standing out in the street, engaged in a spirited fistfight with a guy who’d apparently been driving a red Volvo station wagon.
If he’d asked me I’d have told him. You don’t want to start anything with the local station wagon set. For all you knew this guy ran thirty-five miles before breakfast every morning and hadn’t eaten anything but wheatgrass for the past twelve years. Maybe not as big and bulky as Rockland, but with one percent body fat and a physique stringier than an Ethiopian chicken, these guys could be dangerous.
I kept moving, as fast as I was able. They were wrestling now. Pushing at one another like a pair of bulls. Wasn’t till I lumbered past the Little Water Cantina that I snapped to the fact that traffic had stopped.
I looked farther up the street. The bridge was up.
Guy in a Ford truck saw me coming in his rearview mirror. Rolled down the window. “Son of a bitch tried to carjack him,” he yelled as I passed.
“Come on,” I yelled back.
I’m very seldom inspirational. Mostly I do my thing and let you do yours. But today, I seemed to be a leader of men. By the time I’d covered half the distance, I was leading a posse of half a dozen civic-minded Seattleites who strongly objected to such politically insensitive behavior as brawling on city streets in the middle of the day. This could, after all, be a hate crime.
Rockland saw the mob approaching and took off running. The bridge was coming down now. A white panel truck came up from under this side of the bridge and started down the empty side of the street. Rockland ran in front of the vehicle, waving his arms, trying to flag the driver to a stop. No go.
The guy behind the wheel put the pedal to the metal. Rockland had to dive to his left to avoid being pancaked. By the time he’d scrambled back to his feet, George had arrived with my car. Barreling down the wrong side of the street like Mario Andretti, George swung hard left toward Rockland, who then jumped up onto the sidewalk.
George screeched to a halt. Rockland Moon took off running up the sidewalk. I could see it coming. Georgie didn’t like people putting their hands on him. I was no more than twenty yards away when George decided he didn’t give a shit if it was a sidewalk, he was going to run that motherfucker down, no matter what.
I grimaced as he threw the Blazer in low gear, bumped up over the curb, and started roaring down the sidewalk, turning potted plants and outdoor furniture into airborne litter as he swerved along the storefronts.
Only thing that saved Rockland from becoming roadkill was a pair of utility poles at the end of the block. To avoid having the poles for lunch, George had to veer hard left and bounce down onto Fuhrman Avenue, pointing in the wrong direction.
The bridge was nearly down by the time Rockland Moon ran through the bells and around the flashing barrier, headed, apparently, for the center of the span. The bridge tender immediately began to blow the whistle at him, but Moon seemed not to hear. The PA system began to squawk warnings over and over. People on both ends of the bridge began to blow their car horns. Rockland kept going.
Looked like his legs had turned to jelly by the time the pair of SPD cruisers appeared at the north end of the span. He slid to a stop. His mouth hung open. His chest was heaving, fighting for breath, as he walked over to the rail and looked down.
The assembled multitude caught its collective breath when he climbed up onto the rail. The SPD cruisers stopped coming this way. The cops got out of the cars.
I staggered up onto the bridge and looked down at the water. A red and white Crowley tugboat was motoring slowly toward Lake Union.
Without further ado, or seemingly another thought, Rockland Moon jumped. All things being equal, he should have landed in the tugboat’s wake. Problem was . . . the tug was towing a gravel barge that came out from under the bridge when Rockland was about halfway to the water.
Quite frankly, it didn’t look real. Looked like some cheesy special effect when Rockland hit the front of the barge and pinwheeled into the dark water of Portage Bay.
Took the water cops three days to find the body. From what I was told, the impact with the barge had very nearly decapitated him. My nerves were still pretty raw, so when the buzzer for the front gate went off when I wasn’t expecting anybody, first thing I did was stuff the .38 into the pocket of my pants. I hit the intercom button and turned on the cameras.
There he was, grinning at me. Keith Taylor in his handy-dandy, brand-new Asotin County deputy’s uniform. I opened the gate. He drove an unmarked county car right up to the side of the house and got out. We shook hands.
“Don’t you look slick,” I said.
“They sent me over to help bring Rockland’s body back,” he said.
“How’s the ladies?” I asked.
He went on for a minute and a half about Ginny. Capped it off by saying they were thinking about getting married.
“Irene says hi,” he told me after he’d woun
d down a bit.
“Give her my regards,” I said.
I gestured toward the front door. “You want to come in?”
He shook his head. “I gotta get back,” he said. “Got a shift in the morning.”
“Nice seein ya then.”
“Hey . . . uh . . .” he started to say and then stopped.
“What?”
“I wanted to thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For whatever it was you did to get me this job.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did.”
“You were the best man for the job,” I insisted.
“Thanks,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
He started for the car, changed his mind, and came back. We hugged. One of those prickly porcupine hugs common to men, but a hug nonetheless.
“Drive carefully,” I said.
I stood on the front steps and watched as he drove out through the gate and disappeared from view. I pushed the button, closed the gate, turned the security system on, and walked back inside the house.
Rachel was in L.A. at a convention, so I was taking the opportunity to catch up on all the little tasks I hadn’t gotten to in the past couple of weeks.
I was in the laundry room, going through the pockets of everything, when I came upon a little white envelope in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. The one from Jules’s joint. A lot had happened since then. I’d forgotten about it. I opened the envelope and pulled out the plain white card.
There was only one line. I read it three times before slipping the card back into the envelope. It said: Maybe we should talk. That’s all. Just Maybe we should talk and Rebecca on the bottom.
I picked Rachel up at the airport at four-thirty the following afternoon. Traffic was murderous, and she claimed to be starving, so I followed the arrival ramp around and pulled into 13 Coins, figuring to wait out the rush hour over cocktails and conversation.
We were seated in a brown leatherette booth about fifteen feet tall. Real retro sixties. Gave you the sense of having the place to yourselves.
“How was the conference?” I asked.
“Same old, same old.”
“Then why go?”
She shrugged and finished her Tom Collins. I caught the waiter’s eye and ordered another round. “Oh . . .” she said, “I get to see people I went to college with. I get to hang out in the bar with the girls.” She thought about it as the waiter brought our drinks.
“I get to be Harvey and Susan’s girl Rachel, more than I do most of the time.”
I lifted my glass. We clinked.
“Nice to have you back,” I said.
She set her glass on the table.
“So . . . how’s things on your end? You get everything settled?”
“Back to status quo,” I said.
“You want to tell me about what happened to Gordy?”
“No,” I said.
She nodded that she understood.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“You get over your money guilt?”
“Moved completely past it,” I said.
She smiled. “Really?”
“I’m giving up guilt for Lent.”
Her smile got bigger, so I kept talking.
“I’ve decided that money isn’t important, unless you don’t have any, and that anybody who says money won’t buy you happiness just doesn’t know where to shop.”
She did that searching-my-eyes-with-hers thing she does.
I don’t want to think about what she might have found in there, because I was feeling like I needed to tell her about Irene. Fortunately for both of us, she read my mind.
She reached across the table and placed a long manicured finger over my lips.
“I don’t have to know everything,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
She laughed. “Because you don’t know everything.”
I loved it when she laughed.
Acknowledgments
To my agent, Lisa Erbach Vance, for hanging in there when the light at the end of the tunnel looked like it might turn out to be New Jersey.
About the Author
Photo © Skye Moody, 2004
G.M. Ford is the author of seven other novels in the Leo Waterman series—Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca?, Cast in Stone, The Bum’s Rush, Slow Burn, Last Ditch, The Deader the Better, and Thicker than Water. He has also penned the Frank Corso mystery series and the stand-alone thriller Nameless Night. He has been nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Lefty awards, among others. He lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.
