by G. M. Ford
Nathan eased the van to a halt just outside the gate and rolled down the window. It was of no importance that he kept his face deep in the shadows, because the closest guy didn’t bother to look up from his fingernails. “Names,” was all he said, as if, regardless of the circumstances, everything else was unquestionably somebody else’s problem.
“Singh and Kimberly,” Nathan announced.
The other man—the one standing just inside the gate—ran his finger down a list he had on a clipboard. “Got ’em here,” he said. “They’re new.” He jammed the clipboard into his armpit and rummaged through a battered cardboard box resting against the fence.
When his hands reappeared, they held a pair of ID cards dangling from bright red lanyards. He came forward several strides and handed them through the window to Nathan, who thanked him and put them gently on the seat next to his hip.
Only then, as he stood close to the van, was the man able to catch a glimpse of Nathan. He winced and pointed. “Park over there with the rest of them.”
Nathan felt the man’s horror. He could sense discomfort with the same degree of certainty with which others could feel a spring breeze. He allowed his eyes to follow the finger toward a dimly lit area to the north, where half a dozen men with flashlights directed the parking of the cars. The way they moved their arms reminded Nathan of the men who’d guided the airplane into the gate at Montreal on the night they’d arrived, their long orange arms enfolding, beckoning them forward and forward and forward…as if toward the promise of a warm embrace. He looked over at Wesley, who sat transfixed, staring out the side window at the reason why they’d come.
“Keep your IDs in sight at all times,” the guy said and then waved hard with his arm, as if to hurry them along. “Let’s go now,” he said.
He pulled the clipboard out from under his arm and watched the taillights recede into the gloom before he turned to his partner and spoke.
“You see the face on the driver?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“Guy looked like he had a fire on his face and somebody put it out with a track shoe.” He picked at his own face with pincerlike fingers. “Looked like he had pieces of gravel or glass or something sewn all up under his skin.
“Lotta ugly people,” his partner commented.
“Not like that, man. Not like that.”
“Don’t move, man. Just stay still.”
Pete didn’t need to be told. He’d unbuckled his seat belt and had one hand out the window, hanging on to the roof, and the other locked so tightly around the steering wheel his knuckles were bone white in the gathering darkness.
“It’s going over,” he said through his teeth.
Jim waved him off. “I’m gonna move your way.”
When Pete began to shake his head, the van began to teeter. He stopped and waited for the balance to stabilize, then watched helplessly as Jim Sexton grabbed the steering wheel and pulled himself upward until his hip rested on the side of the passenger seat.
“Go on. Climb out,” Jim said.
Pete was more than willing. He used the roof for leverage, easing his hip out the window frame, until only his feet dangled inside the vehicle; then, one by one, he brought his legs out onto the door before stepping upward and disappearing from view altogether.
Jim moved carefully into the driver’s seat and surveyed the scene. The van had come to rest at a thirty-degree angle. The driver’s side wheels were a good four feet higher than those on the passenger side. All the equipment in the back of the truck had shifted downhill, making the balance even more precarious.
The squeal of tires pulled his eyes downhill, but the roof was in the way.
“What’s going on?” he shouted out the window.
“More cops.” Pete answered. “Lots more cops.”
“Shit,” Jim muttered to himself.
“What?”
“Stand clear.”
“Oh no, man…don’t…”
Jim found the accelerator and raced the engine. The roar sent Pete clawing his way up the railroad grade until he stood huffing and puffing on the tracks, his heart hammering, his shoes full of gravel. “Gonna go over, man…gonna go over,” he chanted as Jim dropped the transmission into first gear and fed it a little gas. The van inched forward, sending a cascade of loose dirt rolling down the hill.
Pete covered his eyes with his fingers as Jim began to point the front wheels downhill in a desperate search for equilibrium. He closed his eyes and began to picture the scenario where he explained to the bosses that…no, he personally wasn’t driving when everything went to shit. Had to word it just right. Not ratting old Jimbo out, but rather just calling a spade a spade. Just the way it was, man.
He peeked out from between his fingers just in time to see the upper part of the grade collapse and begin to slide down the hill. The whole slab was sliding toward a four-foot drop into the parking lot below when Jim Sexton gave the engine full throttle, sending the van crawling across the moving expanse of earth like a bug on a floating leaf.
The tires spewed up rooster-tails of dirt as the van picked up speed, gaining sufficient momentum to bounce the front wheels up onto the grassy berm separating the sidewalk from the railroad right-of-way. Pointing the nose toward the sky…lurching forward and up…and then, as if by magic, the landslide picked up speed and disappeared over the edge of the retaining wall, leaving the van sitting benignly on the sidewalk.
“Holy shit,” was all Pete could think to say.
He recalled when he used to swim in the river as a boy. When they traveled to Fessil Park to visit his mother’s sister. He remembered the way his innards seemed to cool in the muddy water, leaving him feeling nearly hollow, like a tube of skin through which the cool water flowed. In those moments, he came to understand why the people scattered the ashes of the dead upon the sacred river. How a soul could never rest until it was returned to the river from which it had sprung and so given its eternal relief from the sun in the cool currents of the underworld.
But the cold was never like this. The ache never this deep. The urge to die never this strong. Holmes took in a great gulp of air and began to scissor his legs again, mindless of direction, moving with the tide, holding Bobby Darling across the chest, pumping for all he was worth…left, right, north south, it didn’t matter…anywhere but down into the icy depths below his feet.
Bobby began to squirm in his arms. Holmes held him closer, whispered in his ear. “Parag,” he whispered. “It’s all right, Parag. We will make it.”
And then…a powerful wave pushed them sideways and down, dragging them beneath the bubbling surface for what seemed like an eternity before thrusting them up once again into the cold night air where they shook the water from their eyes and gasped for breath and then suddenly…Holmes blinked in disbelief…it seemed as if they were in a forest of great looming trees, angled this way and that, each trunk reaching for the night sky with bare black arms.
Holmes reached out, half expecting to find it all an apparition, but instead found it hard and slimy and real. He threw his free arm around the nearest tree and held tight as he swung Bobby toward the trunk.
“Hold on, Parag,” he said. “Hold on to it.”
Instinctively, Bobby complied, wrapping his arms around the slippery surface and squeezing for all he was worth. His black hair had washed completely down over his face. The chattering of his teeth made a sound like a small, badly tuned motor.
Relieved of Bobby’s weight, Holmes looked around. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. The trees of this forest were the underpinnings of a pier. Ancient poles driven deep into the bottom of the bay. Out over Parag’s shoulder, he could see the south facade of the hotel. The current had pulled them two hundred yards south. Two full piers down from where they had gone into the water just minutes before.
And then…as he fought to control a shudder, he lost his grip on the piling and slid down under the water again, the water cresting his chin and
then his nose and mouth…until his foot hit something. Something solid. He pushed off and bobbed to the surface. He looked around, loosened his grip on the pole and did it again. Just to be sure.
“Parag,” he whispered. “Parag.”
Bobby disengaged one hand from the piling for long enough to wipe his hair from his face. His lower jaw quivered violently. His lips were blue. He opened his eyes.
“The bottom,” Holmes said. “It’s right beneath us.”
Holmes watched as Bobby Darling groped downward with his foot and discovered he could stand with his chin just above the waterline.
Holmes pointed toward shore. Toward the floating dock and the sailboat and the concrete stairs rising to the street. “Just a little farther,” he said.
41
Charly Hart slammed the phone on the bed. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled. He checked his watch and looked up at Corso who stood with one foot on the balcony and the other on the carpet.
“Problem?” Corso asked.
Hart threw his good hand into the air. “What kind of crazy son of a bitch throws himself off the balcony on a night like this?”
“Son of a bitch who really don’t want to get caught.”
Hart nodded grudgingly, struggled to his feet and shuffled out through the sliding doors onto the balcony. Three stories below, Puget Sound gleamed like a cabochon. A full moon, veiled and pale, rode high over Bainbridge Island, sending a silver stake of light shimmering across the expanse of water, narrowing its beam…thinner and thinner, until it seemed to point directly at the room in which they stood.
Corso stepped all the way outside and leaned over the rail, where a pair of Coast Guard runabouts skirted the pilings, the narrow beams of their halogen searchlights spearing the darkness beneath his feet.
“Reuben’s still in the operating room,” Charly Hart said, as he snuck another peek at his watch. “What in hell can they be doing all this time? It’s been four fucking hours, for christ sakes.”
Corso rejected several responses, opting to keep his mouth shut. Thus encouraged, Hart went on. “I guess Inez came all the way unglued down at the hospital. Hadda be sedated. They got her in the room next to where Reuben’s gonna be.” He stared off into space. “Woman’s a soap opera waiting to happen. One of the great fucking drama queens of our time.” Catching the bitterness in his own voice, Charly Hart clamped his jaw closed.
Corso put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s see what’s going on downstairs,” Corso said. Charly didn’t answer. Just turned and started pushing his feet toward the door.
Samuel checked the zipper on his coveralls and then did the same for Paul.
“Who are you two.” The voice came out of nowhere in the seconds before the face emerged from behind the battered aluminum trailer where they’d just been issued their haz-mat suits. He was older than Holmes. Maybe fifty. Needing a shave. Wearing the same two-tone brown coveralls they were sporting. NORTHWEST SANITATION sewn across the back. One size fits all.
“Rishi and Singleton,” Paul told him.
“You new?”
They nodded in unison. He pointed across the lot…to a larger, newer portable building where a line of men walked in one end dressed like they were now and emerged from the other end with tandem breathing devices resting on top of their heads and silver canisters strapped across their backs. “Hurry up,” the man said. “Hustle over there and get yourselves into your gear. The party’s about to start.”
Samuel and Paul passed a quick look. The plan was to sidle back over to the car…to get their facsimile canisters, then to join the rest of the crew over by the west gate.
When they failed to move, the guy stepped in closer, eliminating any question as to what he’d been doing behind the trailer. His breath smelled of old cigarettes and new whiskey. His etched fingers were yellowed at the ends.
“Let’s go, fellas,” he bellowed. “Ain’t no fashion show here.”
He took Samuel by the elbow and began to move him across the yard. Paul trailed along in their wake, casting furtive glances at the Subaru as he moved along.
“Hope to God you two ain’t gonna be this pokey all morning.”
“Oh man…it’s fucked. Took the whole damn antennae mast off and everything.” Pete slapped his hands against his sides. “They’re gonna go ratshit over this. Absolutely ratshit.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jim Sexton soothed. “We’re on such a roll, they’ll never even mind.”
He said it, but knew it wasn’t true. These days you could find Jimmy Hoffa’s body and there’d still be some bean counter demanding you justify the pick and shovel. The bottom line was king at KING-TV. And, although it was not a word he generally used…because Beth went absolutely ballistic…“fucked” was precisely what the van was. A deep crease ran the entire length of the vehicle; in places the paint had been ground all the way down to the bare sheet metal. The passenger window was sprung and would no longer roll up. Worse yet, as Pete had so aptly pointed out, the microwave antennae had been torn completely loose and at some point had been run over by the tires, leaving twenty grand worth of high-tech equipment little more than a twisted assemblage of wire and metal, ready for immediate recycling.
“Let’s get real clear here, man,” Pete was saying. “I wasn’t the one driving when all this…” He waved a hand at the carnage. Before he could drum up the proper phrase, however, it became apparent to him that Jim wasn’t listening, but instead was staring intently at a pair of men crossing Elliott Avenue arm in arm. Considering the neighborhood, it would have been easy to write the sight off as a pair of drunks helping one another across the street after yet another afternoon of drunken debauchery. Problem was…they were soaking wet. Not the kind of wet you get from the rain. The kind of wet you only get from swimming in your clothes. The kind where you leave big wet tracks on the sidewalk as you move along.
“What do we have here?” Jim asked himself.
A block and a half to the west, the night was aflame with pulsing emergency lights…red and white and blue and red and white and blue…ricocheting off the bricks, dancing on the clouds, as what seemed like half the police cars in town had converged on the Edgewater Hotel.
They watched in silence as the pair crossed the sidewalk and disappeared inside the Belltown Parking Garage. Monthly Rates Available.
“You don’t suppose…” Jim started.
“Don’t even start, man,” Pete jumped in. “Next thing I’m going for a ride in is a tow truck.”
For the second time in as many minutes, Jim wasn’t listening. He’d pulled the walkie-talkie from his pocket and had it pressed tightly to his ear.
“…went off the balcony. Got two Coast Guard and two of our own boats scouring the water side,” the skinny cop was saying.
“What about the others?” Sounded like the chief.
“Rooms were empty. We’re doing a door-to-door.”
“Keep me in the loop,” Click. Silence.
And then, half a block down the hill, a black Mercedes nosed out of the parking garage. Stopping for a moment in the middle of the sidewalk while the driver surveyed the scene. The gentle rocking movement sent one of the chrome headlight rims rolling out into the street. A rhythmic ticking sound said the fan was hitting something as it went around.
The driver turned left…heading south. Without willing it so, Jim Sexton found himself trotting toward the van. He could hear Pete carping in the background…something about giving it a rest…as he slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key.
He was down the hill and around the corner before he realized the van was dragging something. He shrugged and turned up the radio. Warren Zevon. “Werewolves of London.”
42
Wesley shifted his weight from foot to foot. Nathan gave him a little bump with his hip as if to tell him to relax, but it didn’t do any good. If anything, Wesley seemed to get more energized by the contact, so Nathan bumped him again and threw a scowl his way. From the corner of his
eye, he watched Wesley’s right hand clenching and unclenching around something he was holding. He looked away.
The foreman of their cadre—they called the work groups “cadres”—was finally winding down. Other groups had been inside for at least ten minutes, while they were still standing outside receiving instructions. Nathan was ready. Everything had gone according to plan. They’d switched backpack sprayers, queued up and nobody had been the wiser. Their hour was finally at hand. Nathan looked up, forcing his eyes to take in the sheer scale of the world they were about to enter. He stifled a shudder.
“Harris,” the foreman called.
“Yeah,” somebody yelled back.
“Got a new partner for you.”
“Another one?”
“Some folks just can’t stand prosperity.”
Harris strolled up from the far end of the line. Like everyone else, he was clad from head to toe in blue. SANITATION MANAGEMENT SERVICES INC.
“Singh,” he called out now.
Nathan held his breath as Wesley stepped forward. The one called Harris beckoned Wesley to come closer, then took him aside. “We’re working C deck, you and me.” He looked Wesley up and down. “You ever done this kind of work before?” Wesley shook his head. Harris reckoned how it didn’t matter much either way as it wasn’t what he called “rocket science” anyway. Nathan watched as Harris and Wesley walked toward the far end of the queue and eventually disappeared from sight.
“McGruder,” the foreman called.
“Let me guess,” the man on Nathan’s right said.
“Another training opportunity.”
McGruder stuck out a hand. “Must be you,” he said to Nathan. “I know most of the rest of these monkeys.”
Nathan shook hands. The guy patted him on the shoulder. “Gonna be workin’ right across the hall from Harris and your buddy.” He smiled. “Like old Harris there said, this ain’t exactly rocket science.”
