Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  I stood in the doorway and watched the action until he managed to corral her hands, duck out of her grasp, and scramble to his feet.

  “What, sweetie? What?” he kept saying.

  That’s when he saw me moving his way. His face went white. He let go of her hands and showed me his palms, almost as if he was showing me he wasn’t armed.

  “I…,” he stammered. “Leo…”

  She balled up her fist and belted him in the face. She was going to do it again, so I took her by the shoulders and manhandled her over to the door.

  I took her head in both hands and looked her in the eyes. Her breath came in gasps. Her eyes were twitchy and hard as gravel.

  “You don’t want to be here for this,” I said.

  She made a leap toward Brett, but I looped an arm around her waist and lifted her from the floor. I swung her in a gentle arc and deposited her in the hallway.

  She gulped air. “Hurt him,” she said. “Hurt him real bad.”

  I closed the door. Brett had backed into the far corner of the room. His eyes rolled in his head like a spooked horse. He was pointing a 9 mm automatic at the center of my chest.

  “Where is she?” I said.

  “Keep away from me, Leo. Swear to God, I’ll kill you,” he stammered.

  I don’t know what got into me. Maybe all the frustration I’d been bottling up for the past few days finally spilled over, because I did something very stupid. I rushed him.

  I had to take one step to the left in order to avoid running into the coffee table, a move that ultimately saved my life. I saw the muzzle flash and the smoke leaving the barrel. In the confines of a closed room, the nine sounded like a cannon.

  I felt the round tear through my coat as I vaulted forward. At that point, I didn’t much care whether I’d been shot or not. All I wanted to do was get my hands on Brett Ward. He was lining up for a second shot when I batted the gun aside and hit him with everything I had, right in the solar plexus.

  He went down like a stone. The gun bounced off the wall and came to rest on the carpet. In my peripheral vision, I could see Barbara peeking through a crack in the door.

  I bent over and pocketed the automatic. When I looked at the door again, it was closed. Brett was balled up on the floor making an odd, keening sound.

  I patted myself down, looking for wounds, but couldn’t find any, then checked myself in the mirror, just to make sure. Apparently, I was intact.

  Brett rocked back and forth on the floor, braying like a donkey, trying to force air into his paralyzed lungs. He was stiff from gasping as I grabbed him by the upper arms, picked him up, and threw him onto the couch.

  I walked over to the edge of the couch and looked down at him. I took the automatic out of my pocket and checked to see if it was loaded. It was. I snapped the safety off. “While your air’s coming back, you listen to me,” I said. “’Cause I’m only gonna ask you this one time. If you don’t tell me what I want to know I’m going to shoot you in the head with your own gun and claim self-defense.”

  I bent over and grabbed him by the ears. Pulled his face right up to mine. “And I’m willing to bet that your friend Barbara there will be more than willing confirm my version of the story,” I said. “I told her all about your videotaping setup down there at the boatyard. Something about being betrayed like that tends to wear on a person’s sense of humor.” I let him go and straightened up.

  “Where is she?” I asked again.

  He thought about lying to me. I could see it in his face. Fortunately for him, he thought better of it. “They took her,” he croaked.

  I bent over and put the gun to his forehead.

  He began to blubber. “No, man, no…don’t. Please don’t…”

  I ground the barrel into the flesh of his forehead. “They who?”

  “You gotta understand,” he said.

  I pressed harder. “No, I don’t.”

  He closed his eyes, scrunched up his face, and started to cry. I straightened up and watched as a spasm of sobbing shook his body and a steady stream of tears rolled down over his cheeks. He blubbered something, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “Say again.”

  “They fucked me,” he wailed.

  “Outta what?” I asked.

  He began to shake his head. “No…no.”

  That’s when it occurred to me I was seeing the same look in his eyes that I’d seen in Ricky Waters’s. Almost like he had amnesia or something. Like he woke up one morning and no longer recognized himself in the mirror. A man who had his mooring lines cut in the dead of night, and now found himself adrift in dark, unfamiliar waters.

  “Both of ’em,” he blurted. “One of them held a gun to my head while the other one fucked me.” He closed his eyes and wept some more. “Sons of bitches traded off on me like I was some cheap whore.” He covered his face with his hands.

  I decided to ignore the terrible irony of a man with Brett’s pornographic predilections being assaulted in such a manner. I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t nail a sentence together. It’s not often that I find myself totally at a loss for words. I mean, what do you say to something like that? I’m sorry? Somehow that doesn’t seem to cover it. Hope you at least got dinner and a movie seemed a bit flip, even considering how I felt about this jerk. Nothing in my previous experience with quips and pithy one-liners had prepared me for this moment, so I shut up and waited for him to regain his composure.

  “Start from the beginning,” I said, when he’d calmed down a bit.

  The story I’d gotten from the Millennium boat mechanic was pretty much on point. With yacht sales in the toilet, Jorgensen had put Brett to work repossessing boats from Canada. Since most of the owners were more than happy to get out from under their payments, it was just a matter of keeping the paperwork straight and piloting the boats down to Seattle.

  Everything had gone well up until the night he showed up at the Cross-Current Marina and the boat owner went nuts, waving a gun around, threatening to blow him away. Brett called the cops, and then all hell really broke loose.

  Took him two days to get the Hatteras released by the Canadian authorities. Since he was already way behind schedule, he skipped his customary mechanical checkout and seaworthiness tests, and started motoring south. Predictably for a boat that hadn’t been in the water for a while, the engine kept cutting out on him, probably fuel filters, he figured. He had to baby it all the way back to Seattle, never got it over ten knots the whole damn trip.

  In addition to the engine problems, the boat was without water, so the minute he pulled the Hatteras out of the water in Seattle, he started looking for the pump from the holding tank. That’s when he found the first packet of pot…and then the second and the third and so forth. The whole bulkhead was filled with what looked like one-kilo packages of meticulously wrapped marijuana. Real high-quality stuff. Coupla tons of it, at least. No wonder the guy with the gun didn’t want to give up the boat.

  He hesitated in his recitation.

  “And, as a civic-minded citizen, you called the local authorities, of course,” I prompted.

  “I never got the chance, man. I was still working it out when…” He looked sheepish. “I figured…you know…what the hell…the maniac with the gun was in jail.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t going to have to worry about him for a while. I mean, how was I supposed to know he was working for somebody else?”

  “And then?”

  “The somebody else showed up.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Jordan Koontz and Lui Ng.”

  His eyes began to fill. I watched as he choked up, cleared his throat, and went on. “After they had their fun with me, they said they were going to kill me.”

  “Might have been better if they had,” I suggested.

  “I hadda think of something, man,” he whined.

  “Such as?”

  I watched as he gathered himself for the story. “I said, hey you know maybe we could work something out together. I’ve go
t twenty to thirty boats lined up for repo and it’s like a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card. I’m just the repo man. How in hell do I know what’s in the damn boat? Where’s a guy like me gonna get a couple of tons of pot? Either coast guard comes aboard and finds anything, I’m sure as hell going to walk. All you gotta do is get ’em loaded up with whatever you want and I’ll motor it down to Seattle for you.”

  “What did they say to that?”

  “That’s when the other guy showed up.”

  “Describe him.”

  “He stayed in his car. I never got a look at him.”

  “Anyway,” I said.

  “We cut a deal. I took care of the paperwork. They loaded up the boat and I motored it down to Ballard. They showed up the next day, unloaded the boat, and drove the stuff off in a rental truck. Everything went like clockwork. Couple of times a week for the past six months or so.”

  “What was your end?”

  “Twenty grand a run.”

  “And then?”

  “And then all of a sudden, things changed,” he said.

  “Changed how?”

  He thought about it. “Things got real serious all of a sudden. I could tell something was special about this last run. Something they weren’t telling me. Wasn’t just Collins loading the boat anymore. Couple of Latino guys made me stay outside while they buttoned her up.”

  “And you weren’t curious about this sudden change in routine?”

  “Like I said, I could tell something was different.”

  “So?”

  “So I motored out into the middle of the strait and took a look around.”

  “Don’t make me pull this out of you,” I warned.

  “Heroin,” he said. “Maybe half a ton of it packed into the bulkhead.”

  “And that didn’t bother you? You didn’t have any kind of ethical problem with smuggling heroin into the country?”

  His voice got whiney. “What was I going to do? I was already in over my head. They’d have killed me in a fucking heartbeat.”

  “And then what?”

  He looked away again.

  “You didn’t try to rip them off, did you?”

  When he didn’t say anything, I knew I’d hit the mark.

  “How goddamn dumb are you?” I bellowed. “People like that don’t let people like you rip them off. What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “I told ’em I got busted by Homeland Security. No way you can check something like that. Those guys have intercepted more dope than all the other agencies combined, and that isn’t even what they’re looking for. Everybody knows that. And those guys release no information at all. No way anybody could check on it.”

  He still didn’t get it. I could tell.

  “Don’t you understand? People like that just kill your ass now, then worry about whether you deserved it later.”

  “I was gonna hide the dope and then get lost until things calmed down. We talked about how we were pushing our luck. I figured, you know, what the hell. One big score.”

  I pointed the gun at the center of his forehead. He raised his hands as if to shield himself. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he chanted.

  “Where’s Rebecca?”

  When he didn’t answer, I pushed the barrel against his brow again. He began to shake and stammer. “They…they said they’d give me a week to get the dope back to them.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or they’d send her back to me in pieces.”

  “When’s the deadline?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “And you just sat here in your girlfriend’s house passing time while those freaks had your wife?” I recoiled in disgust. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  “What was I going to do, man? I poke my head outta here, they’ll kill me for sure.”

  “Where’s the boat?”

  He hesitated just long enough to tell me he was thinking about lying. I shifted the automatic to my left hand and used the back of my right to discourage him. The force of the blow knocked him from the couch. He pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his face.

  “Don’t make me ask you again,” I growled.

  “Two doors down,” he said. “Ballard Marine.” He looked up. His nose was bleeding. “I figured…you know…just in case they didn’t buy it…” He shrugged.

  “Call them,” I said. “Tell ’em we’ll trade the boat and the dope for Rebecca.”

  “I don’t…” he stammered.

  I backhanded him again.

  He struggled to his feet, straightened his shoulders, and stiffened his spine. His nose was bleeding in earnest now. A red sheen covered his teeth.

  “You might as well kill me right here, Leo, because I’m not getting anywhere near those freaks.” He shook his head resolutely. “I’ll call the cops before I get near those assholes again.”

  I hacked out a short, dry laugh. “And tell ’em what, bright boy? That you smuggled hundreds of pounds of heroin into the country, but now you’re sorry and want to make nice-nice? There’s fifty or sixty years of hard time for you in there, baby, and believe me, Brett, they’re gonna love you in prison. You’ll be the belle of the ball.”

  “They’ll kill me, man,” he whined.

  “Before this is over,” I assured him. “You may wish they had.”

  Took forty-five minutes of whining into my phone before Brett Ward looked up and offered it to me. With his redrimmed eyes and his nostrils packed with toilet paper, he looked like a not-so-wild boar.

  I reached out and took the phone. The screen read, “Blocked.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The voice on the other end was using one of those electronic voice transformers, available for under fifty bucks in any one of a hundred mail-order security catalogues. Turn it up high and you sound like Porky Pig. This guy had it set for low and slow, dropping his voice several octaves, to the point he sounded like he had a brain tumor.

  He started to tell me what he wanted…something to do with a truck…but I cut him off, “No,” I said. “You’re getting it back, boat and all. Everything’s exactly where you put it. The exchange takes place out at the end of a dock someplace. You get the boat. I get the woman. You just tell me where and when and I’ll have it there.”

  “Listen, asshole,” Robbie the Robot droned. “You’re not the one making the…”

  I cut him off again. “I want to see her. Face-to-face, Skype…I don’t care. You figure it out. I don’t see her, you don’t see your dope again, and we get the cops involved in this thing.”

  Long, ominous pause and then he said he’d get back to me and hung up, which was just as well. I needed time to think. Things had happened so fast I hadn’t had a chance to work anything out. I paced the room.

  I hadn’t really meant what I’d said about getting the cops on the case. As much as I would have liked to arrive with a SWAT team secreted onboard, there was no way it was going to happen. The minute the authorities were involved, things would be beyond my control. Hell, I’d be lucky if they didn’t clap me in jail. Worse yet, there was no way the powers-that-be were trading a thousand pounds of heroin for Rebecca Duval, even if she was one of theirs. That’d be strictly against policy, whereas I had no qualms whatsoever. So it was no cops. I was going to have to do this on my own.

  I checked my watch. Just after three o’clock in the afternoon. Brett was huddled on the far end of the couch, licking his wounds, and staring at the wall. I could hear Barbara P banging around in the kitchen. Sounded like she was lobbing pots and pans into the sink from across the room. I suspected she’d watched the video and was more than a little miffed.

  The phone rang. Mr. Blocked calling again. Before I could bring it to my ear, the phone blinked a couple of times and there she was, Rebecca, barely able to stand, propped up between two pairs of hairy hands, her head lolling back and forth as she wavered on unsteady legs. Her face was lumpy and her eyes seemed unable to focus.

  The screen went b
lack. “Satisfied?” Robbie the Robot inquired.

  “Where and when?”

  “You know the Hylebos Waterway?”

  He pronounced it wrong. Said Hillybus instead of Hilee-bus, which told me he was getting his information from somebody who wasn’t familiar with the area.

  “Tacoma,” I said.

  “Eleven tomorrow night.”

  “She walks down the dock under her own power,” I said. “No more than two people with her.”

  “You so much as blink and she’s dead.”

  “Where in the waterway?”

  “Right after the Hylebos Bridge. North side. You’ll see a big pile of scrap metal piled up. Hundred, hundred and fifty feet tall. You can’t miss it. There’s an old wooden dock along the west side of the yard. Right there. Eleven o’clock.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  The Hylebos Waterway was one of several heavy industrial canals dredged out of the Puyallup River delta. Its man-made shores were lined with all manner of shipbuilders, scrap yards, recyclers, and receiving docks. Anything deemed too unsightly, too smelly, or just plain too ugly for Seattle had been relegated to Tacoma, and anything too unsightly, smelly, or ugly for Tacoma had been relegated to the waterways.

  All in all, it was a good choice for the exchange. The heavy industrial part of Tacoma would be completely deserted at that time of night. Even the bars and coffee shops closed up when the business day was over. That time of night, the only things moving were rent-a-cops and Rottweilers.

  Brett looked my way.

  “Get up,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Sometimes the smallest things tell you all you need to know. The name of the boat was Yachts of Fun. Need I say more?

  Ballard Marine wasn’t happy to see us. You want to splash a seventy-foot boat back in the water, they expect a little advance notice. As a means of expressing their displeasure, they let us stand around for an hour and a half before they got around to dropping us in the drink, so it was six-forty by the time we left the fuel dock and headed for the locks.

  The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks negotiated the twenty feet of elevation difference between the lakes and Puget Sound and were a mecca for the tourists, who showed up in droves every year to watch the boats go up and down, and check out the salmon runs in the attached fish ladder. Commercial maritime traffic always has the right of way in the locks, and as a trio of Argosy sunset cruise tourist boats were lined up in front of us, it was another hour and a half before we motored past the last green channel marker.