Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  “Which way?” Brett asked.

  “South,” I told him.

  As might be expected, Yachts of Fun was a big, blue party barge. Seventy feet of fiberglass and polished wood, powered by a pair of Detroit Model 60 diesels, capable of pushing her over twenty-four knots, as long as you didn’t mind burning the better part of a hundred gallons an hour. Brett settled into the pilot’s seat and goosed the engines.

  To starboard, the sky was the color of a day-old bruise. The jagged outline of the Olympic Mountains rose black and menacing above the wooded hills of Bainbridge Island. The tide was ebbing and the wind had switched around from the south, which, around these parts, was generally a portent of bad weather. We motored along in silence as the big yacht cut through the chop without so much as a quiver. I could feel the low rumble of the engines in my feet but otherwise the boat was like a floating hotel.

  Brett was twitchy. Every time I got within arm’s length he flinched and put as much distance between us as he could. His eyes held that same hangdog expression I’d seen in Ricky Waters, as if a major portion of his foundation had suddenly been washed away, casting him adrift in unfamiliar waters.

  Wasn’t until we motored past Alki Point, when he finally worked up the courage to ask me exactly where we were going.

  “Tacoma,” I said. “I need to see the place where we’re going to make the exchange tomorrow night. Think things through.”

  “Maybe we could…” he began.

  “Just shut up and drive the damn boat,” I said.

  But, of course, he couldn’t do that. Not Mr. Irrepressible. Something in his makeup required that he maintain a constant flow of patter. Mr. Salesman overcoming objections, I figured. It was as if nothing was more terrifying to him than the prospect of silence.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen…” He started babbling about how sorry he was. How he was just trying to make Rebecca proud of him. How he never intended…

  I tuned him out.

  By the time we arrived at the Puyallup River delta the onboard clock read 10:12 in the evening. The two halves of the Hylebos Bridge jutted into the sky like post-industrial church steeples. If I recalled correctly, about ten years back the mechanism that opened and closed the bridge had slipped an irreplaceable gear. In order to keep the waterway navigable, they used cranes and cables to yard the bridge into the open and upright position, where it had remained, signaling touchdown for the past decade or so.

  To the south, the Art Deco remains of the ferry Kalakala slouched half in, half out of the water, its rounded electro-welded superstructure looking for all the world like a two-hundred-and-seventy-foot Airstream trailer.

  Over on the next channel, an honest-to-God Mississippi riverboat bobbed contentedly in the chop, its giant red paddlewheel silent and still. Back in the mid-1990s, the Puyallup Tribe had purchased a riverboat named the Emerald Queen and turned it into a Cajun-themed casino, with card games, costumed crew, and all. Six or seven years later, the tribe parlayed their floating foot-in-the-door riverboat into a series of dry-land casinos that now dotted the northern Pierce County landscape like neon mange, making the Queen more or less superfluous and relegating it to an ignoble fate alongside this fetid industrial waterway.

  Mr. Blocked had been right. You couldn’t miss the enormous pile of scrap steel thrusting high into the sky, enough rust to make the surrounding air smell like fresh blood, and to get my nostrils twitching with fear.

  Brett idled the engines as we crept in front of the scrap yard, moving only marginally faster than the outflowing tide. The dock was old and falling apart, with a rickety-looking ladder running down the east side. A remnant of an earlier age, before cargo boats grew to the size of small towns and the Port of Tacoma mostly shipped logs from place to place.

  Looked like there used to be another dock a bit farther west, but it was gone now, leaving only a series of rotted pilings jutting above the waterline like broken teeth.

  I told Brett to hold our position while I looked the place over. From their perspective, the place was perfect. Isolated, deserted that time of night. The minute we handed over the boat and the dope, we’d be faced with a hundred-yard death march back to dry land. A hike I felt certain they had no intention of allowing us to complete. Even if we did make it to terra firma, the broken bridge limited our landside escape routes to one.

  Interestingly enough, the place worked for me too. The narrow hundred-yard pier was my own personal Thermopylae, giving me ample time to see who was coming our way and prevent them from launching any sort of frontal attack. The secret was to use that hundred yards to my advantage, which, unless I was mistaken, meant not using it at all. The way I saw it, every step we took on that dock brought us one step closer to being dead.

  “Where’s the tide?” I asked.

  Brett pushed a few buttons on the Simrad chart plotter. “Be all the way out in an hour,” he said. “Low, low.”

  “What about at eleven tomorrow night?”

  More button pushing. “Gonna be a minus three,” he said. “One of the lowest tides of the year.”

  I turned it around in my head, trying to look at it from their perspective, as if I was the one plotting an ambush. You had to figure that Billy Bud owned the scrap metal business, which meant our adversaries had the keys to the gates. And what about security? With all the metal thievery going on, there must be some sort of security at night. If I were them, I’d call off security for the night on some pretense or another and lock myself in the yard. That way nobody could walk in on what was going down, and then…then what?

  My first thought was that I’d station a couple of shooters on the mountain of steel. Maybe another one laying low in the weeds along the western fence line. Put us in a cross fire. Pick us off the minute the boat and the dope were safely in the channel and out of the line of fire.

  Problem was that killing us out at the end of the dock presented a very sticky “what the hell to do with the bodies” problem. Carrying three deadweight bodies a hundred yards was no small feat and required more people than you wanted involved in something like this. Wasn’t like they could kill us and leave us lying there for the day shift to find either. Not with Billy Bud owning the place. Too many questions about how the perpetrators got in and out of the yard. And sooner or later somebody was going to wonder exactly who removed the security patrol for the night and why. And what if one or more of us went in the water—what then? A boat standing by? Way too James Bond for these guys.

  No. Unless I was mistaken, they were going to have to be neat about this. We were going to have to completely disappear, which meant they were probably going to let us walk back to dry land before they put us out of our misery. That way they could cut us down and cart us off in some sort of motorized conveyance, never to be seen again.

  I walked to the back of the boat. No davit, no dingy, no nothing.

  “Where’s the skiff?” I asked.

  “In the garage,” Brett said.

  I watched as he flicked a couple of switches on the control panel.

  “Watch your hands,” he advised.

  The whine of hydraulics filled the air as the back of the boat began to rise, revealing a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler secreted in a little fiberglass compartment.

  “Put us on the dock,” I said.

  Brett engaged the thrusters and began to cozy us up to the end of the dock. I threw a couple of orange fenders over the rail and tied them off at dock level, and looped a line over the nearest piling and tied it to a cleat.

  “We’re going to tie the skiff under the dock,” I said. “By the time it gets light, the tide will be up and it’ll be out of sight.”

  “Yeah…sure,” Brett said. “I’ll get it out for you.”

  “No,” I corrected, “you’ll get it out for you.”

  No way I was giving Brett Ward the opportunity to motor off in the yacht and leave me behind. I watched as he grabbed what looked like a small TV remote from the dashboard and pointed it
my way.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Yacht controller,” Brett said. “You can run the whole damn boat with this thing—engines, thrusters, system controls—the full Monty.”

  “How does the boat know which nav station to respond to?”

  He pointed to three toggle switches immediately above the radar screen on the yacht’s main console. “To the left, she listens to this nav station here. To the right, she listens to the station up on the flybridge. The one in the middle gives priority to the yacht controller.”

  “What happens if somebody tries to run it from here when the controller switch is on?”

  “The boat does what you tell it, unless the controller switch is on and somebody starts telling it to do something else.”

  “In which case?”

  “In which case it does what the controller tells it to do.”

  “Tie it up good,” I said. “Fore and aft, and make sure you leave enough slack in the lines to account for the rise and fall of the tide.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” he sneered.

  As he slid even with me I put a hand on his chest and looked him dead in the eye. “Don’t get cute here, Brett,” I warned. “Remember, I’ve got your wallet, your cell phone, and your car keys. Just put the boat under the dock and get back on board.” I leaned in closer. “I found you once; I can find you again.”

  He started off. I stopped him again. “I’ll make finding you and killing you my life’s work.” The look in his eyes said he believed me.

  I stood at the rail and watched as he used the emergency paddle to move the boat into place. Once he was next to the dock, he gave it a hard paddle, ducked his head, and disappeared from view. A tense minute passed. And then another. I was beginning to worry. He’d been under the dock for what seemed like quite awhile when I saw a hand pop out and grab the dock’s ladder. Two seconds later he was scurrying upward like a spider monkey. About halfway to the top, one of the ancient rungs suddenly gave way. I held my breath as he caught himself with his arms and pulled himself high enough for his foot to find the next rung.

  “Damn ladder’s seen better days,” he groused as he climbed back on board.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Where to?”

  “To see a man about a gun,” I said.

  The timing was perfect. By the time we motored back to Seattle, tied Yachts of Fun to the outside guest dock at the Elliot Bay Marina, and caught a cab back to my car, it was nearly two in the morning, a tad late for the rank and file, but just about the time Joey Ortega was starting his work day.

  If the local crime scene were a movie, Joey would be in the credits as the executive producer. That’s what he did; he produced things. You needed a cold piece, Joe would produce it. You needed your very own armored car? No problem. A flamethrower? Diesel or unleaded? You name it, Joe could produce it. All for a price, of course.

  While I hadn’t availed myself of his services in a number of years, and certainly wasn’t to be counted among his circle of friends, assuming he had one, which I doubted, Joe and I were nonetheless joined at the hip. Joe’s father, Frankie Ortega, had been my father’s chief persuader and hatchet man for the better part of thirty years.

  Right after their final attempt to pry Big Bill Waterman’s estate from my trust fund had failed, a bitter SPD police captain confided to me that the department estimated that Frankie Ortega was, in some capacity or another, involved in something like twenty-five murders and disappearances, nearly all of which were, in some way or another, connected to my old man’s dirty dealings.

  I think maybe Captain Crunch figured this awful rev-elation would so unnerve me that I’d feel guilty and call a press conference where I’d tearfully give the money back to the city and apologize for my father’s myriad transgressions. Much as I hated to disappoint, I’d long since decided that none of that had anything to do with me. I was just a kid when most of it was going on. Joey Ortega and I used to pitch horseshoes and play Wiffle Ball in the backyard on summer days, while inside the house, Frankie and my father sautéed their schemes. Hell, right after I got my first driver’s license, we even double-dated several times. The Lombardi sisters, Connie and Donna.

  Unlike me, however, Joey had relished the idea of taking up where his father left off, and unlike Junior Bailey, he was good at it. While Frankie had handled the wet work personally, Joey outsourced. All Joey did these days was produce things.

  I didn’t have his number anymore, but I knew where to find him this time of night. Ever since we’d grown up and haired over, Joey had operated from the upstairs offices of a gentleman’s club on Lake City Way, about five miles north of downtown.

  Like every other strip club owner in King County, Joey found himself subject to constant harassment from bluenosed local authorities, whose mission in life seemed to be ridding the world of nocturnally inclined young women and those naughty young men who were inclined to incline them.

  As a result, the joint’s name had changed innumerable times over the years, as drug and prostitution allegations had necessitated closing down for a week and slinging “Under New Management” banners across the front of the building. The club’s name morphed from semi-clever monikers such as Camelot, to somewhat racier titles such as Pole Position and Volcanic Eruptions, and, back in the late 1990s, to my personal favorite, Starbutts. These days, it went by the name of Club Exxxtacy. The management, of course, never changed. Only the banners.

  Cost us twenty bucks apiece to get in the door. I nudged Brett along in front of me. The joint was nearly deserted. Without dozens of sweating bodies to soak up some of the sound, the booming music rattled the fillings in my teeth as we shuffled inside. A brace of bored bartenders leered at us like hyenas over a carcass.

  Brett immediately became fixated on the prodigiously appointed young woman communing with a brass fireman’s pole at the near corner of the stage. I butted him with my chest to keep him moving, bumping him toward the back corner of the room and the little fire hydrant of a guy leaning against the brick wall.

  A tired-looking waitress was on us like a lamprey eel, bellowing over the music about a three-drink minimum, but I shook her off and kept nudging Brett forward. The door was painted the same color as the wall and didn’t have a knob, making it nearly invisible until you were right up on it.

  A pair of high-resolution surveillance cameras tracked our progress across the floor. The guy at the door was as wide as he was tall. Looked like George Raft was his tailor. I watched his eyes flicker as the Bluetooth earpiece whispered sweet somethings in his ear, and then heard the soft snick of the electronic lock.

  He nodded at me. “Just you,” he said, pulling the door open. The door was wood on the outside only. The rest of it was steel, half as thick as a bank vault.

  “Keep an eye on him for me,” I told the guy. “He has a tendency to get lost.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he assured me.

  By the time I mounted the second stair, the door had automatically locked behind me, and the boom of the music had faded to silence. I mounted the dozen or so stairs and turned left. The office door was wide open.

  Joey was alone in the office, which was how he’d managed to stay out of the slammer for all these years. Joey talked to nobody. You wanted to talk to Joey, you had to come to him. And whatever you wanted wasn’t going any further than the two of you, because you two were the only ones in attendance.

  He spent a great deal of time and money making sure nobody bugged his office and he never, absolutely never, did business on the phone.

  He looked a lot like his father. Maybe five-foot-seven and a hundred-and-forty pounds. Same wavy black hair and pencil-thin mustache. Same narrow face and black watchful eyes that never missed a thing.

  He came out from behind the desk and threw a bear hug on me. “Hey, big boy,” he said with a grin. “Been a long time.”

  “Too long,” I said and pulled him tight to my chest.


  He stepped a yard away and looked me over like a lunch menu, smiled, and gestured magnanimously toward the yellow leather chair in front of his desk. “Siddown, siddown,” he said as he gingerly made his way back to his desk chair.

  I watched as he eased himself onto the seat with extreme care. I wasn’t going to ask, but he caught me watching and told me anyway. “Hemorrhoids, man,” he hissed. “Gotta have something done.”

  “Sorry to hear about it,” I offered.

  “Not as sorry as I am,” he assured me. He pinned me with his little ebony eyes. “So what’s up?”

  I told him. Not all of it. I left out the stuff he didn’t need to know. He listened intently and without comment.

  “Fucking Colombians,” he said when I’d finished. “They’re the ones pushing all the scag out of B.C. Up there, you come up with half a ton of pure, you got it from the Colombians.”

  “I need a gun,” I said.

  He made a “you gotta be kidding me” face and shook his head. “Not your thing, Leo,” he said.

  He was right, of course. In the twenty or so years I’d been a private eye, I’d never carried so much as a pocket-knife, let alone a gun. The way I figured it, you didn’t need a gun unless you intended to shoot someone, and since I didn’t, I had no reason to be heeled.

  “Something with a hundred-yard range and serious stopping power.”

  “I repeat, Leo. Guns ain’t your bailiwick.”

  “Maybe some kind of night vision sight too.”

  “You need a gun like a fish needs a bicycle.”

  “And it probably best be waterproof.” I shrugged. “You never know.”

  He leaned back in the chair and thought it over. “Gimme a few days. I can put you on some serious contractors. I can…”