by G. M. Ford
“I haven’t got a few days,” I said. I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time. “Got about twenty hours.”
Joey ruminated for another minute and a half. “Better get you something you can squirt like a garden hose then,” he said finally.
“Something easy to use,” I said.
“This is coming down at night?”
I said it was.
“We’ll get you tracers, so you can see where they’re going. Makes it easier to zero in on what you’re aiming at.” He rolled his eyes. “You know, in case, God forbid, you ain’t much of a shot.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You need it tomorrow?” he said.
“Yeah.”
He heaved a sigh and held out his hand. “Where’s this boat now?”
“Elliot Bay Marina.”
“Over by Magnolia?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“What’s the name of this barge?”
I told him. He made a disgusted face.
“Cute,” he said and got to his feet. “One good thing about the Colombians is that they mind their own business. They got a beef it’ll be with this Junior guy. You give ’em what they came for, and they’ll take it and leave. Anything happens after that gonna come from this Junior guy. They ain’t gonna do his dirty work for him.”
I liked the sound of that because it meant Junior and his minions would be on a short leash until the exchange was completed. Whatever Junior and the pervo twins had in mind for us would have to wait until the heroin changed hands. It wasn’t much, but if I held any edge at all, that was it.
I got to my feet. “Thanks.”
He made a pained face. “Be careful, Leo. You’re in way over your head here.”
“I know,” I admitted.
“I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
At the bottom of the stairs, the door swung open on its own. The pulsing music and the flashing lights hit me on the face like a bucket of spit. I was still coming to grips with the sensory overload when the door closed behind me. Brett didn’t notice I was back. He was too busy hitting on the waitress.
For want of a better plan, I took Brett home with me. I locked us in my bedroom and pocketed the old-fashioned skeleton key. Because my bedroom windows overlooked the garden and were not visible from the street, my insurance company had insisted the windows be equipped with burglar bars. That meant the only way out of the room was either over or through me, and I didn’t figure Brett was up to either. Fortunately for both of us, neither did he.
We slept, if that’s what six hours of nightmares could be called, in the same bed, fully dressed, each of us lost in our personal house of horrors, until my eyes popped open and the digital clock informed me that it was 10:07 in the morning.
To my left, Brett lay sprawled on his back, one arm thrown over his bruised forehead, snoring lightly. He had a fat upper lip and his cheeks were scraped up pretty good. Random blood spatter decorated the front of his shirt like a Jackson Pollock painting.
I rolled to the right and dropped my feet onto the floor. My shoulder throbbed. I reached up to scratch the side of my head and inadvertently hit my ear. The pain nearly blinded me. I groaned and flopped back onto the mattress, gritting my teeth, waiting for the red cloud to clear.
By the time I was ready to sit up again, Brett was groaning himself to consciousness. While he was in the shower, I threw his clothes in the washing machine. By the time we’d dried his duds, cleaned ourselves up, and choked down breakfast, it was damn near noon. All the while, a little voice in my head was counting off the hours. Ten hours and fifty minutes, it whispered as we backed out of the garage.
I’d seen the exchange site from the water, now I wanted to see it from the landside. No matter how this came down, assuming we were still alive, we were going to need a way of getting out of there when it was over. Working that out was going to be the hard part, because, once the action started, things had a habit of taking on a life of their own, scattering your best laid plans like windblown leaves. I had to be ready for anything.
Half an hour later, we rolled off the freeway at the Fife exit and followed 509 around the loop. Soon as we rounded the corner onto Marine View Drive, you could see the scrap metal trucks queued up, belching diesel in the turn lane, awaiting their turn to pass through the gates and dump their loads.
Miramar Metals, it was called, and, like I’d figured, they had some serious security in place. As nearly as I could tell, the pair of uniformed security guys checked every truck’s paperwork before rolling back the heavy metal gate and allowing it into the yard. They weighed the trucks both coming and going. One in, one out. That’s how it worked. All neat and under complete control.
Not wishing to attract undue attention, I kept the Tahoe moving past the yard, all the way to the end of the spit where I should have been able to turn left and cross the Hylebos Bridge but couldn’t because the bridge was kaput.
I U-turned at the bridge approach and eased back the way we’d just come, moving at lost tourist speed, trying to take it all in, while not looking like I was casing the joint.
Across the street from the security gate, a car upholstery business had filled the dirt shoulder with a dozen or so cars. I pulled into the parking area, stopped directly in front of the shop entrance, and got out. Shop hours were posted on the door. Six to six, six days a week.
An eighteen-wheeler rolled out of the Miramar lot and roared up Marine View Drive in a cloud of dust. From this vantage point, I could see the old pier jutting out into the water and beyond that the Emerald Queen, whose bold colors and ornate woodwork looked about as out of place as a barnacle in béarnaise sauce.
I used my phone to snap several photos of the Miramar security gate as we inched by in the street. When one of the guards stopped what he was doing and took notice of me snapping pictures, I fed the Tahoe a little gas and headed back up the street. Around the loop in the opposite direction, rolling down Taylor Way until I was directly across the waterway from Miramar Metals.
The south side of the Hylebos Waterway was utterly deserted. Twenty years ago, the EPA had declared it a Superfund cleanup site, complete with a bevy of skull and crossbones signs announcing that the ground should be considered highly dangerous to your health. I got out of the Tahoe, walked over and read the fine print, which warned of the presence of PCBs, PAHs, arsenic, hexachlorobenzene, hexachlorobutadiene, and a host of other tongue-twisting carcinogens left over from the last couple of centuries.
If this thing was going to come off as I envisioned, this spot was where we needed a car. Problem was, I couldn’t leave one here. Port of Tacoma Security would be all over it like ugly on an ape, so the car was going to have to get there just about when we arrived. If, for some reason, the car wasn’t in place when we got here, if something went wrong, it was “kiss your ass good-bye” time. With the Three Stooges crew I was about to assemble, some kind of mishap was just about guaranteed. I shuddered at the thought.
I wandered back to the Tahoe and climbed in. Brett was huddled against the door looking out over the Puyallup River delta. From this angle, you could see the brown runoff from the river mixing with the slate-blue waters of Puget Sound. What had last night been only a vague plan to rescue his wife, was working to become a reality and he was getting scared. Couldn’t say I blamed him either.
“You want to tell me what we’re doing?” he groused.
“No,” I said as I dropped the car in gear.
The Zoo was hopping. Della Reese was crooning how it was “almost like being in love.” Pool balls clicked, pinball machines squawked and rang and whistled above the low-register drone of voices and the clink of glassware.
“I found her,” I whispered to George. I leaned in close and gave him the details. “She looked to be all doped up, but at least she’s alive. I need your help to get her back.”
Down below the mezzanine, Heavy Duty Ju
dy had decided Brett was très cute and she was all over him, draping her arm around his shoulders, pinching his butt, and drooling in his ear. He kept looking up at me for help. I pretended not to notice.
“Anything,” George said. “Gotta get Becca back.”
“I’m going to need you to stay sober.”
He gave me the Boy Scout’s honor sign. For what it was worth.
“’Cause, if we don’t pull this off, we’re going to be dead. All of us, and I don’t mean dead out of luck. I mean dead as in shot to pieces.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“There’s gonna be shootin’?”
“Probably.” I told him about the 175 rounds somebody had pumped through our knotty pine cabin in B.C. About Marty being in the hospital. “These guys are into overkill.”
He swallowed hard and ran a hand over his pouchy face. Twenty-plus years of alcoholism had robbed him of his self-confidence. The mention of gunfire scared the shit out of him. I could see it in his eyes.
“You still got a driver’s license?” I asked.
As I’d hoped, he was annoyed by the question. Get George pissed off and he tended to forget about everything else. Although he hadn’t owned a car for the better part of twenty-five years, he’d always maintained his driver’s license as a matter of pride. “Damn right, I do,” he barked above the din.
“Good,” I said. “Here’s what I need you to do.”
I laid it out for him. Showed him the photos of the Miramar security gate that I took on my phone. With this crowd, visual aids were pretty much de rigueur.
“Where we gonna wait?” he wanted to know.
“There’s a car upholstery shop across the street. Bunch of cars they’re working on parked in front. It closes at six. Long as you lay low, one more car shouldn’t attract undue attention.”
“You got all the stuff I need?”
“The lock and the chain are in the car.”
He wiped the corners of his mouth. His expression said he wasn’t sure he was up to it. Especially sober. “I don’t know nothing about that area down there,” he said.
“I drew you a map. It’s in the car too.”
I slid my car keys across the table. “Bring Normy in case there’s any trouble.”
He nodded.
“Can you handle it?” I asked.
His eyes darted left and right, before he said, “Guess I gotta.”
I waited while he came to grips with the situation.
“Quarter to eleven?” he asked finally.
“That’ll give you plenty of time to get around to the other side,” I said.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out Brett’s cell phone and slid it across the tabletop. “Use this to keep in touch,” I told him. He swallowed hard again and nodded. “We gotta rescue that girl,” he said, as much to himself as to me.
Down below, Judy had wiggled her hand down the back of Brett’s trousers. Brett looked like he was tiptoeing through the tulips.
For the second time in a week, I smiled.
The full gravity of the situation began to wash over Brett as we cabbed our way back to the Elliot Bay Marina, settled up for the use of the guest slip, which included taking a raft of shit from the marina manager for leaving a seventy-foot boat in a fifty-foot slip, after which we walked out to the end of the dock and climbed on board Yachts of Fun.
Actually, it had started earlier. On the way back from Tacoma, he’d gone silent and sullen on me as whatever meager store of courage he possessed began to ebb. That’s why I decided to spend the last hours before the exchange on the boat. I figured I best keep him in a restricted environment, lest he decide he was more afraid of Koontz and Ng than he was of me, and did something stupid.
We were making our way through the salon, headed up front to the pilot station, when Brett suddenly screeched to a halt. I heard his breath catch and watched the color drain from his neck. I leaned over his shoulder, trying to make out whatever had stopped him in his tracks.
It wasn’t hard to find. There, right in the middle of the big wraparound settee, a plain white envelope lay propped up on a wicked-looking assault rifle. I shouldered my way around Brett and grabbed the envelope. Inside was a single typed sheet of paper that read:
Model AX9
Caliber: 5.56 x 45 mm
Action: Gas operated, rotating bolt
Overall: 838 mm in basic configuration, butt extended
Barrel length: 508 mm in sharpshooter version
Weight: 2.659 kg empty in basic configuration
Rate of fire: 750 rounds per minute
Magazine capacity: 30 rounds (STANAG) or 100-round double drum. Five double drums included.
Short bursts work best. Good luck!
When I looked over my shoulder at Brett, his hands were balled into white-knuckled fists, his face the color of oatmeal. “I don’t know…,” he stammered. “I don’t think I can…”
I grabbed him by the shirtfront and pulled him close to my chest. “This is your doing, asshole. Your greed and stupidity got her into this, and you’re going to help get her out.”
“I don’t…,” he stammered.
I shook him hard. His head flopped back and forth like a life-sized bobblehead. “We’re going to do this,” I said. “We’re going to give the Colombians back their dope, grab Rebecca, and get the hell out of there.” I pulled him up nose-to-nose. “Either that or we’re going to die trying.”
We were idling at the mouth of Quartermaster Harbor at the south end of Vashon Island, directly across Commencement Bay from the Hylebos Waterway, maybe a fifteen-minute motor from the Miramar scrap yard. Brett looked like he’d shed ten pounds in the past twelve hours. His cheekbones threatened to slice the skin as he paced back and forth across the cabin at flank speed. The control panel clock read ten thirty.
The wind had died. It was raining hard, straight up and down, making the surface of Puget Sound look like it had been digitized and was pixelating.
I had Brett’s 9 mm jammed in my belt and the AX9 assault rifle banging against my chest as I walked to the stern, brought the Pulsar Digisight up to my eye and surveyed the area. Other than a Foss tugboat steaming north past Dash Point, the surrounding waters were devoid of maritime traffic.
I walked back into the cabin. “Fire it up,” I said.
He started to say something, but I sawed it off.
“For the next hour or so, I’d suggest that for once in your life you shut the fuck up and do exactly what I tell you to do.”
Believe it or not, he opened his mouth to say something.
“Let’s go,” I growled.
As Brett engaged the transmissions and fed the boat some diesel, I pulled out my cell phone.
“What’s your cell phone number?” I asked him.
He told me. I dialed it. George answered on the first ring. His voice was thick with fear. “Yeah?”
“They show up yet?”
“Nope. Ain’t nobody inside at all.”
“Call me when they show,” I said.
I heard him clear his throat. “Will do,” he gargled.
Ten minutes later, as we motored across Commencement Bay, the tension inside the cabin was thick as concrete.
Brett’s face was gray and hard. His breath came in short ir-regular bursts, and he began to sweat.
As for me, adrenaline overload had my cheeks tingling like a funny bone, and I could feel the beating of my heart. I came a foot off the deck when my cell phone rang.
“They just went in,” George said. “Two cars. One of them Humper things.”
I figured he meant a Hummer. The clock read ten fifty.
“Lock ’em in and get over to the other side,” I said.
“Party time,” I said to Brett, with more bravado in my voice than I actually felt. He put the hammer down, and the boat rose up on plane and roared across the water.
Brett used the thrust to ease the boat alongside the dock. I didn’t bother to put fe
nders out. Seemed a good bet that a couple of scratches on the hull weren’t going to bother anybody at this point.
The clock said eleven, straight up. The dock was empty.
“Where’s that yacht controller thing?” I asked.
He pulled open a drawer beneath the chart plotter, pulled it out, and handed it to me. “Set the switch for the yacht controller,” I said.
Brett skittered across the cabin and flicked the center toggle into the upward position. The little red light at the center of the device blinked.
I dropped the controller in my pocket. Checked the dock through the scope. Still nothing.
The depth sounder said we were in six and a half feet of water. The clock read 11:02. The volume of the rain had increased; a hissing a wall of sound pounded down onto the fiberglass roof of the boat. I looked through the scope again. The eerie green light wavered for a second and then came into focus.
“Here they come,” I said.
At the far end of the dock, a trio of hazy figures lurched our way. They had Rebecca by the elbows, forcing her along from behind, using her more or less as a shield as they short-stepped over the uneven boards.
I thumbed the AX9’s safety to off, wiped my sweaty palm on my pants, and stepped onto the dock. I had the extra double-drum magazines jammed into every pocket. I rattled like a car wreck as I moved out onto the pier.
“Come on,” I said to Brett. “Don’t get between me and them,” I whispered, not that I really imagined he would.
He didn’t move. Looked like he was welded to the deck.
“Unless you want to sail off into the dawn with those two, I’d suggest you get your skinny ass out here.”
Apparently the idea of a romantic moonlight cruise didn’t appeal to Brett. Next thing I knew, he was standing beside me on the pier. The rain was unrelenting, pouring down from the blackness overhead in torrents. Took all of thirty seconds to soak us to the skin.
Rebecca and her captors were a quarter of the way down the dock. A big, thick Hispanic guy in a yellow raincoat and a pimply white guy that kept popping his head out from behind her to see how close they were getting.
