Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  Good thing too. A second and a half later, I heard the launcher’s ignition whoosh and then, in another half a second, the Tahoe was blown to pieces. The shockwave drove me face-first into the ground. Flames shot twenty feet into the air. I covered my head as big chunks of molten metal and glass and plastic rained down from the skies. When the overhead onslaught subsided, I pushed myself up to one knee and looked around. The last mortal remains of my car had been reduced to the size of a VW bug and were engulfed in flames.

  At that point, I got smart and began to act counterintuitively, trying to do something, anything they weren’t expecting. Instead of running for cover, I crawled back up and got as close to the Tahoe as the roaring flames would permit. Close enough to smell my hair beginning to singe. I shielded my eyes from the heat and peeked around the edge of the burning wreck.

  Like I figured, all three were sprinting hard in my direction, thinking there was no way I could have survived the explosion. I had a better line of sight on the guy on the right, so I started with him. I set my sights low and allowed the natural pull of the weapon to bring the barrel up as I emptied the clip. I watched as the firefly slugs stitched him from crotch to chin. He went down in a heap and stayed there.

  Seeing their compatriot go down sent Koontz and Ng scurrying back over the bank. I squinted through the rain. Ten seconds passed before I saw the rocket launcher reappear. I took off running, keeping the remains of the car between us. And then—bang—my car exploded again. Two direct hits had morphed my former Tahoe into little more than a pile of flaming metal, ready for the Miramar scrap heap.

  In front of me, Norman had Rebecca tucked under one arm and was loping toward the Emerald Queen with George zigzagging along in his wake. Brett was nowhere in sight. He’d dropped her on the ground and run for his life. I silently cursed myself for trusting him and especially for giving him back his gun. My ire was short-lived, however. Movement in the corner of my eye said Koontz and Ng were setting up to launch yet another rocket-propelled grenade in my direction, so I made a dash for it. Holding the assault rifle tight against my chest, I gave it all I had in a sprint for cover. I’d barely gotten started when another massive round whizzed by my ear, missed the Emerald Queen by a foot and a half, and disappeared into the darkness. I threw my head back and ran for my life. I don’t sprint much these days, so by the time I arrived at the Emerald Queen, my breath was about gone and my legs felt like they were about to rotate out of the sockets.

  Norman had kicked in the casino’s double front doors. He and George and Rebecca lay scattered on the casino floor like fallen poker chips. I stayed outside, ducked behind the ornate rail, and flattened myself on the deck.

  The combination of terror and oxygen must have had a regenerative effect on my brain, because that was the moment I realized that coming to the boat was, in all probability, going to be the last dumb decision I would ever make.

  What had kept us alive thus far had been the fact that we were out in the open. When you fire at somebody with a rocket launcher, you’re not trying for a direct hit. That’s not what the weapon was designed to do. What you’re hoping to do is to blow up something in your quarry’s immediate vicinity and take him out as part of the collateral damage of the explosion.

  As long as we were in the middle of the Superfund site, there was nothing for the grenades to hit, nothing to blow up. Either they scored a direct hit and vaporized one of us on the spot, or the rockets just flew off and eventually dropped into Puget Sound. What they really needed was something substantial that would create enough shrapnel to shred anything and everything in the immediate impact area, and that’s just what running to the boat had given them. I cursed again and waited for the final rocket to punctuate the sentence. But nothing happened.

  An eerie silence settled around us like a shroud. A minute had passed when I heard the riverboat’s engines roar and felt the rumble beneath as the boat came to life. Had to be Brett, I figured. Scrambling to save his own life. I cursed again, and then duck-walked a hundred feet up the deck and peeked over the rail.

  Koontz and Ng must have heard the engines too. They worked their way up the south bank of the Hylebos until they were parallel with the boat. I saw a yellow muzzle flash and waited to for the end to come. And come it did, but not in the caliber I’d imagined. No rocket. Just a long burst of automatic weapon fire tearing up the section of deck where I’d been half a minute ago.

  “Stay down,” I screamed to the trio inside. “Stay down!”

  Why they had switched weapons was beyond me. They had us right where they wanted us and they…Then it came to me: They must be out of rockets. How many of those things could anybody lug around, anyway? A short, dry laugh escaped my throat.

  Now, if there was any strategic advantage, it was ours. They were seventy or so yards away, with nothing but open ground between us, and we might actually be able to motor off into the sunset and save our collective ass.

  I popped my head up, sighted and let loose a short burst of fire designed to keep their heads down as I crawled forward, untying the lines as I went along. Not surprisingly, another prolonged burst of fire from shore pulverized the area I’d vacated. I pulled another line from its cleat and crawled some more, working my way from cleat to cleat. By the time I reached the back of the boat, the red paddle-wheel had begun to churn the water like a giant eggbeater.

  Just above my head, the woodwork and windows were shredded by another prolonged burst of automatic weapon fire. I flattened myself, covered my head with my arms, and hoped to God that everybody inside was doing the limbo.

  And then suddenly we were moving. I could feel it. The big boat began to slip out into the waterway just as the next salvo slammed into us. Not down here on deck this time, but higher. Up at the pilothouse where Brett presumably was at the helm.

  I popped up, put the scope to my eye, and let loose everything I had at the bright green muzzle flashes. Above the roar of the engines, the drumbeat of lead crashing through the boat and the tinkling of broken glass, I thought I heard a scream, something long and high pitched, and final.

  Wasn’t until we’d both stopped firing that I heard the sirens. A bunch of them headed toward us, their pulsating light bars painting the undersides of the clouds with splotches of red and blue.

  I crawled into the casino on my hands and knees. Rebecca was still out of it, rolling on the floor, flailing her arms, duking it out with her demons. Norman was on his back cradling his wounded arm, and humming a song known only to him. George had crawled under a discarded food service table and assumed the fetal position. From the movement of his lips, I guessed he was praying.

  Took me a couple of minutes to find the stairs. Red and white sign on the door: Authorized Personnel Only. By that time, the sirens and lights were all around us. I was halfway up the set of stairs leading to the pilothouse when the Emerald Queen came to a crashing, glass-mashing halt, throwing me onto the stairs, busting my mouth open like an overripe pomegranate.

  I felt warm blood run down my chin as I grabbed the handrail, righted myself, and clawed up the remaining stairs. The pilothouse was in shambles. Shot to pieces. As I looked around, two things became readily apparent. First off, the Emerald Queen had run aground on the far side of the Puyallup River. The big boat shuddered as the paddle-wheel tried to shove us up on the shore. I walked over and pulled the transmission levers into the neutral position and turned off the engines. The shuddering ceased.

  The other thing wasn’t as easily fixed. Brett was spread out across the floor like something requiring assembly. The bottom half of his left arm was missing. Blood was everywhere. Looked like he’d been hit three or four times. The baseball-sized wound an inch below where his left eye used to be would surely have been sufficient.

  I pulled a South Puget Sound chart from the nav table and put it over his face.

  George crawled out from under the cart and was puking on the rug. Rebecca, who somehow struggled into the sitting position, was holding he
r head in both hands. She didn’t recognize me as I walked by. Norman was still humming that lonesome song.

  I heard the flat static crack of bullhorns blaring. I brought a hand to my face and gingerly felt around my mouth. My upper lip was the size of a rutabaga. At least one of my front teeth was missing. I spit dark blood down on my shoes before folding my hands over the top of my head and walking out on deck.

  Half-a-dozen red-laser sights bounced over my body. “Hands, hands,” a cop screamed. “I want to see those fucking hands.”

  I figured, what the hell? “Is there an echo in here?” I inquired.

  “You stole a fucking casino,” Hardy bellowed.

  “Well, not exactly stole,” I amended. “More like requisitioned.”

  In actuality, the words didn’t sound that way at all. The ruined state of my mouth made enunciation nearly impossible. But owing to the fact that Captain Andrew Hardy and I had been bantering back and forth for the better part of an hour, he’d become quite adept at translating the thick utterances that spilled from my mouth like porridge.

  When I said, “Ellll, no zacly tole,” he knew precisely what I meant.

  Day before yesterday, as I’d languished in the medical unit of the King County lockup, the county doctors had discovered my missing front tooth lodged inside my upper lip, from whence they removed it, leaving the area around my mouth with more stitches than a set of slipcovers.

  By that time I’d already called my lawyer, Jed James, and, had I been able to speak, I was, on the advice of my attorney, no longer answering questions.

  First thing Jed told me was that we were in no hurry to converse with the cops. Quite the contrary. If they wanted to talk to me, they had to get medical clearance first. Independent medical clearance too. Not from the collection of county quacks they kept on retainer. He figured we could put any interrogation off for the better part of a week with medical issues alone.

  “I…i…i…i?” I inquired.

  “’Cause you’re all the buzz, man. There’s an army of reporters and a Dateline crew outside. Maggie had to hire extra help with my phones. There’s a rumor you’re going to be the People magazine cover for the coming week. This thing needs to simmer down a bit. Right now, it’s way too telegenic.” He threw a hand toward where a TV should have been but wasn’t because this was jail. “You turn on the boob tube these days and there’s either a twenty-year-old picture of you with a crew cut and all your teeth, or file footage of that friggin’ paddle wheeler toting a bunch of drunken idiots around Puget Sound.” Jed patted my shoulder. “You just lay back and get to feeling better.” He grinned. “Besides…” His blue eyes twinkled. “Trust me on this, buddy, you don’t want your face on television. Right now you’ve got a radio face.”

  So five days later, and while my cherubic countenance still didn’t have a good side, we decided to do our impression of good citizens, and finally agreed to chat with the boys in blue. Jed leaned against the south wall of the interview room with his stubby arms folded across his chest. We also decided that the best policy would be to give it to them as straight as we could without involving anybody we didn’t need to.

  The final tally, counting Brett Ward, was five dead, four by gunshot, one by drowning, and two soaking-wet Canadian citizens taken into custody while hitchhiking north on I-5 and listed as “persons of interest” in the ongoing Pierce County homicide investigation.

  Lui Ng was found among the dead, but Jordan Koontz was nowhere to be found. Every cop in two countries was turning over rocks looking for him, but thus far he had managed to avoid detection, a feat of no small magnitude when you looked like he did.

  George and Normy were still guests of King County, which, in their cases, probably wasn’t altogether unpleasant. For those guys, three square meals a day and a warm place to sleep amounted to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  News on Rebecca was sketchier. Jed had asked around, but the cops screwed the lid on tight. Scuttlebutt had it that she’d emerged from her drug-induced coma and was resting comfortably, with Iris no doubt hovering buzzardlike by her bedside.

  The Coast Guard had located Yachts of Fun moored in the Longbranch Municipal Marina. Trevor Collins was found on the engine room floor, with his throat cut and an X carved into his forehead. No heroin. No Colombian.

  The interview with Captain Hardy went better than I’d expected. We’d hit the yelling stage a couple of times when Hardy suddenly changed course and wanted to know where I got the AX9. That’s when things took on a more contentious air.

  I shook my head. “Na…owin…dere,” I slurped.

  “What do you mean you’re not going there?” Hardy demanded. “That gun was stolen from the Silverdale PD storage warehouse. The property locker cop got his head bashed in. Poor bastard’s still in intensive care, and I want to know where that fucking gun came from.”

  I turned my face toward the wall.

  “Let’s move on,” Jed said. “If the DA files weapons charges, we’ll deal with the matter at that time.”

  “D…ooo…ead…by…tatemen?” I asked.

  “Yes, I read your goddamn statement. For all the fuck it’s worth.”

  I’d written it all out for them and signed it. Blow by blow, so to speak. The only things I left out were Joey Ortega and the Colombian—for obvious survival-related reasons—and Rachel Thoms for reasons I couldn’t quite specify. I guess I figured that if Rebecca wanted them to know about her therapist, she could tell them herself.

  “Aah dinna hoot a anabodi who wann’t hooting a me.”

  “Self-defense?” Hardy sneered. “I’ve got four dead bodies, three of which are a ballistic match to your weapon, and you’re claiming self-fucking-defense?”

  “Ay weer tyin to kill me.”

  Hardy made a rude noise with his lips. The muscles along the side of his jaw rippled like snakes. His frustration was palpable.

  What I knew, and he knew that I knew, was that both the Pierce County and the Washington State Patrol evidence collection teams had pretty much verified my version of the story. As usual, Jed had been right on the money when he told me I was going to skate on the charges. That they’d screw around, threaten me with a host of lesser charges until the story fell off the front page, and then kick me loose.

  “I told you to stay the hell out of it,” Hardy said angrily.

  “Aaam no so goo a dat,” I admitted.

  They must have kept Brett’s body in a freezer, because it was a week and a half since he’d been killed, and he still looked fresh as a daisy. I hadn’t realized that the “looks good in clothes” thing of his persisted even after death.

  I’d parked my rental car on Tenth Avenue East, walked up the alley that separates the ball fields from the Broadway storefronts, and snuck in the back door of the Bonney-Watson funeral parlor, where I tiptoed past the corpse cooler and the stainless-steel embalming tables, down a long, brightly lit corridor, and into the viewing room.

  The lights were on in the richly carpeted room, subliminal organ music was seeping from overhead speakers, and the clock on the wall said it was ten minutes to one. I slithered between the sprays of flowers and peeked down into the casket. Last time I’d seen Brett Ward, half of his face was missing. They’d done a good job with the reconstruction. His death visage was a little fuller than he’d appeared in life, but if you didn’t count the waxy pallor, and the fact that he wasn’t talking, it was pretty much Brett Ward.

  The way I told the Great Tacoma Shoot-Out story, Brett’s heroic actions had ultimately saved our ass. I mean, what the hell? Huh? No sense in speaking ill of the dead. If not for his sake, then certainly for Rebecca’s. When she came out of her drug-induced stupor, she would remember what a weasely little shit-head she’d married. That was bad enough. No sense in rubbing her nose in it.

  I could hear a symphony of hushed conversations and a horde of feet milling around outside the double doors and then I suddenly picked up the sound of Rebecca’s voice telling somebody, “Tha
nk you for coming today.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for company, and I took her voice to be my cue to exit. I wound my way out the back door, around the corner and out onto Broadway, where the air was ripe with water and streets were alive with Seattle Central Community College students going to their classes. Even their backpacks had backpacks.

  It was too early for me, but on this day I needed a drink, so I walked down the hill, past the statue of Jimi Hendrix kneeling on the sidewalk and across Pike Street, under the Egyptian Theater marquee, down to Brody’s Place, where I found a nice, dark table in the corner, ordered a double Stoli on the rocks and told the bartender to send another along about every fifteen minutes.

  By the time I’d brooded my way through six doubles and all the couldas, shouldas, and wouldas surrounding my present predicament, more than two hours had slipped away. It was three-thirty, and I was seriously wasted. I didn’t even think about driving. I called for a cab. At this point, if I got a DUI, they’d probably give me life without parole.

  When I got in the cab, I had every intention of going home, of taking a hot shower and maybe even a short siesta. In the front parlor of my brain, the lace curtains were drawn, and I was turning off the lights. Apparently, however, my brain also had a steamy back room, where they were having a meeting and hadn’t bothered to invite me.

  We were rolling down the steep part of Denny when a voice told the driver, “Get on the freeway. Go north.”

  I looked around to see who said it, but found myself alone.

  The graveside service was winding down by the time I got there. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust and all that rot. Couple of guys from the mortuary were lowering the casket down into the hole with some kind of mechanical contraption.

  Iris and Rebecca and a cadre of her closest friends stood stiffly at the head of the grave as the pastor droned on about coming into this world with nothing and going out the same way. I kept expecting somebody to spontaneously start singing “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Standing directly behind Rebecca, intermittently rubbing her back for comfort, was Hillary Franks, she of Brett’s little love-nest fame. Apparently, the hussy had no shame.