by G. M. Ford
His name was Timothy Prichert. He was a King County court officer. I handed over my passport, at which point we had one of those conversations you can only have with a true bureaucrat.
“This is expired,” he said disgustedly.
“So what?”
“It’s no longer valid.”
“I was ordered by the judge to turn it over to you.”
“But it’s expired.”
“Since I’m also ordered not to leave the county, and you’re about to slap an ankle monitor on me, that shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”
“It’s also a means of identification,” he snapped.
“The expiration date has very little to do with my identity.”
He punished me by taking his sweet-ass time connecting my ankle monitor, and by running his mouth the whole damn time.
“This is a GPS tracking device. Should you remove it from your person, or exceed the twenty-five-mile limit to which it has been set, you will be returned to the King County jail, where you will be held without bail until the disposition of your case. Do you understand?”
I said I did. He went on babbling.
“You will be tracked indoors and out, 24/7, by both satellite and wireless technologies. The device is waterproof. The strap contains a tamper detection system utilizing fiber optics. If an individual cuts the ankle strap, removes the battery, or tampers with the transmitter, an alert signal is sent and the violation is reported. You will be given a warning should you exceed your boundaries. The monitor will begin to blink red. At that point, you have four minutes before it begins to beep. Should that happen, you will immediately be taken into custody. Do you understand?”
It was a little black gizmo about the size of two flip phones, connected to my ankle by a wide plastic strap. When he’d finished, he stood there like he was waiting for me to thank him. Instead, I showed him the door.
I’d just poured my second cup of coffee when the doorbell sounded. I figured he’d forgotten something, so I took my time answering.
Wasn’t him though. It was a pair of cops.
“You Waterman?” one of them asked.
“Yup,” I said.
The other one reached out and handed me a business card. SPD North Precinct. “I’m Detective Sanchez. This is my partner, Detective Gomes. We’re working your friend Carl Cradduck’s case.”
We shook hands all around. “You guys making any progress?” I asked.
“We’ve had a rash of home invasions in that part of the city,” Gomes said.
“Eleven in the last thirty days or so,” Sanchez added.
“You know any reason why anybody’d want to hurt Mr. Cradduck?”
“I can’t think of any reason why anyone would do that to another human being.”
Gomes asked, “You familiar enough with Mr. Cradduck to tell if anything was missing?”
“Nobody but Carl could tell you that, and I’m betting he couldn’t either. The guy isn’t very domestic. His world is that wheelchair. As long it can still roll around his place, he’s happy. When it gets so bad he can’t get around, we take him out to lunch and a movie and send in the Maid Brigade. He goes crazy when we get back. Claiming we’ve ruined his whole filing system. That’s just how he is.”
“Got a big heroin problem up there in North City,” Gomes said. “Those tweekers will do whatever it takes to stay high. We’re kicking in shooting gallery doors, but we haven’t come up with anything worth talking about.”
We tossed it around for another ten minutes. “If there’s anything I can do to help,” I said finally.
“We’ll get back to you,” Gomes assured.
I closed the door and went back to my coffee.
The Seigal house was buttoned up tight. Curtains drawn, lights out. About thirty yards up the street a black SUV with midnight-black windows was cozied up against the curb. Looked to me like the boys in blue were keeping an eye on Janet Seigal.
I’d thought about Richard Seigal’s death at some length and had come to the conclusion that all she had to do was keep her mouth shut and she was pretty much guaranteed to get away with murder. Without a handful of “probable cause” the cops can’t actually compel anybody to talk to them. As most of the evidence had pointed at me, it was safe to assume that they had little or nothing on her. The only possible link was if they found her fingerprints on the gun . . . but I was her alibi for that. I’d dropped the gun into her raincoat pocket after I took it away from him. No traction for the cops there. Yeah . . . this was one of those times when, if she was smart, and she was, silence was truly going to turn out to be golden.
I was on my way up the back stairs when my phone began to buzz.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Mr. Waterman?”
“Who’s this?”
“Paul Edlund at Northwest Hospital.”
“Oh no man, don’t tell me . . .”
“Quite the contrary,” he said. “I think you ought to come up here.”
“Twenty minutes,” I said.
His head was bandaged like the Mummy and about the size of the noggin on the Jack in the Box guy. All they’d left open was the area around his left eye. And it followed me, bright and blue, as I tiptoed into the room. Felt like a car had been lifted from my back.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “You scared the shit out of me, you little fuck.”
He blinked.
“The doc says I can’t stay long.”
He blinked again, which told me for sure he knew what I was talking about. Then his right hand twitched. The hand was connected to the bed frame by a piece of surgical gauze so he couldn’t pull out any of the IVs.
“Take it easy,” I said. “You just get better.”
His hand moved again. But it wasn’t twitching. He was making a back-and-forth motion. I walked over next to him. He did it again.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Back and forth. Back and forth. And then I got it. He was making a scribbling motion. “You want to write something?”
He blinked.
I patted myself down. Came up with my notepad and that same green golf pencil.
I reached down and carefully slid the pencil between his fingers and then slipped the pad beneath the pencil. He took a deep breath before his hand started to move. He lost his grip on the pencil. It rolled across the pad and down onto the sheet.
I picked it up and started to put it back in my pocket. He began tapping his finger on the pad. The feral look in his eye told me everything I needed to know.
I slipped the pencil back into his fingers and stepped back. Took him the better part of five minutes that felt like an hour and a half. By the time he finished he was about out of gas. He closed his eye. The pencil slipped from his fingers again. His chest was heaving as he sucked oxygen from his mask.
I walked back and retrieved the pencil and the pad.
The letters were crooked, and there were only five of them, but I knew right away what it said.
When I looked up he had me fixed with that bright blue eye.
“Biggs?” I said.
He blinked.
“Why?”
One shaky finger rose slowly off the bed, and it was pointing right at me.
I wrapped the shotgun in a navy-blue blanket and laid it on the floor behind the driver’s seat, then carried the U-Dub duffle bag of ammo around to the back, lifted the carpet, and put it where the spare tire used to rest.
The Smith & Wesson M&P was riding in the passenger seat today, where I could reach over and pet it. Carl had been right from the very beginning. He’d warned me that we were running blind, and that when that happened, things had a tendency to go to shit in the blink of an eye. And, of course, I’d listened. Oh yeah . . . just like I always do.
All I’d managed to accomplish thus far was to endanger the lives of any number of innocent people, get myself beat up, kidnapped, and dumped in the trunk of a car, then arrested and charged with capital murder, and now for m
y grand finale, I’d caused one of my best friends to very nearly get beaten to death.
And the thing was . . . I still didn’t know how or why. I had no idea how Biggs and Bostick had connected Carl to me, or how they’d found out where he lived, or why they’d want to hurt him.
Neither did I have the faintest idea how Chuck Stone and Blaine Peterson had ended up dead, what Biggs and Bostick had to do with any of this, or how my father’s ugly tweed coat played into the whole damn thing.
I only knew one thing for sure, and that was that Aaron and Alice Townsend had both denied knowing any of them, and, for the life of me, I still couldn’t figure out why. Why not just tell me Stone and Peterson had been former parishioners, and that Biggs and Bostick were a couple of ne’er-do-well jerk-offs who used to be foster kids of their parishioner Nathaniel Tuttle, and who now spent their time trying to muscle some of Tuttle’s estate from anybody they could. That, in all probability, would have been the end of it. Why lie?
The other thing I knew for sure was that I was damn well going to find out. The minute I’d walked in the door from the hospital, I sat down at my computer and navigated my way to Aaron Townsend’s website, looking to find out where he was speaking this week, see if maybe he didn’t have a gig tonight. And what did I find? A notice stating that all his speaking engagements for the near future were cancelled while Pastor Townsend went into a period of deep meditation and soul-searching. He thanked everyone for their prayers and patience, and wished them peace with the Lord. How nice.
You know what they say about Mohammed and the mountain . . . if Aaron Townsend wasn’t coming to Seattle, that meant I was going to Salvation Lake.
I don’t drive much during rush hour. Today I remembered why. If I had to fight my way through the masses twice a day, they’d find me hanging in the basement within two weeks.
I figured it to be something like twenty-five miles from downtown Seattle to Duvall. I just had to hope that the distance from downtown didn’t set off my ankle monitor. Took me the better part of an hour and a half. By the time I turned north onto Retribution Road it was damn near six thirty and the hazy sun was sliding low over the trees. The box on my ankle was quiet as a mouse.
The ASCENSION ACRES sign was still standing. The rain had cleaned it off, leaving the colors more vivid than I remembered. I pulled over. The promised model home looked a lot like Tara. Columns and all. Some kind of idealized vision of simpler times. Sometimes I think that the most revealing question one can ask another human being is whether they think things are getting better or getting worse. No equivocation allowed. Better or worse?
The people who make me nervous are those retro souls who long for those thrilling days of yesteryear. Whether it be Evangelical Christians or the Khmer Rouge insurgents, the results are always disastrous, because time, quite simply, doesn’t move in that direction. Time is a forced march forward. A one-way street. You don’t have to like it, you just have to keep walking. It’s like Satchel Paige said: Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.
What with my recent penchant for walking into hornet’s nests, I doused the lights as I rolled up the last hundred yards of the Townsends’ driveway. And it was a good thing too, because the white Range Rover was sitting right in the middle of the yard.
I braked to a halt, picked up the Smith & Wesson, and waited to see if I’d attracted any unwanted attention. When a couple of minutes passed and it seemed I hadn’t, I threw the car into reverse and began to ease back out of the yard, rolling slowly on the dark, rutted track, until I found a small turnout nearly back at the main road.
I got out, pulled the Mossberg Slugster out of the blanket, and then walked to the back and retrieved my bag of ammo. I had eight rounds in the S&W 9mm, four in the Mossberg’s belly and another one in the chamber. I filled one side pocket with 9mm cartridges and the other with shotgun shells.
I threw the ammo bag on the backseat and locked the car. The air was heavy and wet. Took me five minutes to creep back to the house. The brass carriage lights on either side of the front door were glowing fuzzy in the misty darkness. The lights were on in the back of the house.
I was about to knock on the door when I heard a high-pitched yelp of pain. And then another. Then a man’s guttural grunt and an anguished scream.
I stepped off the porch and began to make my way around the north side of the house. A voice was shouting something. Something about hands. And then another scream. I flattened myself against the house and peeked into the nearest window. Looked like an office. It was empty.
I stepped back out of the shrubbery and kept going. The voices were louder now, the agony more distinct. “Hands on your head, bitch!” someone screamed.
Then a loud, flat crack and another scream. I slipped in among the rhododendron bushes, flattened my back against the bricks, and peeped into the corner of the window.
I jerked my head back in disbelief. Someone was groaning now. I took several deep breaths and then peeped again. The family room. Four people in sight.
Aaron Townsend was slouched in a red leather chair. He was naked and bleeding from several places on his face. Brother Biggs had him by the shoulders, forcing him to sit and watch what Bostick was doing to his wife.
Alice Townsend was over in the back corner of the room. Squatting. Naked. Her arms protecting her chest. “Get up,” Bostick screamed.
She slowly pushed herself up the wall. Her eyes were wide and wet.
“Hands on your head, bitch,” Bostick ordered.
“Please,” she begged, cringing back into the corner.
“On top of your head,” he bellowed.
I watched as she laced her fingers together atop her head and squeezed her eyes shut. The whole front of her was red as a lobster.
Bostick stepped forward and began slapping her breasts. First one, and then the other. Hard. Left and right. Back and forth, until she couldn’t take it anymore and slid back down the wall onto her haunches, weeping uncontrollably now.
Bostick turned to Aaron Townsend. “You like that, do ya?” he asked. “Like watchin’ those big titties of hers bounce around?”
Townsend tried to get up, to come to her defense, but Biggs slammed him back into the seat. When Townsend began to fight, Biggs clubbed him in the right eye and then began to choke him.
“You ready to tell us yet?” he screamed.
Townsend’s mouth was bloody. “I told you,” he whimpered. “I already told you. For the love of God, believe me.”
Biggs hit him again. Townsend slid down onto the carpet. His mouth wide open, his eyes rolling in his head like a spooked horse.
“Guess we’re gonna have to get serious with her,” Biggs said to Bostick.
I pulled back until I was out in the middle of the yard where the house lights didn’t reach, and then hurried around to the back of the house. I hadn’t seen any sign of their little girl, Lila. I’d have felt a lot better if I’d known where she was, but I just didn’t have the time to make sure she was safe.
I duck-walked under the big window that overlooked Salvation Lake and up onto the back porch. “Bend over,” I heard Bostick say in the second before I kicked in the back door.
Looked like a game of freeze tag. Everybody glued in place. I swung the shotgun back and forth between Biggs and Bostick.
“Just give me an excuse,” I said. “Either of you assholes, just give me an excuse and I’ll blow you back to wherever hellhole you came from.”
Apparently, they caught my drift. Neither of them so much as twitched.
Townsend had come to his senses and was pulling himself to his feet.
“Call 911,” I told him.
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
From behind me, Alice Townsend said, “No . . . no . . . no police.”
I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. She was squatting against the wall, panting, covering her chest with her elbows.
Townsend began to stagger in my direction.
&nbs
p; “No,” he gargled around a mouthful of blood. “No police.”
Biggs and Bostick were inching toward the center of the room, hoping to put Townsend between themselves and the shotgun.
“Get out of the way,” I shouted at Townsend, but he kept tottering forward, until he was directly in the line of fire.
That’s when Biggs and Bostick saw their chance and made a run for the door.
I shoved Townsend aside. He reached out and grabbed my shirtfront, throwing me off balance. I straight-armed him to the floor and brought the Mossberg back up to my shoulder, but they were around the corner by then.
I could hear the pounding of their feet as they ran for the front door. I started after them, but Townsend was back on his feet now, barring my way. “No . . . No . . .”
I threw him aside and ran after them. I could feel the monitoring device slapping against my ankle as I sprinted for the front door.
I heard the Range Rover start, heard the roar of the engine and the tires spewing gravel as I got to the doorway. I brought the shotgun up, squinted out over the bead, and squeezed off a round. The back window exploded. The car fishtailed wildly, then righted itself and disappeared into the darkness.
My head felt as if it was going to explode. My hands were shaking as I walked to the back of the house. Aaron Townsend was crawling around looking for his clothes. Alice had pulled a throw from one of the chairs and had it wrapped around herself.
I told myself to stay calm, but I was so pissed off, I lost it anyway.
“What the fuck is the matter with you people?” I screamed. “Somebody comes in here, beats your ass, sexually assaults your wife, and you don’t want to call the cops? Have you lost your goddamn minds?”
Townsend looked up at me from the floor, and then over at his wife.
“They’ve got Lila,” he said.
“They said they’d kill her,” Alice whispered.
“You ought to be more afraid of what will happen to her if they don’t kill her,” I said, and then immediately wished I hadn’t.
They both looked away. Alice began to cry again.
