Past Crimes

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “And Juliet’s car. It’s a green Honda, parked downstairs, on Level Two. Here.” He handed me the keys. “You can’t go to the hospital to check on Dono anymore, can you?”

  “No. But I’ve got that covered.”

  “Those security guards you hired?”

  “And a neighbor of Dono’s, armed with knitting needles. I’ll let her know how to reach me if anything changes. You, too.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. Davey’s fingers beat a hard-rock rhythm on his pant leg. His eyes had the happy-maniac look that they used to have when we were teenagers, waiting to boost a car or bust into a business. Ready for the fun.

  A class of junior-high-schoolers flowed around us like breaking shore waves around dock pilings, noisy and jostling. I waited until they were down the stairs.

  “I’m not holding a grudge, Davey. But I don’t want to have to tell Juliet that her husband and Frances’s dad is dead body number three.”

  His face was rigid. “I can take care of myself now.”

  “I’ll call you if things get too tight.” I walked away, through the gleaming scarlet tunnel.

  He didn’t believe me. I wasn’t even sure why I’d bothered to say it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  LUCE HAD UNLOCKED THE loading door to the Morgen for me. I slipped in and through the bar’s back room with its uneven towers of booze, then up the stairs to the second-floor hallway. I was still in the torn and bloodstained jeans and dirty shirt, though I’d ditched the reeking hoodie at the library. She opened her apartment door at the first knock.

  “You dressed up,” she said.

  Luce wore a silver button-down shirt over black jeans, with black ballet slippers. No jewelry. Light makeup. Her pale hair was brushed straight back from her forehead.

  “How long have you lived above the bar?” I said.

  “Just another thing that used to belong to Uncle Albie. What is that smell?”

  “I should have brought flowers,” I said.

  “You know the police came by right after you called me?” she said. “They asked Mike downstairs if you’d been around today. Very casual, he said, like they needed help with a trivia question that was bugging them.”

  “What’d Mike tell them?”

  “What could he? He didn’t even know that you and I had talked. But Mike’s not dumb. When I asked him to run the bar on his own tonight, he must have caught a clue.”

  “Once I reach Hollis, I’m out of your hair,” I said. “The cops won’t be a problem for you.”

  “Don’t be dumb. The police might poke around at the bar, but no one’s going to come up here looking for you. Sit down and stop looming, for God’s sake. I’m going to make coffee.”

  I sat, on a fat green velvet sofa. I felt a little of the tension go out of my shoulders. Guerin wanted Boone a lot more than he wanted me. The net would close, and that murdering son of a bitch and whoever might be helping him would go down. After that, I’d take Captain Unser’s shit and keep smiling every minute.

  Luce’s place was a one-bedroom, barely larger than a studio. It was stuffed full. Dark green curtains were open to let the evening light stream in through big wood-trimmed windows. She had hung two dozen or more photographs in small silver frames on the main wall, until the volume of glass in the frames made a kind of mirror.

  Every shelf in the room was groaning under the weight of books. I looked at the stacks. Lots of nonfiction, lots of literature. Addy Proctor the Librarian would approve.

  Luce brought two cups of black coffee back from the kitchen. “I was a wreck after you called,” she said. “I jumped every time I heard a siren. Which is a lot. Have I just gotten used to hearing those the whole day? Or did you do something to get all the cops in the city acting like angry wasps?”

  I told her about finding Cristiana Liotti, and about Julian Formes, and the complete clusterfuck that had followed. Luce listened with growing frustration.

  “But why are the police after you?” she said. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “And I think the cops believe that. But they don’t know for sure. I fled the scene at Formes’s place. There was gunfire. They have to take me into custody and get a formal statement.”

  “Which you can’t let happen.”

  “Not yet. Boone might slip past them. Could I borrow your cell phone?”

  I called Addy Proctor. She picked up the phone just as I thought it was finally going to go to voice mail.

  “Addy, it’s Van. Are you in a place you can talk?”

  “Van, oh, thank goodness. Yes. I’m fine. A little flustered, is all. I thought for sure it would be the hospital about your grandfather. I’m just on my way out of the house to see him now.”

  “Before you go, write this down.” I gave her the number of my new burner phone. “That’s where you can reach me now.”

  “Does this have something to do with the unmarked police car on our street? Two officers have been sitting right outside in a brown car since early this afternoon, looking up the block toward your house.”

  “It might.”

  “And may I assume that there’s another two of Seattle’s finest at the hospital?”

  “You may. So I need—”

  “I’ll call you immediately if there’s any news about your grandfather.”

  “Thanks, Addy. How are you holding up?”

  “I’d do much better if I didn’t feel like I was being watched. It’s unnerving.”

  “Call 911 and tell them there’s a pervert parked outside. They’ll be gone in ten minutes.”

  “I might just do that.”

  We hung up.

  Luce held her coffee mug with two hands, not drinking it.

  “This ticks me off,” she said. “If you’d sat back and done nothing, the cops wouldn’t have the first clue as to who had killed those people.”

  “Neither of them was innocent,” I said, “but I don’t think they deserved what happened either.”

  “You’re putting your whole career at risk. Can’t the police department or the prosecutor’s office or somebody get the army off your back?”

  I amused myself for a second, picturing Captain Unser’s reaction if some assistant D.A. tried to tell him what to do.

  “Ultimately it’ll be up to a JAG hearing to decide whether I really get busted. But I don’t give a damn about the army right now. I need to see this through.”

  “What you need right now is a shower,” she said. “Go. There are fresh towels behind the door.”

  The hot water felt like nirvana. Even across the cut and abraded skin on my legs, it was more pleasure than pain. I wanted to stay in it for a week. I got out of the shower and toweled off in the thick steam clouds.

  Luce knocked and opened the door. She looked me up and down.

  “Just checking if you had everything you need,” she said.

  I smiled. “Not everything.”

  We kissed once, in the doorway, then again in the hall. I’m not sure which of us directed the other into the bedroom. Her jeans fell to the floor with a whisper, and she kept her lips on mine as my fingers worked the buttons on her shirt. She had to turn away to throw a pile of pillows off the iron-posted bed. Her body was pale and improbably long, an icicle flecked with cinnamon.

  She watched my face, her pupils as dark as the centers of whirlpools, while she removed the last of her clothing, proudly, knowing the effect she had. I caught up to her. We met in the middle of the bed. I reached out and found that her body wasn’t ice at all, but the white flame of acetylene.

  *

  LATER HER BEDROOM WAS dark blue, matching the evening sky outside the window. Luce lay across my chest. I felt her lips and teeth resting softly against the heavy pulse in my throat.

  “You don’t have any tattoos,” she said. Her breath was still a little fast, and warm against my skin.

  “Neither do you, I noticed.”

  “I always thought soldiers got blind drunk and wandered into tattoo parlors to
gether. Like team spirit for your unit.”

  I looked at her and cocked an eyebrow. She blushed.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “A lot of guys have ink,” I said.

  “You scared of the needle?” She nipped me on the shoulder with her teeth.

  I laughed. “Somehow I grew up thinking that getting a picture drawn on your skin was a dumb thing to do. Too identifiable.”

  “Albie had one,” Luce said. “An eagle.”

  “Well, Dono always said Albie was an idiot.”

  She punched me lightly in the ribs. “He did not. Did you know that Albie was the only person who visited Dono every week when your grandfather was in jail? He told me once. It was years before I went to live with him.”

  “How was that?” I said. “Living with Albie?”

  “He came to my high-school basketball games with a flask,” she said. “But he came.”

  “Dono and I would go on road trips. Or out on the water sometimes.” In the half-light, I saw my forearm, brown against the alabaster sleekness of Luce’s back. There was one thin white line that never tanned, just below my elbow.

  “Was it fun?”

  “The best was when I was about twelve,” I said. “In the San Juan Islands. Dono and I were motoring around on this runabout he’d borrowed from Hollis. Hollis was anchored off Sucia, partying with some girlfriend. Dono took me fishing, mostly to give them some privacy, I think.”

  Luce chuckled, low and soft. “I’d love to have heard that conversation.”

  I grinned. “We took the boat to the outer islands, just to see what they looked like. When we got close to one, we dropped the lines. Something hit the bait right away.”

  “Tell me it was a mermaid.”

  “Might as well have been, I was so excited. I brought the tip of the rod across the bow a bit too close and snagged the fishing line on the bow cleat.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Not a big deal. But without thinking I reached across to free the line, and the tough little bastard of a fish picked that moment to make his run. The line whipped right over my arm and sliced the meat, right here.”

  Luce grimaced theatrically and took my arm and kissed it where I was pointing.

  “Dono already had his knife out, and he cut the line,” I said, “but by then I was bleeding all over the boat. I remember spots on the tackle boxes, our lunch, and my shoes, and thinking I was in big trouble.”

  “Was he mad?”

  “No. No, not at all.”

  I remembered even more, with the telling of it.

  Dono had taken off his T-shirt and slapped the folded cloth over my arm, ordering me to grip down hard. He tried to reach Hollis on the handheld VHF but got no reply, and after a moment’s hard cursing he took the boat into shore.

  “Too bumpy out here, boy,” he had said, “for what we have to do.” I hadn’t replied. I might have been in shock, not from real injury but just from the suddenness of it all. The center of the floor was a watery pink stream, with flowers of red blooming around it. Dono’s T-shirt looked tie-dyed.

  He beached the runabout on the rock without much regard for its bottom and hauled me and a tackle box out and over to the nearest place to sit down. It was the broken trunk of what had once been a huge madrona tree. The top surface of the trunk was worn smooth by decades of weather, making a broad wooden throne at the very edge of the small island.

  Dono had washed a slim fishing hook in salt water and threaded a fifty-pound-test line through it.

  “This will hurt,” he said, and it did. My grandfather was no great shakes at field medicine. Every time he pushed the hook through my skin, it was like he’d stuck me with a tiny branding iron. He had me bite down on a stick. But I held still, watching the dry wood of the tree trunk greedily soak up each red drop.

  Dono’s crude stitching held the gash closed, and before very long the blood flow abated. Hollis answered the VHF on the next try, and he and Dono had a low thunderstorm of a conversation.

  While we waited for the cruiser to return, Dono sat next to me on the stained throne of wood. He handed me the thermos of coffee, which he’d been using like a huge mug.

  “A good day,” Dono had said. And I took a first cautious sip and wheezed a little, and nodded, and he laughed. I’d laughed, too.

  “Hollis turned up an hour later,” I said to Luce. “Red in the face and quiet, which isn’t like Hollis at all. I barely noticed. I was so wired after the excitement.”

  “Scary,” Luce said.

  “Yeah. But after that, Dono and I were closer.”

  “Because you’d been brave?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe because Dono knew that I trusted him again. He’d only been out of jail a few months. Looking back, I realize we were both taking things day by day. I wasn’t so certain anymore that he would be around.”

  “Because he’d left you.”

  “He hadn’t wanted to. But he screwed up and got nailed. And I went into foster homes for a year and a half.”

  “Tough little guy,” Luce said.

  I pressed my lips against her forehead. “But still scared of the needle.”

  “You don’t have to get a tattoo on your arm, you know. You could put it anywhere.”

  “Like where?” I said. “Here?”

  “On you, not me. Oh. Never mind. Keep doing that.”

  I kissed her. She kissed back, harder.

  *

  WE WOKE TO A cell phone ringing. It had started raining hard, and the trill of the ring melded with the sound of tires outside, hissing over wet pavement. It was the new burner phone. I rolled out of bed and went into the other room to find it.

  “Oh, Van.” Addy Proctor. “He’s slipping. Dono. You need to come right away. Hurry,” she said, her voice breaking. “Please hurry.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  RAIN HIT ME LIKE a swarm of hornets the instant I stepped out of the Honda. The wind was flinging the drops almost sideways. I ran up the middle of the street, toward the eastern side of Harborview. Was I too late? Again?

  The ambulance dock was the closest entrance. I followed a group of paramedics and drivers as they race-walked their gurneys through the automatic doors. One of the patients fought violently against his restraints, screaming. Nobody looked at me. Inside, I broke off from the medics and headed for the hallway.

  It could be a trap. I didn’t doubt that Addy’s message was legit, but Guerin might still be counting on the news to draw me in. He could have a couple of cops watching the critical ward right now.

  I had to risk it. Had to. Even if Guerin handcuffed me right next to the damn hospital bed, at least I’d be there.

  And I had to be there, for Dono, if this was the end.

  The elevator doors opened on the fourth floor. No cops in sight on the ward. No guards from Standard Security posted at Dono’s door either. The hair on my scalp rose.

  I ran, drops of water flying off me, down the hall. I was halfway there when Addy Proctor stepped out of Dono’s room, followed by Dr. Singh and one of the uniformed men from Standard.

  Addy spotted me first. “Van, thank God,” she said. “He’s still with us.”

  “You should go in,” said Singh.

  I did. They stayed outside. The door shut behind me.

  He looked very thin. The day before, I might’ve believed he was only sleeping. Now his head didn’t seem to dent the pillow quite enough, and his steel-colored hair was disheveled. They had more wires attached to him now, a new monitoring machine next to the bed.

  I stepped forward and took his hand. It was cool to the touch.

  “Dono,” I said, “it’s Van.”

  A nurse had tucked the sheets and the sky blue blanket very neatly around him. The top of the sheet made a crisp white stripe across his chest. It rose and lowered a fraction as the air was forced into his lungs and sucked back out again.

  Rain beat against the windows, the wind behind it calling. Loud enough to mask the erratic
tap of the EKG. A downbeat of Dono’s heart every two seconds, then three, then holding back at two again.

  “We’ll get him,” I said. “I’ve seen the son of a bitch. Boone McGann. He’ll burn.” I leaned in close. “You need to be there to see it. To watch his face when judgment day hits him. You need to see that, Dono.”

  His hand squeezed mine. Light as a spider’s touch.

  I squeezed back, willing it not to be a reflex.

  “Dono,” I said.

  His back arched violently. He coughed and choked against the tube of the ventilator. I turned and yelled for help as his arm jerked weakly under my hand.

  A nurse yanked the door open and pushed me away from the bed. She pinned his forehead down while her other hand began removing the ventilator. The heart monitor was shrieking. The nurse called for Singh. Addy’s face at the edge of the doorway, pale and clenched.

  Dono’s eyes half opened. Black gun barrels in his long white face. The first I’d seen those eyes in ten years. His body was rigid, and his head, free of the ventilator mask, moved an inch one way, then the other.

  I stepped forward, and his eyes found mine. Stayed there. His mouth twitched.

  I leaned down and put my ear close to his face. Singh said something to me. There was an exhalation of breath from Dono against my cheek.

  “I’m here, Granddad,” I said.

  Another breath. I was so close that the stubble on his chin grazed my face.

  Somebody was pulling at my arm. The guard. I reached out without looking and shoved him, and he crashed over something and fell to the floor.

  “Van.” I heard Dono say it. The V was only air, pushed out an extra fraction.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  His big hand flailed suddenly and grabbed mine where it rested on the blanket, my fingers still looped around the ring of keys from Juliet’s car. He gripped me with spasmodic strength until the metal teeth bit into my skin.

  “Here.”

  “I’m here,” I said, my ear still an inch from his mouth. “Tell me.”

  Dono went limp. His clenched fist eased over my hand. I looked up in time to see his eyes lose the light.