by J. A. Jance
So is change.
I walked back inside and made myself another cup of coffee. Then I sat down on the living-room window seat and looked out at the Space Needle. That iconic piece of Seattle’s skyline has taken on a whole new and much darker meaning these days. It was where all of our lives had taken a sudden turn in a new and unexpected direction.
THINGS HAD STARTED going haywire almost three months earlier, on the Friday, two weeks before Christmas. Mel was back in her bathroom getting ready for our evening out while I sat in this same window-seat perch looking at the red and green lights, including the glowing Christmas tree that topped the Needle’s flying-saucer-shaped roof. Ross Connors had scored the Needle’s lower level for a Special Homicide Investigation Team Christmas party. If Ross had been using state funds for the event, he probably would have had to call it a “Holiday Party,” but since he was paying for the whole thing out of his own pocket, he would, as he told me, call it whatever the hell he wanted.
The people from all three S.H.I.T. squads—the ones in Spokane and Olympia as well as our Seattle-based one—along with their spouses/partners were invited. Ross was also springing for hotel rooms where necessary. We all knew what the real deal was. It was really a thinly disguised post-election celebration. When the polls had closed the previous November, and when all the votes were counted, Ross Connors had won again despite all the predictions to the contrary. He was still the Attorney General because countless people had crossed party lines to vote for him. The problem was, Ross was the exception. All the other statewide office holders, including the governor himself, now belonged on the “opposite side of the aisle.” I hadn’t a doubt in my mind that Ross’s Christmas party was a poke in the nose at all those folks—a way of letting them know that he was the last man standing.
As for his people, those of us privileged to call Ross Connors “boss”? We really were “his people.” Ross had used that same considerable political savvy that had won cross-party-line voters in creating S.H.I.T. He had collected a diverse set of people—always the ones he thought most skilled in getting the job done—and had molded us into a cohesive whole, a team in every sense of the word. If this was a Christmas party, we were all going, and that included the two guys in the organization who describe themselves as “non-observant” Jews.
The event was due to start promptly at six. It was five fifty-five when Mel emerged from her private domain at the far end of the hall. Dressed in a long, ruby-red dress with her long blond hair swept up onto her head, she would have been at home on any Hollywood red carpet. So would the shoes—amazing bright red stiletto heels made by a guy named Jimmy something. They matched her dress perfectly. In four-inch heels, she was only slightly shorter than me. In honor of the evening, she was carrying a small, glittery clutch rather than one of her more customary suitcase-sized purses.
I had sat there, waiting for her and holding her coat. Standing up, I slipped it over her shoulders and inhaled a hint of perfume.
“It’s spitting snow,” I said. “How about if we take the car and use the valet?”
“Come on,” she said. “It’s only three blocks.”
The thing is, I was well acquainted with almost every inch of those three blocks. Doing rehab in the aftermath of my knee-replacement surgery, I had done more walking than ever before, trudging alone through Seattle’s Denny Regrade neighborhood. I knew full well that the Space Needle was a mere three blocks away from Belltown Terrace’s front door, but I also understood that those three blocks are lined with mature trees whose roots have, over time, played havoc with nearby sidewalk surfaces. Not only is the concrete lumpy and bumpy in spots, it’s also riddled with cracks and iron drain covers that are the natural enemy of misplaced feet, especially ones in very high heels.
“Besides,” Mel said, “it’ll be fun, and I promise to hold on to your arm for dear life.”
“Right,” I said, “as in the blind leading the blind.”
Someone once told me, “Happy wife; happy life,” so we walked, laughing and talking through spattering snow that we both knew would never stick. We crossed Broad at Second then walked up the north side of the street as far as Denny, which we crossed at the light.
Walking along the grassy berm between Denny and the Pacific Science Center, we were almost at the valet parking entrance at the bottom of the Space Needle and the Chihuly Glass Garden when I heard the first hint of sirens—lots of sirens.
When you live downtown, you grow accustomed to sirens. You learn to differentiate between those of the fire engines and aid cars at the Seattle F.D. station over on Fourth. There are the short bursts from patrol cars that usually indicate traffic stops. Those are especially annoying in the wee hours of the morning, just after the bars let out, when the traffic guys are busy taking drunks off the street. But this was different. This was something more. It sounded like a car chase to me, coming southbound toward us along Elliott. Suddenly, sirens blossomed all around us as police vehicles from all over the city converged on the area. There were cars coming northbound on the avenues from downtown and cars coming down from Queen Anne Hill.
Car chases are inherently dangerous. The potential for tragedy—for death and serious injury—is always there, whether it’s on a deserted highway in the middle of the night or on a city street in broad daylight. A car chase during rush hour on a dark and rain-slick city street was insanity itself. Someone else must have come to that same conclusion. The sirens went silent, and I surmised that orders to break off the chase must have been given. The cops got the message. They backed off, all of them. Unfortunately, the crooks didn’t.
Let’s just say that guys who set out to make a living by robbing banks usually aren’t the sharpest pencils in the box. The only place smart bank robbers show up is on scripted television shows. And bank robbers who would pull off a heist in Ballard then head into the city center in rush-hour traffic, hoping to make good their escape, exhibit a particularly astounding brand of stupidity. But that’s what these two dimwits had done. They had somehow convinced themselves that if they just made it into the downtown core, they’d be able to blend into traffic and disappear.
In the old days, bank tellers would slip dye packs into the crooks’ tote bags that would stain the robber and render the money unusable. These days, tellers have access to packets of bills that come pre-equipped with GPS locator chips. All the teller has to do is activate the chip before slipping it into the bag, and voila. That money is invisibly findable with no car chases necessary. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons the chase was called off. The chip was working. The good guys had all the time in the world to track the bad guys down.
So far the two boneheads hadn’t figured that out. I heard the squeal of tires behind us as they came screaming up past Western and onto Denny. Then, to my amazement, a set of headlights weaving in and out of oncoming traffic, turned off Denny and onto Broad with other drivers slamming up onto sidewalks in desperate attempts to escape harm. Obviously, the maniac behind the wheel hadn’t gotten the memo that Broad is no longer a through street.
Instinctively, Mel and I both headed for higher ground although Mel didn’t start up the grassy berm until after she’d pulled off those damned shoes. We were standing side by side when the robbers flew past us, herding their stolen Range Rover between rows of stopped cars and tearing off mirrors and door panels as they went. The Range Rover slewed sideways directly in front of us then accelerated up Broad.
I knew what was going to happen long before it did. A vehicle turned off Fourth. The then, with oncoming traffic apparently stalled, the unsuspecting driver made the left-hand turn into the Space Needle’s valet parking area. The speeding Range Rover, driving in the wrong lane, smashed into them midturn, T-boning them, hard.
You can go to movie theaters and watch all the computer-generated mayhem you want, but none of that compares to t
he real thing—to the terrible crash followed by the sickening, grinding sound of twisting metal coming to rest. And then, out of the sudden silence that followed the carnage came the haunting sound of not one but two wailing car horns. They sounded like sentinels announcing the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we knew it.
By then, Mel and I were both moving, toward the action rather than away from it. There would be other cops in the neighborhood soon, but we were closer than anyone else, and in what would soon turn into a massive traffic jam, we’d get there before anyone else could, too. If the crooks, whose car was closer, managed to exit their vehicle and tried to take off on foot, we’d be able to restrain them.
Not surprisingly, neither of them—dumb and dumber—had been smart enough to wear a seat belt. They had both been ejected from the vehicle. We found them lying on opposite sides of Broad. I located the first one on the north side of the street, lying with his head cracked open like a broken watermelon on the sharp edge of the curb. I didn’t need to check for a pulse to know he was a goner.
The other guy, the passenger, had slammed full-tilt into a metal utility vault on the far side of the street. Mel reached him at the same time several passersby did. She knelt briefly and dropped out of sight. When she straightened up, she caught my eye and gave me the thumbs-down. So that one was dead, too—no great loss there. Subsequent computer-generated reconstructions of the collision estimated that the two dunces were doing seventy and still accelerating when they slammed into the turning vehicle. There was no sign that the driver ever touched the brakes.
Knowing those guys were dead, Mel and I turned our attention toward the other damaged vehicle. It was only then that we realized, with growing horror, that what we were seeing, stalled in the middle of Broad, were the still-smoking remains of Ross Connors’s Lincoln Town Car.
Even months later, recalling that horrific scene that changed all our lives was enough to shock me back to real time. I set down my coffee mug and headed for the shower. An hour or so later, when I left Belltown Terrace, I turned right on Second and drove all the way down to Olive and used that to make my way up to Harry’s rehab facility on the far side of Capitol Hill. That’s the official name for that particular neighborhood, but due to all the hospitals based there, locals generally refer to it as Pill Hill.
In the old days I would have turned right on Broad and over to Fifth to make that trip. Not anymore. For one thing, the city’s traffic engineers have fixed it so Broad no longer goes anywhere useful. Besides, I avoid Denny and Broad as much as possible. That’s where the accident happened. It’s where Ross Connors and his driver, Bill Spade, lost their lives, and it’s also where Harry Ignatius Ball lost both his legs.
Just glancing up either of those streets is enough to bring back vivid memories of that nightmarish scene. Ross’s aging Lincoln Town Car had been hit so hard that both people on the driver’s side of the car—Bill at the wheel and Ross seated directly behind him—had died on impact, crushed to death when the stolen Range Rover plowed into the passenger compartment, ending up with the Rover’s front bumper crushed up against the Town-Car’s drive shaft.
Momentum from the collision carried the two conjoined vehicles into a nearby light pole with enough force that the pole toppled over. It landed on the roofs of both cars, crumpling metal like so much tissue paper and sending a jagged edge of roof into Harry’s lower thighs, nearly severing his legs. The weight of the pole on top of the roof was the only thing that kept him from bleeding to death on the spot.
I had reached in through the wreckage and checked both Bill and Ross. Neither of them had a pulse. They were gone. By then, Mel was on the far side of the car, reaching in through the shattered passenger window and trying to comfort Harry, who was howling in pain. Looking at his legs, I was sure he was a goner, too.
The nearest fire station, at Fourth and Battery, was only five blocks away, but in the sudden snarl of stalled traffic, it could just as well have been in Timbuktu. It seemed to take forever for them to get there with the jaws of life. In fact, an EMT, a young woman, jogging from the station and carrying a first-aid kit, arrived long before anyone else or any other equipment. She was small enough to maneuver inside the tiny space left in the vehicle and somehow managed to fasten two tourniquets around Harry’s upper thighs, thus saving his life but dooming his legs. In the meantime, I was left with nothing to do but wish I could slam my fist through someone’s face, preferably that of the stupid driver, who was already dead.
Mel and I had set out for the Space Needle just minutes before the party was scheduled to start. It turned out that Ross, too, had been making an uncharacteristically late entrance. I found out later that Harry’s car had developed a fuel-pump issue on his way into the city from Bellevue. When he’d called Ross to let him know he’d be late, Ross had insisted that he and Bill drive over Lake Washington on the I-90 bridge, pick Harry up, and bring him to the party. I’ve always been struck by that old saying about no good deed going unpunished, but having Ross and Bill dead because they’d done nothing more than give Harry a ride was too much.
The jaws of life were not yet on the scene when I realized that if most of the other partygoers were already upstairs, I was the one who would have to deliver the bad news. And so I did, pushing my way into the Space Needle lobby and through the line of holiday revelers waiting for the elevator. People protested vigorously as I fought my way to the head of the line and flashed my badge in front of the boyish-faced operator.
“Skyline Banquet level,” I snarled at him. “Now!”
Without a word, he allowed me into the elevator, barred the other waiting passengers by means of a velvet-covered rope, closed the door on them, and pushed the buttons. We rode up in utter silence. “Wait here,” I ordered. “I’ll be coming right back down.”
Just inside the door stood a waiter holding a tray of glasses filled with bubbling champagne. I was tempted to grab one of them. In fact, I was tempted to grab them all and swill them down one after another. Instead, I stopped short and scanned the room.
It took a moment for me to locate Katie Dunn, Ross’s secretary. She was talking to Barbara Galvin, Harry’s secretary and the cornerstone for Unit B of Special Homicide. Finding both women together was a stroke of luck. Katie must have caught sight of the look on my face. She turned away from Barbara and hurried toward me, with Barbara, also sensing something amiss, close on her heels.
“Beau,” Katie asked, frowning, “whatever’s the matter?”
With no time to lessen the blow, I blurted it out at once. “There’s been a car accident down on the street. Ross is dead, and so’s his driver. Harry may not make it, either.”
Katie’s face drained of all color. “Oh, no!” she whispered. “Ross is dead?”
I nodded. Without a word, Barbara sprinted for the elevator.
“Go with Barbara,” Katie said to me. “I’ll hold the fort here. Keep me posted.”
When I entered the elevator, Barbara was already there, white-faced and furious, screeching into the operator’s face. “Go, damn it! What on earth are you waiting for? Go now!”
But I had made a believer of the poor guy. He waited until I stepped on board before pushing the DOWN button. By the time we hit the ground level, Barbara was out of her sequined heels. Holding them in one hand and a tiny beaded clutch in the other, she sprinted out of the elevator and left me in the dust as she pushed through the crush of people waiting for the long-delayed elevator.
I caught up with Barbara only because she was stopped short by a uniformed cop trying to maintain a perimeter around the crash site. “She’s with me,” I told him, holding up my badge. “Let her through.”
We reached the wreckage while firefighters were still maneuvering the jaws of life into position. Despite protests from more than one first responder, Barbara shoved Mel out of the way. “Don’t you die on
me, you bastard!” she yelled at Harry, snatching his hand from Mel’s. Bad as things were, Harry focused his eyes on Barbara’s face and favored her with a tiny grin.
“Do my best,” he whispered. “I’ll do my best.”
Believe me, the relationship between Harry I. Ball and the reformed punk rocker, Barbara Galvin, had nothing to do with an office romance. It was more like a love/hate, father/daughter kind of thing.
At that point, one of the firefighters simply picked Barbara up and carried her away from the wreckage, bringing her over to where Mel and I had taken refuge on a piece of sidewalk slick with shattered glass. “Keep her here and get her shoes back on,” the man growled at us. “We need this woman out of our way!”
Another firefighter appeared behind him. “Okay,” he said. “We’ve got permission to land the chopper on top of KOMO.”
The snarl of traffic, growing worse by the minute, made transporting Harry to a hospital by ambulance a nonstarter. The building for the local ABC affiliate, complete with a helipad on its roof, was almost directly across the street. In moments, they had Harry out of the crushed vehicle and onto a gurney, rolling him across the street and toward the building to the helipad. Once at Harborview Hospital, a team of the ER docs tried valiantly to save his legs. It didn’t work. His legs were gone, and soon, so was everything else, S.H.I.T included.
Within weeks of Ross Connors’s funeral and while Harry was still in the hospital, the governor—the one from the “other side of the aisle”—had appointed a new attorney general, whose first order of business was to disband Special Homicide altogether. Suddenly we were all out of a job. Well, not all of us. Mel was one of the younger ones, and she’d already decided to make the move to Bellingham before the axe fell. But the rest of us—the old duffers—were out of luck. For right now, I was keeping busy wrangling construction projects. What I’d do later on when all the plaster dust settled was something I mostly avoided contemplating.
