by G. M. Ford
G. M. FORD
FURY
In this dreary and comfortless region, it was no inconsiderable piece of good fortune to find a little cove in which we could take shelter, and a small spot of level ground on which we could erect our tent….
—From the journals of Captain George Vancouver
Contents
Epigraph
A Pound of Flesh
Chapter 1
In the year when summer never came, the spring rains…
Chapter 2
The hunted develop an eye for detail. An inner lens for…
Chapter 3
Looked kinda like an older version of that karate…
Chapter 4
The pictures on her desk made the facts of her life…
Chapter 5
Corso sat in the red leather chair and watched the rain…
Chapter 6
Corner of Fifth and James. The Public Safety Building …
Chapter 7
The mayor stopped in mid-sentence when Dorothy…
Chapter 8
"No eat?” the waitress asked.
Chapter 9
Special Agent Edward Lewis pushed the earlybird edition…
Chapter 10
"Robert.” That voice from downstairs. Sounded like a …
Chapter 11
She brought the morning paper. Dropped it on the seat…
Chapter 12
The eastern slope of the Cascades loomed like purple…
Chapter 13
He sat on the blacktop with one knee pulled tight to his…
Chapter 14
Dorothy Sheridan massaged her temples with her fingertips.
Chapter 15
Corso listened as the wolf-pack sirens moved closer.
Chapter 16
South Doris Street. A little in-grown toenail of a lane,…
Chapter 17
"You stink,” she said sullenly.
Chapter 18
Never heard her comin’. Not till the crash of the door.
Chapter 19
The cab’s headlights punched narrow channels into the…
Chapter 20
“Stop,” Corso said.
Chapter 21
Like Mad Fred said: The only thing the dead knew for…
Chapter 22
Hear the car door. Figure it be that fat Korean she work…
Chapter 23
“Skinny little white guy. Weird eyes. Somewhere…
Chapter 24
Yuppies love brunch. Especially on weekends, when,…
Chapter 25
Dorothy Sheridan was keeping her mouth shut. She…
Chapter 26
“Got no damn use for no preacher,” Himes said to the…
Chapter 27
The van’s engine shuddered slightly at each revolution.
Chapter 28
His knuckles glowed white around the phone. Again,…
Chapter 29
It was like a small-town carnival. Bright ballpark…
Chapter 30
Corso dreamed of that cobbled street again. Of the soldiers…
Chapter 31
Why, she used to wonder, would survivors subject…
Chapter 32
“Guess what’s missing?”
Chapter 33
She put on the big-time pissy face when he say he doan…
Chapter 34
A husband and a daughter…both dead and gone. Alice…
Chapter 35
Maybe losing a friend to a monster permanently…
Chapter 36
Wald slipped onto the stool next to Corso. Ordered a…
Chapter 37
Butler Parking Garage. All the way down to the bottom,…
Chapter 38
At the Fairway buoy, less than fifty feet of water…
Chapter 39
Dorothy Sheridan straightened the red-white-and-blue…
A Pound of Cure
About the Author
Praise
Also by G. M. Ford
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Pound of Flesh
God only knows where he found an orange-plaid suit. Probably some retro consignment joint up on Broadway. Jacket two sizes too small, with the shoulders sticking up like epaulets. Trousers six inches too short, like he was expecting a flood or something. Big cuffs…brogans…no socks.
His lawyer, Myron Mendenhal, on the other hand, was the very soul of sartorial elegance. Natty in a charcoal-gray three-piece. Pinky ring, with a diamond as big as the Ritz. A habitual cuff shooter who kept the Rolex double diamond tastefully in view at all times. After all, when one tilled the personal injury end of the legal field, it was merely good business to look as prosperous as possible.
Mendenhal had already stated his case. Two or three times, in fact. On behalf of his client, he was filing a lawsuit against both the city of Seattle and the state of Washington. Wrongful and malicious prosecution. Three million in compensatory damages. Ten million in punitive damages. Each. Individual civil actions to follow.
Only reason he was still talking was so his client wouldn’t. Last time Bozo’d opened his trap, all hell had broken loose. A guy in the front row had lost his composure and tried to crawl over the table at them. He’d clawed halfway through the forest of microphones before the female cop grabbed him by the belt and jerked him to the floor. Took four officers to get him out of the room and ten minutes to get the electronics back in order. The echo of the man’s anguished cries still ruffled the drapes, and a scent of spent hormones hovered in the air like gunsmoke. No doubt about it; Myron Mendenhal was prepared to run his mouth for as long as it took.
“How do you compensate a man for three years of his life?” he asked. “Is there some dollar figure that can repair the heart of a man who has lived for years under the specter of his own imminent death? Who has lain upon the table of death? I think not. Can we—”
The client leaned toward the mikes. “If it ain’t me or him, just gonna be somebody else, you know.”
“Excuse me?” one of the reporters lining the wall said.
Mendenhal covered the nearest mikes with his arm and whispered something to his client. First, imploring. Then, insisting. The audience caught its collective breath when the client reached over and clamped his big hand over Mendenhal’s nose and mouth. With the bug-eyed lawyer still squirming behind his half-acre palm, the client curled his rubbery lips and scooted his chair closer to the alphabet-soup collection of microphones.
“Said there’s always gonna be somebody out there killin’ bitches. Bitches and mo’ bitches is gonna be dyin’ all over the damn place, till you-all up to your damn ass in dead bitches.”
Seven separate cameras recorded the onset of what happened next. The man sitting front-row center slowly got to his feet. He ran both hands over his face, like he was wiping away spiderwebs. He turned his back on Mendenhal and his client. Leaned over and appeared to whisper in the ear of the woman seated in the chair beside him. By then, the half dozen rent-a-cops stationed around the hotel ballroom were all moving his way, but it was too late.
When the man straightened up, he was holding a WWII-vintage Colt forty-five automatic in both hands. With tears in his eyes, he looked out over the crowded ballroom and uttered a single syllable. And then he turned toward the front of the room, raised the gun, and began pulling the trigger.
Run the NBC tape and you can see the client take four direct hits in the chest. Each time the force rocks his chair up onto two legs, only to have his weight slam it back to earth. Slow it down and you can see the impact of the bullets as they tear through the garish fabric of his suit. Watch the second slug go high left, taking off part of the shoulder, painting the side of Myron Mendenhal�
��s face with a high-pressure spray of blood and bone. Stop it right after the third impact dents the suit; run a couple more frames. Then, right before your eyes, seems like all at once, the plaid fades to red and the client falls slowly from his chair with that odd, enigmatic smile still frozen on his lips.
By that time, the ballroom is in complete panic. When the man with the gun turns back toward the crowd, only the brass-balls NBC cameraman keeps it rolling. Everybody else hits the deck. The rest of the network footage looks like The Blair Witch Project.
People who were there—and God knows half the city claims to have been present at the time—say the air was instantly sucked from the room, leaving the lungs scratched and dry, in that awful silent moment when the guy put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 1
Monday, September 17
10:07 A.M. Day 1 of 6
In the year when summer never came, the spring rains lasted through July and then into August and September, until finally, with the leaves still green on the trees, people bowed to the inevitable and abandoned their memories of the sun.
More out of habit than duty, Bill Post flicked his eyes toward the street. Just in time to see her dismount the number 30 bus and step awkwardly out into a gray, driving rain. He watched as she pulled the hood low on her head and sloshed her big brown shoes across the sidewalk toward the front doors. Once inside, she removed her green raincoat and shook it out over the black rubber runner. He couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone go to that much trouble to keep water off the floor. Like somebody was going to make her clean it up or something.
In other years, he might have mentioned the rain, and they would have nurtured the bond that forms among those who suffer together. Not this year, though. This year, spring and summer had come and gone like wishes, washing any expectation of relief so far downstream that the state of the weather was no longer considered polite conversation.
From behind the security desk he asked, “Something I can help you with?”
She seemed startled by the sound of his voice. “I hope so,” she said. “I need to see a Mr. Frank Corso. He’s a writer…a reporter here.” She draped the dripping coat over her arm and approached the desk.
“Is Mr. Corso in?”
“Not that I ever seen,” the guard said with a chuckle. “The guy I replaced said he used to see him once in a while, but I been here just under two years and he ain’t never been in during my shift. Night crew says he comes in sometimes to see Mrs. Van Der Hoven, but I personally ain’t never seen him myself.” He leaned back in his chair.
When he tilted his head forward and looked at her through the upper half of his bifocals, he instantly realized he was supposed to know who she was. He sat up straight. Closed the travel brochures he’d been reading and stuffed them in the top drawer. Tried to let it come to him, but wasn’t surprised when he couldn’t put a name to the face. In recent months, he seldom could. Hell, if he didn’t hang his car keys on the same hook in the kitchen every night, he couldn’t find the damn things in the morning.
“Maybe somebody else could help you, Miss…?” He left it a question.
She looked like she was going to cry. “Mr. Corso has to see me.” She said it like daytime TV. “You tell him Leanne Samples is downstairs and needs to talk with him on a matter of life and death.”
The name did it. It was her all right. The girl from the TV. He kicked himself for not recognizing her right away and wondered again if he shouldn’t discuss his failing memory with his doctor. He picked up the phone. Who? Mr. Hawes? He was the honcho. The managing editor and all that jazz. Yeah. Last button on the right.
Natalie Van Der Hoven pulled her head back and looked down her nose at Bennett Hawes, her managing editor. She was in her mid-sixties, with a face from an ancient coin. Pointed and haughty like a hawk, with a “fear of God” gaze to match. Wrought-iron hair and shoulders wider than most men’s. Machete murderers jumped to their feet and doffed their caps when she entered a room. She had that kind of style.
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“That’s all she’ll say. She lied at the trial. That and how she won’t cooperate with us unless Corso writes the story.”
Always impeccable, in a Nordstrom three-piece suit, Hawes claimed to be five-nine, but in reality stood about five foot seven. He wore what remained of his sandy hair combed completely across his scalp and sprayed in place. Worked out five days a week at the gym up the street. Everything he did, he did quickly.
She raised an eyebrow. “Surely she can be persuaded.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“You explained that Mr. Corso no longer works directly for the paper?”
“The distinction between direct and indirect employees seems to be lost on Miss Samples. As far as she’s concerned, she reads his column in the paper twice a month, so he works here.”
“Did you explain Mr. Corso’s aversion to the lime-light? That he hasn’t been seen in public since he hit the bestseller list?”
Hawes nodded disgustedly. “She doesn’t care. We either produce Corso today or she takes her story up the road.” He turned his palms toward the ceiling. “Why she wants Corso is beyond me.”
“Did you ask?”
Hawes made a sour face. “She said it was because he was”—he used his fingers to make quotation marks in the air—“nice to her back then.” Jamming his hands in his pockets, he paced across the room.
“Do we have a number for Mr. Corso?”
“I was hoping you had one,” he said.
She shook her head. “When Mr. Corso wants to chat, he calls me.”
“What about his agent?”
“Some woman in New York named Vance.”
“She’ll have a number.”
“Not that she’ll share with us,” Mrs. V. said. “I’ve tried before.”
“I went down to accounting. We send his checks to a P.O. box in the U District.” Hawes’s normal pacing suddenly took on the air of a strut. She searched him with her eyes. “You think you know something, don’t you?” she said.
He kept his face as bland as a cabbage. “I might,” he admitted.
“Come on now, Bennett,” she prompted. “Out with it.”
A smile escaped his thin lips. “While I was down in accounting, I went through his expense file. Gave me an idea how we might be able to find him quickly,” he said.
“Oh?” she said. “At one time, people made careers of trying to find our Mr. Corso. What makes you think you can run him to ground?”
“They never had to pay his expenses.”
“Such as?”
“Such as Corso hired a local private eye a couple of times. I know because we paid the guy’s bill. I think the guy probably knows where to find Corso.”
“Who would that be?”
“Guy named Leo Waterman.”
“Bill Waterman’s boy?”
“Yeah.”
She managed a small smile. “I haven’t seen Leo since he was in short pants,” she said. “As you know, his father and my late husband, Edmund, were quite close. What makes you think Leo could find Mr. Corso?”
“I saw the two of them having a beer together one time, when I stopped for cigarettes. Over on Eastlake, a neighborhood dive called the Zoo.”
“That’s all?”
“You know how Corso is. He hates everybody. For him, having a beer with somebody is like a long-term relationship.”
“He’s not that bad, Bennett,” she scoffed. “That’s just his act.”
Hawes made a noise with his lips. “If that arrogance of his is an act, he ought to get an Academy Award.”
“It’s just his way of protecting himself.”
Hawes snorted. “By this time, if anybody out there still wanted him dead, he’d be dead.”
“Not physically. Emotionally.”
Hawes scowled. “Christ, I feel like I’m on Oprah.” He crossed the roo
m. “So, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t see how we have a choice here,” she said after a moment. “The Himes execution is six days off. Not only do we have a moral obligation to the public, but I don’t have to tell you what a story such as this could mean to the paper.”
No…she didn’t. An exclusive like this could go a long way toward rescuing the Sun. If not financially, then at least in terms of restoring some measure of credibility.
“Problem is, even if we do find him, he won’t do it,” Hawes said. “Why should he?” He kept pacing the room, slowly shaking his head. “Last time I looked, that new book of his was number seven on the New York Times bestseller list. He doesn’t do interviews of any kind. He doesn’t sign books. He sure as hell doesn’t need the money anymore. Why in God’s name would he open himself up to all that abuse? Quite frankly, I’m amazed he still sends in his columns.”
Mrs. V. smiled. “Mr. Corso and I have an agreement,” she said. “And Mr. Corso is an unusually honorable man.”
“Lotta people don’t think so.”
“Lots of people like professional wrestling,” she said.
Hawes snorted and shook his head. “He’d have to be crazy to get involved in something like this. The whole New York Times libel thing is going to end up right back on the front page. No way he’s going to let that happen.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Mrs. V. said.
“What’s that?”
“That the same mighty newspaper that so publicly fired Mr. Corso for fabricating a story now gives him free publicity for his fictionalized reporting efforts.”
