Black River

by G. M. Ford

The lake was a choppy green field, foamy and frantic, falling all over itself from a dozen directions. Saltheart bobbed slightly in the chop. Without warning, a deepening roar began to fill the cabin. A Lake Union Air Service seaplane buzzed over, not more than forty feet above the deck. “Wow,” Rogers said softly, as she watched the yellow-and-white De Havilland Beaver descend. Five hundred feet ahead, the pontoons cut silver slices in the dark water. They watched as the water pulled the plane to a halt and the pilot swung the plane on its axis, until the whirling propeller was pointed back their way.

  Above the taxiing plane, the city stood tall and twinkling, the buildings shadowed by a black sky, glowing purple at the edges.

  Corso closed his eyes and allowed the water to pull the weight from his shoulders, let the movement of the boat and the deep rumble of the diesels loosen the grime of the day. And then he seemed to swim downward in the thick green water, with the hum of the engines in his ears and the taste of the water on his lips.

  “Hey,” Rogers said. He opened his eyes. They were coming up to the south end of the lake. The Wooden Boat Museum loomed ahead.

  “What now?” she wanted to know.

  “Go around the red buoy,” he said, pointing.

  She gave the buoy a wide berth as she brought the boat about. Corso reached over and eased the throttle forward. Eight hundred rpms. About five knots across the surface.

  “My father had a boat,” she said, “when I was a kid.”

  “What kind?”

  “A ChrisCraft.” She waved a hand around. “Not a palace like this. Just a little boat he and my Uncle George used to go fishing in. Maybe twenty feet.”

  “What’d your father do?”

  “He was a county sheriff.”

  “Where?”

  “Anderson County, Virginia.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Way down in the southern part of the state. Almost in North Carolina.”

  “Still alive?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “He died back in ’ninety-one.” She flicked a glance in his direction. “Yours?”

  He offered a wan smile. “Mine was a regular guest of the county sheriff.”

  “Still alive?”

  He shook his head. “His liver gave out at forty.”

  “A pity.”

  “We didn’t think so,” he said.

  To starboard, the shoreline was awash with houseboats. Once cozy weekend retreats, they were now gussied up into million-dollar barges for the army of cellular-software-dot-com millionaires who swarmed the city like portfolioed roaches.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I told you: to see something only seen by the locals.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s very childish.”

  “I know.”

  She feigned annoyance, frowning and looking out the windows into the bright moonlight, swiveling her head in an arc to take it all in, until the frown disappeared and she said, “Look at all these boats. Does everybody in this city own a boat?”

  “Sometimes you’d think so,” Corso said. “They say we’ve got more boats per capita than any other place in the country.”

  Corso played tour guide as they motored under the freeway bridge into the west end of Portage Bay, past the University of Washington and the Seattle Yacht Club and into the Montlake Cut, past the massive steel chevrons of Husky Stadium and out into Union Bay, where Corso reached over and pushed the throttles forward to fifteen hundred rpms and a stately twelve knots. “Moon’s gonna be just right,” he said.

  For five minutes, they ran parallel to the 520 bridge, where the headlights of the traffic formed a solid line of amber that seemed to slide around the floating bridge’s elegant curves like an android snake.

  At the far end of the bridge, Corso finally took the helm, motoring Saltheart under the east high-rise and into the south end of Lake Washington. Ahead in the gloom, Mercer Island floated low on the shimmering water.

  Corso cut back on the throttles and angled closer to shore. He checked his course and then set the autopilot. “Come on. Let’s go down on deck. We can see it better from there.”

  The eastern shoreline was littered with million-dollar mansions: sterile steel and glass monoliths, neoantebellum Greek Revival Taras, fifties Ramblers, and Tudor reproductions all huddled cheek-by-jowl along the narrow bank. Corso pulled open the port door and followed Renee Rogers out on deck. He pointed to a break in lights that lined the shore. “There,” he said. “You can only see it from the lake, and only this time of year, when the leaves are off the trees.”

  Renee Rogers leaned on the rail and squinted out through the gloom. At first it looked like a park. Then maybe a trendy waterfront shopping center. Very Northwest. Lots of environmentally conscious exposed rock and wood, meandering its way up and down the cliff and along the bank for the better part of an eighth of a mile.

  She traced the outline with her finger. “Is that all one—”

  “Yeah, it’s all one house,” Corso answered.

  “Who—”

  “Bill Gates,” Corso said. “Forty-five thousand square feet. Somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred and ten million dollars.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You get a little preprogrammed electronic badge. As you walk around the house, it adjusts everything to your liking. The temperature, the lights, even the electronic art on the walls.”

  “Wonder what it’s like to live in something like that.”

  “When he married Melinda, she said it was like living in a convention center. She hired a team of decorators to make parts of it into something more livable.”

  “Funny how it’s all relative,” she said. “An hour ago, I thought your boat was decadent. Now”—she gestured toward the shore—“it seems like a rowboat.”

  “You think owning a house like that would change your life?”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes I cruise by here and wonder whether having all that would really make any long-term difference in my life.”

  “About a hundred-million-dollar difference,” she scoffed.

  “Over and above the money.”

  “There’s no such thing as over and above the money.”

  “Would you be happier?”

  She searched his eyes for a sign of irony. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “If Bill gave me the place tomorrow, lock, stock, and barrel, paid for, tax-free.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Once the buzz wore off, once I’d had everybody I know over for dinner and got used to the idea of owning the most expensive piece of residential property in America… ?” He hesitated. “A week later I wouldn’t be any happier than I was when I got up this morning.”

  As the house slid slowly to stern, she seemed to consider and discard a number of responses. The moon was directly overhead. The surface of the lake glowed like molten glass. “Me neither,” she said finally.

  “You hungry?” Corso asked.

  “What I am is thirsty.”

  “What would you like?”

  “What do you drink?”

  “Bourbon.”

  “Then let there be bourbon.” She toasted with an imaginary glass. “And come to think of it, I’m starved.”

  Corso pulled open the liquor cabinet and pulled out a half gallon of Jack Daniel’s. In the cabinet above the stove, he found a pair of thick tumblers, filled each with ice, and added four fingers of bourbon. He handed Renee Rogers her drink and lifted his own. “Here’s to putting Nicholas Balagula behind bars.”

  They clicked glasses. Corso took a sip. Rogers swallowed half the drink. Corso set the bourbon bottle on the drainboard next to the sink. “Bottle’s here,” he said. “From now on, it’s self-service.”

  “Just the way I like it.”

  “We could probably rustle up a couple of steaks a
nd a salad on the way back, if you want.”

  “I’m not very handy.”

  “Look in the bottom of the refrigerator. I think there’s a new bag of salad greens in there.”

  She crossed the galley, pulled open the refrigerator door, and extracted a plastic bag full of greens. Corso put the transmissions into neutral, throttled all the way back, and switched off the engines. For a moment, the big boat floated in silence. Then Corso pushed the chrome button on the console and the generator sprang to life.

  “You actually cook for yourself?” she asked.

  “All the time.”

  “I eat out. Or do takeout or call room service or whatever.”

  “There was a time when I couldn’t go out without attracting a crowd and having cameras shoved in my face. I kinda got in the habit of eating in.”

  She watched the memory wash across his dark face. “You actually hate it, don’t you?”

  “Hate what?”

  “The celebrity.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “A lot of them say they do, but I don’t think so. I think it’s chic and humble to pretend you don’t like being famous, but I think most people, once they’ve had their moment in the sun, would rather have it than not, no matter what they say in public.”

  “Celebrity as the opiate of the people.”

  She laughed. “Something like that.”

  She bounced the bag of salad greens in the palm of her hand. “What are we gonna put on this?”

  “Look on the refrigerator door. There’s a bunch of different things in there. Pick something you like.”

  She rummaged around in the door for a minute and came out with an unopened bottle of honey mustard dressing. “This okay?” she asked.

  “Works for me,” Corso said.

  She downed the rest of her drink and poured herself another and then downed half of that. Corso sprinkled salt and pepper on a pair of T-bone steaks.

  “I’m going to the stern and fire up the barbecue,” he said. He reached over and flipped up the teak lid above the sink. Plates, glasses, silverware. “Why don’t you set the table and then dump some of that stuff on the salad and mix it up. You think you can handle that?”

  She took a pull from her glass. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Just a little,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  23

  Friday, October 20

  10:53 p.m.

  Gerardo knew the drill. He’d been watching all day. The shift was about to change. For the next ten minutes, the hospital corridors would be virtually empty, as one shift of doctors, nurses, and orderlies left the floor and another came on duty.

  He pushed his burnished aluminum cleaning cart to the side of the corridor and pretended to rearrange his cleaning supplies. Sixty feet down the hall, a pair of white-clad nurses came out of Room One-oh-nine and hurried up the hall toward the nurses’ station.

  He’d talked it over with Ramón, talked more than the whole fifteen years they’d been together. Nothing was going right lately. The way things had been going, it might be time to clean up their messes. Might be best if Gerardo was ready to run backup too, just to be sure. Lotta stuff going on in that part of the hospital. Might be best to have another gun, just in case somebody walked in or something. You never knew.

  Ramón Javier looked like he belonged at a board meeting. He wore a somber gray suit, a blue tie, and a pair of tasseled loafers that gleamed from a recent shine. The .22-caliber automatic with the noise suppressor was tucked into the back of his pants, leaving the lines of the suit undisturbed as he stepped off the elevator and started down the hall.

  He saw Gerardo standing behind a cart full of towels, wearing rubber gloves and a pair of baby-blue scrubs. Not his color at all. Made him look like a troll. Ramón pretended not to notice him, instead striding by, heading for One-oh-nine down at the corner. Probably could have just walked in and popped her on his own, but things were a little bit loosey-goosey lately, so they were playing it safe. The whole damn thing shouldn’t take more than a minute. A minute, and they’d be halfway back to the kind of programmed normality upon which Ramón thrived.

  At the corner, he stopped, checked the corridor to his left, and looked back at Gerardo, who offered a small nod that said the room was empty. Gerardo busied himself with a clear plastic spray bottle. Ramón took a deep breath, pulled open the door, and stepped into the room.

  As the door closed behind Ramón, Gerardo began a silent count in his head. If he got to a hundred, it meant trouble and he was going in. His mother told him trouble came in threes. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. They’d already had three: the dead guy, the truck coming unburied, and the girl walking in on them. Twenty-three, twenty-four. Didn’t need no more damn disasters. Just a nice clean kill and out the door. He checked the hallway. Nothing but a big-ass nurse, standing with her hands on her hips way down at the opposite end of the building. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight.

  The room was lit only by the machines surrounding the bed. Ramón pulled the .22 from the back of his pants, thumbed off the safety, and placed the end of the suppressor against the side of the bandaged head. He listened for the sound of feet in the hall, heard nothing, and pulled the trigger. The pile of bandages rocked violently to the right and then snapped back into place. The electronic images went wild, dancing over their monitors like insects on fire. The small symmetrical hole began to leak blood, as Ramón placed the suppressor against the top of the head and fired again. Just to be sure.

  He was at fifty-one when he heard the voice. “Hey, you,” she called from the opposite end of the hall. Nigger bitch. Big enough to plow a field. Gerardo pretended not to hear. “You speak English? ¿Habla inglés?”

  Gerardo whistled softly and sorted through a pile of small towels until his hand came to rest upon the taped grip of the automatic. A warm feeling spread through his body, even as he listened to the sound of her shoes squeaking down the long corridor in his direction.

  “You hear me down there?” she demanded. “We got a mess up in One-sixty-four.”

  She kept coming his way and then, suddenly, from the direction of the nurses’ station, a guy appeared, thirty-something, hair and brown beard in need of a trim. He carried a newspaper under his left arm. As he reached the corner, he hesitated for a moment and then grabbed the handle of One-oh-nine, pulled it open, and stepped inside.

  “You got an earwax problem or what?” she demanded. No more than thirty feet away now. Beneath the pile of linen, Gerardo thumbed the safety off and turned her way, grinning maniacally. Pointing at his ear, as if to say he could not hear. When he peeked back over his shoulder, the hall was empty.

  Ramón was halfway back to the door when it began to open. He stepped quickly into the shadow behind the door, which kept opening and opening until it had him pressed flat against the wall. The figure stepped into the room and stood for a second as the door hissed shut, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Ramón was already moving his way when the figure emitted a low moan and ran to the bedside. The bright white screen had gone black. The green hillocks of her heartbeat crawled over the screen like flatworms. The visitor reached out and touched her head, brought the hand up to his face, stared for a brief second at the stain, and turned, wide-eyed, toward the door. From a distance of two feet, Ramón shot him between the eyes.

  A buzzer was going off. Her hand was on his elbow, pushing him up the hall. Gerardo’s hand rested on the butt of his automatic. Eighty-three, eighty-four. He’d already decided: one hundred and the bitch dies. Then, a second later, Ramón was standing in the hall. He gave Gerardo a small nod that meant the job was done and then began following along in their wake.

  “Come on.” The bitch pulled harder on his arm. Gerardo snuck another peek, just as Ramón turned left at the exit sign and started for the stairs. At the far end of the hall, a trio of nurses hurried into Room One-oh-nine. He heard a scream and then another. The nurse loosened her grip and then let him go alto
gether. The door to One-oh-nine burst open. The front of the nurse’s uniform was a glistening smear of blood. Her mouth was a frozen circle. Gerardo wrapped the automatic in a fresh towel and stuck it under his arm. For seventy feet, he shuffled along behind his captor as she hurried back toward the shouts and confusion. At the overhead exit sign, he straight-armed the door, stepped into the stairwell, and began jogging up the stairs. At the first landing, he threw his hip into the emergency exit door and stepped outside into the cool night air. “One down, one to go,” he whispered to himself, as he started up the sidewalk.

  24

  Friday, October 20

  10:57 p.m.

  Along the north shore of Lake Union, the derelict ferry Kalakala lay beached like some moldering gray carcass washed ashore by the tide. Once the pride of the Seattle fleet, the Art Deco Kalakala had been rescued by a local businessman, whose sense of nostalgia had been offended by the notion that the ferry of his childhood seemed destined to live out its final days as an Alaskan fish-packing plant.

  At considerable expense, he’d had her towed down from Alaska and berthed at her current location, only to find that his fellow Seattleites did not share his fondness for the old vessel. Not only were they unwilling to participate in her proposed multimillion-dollar renovation but most considered her little more than an eyesore and demanded that she be removed from sight forthwith. Under intense pressure from the city, her owner now sought a suitable buyer who might be willing to take her off his hands.

  As the rusted hull slid to starboard, Renee Rogers stepped over to the refrigerator and filled her glass with ice cubes, which she then drowned in bourbon.

  “Warren would hate this,” she said.

  “Hate what?”

  “Hate us bobbing around out here on the lake together. He gave me a little lecture the other day about what he called commiserating with you.”

  “Have we been doing that? And here I thought we were just trying to pick each other’s brains over dinner.”

  She laughed and looked around. “We’re almost back, aren’t we?” she said.