Jeff laughed as he retorted, “Yeah Sakol, without you this place would just dry up and blow away.” We all laughed.
Bean had crawled out from under my chair and was now pawing at Sakol’s foot. He reached down and picked her up. She immediately started to lick his hand. “Who this?” he asked.
“That’s Beanie or as I sometimes call her, Bean. She’s mine and I’m going to train her to attack.”
Sakol held Bean out in front of his face. “This not killer dog. Too cute. Like you.” And we laughed again. Sakol handed Bean to me and she settled down in my lap. For the next few minutes, we chatted about various topics. Jeff explained the reason why I was visiting, and Sakol’s eyes opened wide when he learned Bill Tate was one of the major players at our card games. Sakol would love to sit in on a game but so far, I’ve been able to hold him off. Talk about a poker face. Sakol was the best. With his round moon face and crinkly eyes, I could just see him at our game, blinking and nodding and asking, “Please… how play game?” And we would sit there watching him pull in one pot after another! NO! There was no way I was going to let this man into one of our games. The other players would kill me.
Sakol asked, “Any idea where daughter hiding?”
“Her dad said he was afraid she might be involved with drugs. I know I’m just grasping at straws, but I thought I might pay a visit to an old friend of yours.” I looked at Sakol.
“Mouse?” he asked. I nodded. “Need help?” I shook my head. “Call me if problem.”
“Thanks.” I paused and then looked back at Jeff. “I do have one favor to ask…”
Jeff looked up at the ceiling and swore, “Oh fuck. Sakol, save me! Okay Matt, what do you want now?”
I fished the piece of paper with the license number on it from the van that had been following me out of my pocket. I asked, “Can you run this through DMV for me?”
“What’s this?” Jeff asked.
“There’s been a van following me, a big gray Dodge van. Two guys that drive the van have been bothering me. One of them wears an army uniform sometimes, but I want to know who it’s registered to.”
“Who do you think it belongs to?” Jeff asked.
I started to tell them about the visitors I’d had a few days before. I explained that I knew nothing about what the colonel was asking about. Sakol looked at me for a moment and asked, “Is there any way Hollis could have been telling you about Crescent when you were up in the lighthouse tower? Maybe you didn’t realize it at the time?”
I got excited, “Sakol, what was it with you the other night? What do you know about Crescent?”
Sakol held up one hand. “Not so fast. I ask. I see if I can tell you. Right now, I can’t. Please, leave alone!”
I sat looking at them. I sat for so long they probably thought I had forgotten the question. I had made the decision and I started, “Look, you both know where Sharon was while I was up in the tower with Hollis.” Both nodded. “And by the time I got to the top, I knew Jeff was in the hospital, and even though he was supposed to recover, it was still iffy.” I pointed at Sakol. “I’d just seen you lying on the ground in a pool of your own blood. And even though I knew you were alive, I had no idea how badly you were hurt or if you would live. Finally, I was shot on the way up there. I was losing blood and my mind wasn’t working all that well. I’ve never told this to anybody, but I shot Hollis several times when I didn’t need to. I was hurt and pissed and, well, my brain was not taking in all the info that it might have had things been different.” I could see both of them wanted to talk and I held up my hand.
“Wait! Since those two dudes came and talked to me, I’ve gone over the conversation I had with Hollis repeatedly in my head, a memory I really had hoped I could put away. At no time did we ever talk about Nam, or Crescent or…” We all sat quietly for a while, each of us lost, deep in our individual thoughts.
I started in again, “I need to correct myself. I guess I was a little wrong about us talking about Nam. At one point, Hollis did tell me it had been too long since we were in country and I’d lost my nerve, that I couldn’t just shoot him in cold blood. He called me names, trying to get me to shoot him.”
Jeff spoke softly, “Then after he tried to kill you, you shot him.”
There was a long pause before I said, “Yeah. Like that.”
Jeff spoke the words slowly as he asked me, “Did you have to shoot him? I mean to save your life? Was he out of bullets?”
I decided if Jeff really wanted to know the truth, he had a right to it. “Jeff, I shot him because of you and Sakol and Sharon. And I mainly pulled the trigger because he started to describe what he had done to BJ and how much he had enjoyed killing her. Yeah, Jeff. Hollis was out of bullets. I didn’t need to pull the trigger.” It was like all of the air had been sucked out of the room and we all sat there in silence. Eventually I asked, “So, now what?”
Jeff lifted his feet and placed them on the corner of his desk. He shrugged and folded his hands over his stomach. “Matt, I had guessed that was what happened. Look, the case is closed. As far as I’m concerned, justice was served. It’s our belief,” he motioned at the two of them, “if Hollis had been brought back here, the government would have stepped in like they did with Price and who knows what would have happened then. I’m not saying what you did was right, but I know Sakol knows this: I’ve done almost the same thing. We had pretty much guessed what happened up there in that tower and neither of us can really complain about what you did. I think I totally understand why you did what you did and I want you to know both of us are fine with it.”
The room was totally silent again. Jeff had just admitted to me he had killed somebody in cold blood when he could have just arrested the dude. That was quite the confession. As we sat and looked at each other, there seemed to be some sort of shared bond between us. This went beyond Jeff’s and my childhood and my friendship with Sakol; this was something we all knew had been so wrong at the moment we had done it, but in the heat of things, we’d committed the act anyway. We all understood what the other person had gone through. We knew. We understood.
Jeff dropped his feet to the floor as he held out his hand. “Oh, holy shit, give me the damn plate number and I’ll run it through DMV.” I handed him the piece of paper with the number written on it and then watched as Jeff tapped on his computer keyboard. After a few moments he looked up at his terminal and asked in a puzzled voice, “What?” He punched something else into the keyboard and when the information was displayed on the terminal he turned and looked at me. “Matt, are you sure about this number? Positive?”
“Yeah, why?” I was confident I’d written down the numbers correctly.
Jeff said as he read off the computer screen, “I need to use an official override. The information here is only for somebody with an access code as high, or higher than mine. Just a second.”
I watched Jeff key in several strokes and then start to read off the screen. “Listen to this. It comes up as ‘vehicle destroyed.’” He punched a couple more keys. “Hold it, let me read this to you. It says the plate belonged to a red ’98 Explorer which was totaled sixteen months ago.” He continued to read to himself and then looked over at me. “This is weird. It was a US Government vehicle that was involved in a fatality. Plus, it shows the Ford is actually out in our impound lot. I don’t understand. It should be gone by now, but it isn’t.”
Jeff looked over at Sakol. “Why would we even have a federal vehicle in the lot to begin with, and why are we storing it? True, it was involved in a fatality, but that should put it in the Washington State Patrol impound lot, not ours. None of this makes any sense. That car should not have been brought here and for sure it should have been long gone.” Jeff continued to look at the computer screen. “Yep! And it doesn’t say here why we still have it.” I watched Jeff read the information once more. When he looked up at me he had a puzzled look on his face. �
��Didn’t you tell me the van following you was a Dodge?” I nodded. “I wonder why we still have that wreck and even more, how did the plate get out? And what’s it doing on a Dodge now?”
“Do you mind if I go and look at the car?”
Jeff closed one eye, shook his head and looked over at me. “Seems to me the last time we let you loose in the impound lot you got both Sakol and me in a shit ton of trouble.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t in charge of the department then either.” I waited a second and then asked again, “Do you mind if I go and check it out?” I paused, “Pretty please?”
Jeff laughed and threw a piece of paper at me. “Go ahead. Here’s a pass to get you in. And so help me if this comes back to bite me in the butt, I’ll throw your scrawny ass under the bus.”
I smiled at him and said, “Hey, I’ve been under the bus so often now I have a big screen TV under there to keep me company.” I called over my shoulder my usual parting remark to Jeff, “Who loves ya baby?” Jeff and Sakol laughed as I walked out of the office.
~ ~ ~ ~
The impound lot was still as depressing as it was on my first visit. Seeing so many people’s dreams sitting there all banged up is such a downer. I remembered my last go round with the rotund keeper of the lot, and I had no desire to talk to him again. Instead, I just snuck in.
The color of the vehicle made it fairly easy to find even though it was in one of the back corners. Other than the fact the vehicle was red, it was difficult to guess what kind of a car it had been. The top was squashed down and the driver’s door had been pried open to retrieve the body. The air bag had deployed and now hung out of the center of the steering wheel. Every panel was crushed and dented and the car looked like it had rolled over several times. What was weird was there was a license plate still on the back of the car, badly damaged, but still on the vehicle. However, the front plate was missing. I thought to myself if I was going to steal a plate, why not take the one with valid tabs on it? Driving around without tabs just makes you a lot more noticeable. If I saw the Dodge again, I was going to check out the plate as carefully as I could.
As I turned to leave, I heard somebody shuffling up behind me. “Hey!” The voice shouted at me. “What you doin’ back here? You ain’t supposed to be in here.” The voice huffed and puffed.
I turned around and standing in front of me was the caretaker of the lot. I could have sworn he had on the same overalls as the last time I saw him. They were still as filthy and stained and today his stubble had almost turned into a scraggly, white beard sticking out of his fat face. He glared at me for a while and finally asked, “What’s wit ya, ya deef? I asked what ya doin’ back here.”
I handed him the note from Jeff. I had read the note and I knew how many words there were on it. It must have taken him five minutes to read it. I watched his mouth as he sounded out each word and when he was finished, he looked up at me with his rheumy eyes. “Don’t give a shit who says you can come here, you don’t come in my lot witout checkin’ wit me. Now get out.” He glared at me as he extended one of his short, fat, grubby fingers towards the front gate. I decided I’d found out what I wanted to know. It was time to leave.
“Yeah. I was just leaving.”
“Don’t come back here again. I remember you from last time, and you gots me in trouble last time you’se here. Stay out of my lot, hear me?”
I just walked away. This conversation was going nowhere fast and anything I said would just piss him off even more.
When I got back to my truck, I happened to notice my cell phone lying on the passenger seat. I’m not really good at keeping the phone on my person. I’ve been bitched at a few times about it, but I still keep forgetting it. For more of my life than not, I didn’t have a phone you could carry. Phones were something that hung on a wall or sat on a desk and they were connected to an outlet. They were not something you put in your pocket and took with you. It was not a habit I had formed, nor did I think I was going to get very good at keeping the phone on me in the near future.
I picked it up and noticed I had missed a call—from Jeff. I groaned out loud. Did that fat fucking impound lot caretaker call Jeff and complain? I was not really wild about getting my ass chewed, but I decided it would be better to get it over with now than to let Jeff stew about it for a while.
Ring. Two rings. “Davenport.”
“Jeff , it’s me, Matt. Sorry, I missed your call.”
Silence. I waited for a few seconds to see if Jeff was going to respond. I waited until I heard him take a deep breath and I could actually feel anger coming through the phone. “Shit, Matt. What’s it been, an hour, tops, and already you’ve brought down the wrath of God on my head.”
“Hey Jeff, I’m sorry the lot dude saw me and got pissed. I really don’t know what his—”
Jeff interrupted me, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The fat guy! At the impound lot?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
This time it was my turn to interrupt, “Then why am I in the doghouse?”
As Jeff talked, I noticed the stress level in his voice had jumped a couple of notches. “When you bring me a piece of paper with the license number of a government vehicle, a vehicle I might add is supposed to be a secret and nobody is supposed to know a damn thing about,” Jeff took a breath and I was tempted to tell him to calm down but I didn’t. Jeff continued, “Hang on, this gets even better. You come asking about a vehicle that records show has been destroyed on top of being a secret and to top that off, the vehicle isn’t supposed to even exist! Matt, that’s when I get upset! Do you have any idea what kind of phone calls I’ve been getting over the last hour?”
I didn’t see how any of this was my fault. I didn’t tell him to override the ban on his accessing the info, he chose to do that. Things I wanted to say but I sheepishly replied, “No.”
“It turns out the reason that red vehicle is in our lot is because nobody is supposed to know it exists, including you and me. It is officially destroyed. Key words here, guy, officially destroyed. When I asked questions about it, one of the people on one of the many phone calls I received told me it was none of my fucking business. And that’s a direct quote. After I explained our interest in the license plate the next thing they wanted to know was what you were doing evading government vehicles that were following you and—and,” Jeff finally took another breath.
Jeff was upset. No, let me rephrase that. Jeff was past upset. I quickly told him, “The back plate is still on the Explorer but the front plate is gone!”
Jeff exploded, “What? How do you know this?”
“I was just in the impound lot and I saw it. No front plate but the back is still there. Smushed, but still there.”
There was a long silence and then his voice blasted out of my phone. “You were in the lot? Did anybody see you? Why do you keep bringing me these stupid weird cases? Matt—”
“You knew I was going to go to the lot, and yes, the fat old caretaker saw me. What’s your problem, anyway?”
“I didn’t know you were going straight from my office to the impound lot.”
I didn’t feel like I’d lied to him. I never misled him in any way in regards to what was happening. This was bordering on spooky. Jeff was talking nonsense. He knew I was going right out to the impound lot from his office. What was his problem? “Jeff, can I speak?” I tried to reason.
“No,” he said, “I don’t want to hear some bullshit story. Something told me when you came to my office this morning I was going to regret it. And I do!” The last three words were shouted into the phone.
I quickly responded, “Okay, bye.” I pushed the end button and then pushed it again to turn off the phone. I needed to get back to my apartment and think things over. I sure had set off a firestorm.
Why do I keep getting myself in these predicaments?
Chapter 7
Mrs. Tate & Ambruster
I needed some time to think. Basically I just wanted time away from everybody to see if I could come up with some ideas as to what might be going on. I knew if I stopped by the garage Art, my jack-of-all-trades and mechanic, would be there and as much as I enjoyed his company, I wanted to be alone right now. I was also afraid since Jeff knew where I kept my cars stored, he might have an officer hanging around waiting to drag me in. I was concerned he might be so pissed at me for hanging up on him, and then turning off my cell, he was going to have me dragged in front of him in cuffs. I decided the best thing to do was to take Beanie back to the apartment and get my motorcycle and go for a ride. A very long ride to see if I could find some reasons that might make a little sense out of everything going on in my world.
I learned to ride on one of the islands in Puget Sound when I was in my early teens and have been riding motorcycles ever since. A few years back, in a moment of weakness, I went and bought a new Harley Davidson. Even though the bike is now several years old, it only has a few thousand miles on it. I love the bike, but between the not so lovely weather we have around here and my busy schedule, I don’t get to ride it all that much. Since very few people know I have it, I thought it would be a perfect getaway vehicle.
I parked the truck out behind the apartment and let Beanie visit the back lot. When she was done, I took her inside and made sure she had plenty of food and water. As I picked up my helmet, I could tell from the way she walked off and climbed up onto the couch she was upset with me. Tough! I pulled on my leathers and went down to the garage to get my bike.
As I pulled out onto the street, I noticed the Dodge van was back. I turned in its direction and slowly drove past. Looking through the front windows was of no use. I couldn’t see anybody inside and since the side windows were blacked out, I had no idea if there was anybody in the van or not. As I passed the back of the van, I saw there was now a new license plate on the vehicle. For whatever reason, the plate number I had given Jeff had set off a wave of trouble and now the van was sporting a new plate. What surprised me the most was the plate was still not a government plate. However, the plate did have a valid tag on it. Since I knew the colonel and the suit had something to do with the van, I wondered why the van wasn’t sporting official government plates. Another mystery to ponder, as if I didn’t have enough already.
Code Name: Crescent: A Matt Preston Novel Page 8
