Every Day Above Ground

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Granddad never had guys like that in the house. Hollis didn’t count. Or Jimmy Corcoran or even Mr. Willard. I meant guys I hadn’t met, and who Granddad didn’t want me to meet.

  And he was carrying a gun. Jesus.

  A couple of minutes later both men walked down the stone steps. The redhead tapped his keys and a green Ford Taurus parked across the street chirped. As they drove off, I could see a maroon bumper sticker on the Taurus with the Balewood School logo. I knew Balewood. It was a private school, just a few blocks away. All girls.

  “Hey.”

  Shit. Granddad, calling from what I hoped was the dining room and not right at the bottom of the stairs. I dashed out of his room and back to mine, and turned down the radio.

  “Who were they?” I shouted down the stairs.

  “Work. Since you’re home early—”

  “Can I go to Davey’s tonight? I don’t have homework, and it’s vacation. And he’s leaving.”

  “Don’t interrupt.”

  I knew he was waiting for me to come down, so I did. “Can I?”

  “Did you clean your bathroom?” He’d have already looked, of course.

  “I was going to tomorrow. I’ve got all day.”

  “Do that first.”

  “What kind of work is it? With those guys.” I wanted to ask him why the gun, but knew that would be a seriously wrong move. Instead I offered a step toward the washer closet where we kept the cleaning brushes and Bon Ami in a carry tray. “Can I work with you? You said.”

  He thumped his hand on the banister. Not mad-like, just fed up. “I did say it and I meant it. Not this time. In fact”—he coughed, almost a growl—“I want you to keep an eye peeled for those fellows. Around the house, and away from here, too.”

  “But who are they?”

  “Get your ass in gear. Do a proper job and you can go to Davey’s for dinner. And take this.”

  He handed me a flip phone.

  “To keep?” I said. Hoping.

  “For you and me to stay in touch, no one else. You follow?”

  “Yeah. Business.”

  All right. My own phone. Davey would spit.

  Eight

  By last call, the patrons at Bully Betty’s had winnowed down to two distinct groups. People too drunk to get home on their own, and those too invested in finding company for the night to give up now. Quiana the bartender would start calling Uber soon, rallying cars to rescue the first group. The second bunch, the hopeful players, had to fend for themselves. So long as they weren’t preying on the drunk or distraught, we’d let them try their luck until we tossed them to the sidewalk.

  Betty had commandeered the Mac under the counter to start NTS Radio streaming live from London. A rapper from Morocco threw out what I guessed were rhymes and dared a techno beat to keep up with her. Quiana swayed to each line as she drew a round of red ales from the tap. The late show at The Egyptian up the street had ended over an hour before, and a handful of their ticket buyers had continued their dates at Betty’s. I’d caught a little of their conversation. Picking apart obscure documentaries made for a weird kind of flirting.

  I hauled cases from the storage room and began refilling the stock on the mirrored shelves. It took more time than it should, edging each bottle around the strings of purple and white Christmas lights that were the bar’s main illumination after midnight.

  “You got some extra quiet in you tonight,” Betty said. “Which is saying something.”

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  O’Hasson. His abductors. The safe. I had been tossing the details like juggler’s clubs in my mind all night, one and then the next, spinning them around and around in search of anything I had missed. Instead of yielding new insights, it felt like the whirling facts were taking turns clocking me on the skull.

  But there wasn’t much else I could do right now, except keep my head down. Betty paid me under the table. No paper trail that could lead the hunters here. I didn’t know what they were capable of, or how determined they might be to find me, but if they really had bought an entire office building, I wasn’t taking many chances. My apartment was leased under my name, so it was too risky. I could sleep in the speedboat. Spend my days on the move, until Addy turned up some names from city records and I had a trail of my own to follow.

  “When Shy’s thinking, she hardly stops her talk,” Betty continued, counting out the bills from the register. “Thoughts just flood right on out her mouth, even if I’m all the way across the house.”

  Betty probably weighed about the same as I did, but in a radically different configuration. Six fewer inches of height, and a lot more bam, as she put it. Indigo tattoos wound under every inch of her dark skin, from wristbones to jawline. She claimed to be part Aztec. You could squint and see it in the broadness of her face and the dark slashes of brows set far apart, like quote marks around her eyes. Her head was as bald as Jimmy Corcoran’s.

  She watched me open a bottle of Black Seal and pour the half-shot trickle from the old bottle into the new. “How many left in the back?”

  “One case of Bacardi. This is the last of the dark.”

  “The season for beach drinks. You know you can always pour the last drops for yourself, bottle’s that low.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not tonight, huh?” She thumped the cash drawer shut with her substantial hip. Betty didn’t really need my help to toss the occasional asshole out of her bar. But she felt that having the big scary-looking white boy on the door stopped trouble before it began.

  As if to balance Betty’s bare scalp, a large knot of dreadlocks in various shades hung above the cash register. One of many such clumps. It had started as a charity drive—wigs for cancer patients—only the charity couldn’t take dreads, so Betty offered three bucks an inch for every dread her customers sacrificed. With the Broadway hipsters and SCC campus just up the street, she had the makings of a bountiful harvest. The movement took on a life of its own, and now the back of the bar was festooned like an Iroquois tribe had won a major victory against Rastafarians.

  “Closing up,” Betty hollered. A couple of students drifted toward the bar to retrieve their credit cards. My phone burred in my pocket. Hollis.

  “Your boat is ringing,” he said.

  “Try that again.”

  “Ringing,” he said. “I walked over to tighten the lines—wind’s coming up—and there’s a digital something-or-other chirping away like a wounded parakeet from inside the cabin. It stopped after a minute.”

  There was a VHF radio in the speedboat, but I knew it was turned off. Depth sounder, too. Nothing that could—

  I had a quick mental flashback of shoving O’Hasson’s scattered pieces of small electronics into my jacket pockets, by feel more than sight in the black cave of the office building. Everything I could grab, as fast as I could grab it. The sense memory of a tangle of wires and alligator clips and tiny jeweler’s tools, and a small plastic object in my palm. O’Hasson’s cell phone.

  Someone was calling it, trying to reach him.

  If the hunters had the resources to buy a building, could they trace a cell signal?

  “You good here?” I said to Betty, already moving around the bar.

  She said yes. She may have started to say more, but she was slower than the street-side door slamming closed behind me.

  Hollis had the pieces of O’Hasson’s cell phone laid out on a towel in the speedboat cockpit, in one orderly line like instruments in an operating room. The body of the phone, its back cover, the battery, and the SIM card. While driving from Fremont, I’d told Hollis to unlock the cabin, find the phone, and take it apart.

  The small cabin doors were flung open to let the interior light shine out, adding marginally to the beams from the stubby lampposts on the dock. At two in the morning, Hollis and I were the only things moving in the marina.

  “Is it defanged?” Hollis said, prodding at the phone’s guts.

  “He was smart enough to find an old one.
” It was the same Ericsson O’Hasson had been using at the bar. We wouldn’t have to worry about the hunters tracing it through false signals. With newer models, a top-notch tracking device could force any phone to give up its identity and location, just by mimicking a cell tower. It didn’t matter if the phone was turned off. The trackers could be mounted on anything from cop cars to aerial drones. Harder and harder to be off the grid these days.

  I picked up the tiny gold SIM card and plugged it back in, and the battery, too.

  “Hey,” said Hollis. “You just had me dismember the damn thing.”

  “Damage is done,” I said. “I need to see who’s been calling.”

  Hollis sat down quickly. “Jesus. Could it be police?”

  “You’re a bystander. Just my friendly neighbor in the marina.”

  “With a few acquired items in his boat”—Hollis’s voice had lowered to a whisper—“and a shitload of new renovations to the interior. I’d rather not have anyone official looking in my windows right about now.”

  “Head back to the Francesca. I’ll meet you there.”

  Hollis didn’t argue. He walked quickly back to his own dock, looking a little like he was hiding one of his stolen bedposts where the sun wouldn’t fade the varnish.

  I turned on O’Hasson’s phone. The battery was so low, I began pressing buttons as fast as I could. I checked the contacts. Nothing there. No messages either. In the list of recent calls, one number appeared a dozen times. Every couple of hours, since last night. An 818 area code. Was that California?

  I pressed Redial. The space between each ring felt a lot longer than the usual four seconds. Then the ringing stopped.

  The call hadn’t gone to voicemail. The line was open. I could hear movement, and maybe an inhalation of breath. Whoever was listening might have made out the faint sounds of the marina in the background. The wind, and the cry of a gull, far off.

  She broke first.

  “Dad?”

  A girl’s voice. O’Hasson’s kid, Cyndra. I pictured her grave face from the Child Services photo, all bangs and wary antagonism.

  “You there?” she said. “Dad?”

  I wanted to answer. To tell her what was going on. She’d called her father practically every hour since last night. Maybe they were supposed to talk at a certain time, and he’d missed it. Or maybe she had expected him to be back in L.A. by now. It had been a full twenty-four hours since we’d cracked the safe.

  Someone else could be listening on her end. I stayed quiet, and so did she. After half a dozen breaths she cut the call, beating me to the punch.

  Hollis’s nervousness about anyone seeing the Francesca had been an overreaction. He had the interior fully reassembled. The only thing that looked wrong about it was the uncommon tidiness. For anyone who knew Hollis Brant well, that was a dead giveaway.

  “What’d you find?” he called from the galley as I opened the sliding glass door. I smelled meat frying.

  “O’Hasson’s daughter,” I said. “Cyndra.”

  He set down something with a sharp clang on the stove element and stepped out into view.

  “You talked to her?”

  “Not exactly.” I fingered the sharp edge of the phone’s SIM card. “She’s been trying to reach him.”

  “Ah.” Hollis wiped his hands on the dish towel he was holding. “And of course she’s worried. Do you suppose the girl knows why he came here?”

  “If you had a twelve-year-old kid, would you tell her about your plans to commit grand larceny?”

  He curled his lip, slightly aghast at the idea. “If I had a child, I’d likely put her high in a tower. Keep her away from the whole mad world.”

  O’Hasson had been in prison half of Cyndra’s life. But he had given her the number of his burner phone, and she called him Dad. She might at least guess why he was out of town. Did she also know about me?

  I parked myself on the settee. Hollis went back into the galley and returned with Canadian bacon and eggs. An ingrained habit of hospitality. He would have offered me something even if I were jogging past on the dock.

  “Dono would have told me,” I said, “at that age.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the same. You might have been right alongside Dono at the safe, helping him hold the welding torch or some such.”

  “I know that.”

  “She’s just a girl in—what? Sixth grade?”

  In other words, I had no idea what it was like to be a regular kid. I’d been six years old when I came to live with my grandfather. Dono had trusted me with small shared confidences—where he kept the spare change, how to open the door on the old Cordoba without a key—and watched, I’m sure. When he saw I could handle it, that I wasn’t the kind of kid who had a lot of close friends, or who chattered about every tiny thing that passed through his brain, he stepped up the importance and potential consequences of the secrets he shared.

  I couldn’t recall the first time Dono had confessed where our money came from. His real money, not from general contracting work, or whatever meager dollars his bar might have squeezed out. The bar had mainly been a handy way to launder cash. Maybe Dono never actually said the words out loud. He just introduced me to using lockpicks and greasing alarm systems the same way other children would learn how to make their own oatmeal in the morning.

  And when Dono got busted and I went into foster homes, I had kept practicing. Half because it was a way to pass the time. Half because if I got good enough, maybe that would ensure, somehow, that he came back.

  So what if I could relate to Cyndra Ann O’Hasson? At least half the kids in the fucking system had a parent in jail, just out of jail, or about to get their ass chucked back inside. It didn’t mean she and I were anything alike.

  Hollis sipped his coffee. “It’s hard for the girl, sure. But it could be a hell of a lot worse.”

  “You’re right. We’re not the same.”

  I tapped on the wall, somewhere behind which were Hollis’s Japanese bedposts, wrapped in linen sheets. “When is your adventure in furniture moving? Do you still want me on call?”

  “What’s today? Barely Tuesday? Then it’ll be Thursday night, Friday early morning, depending on the tides.”

  “Which tides?”

  “Figure of speech. There’s a ship coming in which I aim to meet. If you could keep one ear on your phone until then, I’d appreciate it.” He shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, you might be swinging by here and moving the posts to your little boat. They’ll fit; I took the liberty of measuring your cabin while I was waiting for you.”

  “How heavy are they?”

  “Well, if an old barnacle like me can lift all four in a go? Barely exercise for you.”

  “Done.” I paused before diving into the eggs, which had grown cold during my musings. “You’d tell me if you needed backup.”

  “I’ve done business with these boys before. Everyone’s civil.”

  I nodded. “Good to work with professionals.”

  “Isn’t it just?” Hollis said.

  Nine

  Sleep came fast, and left the same way. I’d crashed in the berth at the bow of the speedboat, wondering whether O’Hasson might still be alive somewhere, and I went right on wondering it when my eyes popped open to see the underside of the foredeck, eighteen inches above my face. The berth was a thin wedge-shaped mattress, short enough that my feet dangled over the edge, narrow enough at the tip that I could hear the faint echo of my own breathing on the hull. A more claustrophobic person might have been reminded of a coffin.

  A buzzing sounded from my phone, and I shimmied my way down and pushed open the little cabin doors with my foot. Cold air rushed in, making my skin prickle. Day was still getting a firm grip on the sky.

  Addy had sent me a text message. Up and having her single cigarette of the day, probably. I called her back.

  “I have news,” she said.

  “That was quick.”

  “I outsourced it. Some of my friends in the li
brary system know far more about real estate and finances than I do. Enid dug up the county records almost before we’d asked her. The building was owned and managed for many years by a”—I heard Addy leaf through papers—“PNW Commercial Realty, that’s the name. Then two months ago, PNW sold the building to another company called Radius Properties, in Los Angeles.”

  O’Hasson was from Los Angeles. I wondered if that was just coincidence.

  “PNW,” I said. “A local outfit?”

  “They have a Washington license, of course. And a leasing office. It’s down in Burien.” She gave me the address and the phone number. “Should we call them?”

  “Better if I talk to them in person.” I found an olive Henley shirt in the bag of spare clothes and pulled it on over my head as we talked. “Did Enid find anything more on Radius Properties?”

  “It seems to be a subsidiary, owned by other corporations.”

  Which in turn were probably owned by others. Shell companies to hide the real players. If the hunters were behind Radius, I doubted that trail would lead me anywhere useful. Forensic accounting was well beyond my skill set.

  But an idea struck me, sparked by all of the property paperwork I’d had to wade through with Dono’s legacy.

  “Do those records tell you Radius Properties’ insurance company?” I said. “That has to be listed as part of any real estate sale, right?”

  More page shuffling. “Safehome Insurance. I have my auto coverage with them.”

  “Thanks, Addy. I’ll take Stanley out for a run later this week, give you a break.”

  “Radius Properties is a strange one. They don’t seem to have existed before this year. I’m curious.”

  “Don’t get too curious, right? Stick with the public records,” I said.

  There was a moment of quiet. “You think Radius is criminal?”

  “Or close enough. I don’t want you or your friends anywhere on their radar.”