Every Day Above Ground

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Talk to you in a week. Keep your guard up.”

  With that cheery thought, Lorenzo ended the call.

  April Slattery had fled L.A. right after her brother Joe had died. She eventually settled in Seattle as Claudette Simms, and built herself a new little racket with Tamas Fekkete filling in for her absent brothers. April as the brains, Fekkete as the muscle, bringing his Sledge City gym goons from next door into Pacific Pearl as truck drivers.

  Those pieces fit together cleanly enough. But I still didn’t know why April had been hoarding gold in the safe. Had she been setting up a big drug deal? Or waiting for brother Gar to be released from prison?

  I considered the gold from another angle. Had Fekkete known April was stockpiling kilobars? If he had caught her embezzling, that could explain her murder. He’d been out of town for the past few weeks, if I could trust Roddy’s stoned ramblings. Maybe Fekkete was her killer, and he’d fled after doing the deed.

  Or Fekkete was worried he would be the next to die. The hunters had moved awfully damned fast after April was out of the picture.

  I liked that theory better. The hunters had some grudge against April and Fekkete, and after her death they had set the trap at the safe, trying to lure him back to Seattle. Maybe April and Fekkete had reneged on a drug deal. Maybe they had stolen the gold from the hunters in the first place.

  Find the hunters, and I might be able to save Mick O’Hasson. Find Fekkete, and try to figure out how to keep his goons from going after Cyndra again. I couldn’t stash the kid at Addy’s forever.

  Sixteen

  Jimmy Corcoran and I pulled up in front of a small airplane hangar at the far edge of Scobee Field. The face of the hangar was shaped like a semicircle, its curved roof of corrugated steel sloping down to form walls at the sides. A large mud pit had formed along the base of each wall, where yesterday’s rain had flowed down the pitted steel grooves to melt into the earth.

  “She ain’t here,” Corcoran said, rolling down the window on his antique BMW.

  “We’re early.” Over an hour early. I was hoping to get this errand done as soon as I could, so that we could get our plans in motion. The faster we moved, the better chance O’Hasson might still be alive to make the effort worth something.

  As if he had been reading my mind, Corcoran shifted to look at me from the driver’s seat.

  “So your idea is to trick the assholes into showing themselves, and follow them back to where they’re keeping Mick, yeah?”

  I nodded.

  “Without getting grabbed yourself. Or worse.”

  “Or losing them. We’re only going to get one shot. That’s why I need a better way to follow their car than just tailing them.”

  “Like that’s a problem for me,” Corcoran scoffed. “Look here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rubberized disk about the size of a thick half-dollar. The disk had paper covering one side.

  “Peel this off, slap it onto a bumper, and you’re done,” he said. “It’ll send GPS coordinates right to you.” He plucked my phone from my chest pocket without asking, plugged a flash drive into the base with an adapter, and began installing his homemade app.

  “That’s all?” It wasn’t much different than the location service I’d used to find Cyndra at the pharmacy. “What’s the range?”

  “Effectively unlimited. But the battery, that’s the thing. It’s small. Enough juice to send a signal two, maybe three times. Then it’s toast.”

  “So I have to cross my fingers and hope they don’t stop for dinner.”

  “You said quick and easy. This is quick and easy. You want to follow them across the fucking country, that’s something different.”

  “It’ll work.”

  “Don’t fall all over yourself with gratitude.”

  “Here she comes,” I said, opening my door.

  I was assuming that the little red Fiat convertible zooming toward us down the dirt road belonged to Elana Coll. It looked like the kind of car the leggy brunette would drive. Quick, and a little flashy.

  I’d called Elana for two reasons. The first was because I needed a car, which was why Corcoran and I were here. The second was because I had been hoping to rope her uncle Willard into helping Hollis and Corcoran and me in my plan to find O’Hasson. I could use the extra man. Plus, Willard was roughly the size of the hangar door. His size and strength could come in handy if things got rough.

  Willard was back east for the summer, Elana had said, but she could help me with the car. She’d directed me to Scobee Field and told me to meet her at ten in the morning.

  Not just her, I realized as the Fiat came to a stop, and Elana and her passenger stepped out.

  She’d brought Luce.

  The sight of my ex had always stopped my breath. In the past, that had been a very natural reaction to Luce’s looks, and our chemistry. Now it felt more like a sucker punch to the solar plexus.

  She looked just as surprised to see me. And just as uncertain about what to do next.

  “You’re early,” Elana said to me. Maybe she meant it to be apologetic.

  “Luce,” I said.

  “How are you, Van?”

  I nodded an okay. We both turned to look pointedly at Elana. She waved a frantic hand at our unspoken accusation.

  “This isn’t a setup. I swear,” Elana said. “I was going to check to make sure Willard had the pink slips with the cars. Then drop Luce off before coming back to meet you, Van.”

  Corcoran chuckled, a burbling sound like a drain suddenly voiding a hairball.

  “Open up,” I said.

  Elana took the out and hurried to unlock the hangar door. Corcoran loped after her, still amused. Luce and I were left alone.

  “She’s telling the truth,” Luce said.

  “I know.”

  “We went out late last night, and I wound up crashing at her place. She didn’t even mention you were the person she was meeting later.”

  Luce looked good. She always looked good, even when she was just in her work uniform of black jeans and a white button-down with her hair forced into a ponytail. This morning she was downright radiant. Sky blue tank top and skirt. Shoulders tan from the summer, accentuating her blonde tresses. That was new. She’d been getting outside. As the owner and taskmaster of her own bar, the Luce I knew rarely worked less than twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

  The Luce I’d known, I reminded myself. People changed.

  “How’s the job?” I said.

  “Insane.” She smiled. “Tourist season. I hired someone to manage it part-time.”

  “Suits you.”

  “How about you? Elana said you were working for the competition.”

  Teasing me. Bully Betty’s dive and Luce’s bar, the Morgen, were in different neighborhoods, with different crowds.

  “While I work on the house, yeah,” I said. “Framing’s about done.”

  “I know,” Luce said. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I drove past the other day. Just to see.”

  Luce had been there when the house had burned down. A bad night during a bad time. Close to the end, for us.

  Wait. She came to see the house? Or to see me?

  Corcoran and Elana yanked at the low handles and the hangar door swung up with a rumbling shudder. Inside, a dozen cars and SUVs of various makes were parked bumper-to-bumper and door-to-door. All of them had come off the production line within the last few years. Nothing rare. Nothing garish.

  “So you’re getting a car?” Luce said, her smile slipping a notch. “Is the Dodge finally dead?”

  I shook my head. “Still rolling.”

  “Ah.”

  A whole lot of weight in one two-letter word. If I needed a car from Big Will Willard, and it wasn’t for personal use, then it would be for work. Willard’s kind of work, and Dono’s. My playing hopscotch over and around aspects of that life had been why Luce had broken things off with me.

  I could
explain that this wasn’t exactly what Luce thought. That I had good reasons—even altruistic reasons—for wanting a car with a clean history.

  But any explanation would just dig that hole deeper. If I wanted a car like a regular citizen, what the hell was I doing here?

  Luce made the choice for both of us, and turned away to stride back to Elana’s Fiat. Leaving us to our business.

  “I like this one,” Corcoran said, whacking the hood of an Odyssey minivan. “No cop looks twice at a mom-mobile.”

  “Do you have the registrations?” I said to Elana. She unlocked a cabinet on the hanger wall and handed me a zippered folder. Inside, the registration cards were in plastic sleeves, as crisp as if each card had been ironed. Probably free of any fingerprints, too. That was Willard for you.

  I looked through the names and addresses. A woman in an apartment house. A man with a home in the wealthy Sand Point enclave. No good.

  “All of the addresses are real,” Elana said. “The names are fake. The cars will pass a trooper check.”

  “What’s this one?” I showed her the card, which read Hoskins Livery.

  “It’s a real business. Here.” She pointed to a glossy black Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows.

  I had been looking for a car that belonged to an address that would be easy to stake out. I hadn’t considered using a car registered to a business.

  “Perfect,” I said. “I’ll have it back to you in a couple of days.”

  “Take your time,” Elana said. “I’m booked solid for the next few days getting ready for the Con.”

  “What con?” I asked, misunderstanding.

  Elana laughed. “EverCon. God, you live in your own world, don’t you? Haven’t you seen the signs on every lamppost?”

  I had, now that she mentioned it. Big green-and-white banners, with a lightning bolt E. Some huge fantasy and comic convention in the main downtown center. Traffic would be crappy the next few days.

  “I didn’t know you were into cosplay,” I said.

  “Every geek god in the state will be there,” Elana said. “Some of those guys were worth seven figures before they were out of high school.”

  And a long lean girl with flashing green eyes could make friends easy. Elana wasn’t a hustler, but higher social circles provided bigger opportunities. Some of those entrepreneurs, especially foreigners looking to avoid taxes and tariffs, dealt almost exclusively in cash.

  “We finished here?” Corcoran said. “I got shit to do.”

  Elana handed me the keys to the Navigator and I backed it out of the hangar. Corcoran pulled the door down and Elana locked it. Luce was still sitting in the Fiat, apparently busy on her phone. Corcoran came over and leaned against the fender of the Navigator, picking at his teeth.

  As Elana drove off, Luce finally glanced up. She didn’t wave. Just looked at me, until the car turned away.

  “You fucked that up real good, huh?” Corcoran said.

  “Shove it, Jimmy,” I said. He grinned and walked back to his car, delighted to have scored a point.

  Seventeen

  Juniper Adair arrived at the parking lot of the Safeway on 15th driving an aged hatchback the color of a dirty snowball. A big step down from her pristine Viridian truck. She parked. I let her wait, while I watched the morning rush of traffic and pedestrians around the store for a few minutes before crossing the street to join her.

  I got into the passenger seat. Her brown uniform was crisp with starch, and so was the woman herself by that point.

  “I could have sent these to you,” she said, repeating her complaint from our phone call half an hour earlier. “I’m supposed to be out on a repair visit right now.”

  I didn’t say anything. We both knew she was just venting steam. And that she would bend. She fumed for another second before pulling her laptop out of its carry sleeve and firing it up. Its screen brightened into a series of images captured by Juniper’s hidden camera at Pacific Pearl.

  The images Juniper had shown me two nights previously had been selected and enhanced by her, to better reveal the faces of anyone who visited the freight company. These images were different. Raw material. One picture, every few seconds, so that the series told a story. A vehicle crosses the yard, a man in a green hooded sweatshirt gets out of the vehicle, walks out of frame and presumably around the building. Then the man returns and drives away. The timestamp said he had arrived at just after six in the morning.

  I already knew that. The vehicle was a glossy black Lincoln Navigator. And the man was me.

  “He doesn’t show his face in any of these,” Juniper said.

  Very true. But the license plate of the Navigator was as clear as if I held it in my hands.

  “Send them to your boss,” I said, “like normal.”

  “That’s it? We could have done this in sixty seconds over the phone.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  “Now that you know I’ll cooperate, is that it?”

  “You’re late for your repair call.” I got out of her car.

  She yelled over the revving engine, “If I get fired, I can’t help anybody.”

  Juniper was right, I had wanted to see if she would cooperate. She had called me as soon as she had checked the camera feed and found my visit to the Pacific Pearl yard. One point for her reluctant loyalty. And she hadn’t led the hunters to me at the first opportunity. That was two. If the pictures of the Navigator managed to lure the hunters out of the shadows, that would make a hat trick. I’d let Juniper off the hook.

  Within the hour, Hollis and Corcoran and I had taken our positions around Hoskins Livery. A small fleet of polished black vehicles dominated the lot, with a cramped office and a carport for washing and waxing forced into the far corner. The limousine company anchored the end of a retail business block off Southcenter Boulevard, practically in the shadow of the gleaming Tukwila rail station, the commuter train’s first stop after leaving the airport.

  The busy boulevard made our stakeout easier than most. Corcoran had invaded an outside seat at a coffeehouse across the four-lane road from the Hoskins lot, bleeding their WiFi for his VoIP connection to keep a string of complaints coming our way. For a misanthrope, Jimmy C. sure liked to talk to people. Hollis and I sat in the front of his Cadillac, parked in the strip mall lot next door with a broken line of ornamental hedges separating us from the Hoskins office.

  The plan was simple. Wait for the hunters to show, slap one of Corcoran’s trackers on their car, and follow it. I was sure that the hunters would be easy to make. Hoskins Livery wasn’t swamped with customers, and anyone who came drifting around—scanning the property for any sight of a Lincoln Navigator or a big guy wearing a green hooded sweatshirt—might as well be wearing a strobe light on their head.

  “Shouldn’t we be doing this in shifts?” Corcoran said, his voice coming from the speaker on my phone, which lay on the dashboard.

  “They’ll show,” I said. “They’ve got resources. Once they trace the license on the Navigator, they’ll come straight here.”

  Hollis pressed the Mute button with a thick finger. “Not that I want to take Jimmy’s side, but are you as confident as you sound, lad?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Okay then. Just so we’re on the same page.”

  “The hunters have been looking for their man—Tamas Fekkete, I suspect—for weeks. They’ve spent huge money and even more energy. That kind of waiting can drive anyone batshit. If O’Hasson is still alive, it’s because he’s a possible means to an end. End being the key word. These guys want their hunt to be done.”

  “So they’ll stampede toward any new clue that might make that happen.”

  I nodded. “We’ll wait.”

  As if he’d heard, Corcoran’s voice came through the speaker again. “You’re paying me back for all these fucking coffees I gotta buy, sitting here.”

  I won the debate in the end. They came less than ninety minutes later, and they came in force.

&nbs
p; Two Impala sedans, one red and one champagne silver, cruised in tandem past the strip mall. The red one turned into the Hoskins Livery lot. The other made a U-turn around the median and drifted to a stop on the opposite side of the boulevard, a stone’s throw from Jimmy C.

  The driver and a passenger got out of the red Impala. Both were of a type. White and mid-thirties, clean-shaven and short haircuts, white dress shirts with razor-sharp collars. Suit jackets too, despite the warm day. The driver went into the Hoskins office. His passenger stood by the sedan, looking around the lot. He reflexively adjusted something under his navy blazer. A belt holster, sure as shit.

  “Dammit,” I said. Hollis didn’t reply, but his body slumped a little in my peripheral vision.

  I had bet on the hunters making a reconnaissance run. One or two of them at most, posing as potential customers. It would have been simple to use the surrounding vehicles as cover and stick the tracker in place while they were in the office or searching the lot for the Navigator.

  That goal was shot. Too many eyes on the scene, too much situational awareness for me to count on luck.

  “What now?” Hollis said. “I could wander over, try to get that bastard away from the car. Give you an opening.”

  I shook my head. I had a fallback scheme in mind. But it was a hell of a lot riskier, enough that I was desperately seeking an alternative.

  If we lost the hunters here, they might be gone for good. I couldn’t use the same stunt with Juniper’s camera again. Dammit times two.

  Divide and conquer. That was the only way.

  I tapped the phone speaker. “Jimmy.”

  “Yeah, I see ’em.”

  “I need you to stall the silver car. Enough to give me at least five minutes’ head start on them after you see me drive by.”

  “How the hell should I do that?”