Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  We fell silent again. Luce looked up at the antelope head on the wall. I drank a little of the bourbon. I’d learned enough about the lovely Miss Boylan in the past weeks to know that when she was distracted in the middle of a conversation, she was hauling on the reins on something inside herself.

  “Do you think the police will learn why Kend killed her?” she said.

  “They’ll try. But mostly, they’ll try to confirm Who and How.”

  “Two out of three.”

  “They take what they can get.” I held her hand, which was cool from holding the iced drink.

  “It’s still a crap deal,” Luce said. “Willard must be terrible. And terrifying.”

  “I think he’s in shock. Elana was his last family member he gave a damn about.”

  The waiter brought our food. We concentrated on our plates for a few minutes. I tried to show some restraint while eating my venison pie. Luce picked at her salad. After a few bites she gave up.

  “I took some numbers off Kend’s contacts,” I said, tapping the phone in my chest pocket. “If you know any of them, maybe they should hear about Elana from you.”

  “Let me see,” she said. She took my phone to scan the short list of names, and shook her head. “I don’t know them.”

  “I’ll call them anyway. Willard said she hung out with that bunch, mostly.”

  “Because they might know if things were bad between Kend and Elana?”

  “Or they may have seen it happen,” I said. “There were other tire tracks at the cabin.”

  Luce leaned back.

  “You’re wondering if Kend didn’t do it,” she said.

  “I don’t know one way or the other,” I said. Luce raised her eyebrow. “And yeah, I want to. I saw how they were left, Luce. Like bags of trash.”

  She considered it. “If there’s really a chance.”

  I knew what her hesitancy was about. My way of looking into things tended toward the extralegal. After growing up around thieves and robbers, Luce preferred her life less complicated. She’d met enough bail bondsmen.

  “If I find anything useful, I’ll hand it to the cops,” I said. “Any evidence that points to Kend Haymes being murdered will make them very motivated. They don’t want to fumble this one.”

  “All right. Elana deserves that.” She tapped her rum drink. “And afterward, I want to go someplace very warm, with a lot of these for hydration.”

  “A vacation? You?”

  “Us. Before you start whatever job you find. After that it’ll be tough to get time off for a while. What’s that face?”

  “I had a horrible vision of a pension fund chasing me.”

  Luce stole a bite of my pie crust. “I think you can take him.”

  I DREAMED OF DARK wings. They formed patch by patch in midair, each new sweep of feathers announced by long orange flashes of rifle fire off to my right, as if the gun were painting in precise strokes. I kept thinking that I would turn to see who was shooting, but the wings held me rapt. The next burst would be straight at my face. As I was tensing for the coming bullets, I woke.

  I knew where I was. Lying in my bed, Luce beside me, turned away and curled half into a ball like she did when sleep was at its deepest. Her hair was a pale splash in the black room.

  Safe.

  Safe. Say the word a hundred times. It loses its meaning but gains something in power.

  Sweat beaded on my forehead and chest. The natural cool of the old house in winter felt like the hospital morgue had. I got out of bed and pulled up the covers so the cold wouldn’t touch Luce, and went downstairs.

  Moonlight cast everything in the front room into shades of indigo and navy. I sat in Dono’s old leather chair. And breathed.

  Dark wings, and automatic weapon fire. A new dream, mixed with an old one.

  I had believed that the nightmare that started with the three flashes was gone. Or at least subdued. I’d beaten it down over time with treatment and medication and a lot of sleepless nights.

  But it rattled its tail from time to time, just to remind me it was still there. A subconscious stress response, the therapists had called it. The sight of Elana’s blood splashed wide and sweeping across the cabin wall had given the dream strength, and determination.

  I didn’t believe in ghosts. There were too many dead people in my past to buy the notion that any of them cared enough to tap me on the shoulder, symbolically or otherwise.

  Still. The wings, Elana’s wings, had my full attention, if that was what they were asking for. I could be pretty damned determined myself.

  AGE SEVENTEEN

  The first question on the employment agency’s application form, after the boxes for name and address and all of the usual identification details, was:

  WHAT SPECIAL SKILLS DO YOU HAVE? SEE LIST OF EXAMPLES ON PAGE 3

  I could think of a few talents. None that I should put in writing.

  Sitting around me in the agency’s waiting room were a dozen other kids about my age and a handful of older people. Some scribbled on their own copies of the same application, while the rest waited to see if they would be called for what the agency called a pre-interview. I guessed that the other teenagers had either just finished high school, or had dropped out.

  I pretended to fill out sections on the form for a couple more minutes, until the receptionist stepped away from her desk. Then I folded the papers in half and left the office. I followed signs to the stairs. Instead of going down to the lobby, I went up two flights to the top floor. The stairwell door was locked. I used the pick gun in my pocket to open it.

  The hall on the other side of the door was empty. The employment agency was open until seven o’clock, to allow potential candidates to come in after work or after school, but most of the other offices in the building were empty at this hour. I listened for a moment, just to be sure. Then I walked softly down the hallway to the firm of Gallison Engineering, to see what I needed to see.

  Five minutes later, I was leaving through the building’s lobby, employment forms still in my hand. I passed Dono. He was chatting amiably with the security guard. His voice had no hint of an Irish accent, as it often did when he was at home. He wore a polo shirt with a Verizon Services logo, and a matching baseball cap. His face was angled away from the lobby camera.

  Outside, I crossed the street to the brown Sentra that Dono used when we needed to be inconspicuous. While I sat and waited, I looked at the back of the building.

  At one of the fourth floor windows, to be exact.

  Behind that window was the secure storage room of Gallison Engineering & Equipment. Where I would be in thirty more hours, sharing space with about five hundred thousand bucks’ worth of top-quality optical lenses. We’d clear ten percent, with another twenty grand going to the guy who’d sold us the information. Dono had already made the arrangements for the sale with Hiram Long.

  Dono came out. He checked his surroundings and when he was sure no one was watching him, he ambled across the road and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Well?” he said.

  I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. “It’s really soft. There are no cameras in the stairwells or anywhere on the fourth-floor hallways, except by the elevators.”

  “What about the office door? What kind of lock?”

  “Key card. A Jackson Command model.”

  He frowned. He’d been hoping Gallison would have a punch code, or even a plain old deadbolt. “So we’ll use the frequency scanner. But I don’t like you standing out in the hallway that long.”

  “Or I could use this.” I held up a GE&E employee badge.

  “Where’d you acquire that?”

  “Lifted it from a guy leaving for the night as I came in. With luck he won’t even know it’s gone until Monday morning.”

  “Without luck, he’s already reported his badge missing. In which case it won’t work when you need it. And maybe the system will alert the guards at the front desk.”

  “What’s worse? W
e take a chance on the card, or I just cross my fingers that the scanner works before a guard wanders by?”

  Dono looked at me. He didn’t like my tone. But he also couldn’t deny it was a better choice.

  Still, I was a little more polite when I spoke again. “How’d it go with the guard?” I said.

  “Let’s find out.” He took a handheld receiver out of the center console and switched it on, and tuned it to the right frequency. A male voice came through like he was in the back seat of the Sentra.

  —tol’ her that if she wanted to have them over for damn dinner she shoulda tol’ me sooner and I coulda stopped—

  Dono smiled and switched it off. “I pasted the bug right under the desk. A little advance notice if someone hears you and calls it in.”

  “Nobody’s going to hear me.” I grinned.

  “Not if you go slow. You’ve practiced enough with the cutter?”

  He knew I had. But my grandfather would check everything ten times for himself, and make me take another lap through the plan just for good measure. Even if he was letting me run the plays from the field, he couldn’t let it go.

  “We’re ready,” I said.

  “Not without transport we’re not. You recall where Willard lives? Near Green Lake?”

  “The little house.” It always struck me funny that such a huge guy lived in a house that had less square footage than our home’s first floor.

  “He’ll have a suitable truck for us. You go up there tomorrow morning and fetch it.”

  “Is Willard going to be there?” The notion made me a little nervous, even though all I had to do was ask Willard for a set of keys. I’d met him a dozen times, but it was hard not to be uneasy around a guy whose face never told you what he was thinking. Plus, he could probably pop my skull like a grape with just one hand.

  “Don’t bring the truck to the house. Park it three blocks down from us here.” Dono pointed out the direction. “Take a bus home.”

  I gaped at him. “Come on. We’re forty miles from Seattle.”

  Sultan County was north and east of home. One of the latest hubs of business real estate, as the population swelled and pushed farther and farther inland. The office complex where Gallison was located was new and shiny and stupidly generic, one of a dozen just like it in a square mile. “I don’t even know if they have buses out here.”

  “There’s a park-and-ride two miles west.”

  “Geez.”

  Saturday morning came up hot and quickly got hotter. Short sleeves in October, and made even weirder when the overcast skies refused to clear up with the heat. Even the Halloween pumpkins on the lawns were sweating beads of water.

  Willard’s house was walking distance from Green Lake, on a short cross-street packed close with other homes, most of them larger than Willard’s. His was a little older, too, just a bungalow with a porch and maybe a loft. It was painted about the same dark brown as the suits Willard always wore.

  From behind the house, I heard a faint clink of metal on metal. The driveway ran along the side of the house, and I walked up it toward the back. Most of the fenced yard was paved. A big silver Lincoln and a white Toyota pickup truck with a covered bed took up all of the cement. On the remaining strip of grass was a chaise lawn chair, and on the chair was Elana Coll. She wore big gold sunglasses and jeans shorts, and a red T-shirt with the WSU Cougars logo. The shirt was tight enough to show the complete outline of her bra. She held a plate piled high with eggs and sausage and diced potatoes.

  “You made me breakfast,” I said.

  “Ha ha,” Elana said. “This is all mine, and I need it. My sure cure.”

  “That explains the shades. Where was the party?”

  “Shit. I forgot my coffee. It’s in the kitchen. Would you? I’m settled in.” She stretched her legs out to their full length on the chaise.

  “Where’s Willard?”

  “Out of town.” Elana flipped her brunette ponytail behind her shoulder, picked up the fork, and took a big bite of eggs.

  “Do you have the keys to that truck?”

  “D’you have my coffee?”

  To hell with it. I could jump the ignition. I started toward the truck. Elana waved her fork like a little home-team flag.

  “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. God, you’re so serious. Willard left me the keys for you. Lemme eat something and I’ll get them.” She took another bite. “There’s ’nuff coffee for both’ve us.”

  “You could have opened with that,” I said.

  Willard’s kitchen was just inside the screen door. It was so narrow that he could cook and wash dishes and put them away, all by just turning his body. I wondered how he lived here without going nuts. Maybe he had to spend all his money on custom clothes. I found Elana’s coffee mug on the counter—still messy from her cooking—and poured another cup for myself.

  “Are you living here now?” I asked Elana after I’d taken a seat on the back stoop.

  Mouth full, she shook her head. Her plate was already half clean.

  “Mom’n Dad are somewhere in South America. Chile, I think.”

  “What are they doing there?”

  “Shit, what do they always do? Commune with the vibrations, get naked with the other hippies.”

  I grinned. “Not your thing.”

  “Hell, no. Even if I wasn’t in school.”

  “What’s sharing a house with Willard like?”

  “Like living with your vice principal. He’s always checking on me. I’ve got a curfew, if you can believe it.”

  Yeah, I could. Dono had been like that when I was fifteen, too. I had to be home by ten o’clock on the dot, except when he and I were working on a job.

  “Doesn’t matter. End of this semester, and I am gone,” Elana said.

  “Gone? Dropping out?”

  She chair-danced in triumph. “Meltoun Academy. I got the letter last week.”

  “What’s Meltoun Academy?”

  “Boarding school, in Oregon. Very exclusive, thank you very much.”

  I smelled bullshit. “They needed a ringer for the high jump?”

  “Hey, my grades are kick-ass.” She saw my expression. “No shit. Straight As. And Dad went there on account of his folks being rich once. Even if he screwed that up for us, I’m a legacy. It counts.”

  “Willard’s going to throw a hell of a party when he gets his house back.”

  “He’s too cheap,” Elana said. Her fork stopped in midair. “Well, no. Uncle Will doesn’t have a lot of money. He’s real careful, you know?”

  “Cautious. About what work he takes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dono is, too. I guess he wasn’t always. He used to be kind of crazy, when he was young.”

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged. “Prison. The last time was when I was about ten.”

  “No shit? What’d you do? Stay with relatives?”

  We had no relatives. I’d gone into foster homes for a year and a half.

  “You have the keys?” I said.

  Elana looked at me for a moment, then set the empty plate on the grass and stood up. “Hang on.” She walked lightly on the balls of her bare feet to the truck, and leaned deep into the driver’s window to snag the keys off the seat. I tried not to stare.

  She spun like a ballet dancer and tossed me the keys. “I’ll follow you there.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You’re going to walk all the way back?”

  I started to reply that I was hopping a bus, but that sounded even more lame than walking. Elana had a point. We’d be leaving the truck three blocks away from the Gallison building. It wasn’t like I was going to point and show her which office Dono and I would be breaking into later tonight.

  “Try not to get busted on the way,” I said.

  She lowered the sunglasses to blink her green eyes at me. “Please.” Then she frowned. “Wait. You really think I don’t have fake ID?”

  I really had.

  But as Elana was
fond of implying, I was an idiot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CONDOMINIUM BUILDING WHERE Kendrick Haymes had lived was off of Galer, on Queen Anne Hill. Twenty-eight or thirty large units arranged in a wide H-shape to maximize sun and privacy. And profits.

  It was seven in the morning. A lousy time of day to break into a place, with all the neighbors likely to be home and getting ready for work. But if I waited, I might lose my chance to be the first inside.

  I turned onto the cross street and parked a few doors down. The morning was damp. A black vinyl carrying case that had belonged to my grandfather made a warm rectangle under my jacket. I’d found the case the week before, where it had been hidden behind the ventilation mesh in one of the house’s eaves. Dono had kept it out of the reach of a standard police search.

  As I walked back to the building, I heard a mechanical clacking and the gate to the parking level began to rise. A late model Acura flew up the short ramp from the garage and zoomed down the street without pausing. I ducked under the gate before it closed again. A good omen.

  Kend’s driver’s license had listed his unit as #D8. I found the garage stairwell and went up. The fourth-floor hallway was dead quiet, and carpeted in a deep wine color that matched the accents on the wallpaper. Nicer than any room in my house.

  Number D8 was at the end of the hall. It had a cream-painted door, like all the other apartments. And like the others, a Baldwin brand single-cylinder, jimmy-proof deadbolt. I rang the bell. No answer. I could barely hear the chimes from out in the hallway. Another point on my side. High quality condo equals good soundproofing.

  I opened Dono’s vinyl case. Inside, held in place by elastic loops, were a dozen key rings. Each ring had multiple keys. All of the keys had their jagged cuts filed down to stubby points.

  Bump keys, arranged by brand name—Schlage, Kwikset, Master, and more—and by type of lock. I took out the Baldwin ring, and picked the key that matched the 8200 series. It went into the lock like it was coated in goose fat.

  The hallway was still quiet. I took a screwdriver from the case, put a little tension on the bump key, and tapped it with the screwdriver’s rubber handle. A couple more taps, and the pins inside the lock lined up neatly on the shear line, and the key turned.