Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  He stood up off the desk. The interview was over. Ostrander made a business card appear and handed it to me without getting up.

  “Good luck, Mr. Shaw. I do hope we’ll speak again,” Haymes said, giving me another handshake of precisely the same firmness as the first one.

  THE COLUMBIA ELEVATOR WAS fast, but going down thirty-three floors still gave me time to think.

  Boxes. Of papers. I could believe the first part, because of what I had seen, or hadn’t, in the back of Elana’s Volvo hatchback. That empty space could have held plenty of large, heavy cartons. But if Haymes and Ostrander really thought I was buying the part about proprietary documents, I should be insulted.

  Still, they had painted the carrot a nice bright orange. Get whatever Kend had at the cabin back for us, and we’ll make it worth your time.

  It was an easy bet that the alarm schematic I’d found in Kend’s apartment was linked to the boxes Haymes and Ostrander were so eager to reacquire. Taken from HDC or one of its many sister companies by Kend himself, most likely.

  So why ask me, and not pressure the cops, or hire some P.I. to track down their precious boxes?

  Ostrander had asked me about Willard. It wasn’t a long jump to assume they knew about the big man’s criminal history. They had also pulled a few strings to learn my military record. In which case, they might have dug deep enough to learn about Dono.

  I could follow their reasoning. Willard’s a crook. Dono was a crook. So maybe Elana and I are as well. And I happened to be at the scene, with two dead bodies and however many missing mystery boxes.

  I modified my previous thought about the carrot: Give us our stuff back, and we’ll pay you your ransom.

  Back in the Columbia’s underground garage, I turned the corner to walk down the long ramp. The garage was brightly lit, maybe to reduce the tomb-like feeling of being a hundred feet below ground underneath a skyscraper. The workday morning ensured that every parking space was filled. A flash of light caught my eye.

  Near my pickup truck.

  I ducked and moved silently down the row of parked cars. Someone was near the truck, only an outline from behind. The light shone again. A small flashlight. And the door of the truck was open.

  The figure turned slightly and I crouched behind a Prius’s fender. It was a man, broadly built, and dressed in a suit and tie.

  The stocky man who had unlocked Kend’s apartment, and taken his computer.

  He quietly closed the door on the cab of the truck. Then he shone the light through the canopy’s smoked glass, taking a scan of the pickup’s bed. I was very grateful that I had removed the Persian rug with Dono’s rifles and pistols at the house.

  The stout guy walked around to the far side of the truck. I slipped past the few cars between us. The last car was a black Acura RLX Sport. List price about sixty K. Factory alarm standard.

  I stomped on the Acura’s bumper. The horn blared and the flashing lights threw the man’s startled face into view through the canopy windows. He rushed to the rear again. As he rounded the corner of the truck we collided. In the tangle of limbs I lifted his wallet from his breast pocket.

  He swiped at it. “Give that—”

  I sidestepped, already looking at the driver’s license.

  “Rudolph Rusk,” I read, almost shouting over the klaxon shriek of the Acura. I matadored him as he lunged again. With the echo in the garage, it was like being inside an air-raid siren. Rusk stopped trying to catch me. He wasn’t built for chasing.

  “You’re on camera. Hand it over and I won’t bust you.” He even sounded like a cop.

  I fished one of his business cards out of the wallet. “Haymes Development. Director of Corporate Security.” I guessed Rusk to be in his fifties. Probably joined the private sector after qualifying for his department pension. I pocketed the card.

  He took out his cell phone. “Last chance, shitbird.” The Acura’s alarm clicked off. My ears were ringing.

  “No reception way down here, Rudy. What were you looking for?” I asked. Boxes, no doubt. Or whatever had been in them.

  His face was nearing the same shade of maroon as his necktie. “We check the payload of all large vehicles at Columbia Tower. Standard procedure.”

  I laughed. “You personally? Come on.”

  “You’re dirt. I don’t have to explain a fucking thing to you.”

  “And you’re not calling the cops. Not with that slim jim under your coat.” I’d felt the flat metal strip next to Rusk’s kidney when I’d lifted his wallet. “Popping the lock is a little retro. But it’s an old truck,” I admitted.

  I snapped his picture with my phone and the flash made him blink. “That’s a good one. Why the search and seizure, Rusk?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Bank of Seattle, platinum plus. Haymes pays that well?” I flipped the debit card like a small, rectangular Frisbee. It sailed far off into the dim of the parked cars and I heard it clack off a windshield.

  “Cocksu—”

  I threw another card in the opposite direction, over the divider to the next level. This one we didn’t hear. “Everywhere you want to be. Better tell me something before I get to your Jenny Craig membership.”

  Rusk fumed at me. Probably wishing he had pepper spray in the pocket of his Brooks Brothers. Then he turned and walked quickly up the ramp toward the elevators.

  Had the invitation to meet with Haymes and Ostrander been a misdirect the whole time? Just to let their pet bulldog nose around the truck?

  I dropped Rusk’s wallet into a trash can on the way out of the garage. Half of his two hundred forty in cash went into the donations box at Union Gospel Mission on my way to grab second breakfast.

  I may be dirt, but I was hometown dirt.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MY PHONE RANG AS I was waiting for the crosswalk light on Stewart.

  “Van. Can you talk, lad?” Hollis.

  “What have you got?” I had to speak up. The sidewalks were momentarily crowded with a rush of people braving the cold streets on their lunch hours.

  “Less than you might like, I’m afraid. Your Kendrick Haymes has no police record to speak of. Two moving violations in the past six years, and neither of them would make for a good story.”

  “Any firearms under his name?” I said. I was still wondering where the Glock at the cabin had come from.

  “Nothing listed here. You wanted Willard’s niece as well.”

  “I do.”

  “The poor child. She was a bit more like us. There’s a note here that says there’s a juvenile record, but it was sealed.”

  I already knew about Elena’s teenage history. “Give me the other stuff.”

  “Nothing serious, mind. But Elana had been brought in for questioning, twice. Once when some money went missing from a club she was working at in Coeur d’Alene. No charges, but she left for Washington State not long after. Then again two years ago. That time—and this is the part I enjoyed thinking about”—Hollis paused, enjoying the suspense—“jewelry was taken from a dozen high-rent apartments during a fire alarm. Later on they found the superintendent’s keys were also missing. The Spokane police estimated that particular night earned some lucky soul about forty thousand.”

  “Sounds serious enough to me.”

  The crosswalk light had changed while I’d been listening. I hurried to catch it.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a tall guy in a long gray raincoat on the opposite side of the intersection turn quickly to match my direction. He jaywalked through the cars stopped at the light. As I walked down Stewart, he stayed parallel to me on the other side.

  “Well, at any rate, Elana had no convictions,” Hollis said. “And she’s dead now, so all is forgiven.”

  “What about the company that matches the alarm schematic?”

  “Not a thing. No reports anywhere in Washington of a break-in at any larger than a home or mom-and-pop store. Do you want me to look farther afield?”

  I slowed to catc
h a look at the guy in the gray raincoat in the reflections on the windows. He had thin hair and a thick black beard. The bouncer from the ghost book. He stopped to urgently check something on his phone. Cell phones had apparently replaced newspapers as the go-to disguise for clumsily shadowing people. Just another blow for print journalism.

  “Forget it,” I said. “It was a long shot. Thanks, Hollis.”

  It couldn’t be random chance, the bouncer finding me here. Had someone made me at the ghost book? Or maybe there had been another camera I hadn’t seen.

  I didn’t want to lead him to the bar. Instead of going right on 1st Ave I kept going, down into the Market. A few of the outdoor vendors were open, but their business was more hopeful than actual. Not a lot of tourists in February to buy artisan jams or ladles handcrafted from black walnut. I crossed the cobblestones of Pike Place. My gray-coated buddy hurried to follow me through the absurdly colorful row of flower vendors.

  I knew the Market well. It was one of my favorite places to kill a Saturday afternoon as a kid, once I was old enough to catch the Metro on my own from Capitol Hill. I would buy comic books and read them on the long flight of steps between the shops and the waterfront. Later on, the Market became where I practiced picking pockets. Not a time of my life that I was proud of anymore, but it had taught me every possible exit from the rabbit warren of stalls and stores on its enclosed lower levels.

  My shadow was thirty feet behind me when I took the stairs down to the first level. Once I was out of sight I could race to the far side and wait in one of the alcoves, while Gray Coat ran around trying to figure out if I’d gone farther down or into one of the shops. When he gave up and left, I’d give him a little lesson in how to properly tail someone.

  The hall on the first level was nearly empty, with half the stores closed for the slow month. There were only a half-dozen shoppers in the hallway. I started my sprint.

  And stopped almost immediately.

  Another large guy was coming fast toward me down the hall, walking with the rolling gait of the overly muscled. The fabric of his red-hooded sweatshirt was pulled taut over his armor-plate chest and shoulders. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear. It wasn’t hard to guess who he was talking to.

  God damn it. It wasn’t a tail. It was a trap, and I’d been suckered.

  Gray Coat would be coming down the stairs behind me. I moved right, near one of the few shops still open, an emporium selling magic tricks and large illustrated posters of illusionists and circuses from centuries past. I didn’t see the shopkeeper inside.

  A skinny boy was in front of the shop, feeding quarters into a penny arcade fortune-teller, a glass case with the top half of a mannequin in grandma curls who would robotically cast its plastic hand over tarot cards before the machine spat out your future. I grabbed a buck and thrust into his hand.

  “It’s broken, come back later,” I said. He looked at my face and ran off at full steam.

  The machine started to make whirring noises. Bulbs flickered. I put my back to it so neither guy could get behind me. I didn’t need tarot cards to know that would be a bad thing.

  They converged on me together, stopping a little out of reach. Gray Coat was on my left, and the bodybuilder in the red sweatshirt was on my right. The bodybuilder had black sweatpants on as well, probably the only choice that could encompass his thighs. His face was pockmarked and his hair slicked back straight from his forehead. He was a little shorter than I was, but at least two inches wider on every side.

  Gray Coat was taller than both of us, at least six foot three, and while he wasn’t a walking distended vein like his buddy, he was no stranger to barbells, either.

  “This him?” asked the bodybuilder to Gray Coat.

  Gray Coat nodded. “Saw him on the street. When I was coming to meet you. Saw the scars.” He was out of breath from hurrying after me through the Market. He’d been wheezing when he’d chased me at the ghost book, too.

  “Cardio,” I said, “in between sets on the bench press. Give it a try.”

  Gray Coat frowned. The bodybuilder smiled. He wasn’t in any hurry.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “You like messing with people, yeah?”

  “You pissed off a friend of ours,” said Gray Coat.

  I shrugged. “You’ll have to be more specific. I piss off lots of people.”

  “At the book,” said Gray Coat, confused. “Yesterday.”

  “He knows where you mean,” said the bodybuilder mildly. “He’s just being a comedian.”

  I smiled back. “A comedian and two jokes. How’d you morons find me?”

  Keys jingled behind us as the magic shop owner started locking his display cases. Leaving for lunch. The four of us were the only people in the hall now. Soon it would be only three, with no witnesses.

  The bodybuilder’s chest muscles bunched under his sweatshirt in anticipation. I could feel my breath slowing. The tension in my shoulders eased. A relaxed muscle is a fast muscle. I’d have to be very fast.

  “Maybe,” said the bodybuilder, his voice high and excited, “you’re a slow learner.”

  “You mean like this guy?” I pointed to Gray Coat. “He’s the one who plays in traffic.”

  I glanced over the bodybuilder’s shoulder and grinned, like I was pleased as punch to see someone. He turned to look—his whole body, his neck didn’t move very far—and I jabbed my pointing finger as hard as I could into Gray Coat’s right eye. Gray Coat yelped and staggered back, hands flailing.

  I spun, swinging a looping hook at the bodybuilder’s face. Power over style. But the gym rat was already moving, and the hook caught him on the side of his neck. It felt like punching a tire. He grunted and slammed forward into me, trying to tackle me to the ground. Instead we crashed into the fortune-teller machine. The glass case made a sharp and agonized crack. The shop owner shouted behind us.

  The bodybuilder kept pressing, head lowered like a bull and swinging haymaker punches at my ribs. I took two bruising shots on my elbows and cupped my hands behind his head to drive my knee up into his face. He snorted again and grabbed at my forearms. It was a mistake. My second knee strike broke his nose and blood gushed over the hardwood floor and my jeans. His legs wavered and I tore my arms free and, with my fists still clasped together, swung them like a lumberjack swinging an axe into the bodybuilder’s temple. He spun halfway around and fell onto his face.

  Someone yelled again. Gray Coat ran at me blindly, arms extended and hands grasping. I ducked low and got a shoulder into his gut and lifted him like a sack of flour, his momentum carrying him up and over and down onto his forehead. The boom echoed, as loud as a dropped shotput.

  The yelling hadn’t stopped. The magic store owner was screaming for the cops, which I only half-heard over the rasp of my own lungs. Maybe I needed more cardio, too.

  I went to the bodybuilder, who was still on the floor and lost somewhere in the mental mist between out cold and trying to wake up. His hand pawed at me. I slapped it aside. He had a wallet in the pocket of his red hoodie and in the wallet was about eight hundred dollars. Maybe his advance on putting me in intensive care. I took the bills and slipped them through the crack in the glass of the fortune-teller machine. They fluttered down over the tarot cards. The store owner stopped shouting.

  The machine had spit out a thin lavender card, which had fallen to the ground. I picked up the card and read it.

  A BRIGHTER TOMORROW WILL BE YOURS

  “You and me both,” I said to the mannequin. Its blue ceramic eyes stayed inscrutable behind the fractured glass.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LUCE KEPT A COSTCO-SIZED first aid kit in the kitchen of the Morgen, equipped to handle everything from grease fire burns to deep lacerations. She hauled the blue bag from under the cabinet while I ran cold water over my hands. My knuckles were swollen from the fight.

  “You should ice,” she said.

  “Did you buy that bag?” I asked. “Or has it always been that size in case a sal
oon brawl breaks out?”

  “Funny.”

  “Yet you’re not smiling. It wasn’t my plan to get jumped, Luce.”

  “And it wasn’t those two assholes’ plan to have you be tougher than they were. This whole kit wouldn’t have been enough to patch you up, if they had their way.” She swabbed my neck with antibiotic gel where I had a cut, probably from when the bodybuilder and I had cracked the glass on the fortune-telling machine.

  “Okay. You’re right,” I said. “Those two were more sinew than skill.”

  The next guys Broch sent might be better, or at least more numerous. But I decided to keep that thought to myself.

  “So will you go to the cops?” asked Luce. “You trust that detective you met last year.”

  “John Guerin,” I said. “Yeah. But I don’t know what I can tell him that’s usable. Kend was probably in deep with Broch. There’s no way to prove it. Loan sharks don’t give out receipts.” I looked at her. She peeled the paper wrappers off two Band-Aids and stuck them on the back of my neck. Her touch was warm and I felt her breath on the little hairs at my nape.

  “I’m not worried for myself,” I said.

  There was a knock at the rear door of the bar. “It’s Leo,” he called.

  I went to let him in. The Morgen’s rear exit was one of half a dozen unlabeled doors on that side of the building. I hadn’t shown Leo where it was.

  “Did you recon the block when you were here before?” I said.

  “And again just now,” said Leo. “Nobody’s watching the place, unless they bought a condo across the street.”

  Luce looked at Leo, then me. “You called for backup,” she said.

  “Occasionally I use my brain,” I said.

  I caught Leo up on events, while Luce put some ice in a Ziploc bag for my hands. Leo stood at the kitchen door where he could see the front entrance of the bar.

  “The two guys weren’t tailing you?” he said when I’d finished.