Soul Survivor (A Leo Waterman Mystery Book 11)

by G. M. Ford

  I stepped up close to a musty-smelling Confederate Civil War uniform. Lots of faded gold braid on the shoulders, ceremonial saber by his side. I closed my eyes and worked at leveling my breath. Pulling the stench of the centuries into one nostril and then forcing it out the other. Kept at it until the roar of outrage quieted in my head and the adrenaline surge ebbed to a trickle.

  Gabe must have picked up my vibe. Next thing I knew Gabe had lost the shotgun and was welded to my shoulder. “You okay?”

  I inclined my head toward the door and began to move in that direction, Gabe following along in my wake. The outside air slapped me sensible as I stumbled toward the rental car. We got in and buckled up before either of us said another word.

  “What’s up?” Gabe asked.

  “The blonde,” I choked out.

  “With the apron?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “She’s the one who was in the car that was following Martha. She was there when the guy . . .”

  “You want me to drive?”

  Suddenly my anger had an outlet.

  “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shot back.

  Turned out, if I didn’t want to know, I shouldn’t have asked.

  “For the second time in two days,” Gabe said, “you’re lookin’ a little soft to me. Never seen you back off like you did when that cop was busting your ass in the hotel room. A year ago, you’d have cleaned his teeth for him and worried about the fallout later.”

  I wanted to defend myself. Deny everything. Demand a retraction. Do all the dumb stuff people do when they don’t want to admit the other guy is right, but I was graced by a sudden spasm of lucidity and instead took a breath, turned my face away, and zippered my lips.

  Gabe put a hand on my shoulder. “What now? ’Cause we sure as hell can’t stick around here.”

  As with most points Gabe took the trouble to make, there was more than a grain of truth nestled somewhere inside.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I need to think about it.”

  “You notice the guy up front, talkin’ to the kids about the clock?”

  “Same guy who was standing by the door the night Matthew Hardaway shot Valenzuela at the city council meeting.”

  “Yep,” Gabe said. “Lemme drive.”

  This time I didn’t argue. Instead, I heaved a mental sigh, popped the door, and slid out. As I came around the front of the car, I glanced over at Bickfords Bunker; the door was jacked open by a stout white arm, and Blondie was standing wedged in the doorway, apron and all, hands on her hips, watching Gabe and me change places.

  “You sure we ain’t met before?” she shouted from the doorway.

  I averted my eyes and kept moving. When I sneaked a look her way a moment later, the door was closing, and she’d disappeared from view.

  Gabe slid behind the wheel, dropped her into gear, and pulled out on to Evergreen Way heading south. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Gabe muttered as we slid across town on Sixteenth, heading for Broadway and the open road.

  Six blocks later: “We’ve got company,” Gabe announced. I watched those green eyes flicking back and forth between the roadway ahead and the rearview mirror.

  I resisted the urge to gawk. “Cops?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Gabe said. “Rusted-out Subaru wagon. Even unmarked cop cars aren’t that bigga pieces of shit. He’s been with us ever since we left Bickfords Bunker.”

  We were rolling down the southern end of Broadway, on our way back to Seattle. Whipped and wounded, tails between our legs, headed for I-5 and the friendlier climes to the south.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Gabe said.

  Gotta admit, right about then, I was feeling pretty low, like I needed to redeem myself, to take some action that would miraculously reclaim something vital I’d lost . . . something I felt like I couldn’t live without.

  “What say we find out who it is,” I suggested.

  Gabe gave me a minor Are you nuts? look. “You sure?”

  “Get in the right-hand lane.”

  Gabe complied.

  “Just stay on Broadway,” I said.

  Gabe checked the mirror. “He’s comin’ along for the ride.”

  “There’s a big cemetery up ahead on the right,” I said. “Go in there.”

  Gabe required no further explanation. We bounced past an empty sales office and started up the hill into the burial ground. The place was well tended. Lots of flags and flowers. These were people who honored their dead. Gabe gave it a little gas, putting a bit more distance between the Subaru and ourselves as we climbed and twisted our way through the tree-shaded boneyard.

  At the top of the rise, a traffic circle and a parking area announced the end of the line. From this point on, you were hoofin’ it. Gabe braked to a halt, looked around, and then threw the Lexus into reverse and backed the car out of sight behind a wisteria-covered mausoleum. I got out and peeked around the corner.

  The wind had freshened a bit, swaying the trees, swirling bits of dirt and leaves in the air. This far up the hill, the freeway was little more than the dull roar of eternity.

  We waited. Thousand one . . . thousand two . . . nothing. At about thousand thirty, I began to wonder if whoever was following us had lost heart and turned around, but right at that moment, the Subaru poked its nose over the top of the hill. The driver stopped for a minute, surveying the scene, confused—wondering where we could have gotten to, how he could have missed us—and then he began to creep forward again, turning left around the circle at half a mile an hour.

  About halfway around the rotary, when the driver’s back was to us, Gabe pulled the Lexus out onto the roadway, blocking the pavement. No way out, assuming of course you weren’t willing to run over tombstones in some ill-advised, all-out attempt to avoid a confrontation.

  Apparently, the Subaru’s driver wasn’t feeling quite that desperate. The second he caught sight of our car blocking the way out, the Subaru skidded to a halt. Both of us were standing by its side windows before it stopped rocking on its springs. Gabe stuffed an empty hand inside the jacket and brought it out full. The sight of a .45-caliber automatic pointed at his forehead reduced the driver to jelly. I could hear him hyperventilating right through the closed windows.

  I held up a restraining hand. “It’s the kid from the newspaper,” I said disgustedly.

  Gabe stuck the automatic back into the jacket.

  Ben Forrester pulled the hand from his throat and used it to crank down the window. He looked up at me with his mouth hanging open. Standing there in the land of the dead, we shared an uncomfortable moment.

  “I . . . I was . . . ,” Forrester stammered.

  Gabe pulled open the passenger door and slid into the seat next to Ben Forrester. “You was what?” Gabe demanded. This was just the kind of white-privilege kid Gabe made it a point not to like. Entitled frat boys brought out the worst in Gabe.

  Forrester swallowed hard. “I was just . . .” He swallowed again.

  “Make it good,” Gabe growled.

  “It’s my day off,” he stuttered out of the blue.

  “How nice for you,” I threw in.

  He dropped his hands onto the steering wheel with a smack.

  “Okay,” he said. “You got me interested in the Hardaway thing again. I was keeping an eye on Bickfords . . . you know . . . on my own time.”

  “How’d you find out about Bickfords?” I asked.

  “Way back when . . . back before Ron told me to kill the story . . . I talked to a girl Matthew knew . . .”

  “Wendy Bohannon,” Gabe said.

  Surprised, Forrester nodded. “She said Matthew had gotten a job—”

  I cut him off. “We know,” I said. “We talked to her too.”

  “So . . . you know . . . I figured I’d spend a little of my own time . . . and maybe see what was going on with the Bickford place . . . And then you two come bopping out the front door, and I figured . . . you kn
ow, what the hell . . . maybe you guys were on to something.”

  “What we were on was our way out of town,” Gabe said.

  “Turns out you were right, Ben,” I added. “Nobody in this town wants to talk about what Matthew Hardaway did. All they want is for the story to fade away and for us to get lost.”

  “Did she tell you how Matthew started to change once he got the job? How he suddenly turned into the angry young man?”

  “She told us,” Gabe said.

  “I figured . . . you know . . . if she was right . . . you know . . . maybe it was worth a little of my time.” He shrugged. “As long as Phil doesn’t find out.”

  “You know where Conway is?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Up north someplace. Never been up there, though,” the kid added.

  “Supposed to have a tavern that serves great fried oysters,” Gabe threw in.

  “You heard of some kind of camp these guys have up there?” I asked the kid.

  “A shooting club.”

  “Shootin’ what?” Gabe inquired.

  He looked confused. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know, skeet maybe . . . targets . . . stuff like that.”

  “You up for a little ride on your day off?” I asked.

  Gabe’s eyes rolled like a slot machine.

  “Where to?” Forrester asked.

  “To hell and gone,” I said.

  The iconic image of rural America always includes a mongrel dog sleeping, undisturbed, in the middle of Main Street. Here in Conway, the dog had given up and gone home too.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Gabe wanted to know.

  “Methinks this may be the whole damn thing,” I said.

  “I hate places like this,” Gabe groused. “Everybody got their noses stuck in everybody else’s business. Like livin’ in a freakin’ fish tank.”

  There was the obligatory feedstore, across the street from an old wooden warehouse, a tired-looking Shell gas station, and of course the Stars and Stripes flying outside the U.S. post office, along with the Conway Tavern of song and story, and down at the end, Maggie’s Market with a rusted Coca-Cola sign hanging askew on its weathered shingles. That was it. A little quarter-mile loop off the main road, rolling around one corner before reconnecting with the two-lane blacktop.

  “Just a place for the local farmers to get feed and have a beer,” Ben said from the back seat. He waved his phone. “Google says that according to the two thousand ten census, ninety-three people live here full-time.”

  From the look of it, that was about ninety more than needed to keep this place afloat. We’d spent the morning crawling along behind massive tractors pulling even bigger farm equipment, which had added at least an hour to the trip.

  I had no idea what they were growing in the black dirt fields we’d driven past, but whatever it was, they were growing a hell of a lot of it. And it was either a fall crop or they had managed a second planting, ’cause the fields were fuzzy with lime-green growth.

  A pair of battered pickup trucks leaned against the curb in front of the Albers feedstore. Half a block down the street, a dozen mud-flecked trucks and SUVs decorated the street in front of the tavern. Gabe pulled into the last parking space.

  “Shall we?” I said.

  “What?” Ben Forrester asked.

  “Oysters,” I said.

  “I hate oysters,” he whined. “I mean, who in hell ever opened one of those things, looked inside, and said, ‘Wow, that pile of snot looks real good’?”

  Gabe grabbed the door handle and hopped down out of the driver’s seat. “Well then, kid, push the envelope and order something else.”

  I turned toward Ben as I stood in the street and stretched my back. “It’s like Gabe said. Everybody knows everybody else’s business in a little burg like this.” I gestured at the tavern. “And this looks like the only watering hole anywhere around here, so whatever’s going on in these parts . . . somebody in this place will sure as hell know about it.”

  The yellow ruffled curtains told me somebody lived upstairs above the tavern. Gabe held the door. I stepped through. The joint was bigger than it looked from the street, and it was jamming too. Not a table to be had, so we wandered down to the far end of the bar and appropriated the last three stools before you were officially in the toilet. The aroma suite, I imagined they called it. Buoys and Gulls, of course.

  The bartender was a weathered old woman. Seventy anyway. Tall and wiry, she moved like she was on wheels. Rolling the length of the bar, saying a few words to one of the customers, and then rolling back our way, all without ever making eye contact. Looked like there were four of them handling the crowd. Two big girls waiting tables and somebody in the kitchen cooking. Somebody who spoke Spanish, because that was the language the girls used when they hung tickets and shouted instructions into the delivery window.

  It was strictly a John Deere crowd. Lots of coveralls and muddy boots. Several cowboy hats and a couple of sombreros bobbing here and there too. Lots of Hispanics. Maybe half the clientele. Unlike Everett, seemed like everybody was comfortable with everybody else.

  Ben kept trying to get the bartender’s attention, waving, standing up, clearing his throat like a chainsaw and such and sundry. And, not surprisingly, she made it a point to ignore the shit out of him. “The service in here . . . ,” he finally sputtered.

  “Calm down, kid,” Gabe rumbled. “The more you keep thrashing around, the longer she’s gonna make us wait.”

  Took the barkeep the better part of fifteen minutes to get around to taking our orders. Gabe and I opted for the world-famous oysters. The kid pushed the culinary envelope with the ever-popular bacon cheeseburger. By the time the food arrived, the place had mostly cleared out. Apparently they all went back to whatever they were doing at about the same time every day.

  I was dipping my last oyster when the bartender rolled over and asked, “Everything all right?”

  “Delicious,” I said.

  “Glad you liked them. Get ’em fresh every day from just down the road. We been doin’ ’em that way for the better part of fifty years now. Hate to think we’d lost our touch.”

  At the other end of the bar, one of the waitresses was cashing out the last of the lunch crowd. I leaned closer to the old lady and asked, “You know anything about some kind of shooting club up here? Buncha guys from Everett . . . wannabe military types.”

  She looked at me as if I’d maligned her mama.

  “You’re kiddin’ . . . right?”

  “Not that I was aware of,” I confessed.

  She eyeballed me up and down, like there’d been a pop quiz and I’d just failed miserably. I knew the look all too well. Me and my old man had a lot of practice at it.

  “Well . . . ,” she said finally. “If you was one of them idiots, you wouldn’t be in here chowing down and askin’ questions, now would ya?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “’Cause somebody’d kick your ass for sure, that’s why.”

  “Why would they do that?” I inquired.

  “’Cause we don’t put up with none of that Aryan Nations skinhead crap round here. They come struttin’ in here ’bout five years ago, talking ’bout niggers and greasers and Jews and all that racial purity twaddle of theirs.” She waved her hand over the room. “You seen the crowd in here, mister. Agriculture isn’t just the thing round here. It’s the only thing. Without the Mexicans, this whole shootin’ match wouldn’t last a month. These are good, hardworking people. Nobody who comes in here talkin’ trash about them is gonna walk out in one piece. I can damn well guarantee ya that.” She gave me a gap-toothed grin. “They doan even bother coming into town these days. They bring everything they need with ’em from down south, ’cause ain’t nobody round here gonna sell ’em one damn thing.”

  The door opened. A kid about fifteen came blinking through the door with a small brown dog on a leash.

  “Get that damn dog out of here, Rusty. You hear me?” she shouted.

&n
bsp; “It’s a service dog,” the kid protested.

  “We gonna be holdin’ a service for his ass you doan get him the hell outta here.”

  He opened his mouth, but she jumped in first. “Not to mention you can’t be in here without an adult. You wanna lose me my liquor license?”

  The kid turned to leave. The dog, however, was having none of it. He braced his legs, bowed his back, and refused to move, so as the kid dragged Fido stiff legged through the door, the old lady stood behind the bar shaking her head.

  I heard a snort of laughter from Gabe. “You know,” Gabe began, “I get it that people love their dogs and shit, but the notion that you need to bring them into restaurants and supermarkets just baffles me. I mean . . . yeah . . . they’re cute and cuddly and all, and I never met a human being as true as a dog, but this is an animal whose idea of an aperitif involves the commode and whose preferred snack involves their own ass. Anybody says dogs are a clean animal ain’t spent nearly enough time watchin’ ’em. Why they gotta be where I’m shopping or eating is a mystery to me.”

  “Me too,” the bartender sighed. “Same thing with these skinhead morons. What it is makes them think they’re better than everybody else is one of the great puzzles of our time. If I ever laid eyes on the shallow end of the gene pool, it’s those yahoos. It’s like all the losers in the Pacific Northwest got together and decided it wasn’t their fault that they’re unemployed or fifty-seven years old and still baggin’ groceries. Couldn’t be on them. No way. Gotta be some other explanation. No . . . gotta be because of the niggers and the Jews and the handicapped draggin’ us all down. Biggest bunch of nothings I ever saw in my life, all of ’em looking to blame their uselessness on somebody else.”

  She realized she’d been rambling and took a moment to collect herself before turning to the sink and starting to rinse glasses. “You know, mister . . . I don’t know what kinda business you got with those creeps, but you all picked a real good time to show up here. They got some kind of big something or other goin’ on this weekend. They been haulin’ supplies in here for the past week or so. Bulletheads comin’ in from all over the West. Get ’em all riled up to play toy soldiers some more. To cleanse the planet,” she said with a salacious wink.