by G. M. Ford
Diaz entered the room at full volume. He was stocky, with a head of salt-and-pepper hair thick enough to require a hay rake and a brown mole the size of a quarter on his left cheek. Tasseled shoes. Good suit. The lawyer Daggett in the flesh.
“You think I’m going to meet with my client in a fucking interrogation room?” he bellowed. “I need a clean room. No recording of any kind. I’m putting you on notice. I am exercising my statutory right to confer privately with my client. And I mean privately. Is that understood?”
“It’s an interview room,” Cummings insisted.
“It’s an abridgment of my client’s constitutional rights is what it is.” He raised a stiff finger in the air and shook it. “And there will be no more interagency transfers of my client without prior notification. As his attorney, I have a constitutional right to be advised of his whereabouts at all times—in advance. Is that understood?”
They kicked it back and forth for another five minutes. Diaz did most of the kicking. The Bureau Boys just tried to keep their knees together.
When the echoes faded, I ended up in the private office of Federal Judge Harvey Brighton, down on the first floor, with a couple of staties standing guard across the hall from the door.
Diaz sat down across from me.
“Joey?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Are they keeping you over in the jail?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. “There’s like a private suite up on the top floor of the courthouse. I’m guessing they use it to house federal witnesses. They lock me in there at night. Beats the shit out of Casa Vomit down the hill. Hell, they feed me decent Italian food from TULIO so there’s nothing to bitch about there.”
Diaz agreed. “Gabriella sends regards,” he said as he got to his feet. “You’ll be out of here in an hour,” he promised. “But I think I’m gonna stick around till it happens. I wouldn’t put it past these bastards to move you before the paperwork goes through. So I’m sticking around.” He leaned close to my ear. “Mr. Ortega wishes me to inform you that someone he calls Tim wishes to have an urgent word with you. The message is one thirty P.M. today. The mud.”
He started for the door, turned around, and asked me in a low voice, “You got somewhere you can go for a while? This is all over the news. CNN’s going apeshit over it. This skinhead thing even upstaged national politics for a couple of days. Gone international it has.”
“I’m going home,” I said.
“Mr. Ortega suggests—”
I cut him off with a raised hand. “I haven’t been home in a long time,” I said.
I tipped the Lyft driver twenty bucks and squeezed out of the Prius. I stood in the mouth of my driveway and watched him make a lazy U-turn and then buzz away down the hill. I took a couple of deep breaths before I turned around and looked at the house I’d lived in, on and off, for most of my life. My old man’s house. He’d built it when I was five. Tudor. Huge. Glowering. A million small, dark, locked rooms. I’d moved out at twenty and stayed gone until a year after his death, when I’d moved back in and staged major renovations. Fewer rooms, bigger open spaces. All new lighting. Five more windows than the original design. It was still a bruiser of a house, but at least it was light instead of dark and open instead of closed.
After he’d been put in the ground and his legal eagles had cleared up his financial affairs, I’d seriously considered bulldozing it to the ground and building something of my own choosing, but something in me knew it wasn’t about the house. It was about my father and me. All Freudian and such. About our relationship, or lack thereof, and how I’d never managed to make what he considered to be the smart decision in my life. As far as he was concerned anyway. Not in anything. Ever.
I stretched way up, reached over the gate, and pushed the button. The gate began to grind across the asphalt. Soon as the opening got big enough I slipped inside.
The place was immaculate. Somebody’d taken care of everything. The shrubs had been trimmed. The leaves had been raked. The driveway power washed. Looked like I’d never left, but it sure as hell didn’t feel that way to me. I felt like a gypsy in the palace as I tiptoed toward my front door.
Which was unlocked. And that was a good thing too, because I didn’t have anything. No keys, no wallet, no remotes for the garage and the gate . . . no nothing. I was just here. Neither Leo nor Leon. Just here.
Back at the federal courthouse, I’d been getting my personal effects, which were actually the late Mr. Bickford’s effects, from the property room, when the lawyer Diaz appeared at my elbow and handed me a fat white envelope. I peeked inside. Looked like a grand or so in cash. Small bills.
“Traveling money,” he whispered in my ear.
I had made the Lyft driver stop at Fredrick’s Big and Tall on Fifth Avenue so’s I could finally get out of the late Mr. Bickford’s clothes. What I really wanted was an hour-and-a-half shower, but clean clothes were somewhere in the vicinity of the next best thing.
The kitchen light was on. I followed the glow up the flagstone floor and pulled open my junk drawer. I blew out a huge sigh of relief. It was still there, right where I’d left it all. My wallet, my key ring, the fistful of plastic cards that said my name was Leo Waterman. Back before Leon Marks ever existed. Before what now seemed like the greater portion of my life.
I sat down at the kitchen table and fingered through it all. More than once. And then, for no logical reason, I felt a deep need to have it all back on my person, so I stuffed the pockets of my new store-bought clothes with every single thing that said my name was Leo Waterman. You know . . . just in case. What if I was killed on the highway?
Tim Eagen and I had a long-standing place down in south Seattle where we’d meet when he didn’t want to be seen in public with me . . . which was pretty much all the time. Apparently, the secret to a clandestine meeting spot was to choose someplace out of the way, where nobody in their right mind would want to go of their own volition.
The Lower Duwamish Waterway was just such a locale. Used to be a river. Used to not be the color of ethylene glycol antifreeze and smell like something’s ass either. That was back when you might have been able to take a quick dip without having the chemicals in the water flay the skin from your body.
Tim was waiting for me. Leaning against a tall pile of worn-out tires somebody’d kindly left along the banks of the waterway. We had a funny relationship, Tim and I. For reasons I don’t fully understand, twenty-five years of courting the same woman had, rather than alienating us from one another, somehow drawn us closer together. Go figure.
He hugged me hard. “Good to see you, man.”
“Did they stop all of ’em?” I asked.
“All but two,” Tim said with a resigned shrug. “Coupla guys from Riverside, California, shot up a day care center. Eleven dead, before they blew their own brains out. Also what we think was four guys in a panel truck blew a twenty-foot hole in the freeway down by Roseburg, Oregon. The general consensus is that the bomb went off by mistake. Some sort of technical problem. Killed the couple driving next to them on the interstate. The Bureau’s got another bunch of them in custody but isn’t naming names . . . ’cause you know, as usual, the Bureau cooperates with nobody, and everybody’s expected to cooperate with them. Most everybody else on the list is missing and presumed vaporized.”
“They find a guy name Thomas Henry Mitchell?” I asked. “He seemed to be somewhere pretty high up in the Aryan food chain.”
Tim almost laughed. Shook his head. “No way of telling,” he said. “They’re gonna be doing forensic work for months,” he growled. “Tryin’ to figure out which foot belongs to which body, which ear to which head. Finding out who the DNA profiles belong to. They’re figuring the DNA testing alone is gonna cost about four million bucks. Already applied for a federal grant.”
“Art Fowler didn’t kill himself.”
“No?”
“Phil Hardaway killed Art because he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut about his grandson.
Kept asking questions. Tried to hire me. They’d been planning this thing for a long time and weren’t about to let one nosy old man get in their way.”
“How could somebody set up his own son like that?” Eagen asked.
“I think Martha had it right. I think Phil couldn’t stand the fact that his son was damaged in some way. Felt like Matthew’s very existence diminished him, so he sacrificed him to the glorious cause.”
A pair of blue-and-yellow Pacific tugboats putted past us, sending a carcinogenic wake lapping up onto the shore. I stepped higher on the bank, not wanting any of that water to touch my shoes. Didn’t fancy a double amputation being part of my future.
I went through the whole thing with him. Told him everything I knew. Every detail I could remember. Took the better part of twenty minutes.
“Jesus,” he said when I’d finished.
“I went in there thinking we were gonna find a bunch of losers playing cowboy out in the sticks. I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into,” I admitted.
I could tell from his manner that he was holding something back.
“What?” I said.
He sighed. “Last few days . . . while the Bureau was keeping you on ice, I took some sick days. Went down and decorated my sister’s couch in Federal Way for a few days. Staying out of the office, so’s the Feds wouldn’t be able to find me. Claimed like the whole thing had so upset my tender psyche that I needed to take it easy.” He rolled his eyes. “That’s what I told the captain anyway . . . ’cause . . . you know . . . once the panic calms down, which is right about now, somebody’s sure as hell gonna want to know where I got that info from.” He shrugged. “Sooner or later here, I’m gonna have to come up with something. I can’t be claiming I found it under my pillow. The tooth fairy narrative ain’t gonna float here, Leo. This is big-time shit.”
“Tell ’em it was a guy named Ben Forrester who broke the case. Called up and gave you the list.” I spelled it for him.
“And who the fuck might that be?”
I told him. About a minute in, he pulled out his cop pad and took some notes.
“And where’s this cub reporter of yours now? I haven’t seen his name on any of the lists, and we’re gonna need to get our stories straighter than a stiff dick.”
“He didn’t make it,” I said.
“You’re sure? ’Cause I can’t have—”
I waved him off. “I’m sure. Ben Forrester’s remains were on top of four hundred fifty pounds of plastic explosive when it went off.”
He eyed me hard. “You have this on good authority, I suppose.”
“The best,” I assured him.
Brief stare down. A bit of silence. A slight nod of the head.
“Probably get him a Pulitzer.”
“Undoubtedly,” I said.
“Probably gonna get me a captain’s office too.”
“A real good bet.”
“Keeps your name out of it too.”
“Just the way I likes it.”
More silence.
“You saved a lot of lives, asshole,” he said after a minute.
“Shoulda never taken that kid in there,” I said.
“Adults make their own choices.”
“I feel like he’s dead because of my choices,” I said.
“Life is not without its inherent risks.”
Couldn’t argue with that, but there was still something unsaid. I could tell.
I tried to break the logjam with small talk. “House looked great when I got back,” I said out of the blue.
Tim laughed out loud. “It was that shit-faced crew of yours from the Zoo,” he said. “They did everything. They were fucking dervishes. It was like they were preparing for the Second Coming of Christ or something.” He threw an amused hand in the air. “Lawn mowers, hedge clippers, yard rakes . . . all that shit. Never thought I’d see those deadbeats get so organized.”
“Rebecca?”
The second it was out of my mouth, I knew I’d pinned the tail on the donkey.
He shuffled his feet and studied the mud beneath his shoes.
“Yeah . . . I’ve been . . . you know . . . giving her a call now and then . . . but I can tell she’s just not interested . . . it ain’t gonna work out . . .” He looked up from the mud. “Just so you understand,” he said.
I knew what I was going to say because I’d practiced it in my head a bunch of times in case the subject came up, which I knew it was gonna.
“What I understand is that love is hard to find, and that if you find it, you better hang on, because it’s even harder to keep.”
“Yeah,” was all he said.
It wasn’t like I made a conscious decision to become a demihermit, but somehow the days just seemed to get away from me while I was puttering around the house, lookin’ in this, lookin’ in that. Just seemed to happen. For the best part of a week, I ordered out for everything. AmazonFresh and Bite Squad wore out a couple of sets of tires hauling things up the hill to me.
I tried to get real organized. Ready to sneak back in the side door of my life. But funny thing was . . . six days of the void, and I didn’t feel any more at home than I had when I’d first walked back in the door. Something had changed. Something intrinsic. I could feel it, but I couldn’t put a name to it, or find the dark burrow where it was holed up.
Most of what Tim and I had figured would happen had already come to pass. Ben Forrester’s parents in Bloomington had been notified of his heroism. By the time they learned of his sacrifice, he was well on his way to becoming a national hero. You couldn’t turn on the tube without seeing his youthful visage smiling back at you. I thought it interesting that the folks at the Sound Sentinel, the same people who’d pulled him off the Matthew Hardaway case after less than a week, jumped right on board the Forrester express. Yes, they’d assigned Ben to the story. Yes, they’d always known he’d been bound for glory. Knew it all the time.
When I saw his shattered parents on CNN, I had to content myself with the thought that their grief, however painful, would not outlast the story of the ultimate sacrifice their son had made and what a hero he’d become.
Tim was honored with a medal ceremony on the courthouse steps and invited to take the captain’s exam. Seemed a little more like things were under control. That’s when I decided that it was time to get myself sheared like a sheep. I was thinking that maybe if I looked more like the self I remembered, then I might feel more like that too, so I toddled down to Rudy’s Barbershop in Belltown and had myself decluttered. By the time the stylist got through with me there was enough hair on the floor to stuff a queen-size pillow top, and I looked remarkably like the guy I used to be. A little more gaunt, maybe a little older, but definitely familiar.
I stepped out onto Pine Street, pulled my arms above my head, stretched and looked around while I made those stretching noises we all make. There must have been thirty construction cranes in sight. The building boom was making the city of my youth feel tight, as if little by little, the new concrete canyons were closing in on us like the jaws of a vise.
I found a miracle parking space on Eastlake, down by Starbucks and the taco joint, locked the car, and started up the street toward the Eastlake Zoo.
The boys followed a highly irregular regular schedule. Their days started with a few eye-opener beers in bed—just to get the circuits humming, you understand. Anything more than four tallboys was considered problem drinking. Once they were up and about, they would further restore themselves with a couple of what they called phlegm cutters—you know, just to clean the pipes. Thus suitably fueled, they’d segue into a couple of more serious cocktails, designed to firm both the chin and the resolve, prior to actually venturing into the great outdoors.
Right around noon, they’d extrude themselves out onto the sidewalk in front of whatever flop they were using at the time, from whence they’d trek to the Eastlake Zoo, single file, like penguins on the march. There, as their somewhat skewed social contract demanded, a
couple of more cocktails at the Eastlake Zoo’s bar provided a civilized prelude to a sumptuous lunch of beef jerky, peanuts, pigs’ feet, and pickled eggs. All very paleo, you know.
For afternoon sippage, beer was the nectar of choice, while they sat around and shot the shit, played snooker, and generally made nuisances of themselves, which was semiokay with management because the folding-money crowd was rather light in the afternoons. By the time evening rolled around they were generally fully squashed, running out of day money, and beginning to annoy the zoo’s more hygienic clientele, at which point they’d stumble, blinking, out into the early evening and weave their way back home, where, of course, they’d drown the remains of the day with an appropriate nightcap of two. Cue the sleep apnea.
I threw a twenty on the bar on my way by. The day bartender was a kid named Malcolm. We had a deal. He could collect his tip up front soon as I came in the door. All he had to do was turn down the fucking death metal he played at ear-shattering volume so he didn’t have to listen to the boys. There’s no robbery to a fair exchange.
I made it all the way to the far end of the bar, where the room makes a hard right turn, before anybody noticed my arrival. Large Marge was lining up a bank shot on the snooker table when she caught me in the corner of her eye, straightened up, and rolled the cue stick out onto the table.
“Leo,” she whooped.
I’d like to think my dazzling personality and rapier-like wit were the cause for such delirium, but truth be told, the fact that I generally bought several rounds of drinks whenever I showed up had to be considered a major player in the gaiety.
They rushed me like a lynch mob. Sweeping me from the floor in a maelstrom of arms and legs and shouts and sloppy kisses. They squeezed me like the Charmin and pounded my back like a bongo. My name floated on the beer-scented air.
Soon as I could get my feet back among the peanut shells, I signaled Malcolm for a round on me. The crowd went wild.
They were all there: George and Harold and Ralph. Red Lopez and Large Marge, Nearly Normal Norman towering over the crowd like a construction crane. Tiny something or other, who was about the size of a two-bedroom craftsman in Ballard. Heavy Duty Judy was welded to my left arm, drooling in my ear. Little Joey was dancing some strange little hopping dance under the mezzanine. People I’d known all my life and others I’d picked up along the way. The party was on. I felt as good as I had in a long time.
