Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  “I never saw no old guy,” Sean mumbled. “Just saw shotguns. They said they shot me with beanbags. Is ‘at right?”

  “Beanbags from shotguns . . . that’s what they told me too. They sure didn’t use steel shot or I don’t think we’d be chatting now. What was in the safe?”

  Sean kept staring down at the floor; his right hand crept up and he lightly touched the dressing along his rib cage.

  “Beanbags . . . cool,” he said so softly I rocked forward on the chair to hear him.

  Outside the hospital a crow hung on to a phone wire looping in a gust of wind. When the bird finally let go, it rose straight into the air and then swooped up and backwards in a barnstormer’s stunt. On the sidewalk, a scatter of store receipts blew toward the street like a stampede of cartoon mice, and a woman with a torn paper bag was chasing them.

  If the nurse had been right, that Sean had wanted to talk to me, he would. Perhaps all he wanted was that photo album, but if that was true then he would have thrown me out by now. I would wait. A squall gusted again, bowing the glass. The building seemed awash with hissing wind.

  “Gonna blow,” I offered. “The wind . . . it’s going to blow.”

  “I suppose everybody’s talking about us again,” Sean said.

  “People talk. Then they forget and move on to the next thing.”

  “What’re they saying about me?” he said, almost in a whisper. And then, “Did they tear my room apart?”

  “They tore your door up pretty bad, but I think that’s it. As far as gossip, I haven’t heard a thing. Everyone’s talking about Patricia Ewers getting shot. They’re talking about how they think Kevin is responsible for her death. And George Doggy says it’s all about drugs.”

  “Jeese . . .” the boy blustered and shook his head, “people ought to keep their mouths shut. It’s none of their business. They could get hurt . . .” The boy’s voice drifted away. He was angry, I could tell, but scared, too, as if he wanted nothing more than to disappear.

  He wiped his nose and looked straight at me. “There weren’t no drugs. Kevin isn’t into that stuff. That lady was crazy, yelling and waving a gun around. We didn’t ever try and hurt her any. Who was she anyway?”

  I stared at him, not quite believing he didn’t know. But then Sean hadn’t sat through much of the trial. He had never paid much attention to the official aftermath of his parents’ murders. I doubt that he had ever read a paper or listened to a complete news story about the Mygirl killings.

  “Her name was Patricia Ewers. She was Richard Ewers’s wife.”

  “Oh.” The sad kid shrugged. The syllable was a soft puff from his lips. He smiled a little bit, as if he were thinking of something mildly amusing that he intended to keep to himself.

  Then he lifted his head up and looked at me again. His face softened, and it was as if a mask he was wearing was melting away. He looked scared.

  “I’m no snitch. I can’t. You don’t get it. He’d kill me.” The boy’s voice broke slightly.

  “You don’t have to do this alone, Sean.” I leaned toward him. “You don’t have to be bullied. I can help you, and I can have the state troopers protect you if you want. We could even take off somewhere and let things cool. I’ll take you on a trip if you want.”

  He snapped back into his soldier face. “Yeah, to the youth home or jail,” he smirked. “I can do that. But I’m not talking to you any­more.”

  There was a knock on the door and the nurse poked her head in and told us the van and the escort from the youth home were here to pick Sean up. Sean snorted ruefully and slid off the bed.

  “Just tell that old guy to give me my book back,” he said as he walked past without looking down at me in the chair. He tried to swagger, but the injury to his ribs and his natural short-legged gait made him walk flat-footed in a Groucho Marx stride.

  I stood outside the hospital and watched the wind bend the alder trees above the ball field. There were still plenty of leaves on the trees and as each branch swayed, the wind stripped some off and carried them away. Someone bumped the door behind me and I held one of the doors open for a woman and a new baby leaving the hospital. She looked to be a Filipino woman and held the baby casually, but when anyone spoke to her she addressed each of her words down toward her new child. Men ran around for cars and an older woman snapped pictures, and I took off, not wanting to get caught in someone else’s precious memory.

  I walked up over the hill and toward the trailer court. There was something else in Sean’s room, something Sean had been worried about the police finding. If I was ever going to gain Sean’s trust again, I needed to find whatever it was before the police did.

  The trailer door had a police-evidence lock over the knob, but the back window only had plywood loosely tacked over it. Using an old fuel tank from the creek to climb on, it was easy enough to get through the window.

  Inside the trailer it was cold. The smell of blood hung in the air, making it feel like a dirty refrigerator. I peered around in the gloom. I couldn’t risk turning any lights on, and since I didn’t have a flashlight, I had to move slowly. I took a careful look around in the shadows to see if there were any boxes wired into the corners of the room. Sometimes police put motion sensors attached to silent alarms in secured crime scenes, but apparently the Sitka P.D. hadn’t bought those toys yet. In the room with the safe, there was nothing to help me, but some of the “nothing” was useful: there were no scales, no plastic bags, no mirrors or knives, no razor blades, no handheld torches, no butane canisters, no grow lights or plant food, phone lists or money scattered on the floor. There was nothing that made the scene look like a drug operation had been walked in on. There was just a bit of scattered ammunition and some newspapers from around southeastern Alaska. There was a business report on the charter boat industry in Sitka and a couple of glossy men’s magazines. Nothing extraordinary for the room of a young man who had worked in the fishing industry.

  The broken door to Sean’s room stood propped up in the hall. His bed was overturned where the police had jumped on him. There were a few books, old picture books, for kids much younger than Sean. There was even Goodnight Moon, the familiar green, red, and yellow sitting on top of a stack of Soldier of Fortune maga­zines. Sean’s clothes hung in almost military precision in his closet: T-shirts on hangers, an army fatigue jacket. The maps on his wall were of the local area. He had a topographical map above his bed with pencil marks drawn on it. I recognized the area where the ele­mentary school had been built a few years ago. Someone had drawn in the school with trails leading up and into the woods.

  A fat drop of water hit my neck. When I looked up, I could see water stains on the false ceiling. The storm had pulled back a piece of the roof and a leak had started. The ceiling tile was off-kilter in its aluminum frame and along its edges was a gap. I stood on the side of the bed frame and poked up at the tile.

  Photographs fluttered down onto the bed like alder leaves. Kids’ school pictures. Dozens of them. Mostly they were wallet-sized, but there were some portrait-sized photographs too. There were chil­dren from all grades: girls with stylish new glasses and faux pearls around their necks, boys with goofy haircuts and stiff smiles, In­dian kids, and Filipino, a couple of black children, but most of Sean’s schoolmates were white. There was no writing on the back of any of the pictures. I tried to imagine why these photos were hidden in the ceiling. I flipped through them. Boys in sports shirts and some in flannel hunting gear. One or two wearing ties. Girls in pink with frilly collars, but many girls in plain button blouses. Smiles and smirks, and closed-eye grimaces. School pictures. Why hide these? Then I lifted a couple of large pages stapled together. These were the photos of the entire class, where all of the shots of the individuals were collected on a single page with the teacher and the school principal’s portraits in the top corners. There was a page representing all of Sean’s classmates for each grade. There
were heavy Xs drawn over several of the photos on each page. Some of the portraits were cut out. On each page, the principal was carefully X’d out.

  Another drop landed on my neck, and when I looked up I saw the butt end of a rifle hung on a rafter above the false ceiling. I crawled up again and took it down. This was no cheap imitation, no fifty-dollar knockoff that would jam, but an authentic AK-47, well oiled and maintained. On the stock was a kid’s sticker, the kind they usually put on skateboard decks. The sticker had a drawing of a wild-haired kid flying on a skateboard straight toward a brick wall. The lettering read: No Doubt.

  There was a canvas bag that looked military in origin, olive green and heavily stitched. Inside it were three fifty-shot maga­zines for the AK-47. Each had been gently sanded along the edges, and two were taped end to end so the chamber end of the maga­zine where the cartridge would slip into the gun was easily acces­sible. This allowed a shooter to empty one magazine, and, without reaching away from his weapon, eject the empty and insert a loaded magazine quickly. It took some practice, but a kid could practice in front of his parents’ bedroom mirror.

  I heard the rattle of someone working the lock on the front door. I hastily wiped the gun down with the corner of the blanket and stuck it back above the ceiling along with the photographs.

  The trailer’s outer door opened and I heard someone take one step inside. The darkness of the stormy day crept inside too. I slid open Sean’s window and wedged myself out as quickly as I could. But I paused before I dropped to the ground, looking for a police cruiser along my side of the trailer. I saw nothing, so I ran to the rear, hoping I could at least stick the plywood against the outside of the window before the cops made it to the back room. No such luck. I heard the front door slam and someone running down the stairs. I dove through a gap in the trailer skirting and crawled underneath, rolling over and over in the mud until I was wedged between the axles. I saw work boots. Whoever this was, he was alone. He kicked the plywood and started running up into the woods where I had been planning to go.

  I waited. There had been a leak in the sewer line somewhere, because the smell in the mud under this trailer was powerful. There was also the mildewed carcass of a cat and a bag of old traps tucked by the front stairs.

  The work boots came back and paced back and forth. Finally he picked up the plywood and took it inside, and I heard him ham­mering it in place. I decided to get the hell out of there. The smell was about to make me sick, and I thought the sound of someone retching would have caused even one of Sitka’s finest to take a closer look around.

  I bolted through the gap and rolled through the brush under the broken window. I got to my feet and ran behind a trailer on the downhill side, where a Rottweiler started barking at me from the back bedroom. After that, my feet had wings. I flew across the soggy mud all the way down to the fringe of trees between the beach and the road, where I lay in the wet brush until I was sure I couldn’t hear anyone coming for me.

  I am the first to admit that I’m a lousy detective. I’m sure most of it has to do with the fact that I have spent most of my career trying to help people establish their innocence. Looking for inno­cence requires a larger view than looking for guilt; larger, and usu­ally less satisfying. When looking for guilt, you only look at the things that you know are connected, and making connections feels like progress. When looking for innocence, you look at everything else, and it never feels like progress. But sitting there in the wet brush off the side of the road, it occurred to me that I wasn’t making much progress, yet I didn’t feel as if I was in the presence of innocence.

  Today I had seen work boots walking around the trailer, broken glass, and a dead cat in the mud. I had seen windblown leaves and photographs of children, an automatic weapon with a kid’s No Doubt sticker on the stock. I had riled a neighbor’s already para­noid dog. I sat in the wet brush and tried to make some sense of it.

  But I couldn’t, and that doesn’t really surprise me. It goes back to the first principle of defense investigations, which is this: There is no trail of crumbs that leads out of the forest, so there is no sense looking for one. What I have seen more often in my life is a snowstorm of crackers on a landscape dotted with hungry ducks. I tried to explain this once to a police officer when I had been pulled over for some offense or another, and it was from his reaction to my “crumbs and ducks” theory that I came to the conclusion I would never be much of a detective.

  Gulls sailed and dove over the surfbreak. A few stragglers would break from their circle and carve large turns downwind, then labor to come back to where they had begun. I was wet and covered in smelly mud. I was so sure I wouldn’t get a ride I didn’t even put out my thumb.

  The rain felt almost warm as it pelted down on the wind. I walked quickly and was soon able to see down the street to where my house sat over the channel. Workers from the fish plant nearest the center of town were walking out into the middle of the street, some still wearing their aprons and rubber gloves. One guy still had his long knife in his hand. The workers were all looking down toward the Pioneer Bar. I was cold and filthy and in no mood to watch some lunchtime bar brawl, so I jogged the last little bit of the way to my front door. As I started to push my way to my house, I couldn’t help but peer up toward the bar. More and more people were walking down the middle of the street. I heard laughing and cheering now. Even in waterfront bars in Alaska they don’t cheer for bar fights, not in the daylight anyway.

  Suddenly there was a blur of dark hair and saddle shoes running toward me at waist level. I held my arms out and caught the girl before she ran me over. Her name was Natalie, and I knew her from down the street. She was only four years old and held a fistful of money. Her eyes were as big as new quarters, startled and a bit frightened.

  “Cecil!” she said breathlessly. “It’s mine, really. He’s just hand­ing it out. I asked the grown-ups and they said it was okay. Really.” She held the bills out to me without unclenching her fist.

  “He’s just giving them to people down there. You go. You go and get some too!” Her voice was a lively tune.

  I opened her fist gently and I saw what she had: three one-hundred-dollar bills bearing Ben Franklin’s smirky countenance.

  “Who’s giving these bills away, honey?” I asked.

  Natalie looked up at me with wide eyes, happy, and scared too.

  “That goofy guy who lives on that sailboat. Really, Cecil. I didn’t steal it or nothing. The guy’s giving it away.”

  Back up the street, men were yelling, kids were laughing. “Crazy, huh?” Natalie said with delight and ran down the street with a death grip on her bills.

  5

  Jonathan Chevalier was standing in the bed of a rusted red pickup throwing money into a small crowd. In the background I could hear a police siren. About a dozen people gathered in the street, reaching up toward him. Jonathan was smiling broadly, like a politician at a whistle stop, reaching into the pockets of his wool halibut jacket and pulling out crumpled bills. The bills looked like freshly picked maple leaves, and as he threw them just above the hands of the people in the street he was laughing, shouting out, “Easy. Easy now. Don’t hurt yourself. I have plenty more to give you.”

  A police car rounded the corner near the old post office in the center of town, and I pushed my way through the crowd and grabbed Jonathan’s arms. People started booing me. I jerked Jonathan down and put my arms around him, leading him inside a coffee shop next to the truck. The coffee shop had a hack door that led to long corri­dors in the building, which had once been a hotel. It was a fine place to shake off the police.

  Jonathan’s smile was beatific, and just touching him I could tell he wasn’t drunk. In my experience, drunks have soft handshakes and their bodies seem soggy with melancholy. But Jonathan’s body was taut and he moved quickly and easily. He was breathing deeply, and when I looked in his eyes they sparked with a wild en­ergy.

&nbs
p; “We are not greedy, Cecil. We are all just born naked into this world.” He smiled up at me. His new, overly friendly behavior had me more worried than his usual icy stare. Jonathan looked at my filthy clothes with an amused grin. “You could use a change of clothes,” he said.

  I was about to say something when I heard doors slamming and police radios hissing. The crowd outside was hassling the cops. A boy of about twelve came barreling down the hallway and I turned to fend him off with my forearm, but Jonathan reached over me and stuffed some twenty-dollar bills down the front of the boy’s blue coat.

  The kid stopped short, stunned, because he had expected me to slug him, but instead found himself with a coat full of money standing before a wide-eyed fisherman with a rumpled wool jacket and a grin like a broken bottle.

  “Hey, thanks, dude,” the kid said, backing away suspiciously.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just blow that money, okay? Just blow it on something beautiful, all right?” Jonathan’s voice was clear and the words unslurred.

  “Yeah, sure,” the kid sneered and bolted down the hall.

  “Don’t tell anyone where we’ve gone. We have to get out of here, all right?” I yelled after him, and the kid stopped once more and took a long look at us. Jonathan’s long hair was tangled down to his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his eyes were rimmed red. He was muttering something under his breath.

  “Take the elevator to the top floor,” the kid said, deadly serious. “Stay there ten minutes. I’ll tell ’em you went out the back door to the dock. Ten minutes, yeah? “

  “Ten. Thanks,” I said and tugged Jonathan toward the elevator.

  “I’m telling you, Cecil, you never know how many friends you have until you start giving money away on the street,” Jonathan was saying softly. The elevator door eased open and we traveled quietly to the third floor.

  “Going up,” I said, without knowing why. Then I added jok­ingly, “Have any of that money for your old friend Cecil?” Jonathan just looked at me with the same sweet smile and said nothing. I guess irony is not a two-way street within the soul of a blissful person, particularly when it comes to cash.