The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “What is he, then?”

  Good question. “My bodyguard, I guess.”

  “Pfui,” she scoffed. “You need a bodyguard like this town needs more out-of-work idiots with too much time on their hands.”

  “I’m a little banged up.” I lifted the Yankees cap from the front of my head.

  She ooohed and aaahed and gently touched my stitches with the tips of her fingers. “That’s right. You were in that accident over on West River.”

  “Is that what you heard? That it was an accident?”

  She said it was. I don’t know why I was surprised, but the notion that people had tried to kill me and nothing official was being done about it offended the hell out of me. Must be that public trust hang-up of mine again.

  “Did anybody ever tell you your chin gets red when you’re pissed off?”

  “My ex,” she said. Her lips wanted to bend into a smile, but she wouldn’t let them. “According to Donald it also happens during…” She shot me a coy look. “At other times,”

  she finished. I went shopping for a snappy rejoinder, but the sudden redistribution of my blood supply seemed to have left my cranial cupboards bare.

  She began to back up. “Better get my rig out of the way,”

  she said. “You think you can manage to stay out of trouble without me?”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  She stopped. “Every time I see you I feel like I owe you an apology for the way those idiots act.”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I made the sign of the cross. “Domini domini. You’re now officially excused from being the goodwill ambassador for those guys.”

  She put her hand to her throat. “Well, since it’s official, I guess I have no choice but to lay my burden down, do I?”

  she joked.

  “None.”

  “Gotta go. ’Bye.”

  “See ya,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  Halfway to the truck she turned back my way. “You gonna be around for a while?” she asked.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “As my last ambassadorial duty, why don’t you let me make you dinner?”

  “I’d like to,” I hedged, “but I’m not sure of my schedule yet. You know, maybe if…” I felt like I was talking with rented lips.

  “If you change your mind, I’m in the book,” she said with a smile.

  Samantha crossed between us, pushing a cart full of groceries.

  “Did I hear that correctly?” Floyd was by my side.

  “What?”

  “Did she just invite you to dinner at her place and you turned her down?”

  Ramona Haynes rolled down the window and waved goodbye and then went roaring off down the road. I listened as the sound faded.

  “Yeah,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. He reached up and picked the cap carefully from my head.

  “They X-ray your head while they had you in there?” I snatched the cap and put it back on.

  I started toward the car, where Samantha waited patiently for one of us to unlock the trunk. “Cut it out,” I growled.

  “Really, man, I’m serious. I’m concerned here.”

  Although I never would have admitted it to Floyd, I knew exactly what he meant. Hell, I was a little concerned myself.

  24

  THE STROLL WAS BORIS’S IDEA. HE’D COME ROLLING in at about three. Seems the deadly duo had not only come up empty again, but had been so shamed by their failure to produce results that they were forced to get drunker than usual. According to Boris, their last stop had ended when they were escorted out the door by a large and rather unfriendly looking African-American bartender, who’d waved them about like dolls before depositing them in a pile on the sidewalk. Time to go home, he’d figured. We’d marched them by the elbows down to their cabin and left them happily snoring their little hearts out. “How far is dee ocean?” he asked me.

  “A mile or so,” I said. “At least I think so. I’ve never walked down.”

  “I neber seen de Pacifeec Ocean,” he said. I checked my watch. Three-ten. Looked at Floyd. “You mind holding down the fort?” He said it would be no problem. Said he’d seen the ocean and thought he could probably live without the hike.

  We went out to the front of the yard and turned right, following the Quileute west toward the Pacific. J.D.’d owned the last of the trees. The minute we breached the tree line at the far end of the clearing we found ourselves in a series of lowland pastures with only a thin evening fog standing between us and the Pacific Ocean. Boris wanted to know aboutthe plants, so I told him everything I knew. Lots of Scotch broom, its wiry limbs gray and desolate in winter, giving no hint whatsoever of the brilliant yellow blossoms that signal the arrival of spring on the Northwest coast. Marsh grass and sword fern and bracken. A collapsed corral and loading chute. And old fences, bent and crumbling now. North and south, east and west, dividing the valley into an irregular checkerboard of what must have at one time been pastures. Robert Frost came to mind with that poem about good fences making good neighbors.

  Boris was amazed that land such as this was not being used.

  “Who owns dees?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “The guy who was killed—”

  “Spreenger?”

  “Yeah. He told me there were a thousand private acres in here that were surrounded by the Indian reservation.”

  “I doan understand dees reservation beesnus.”

  I did my best to explain the concept of a reservation.

  “So dey vas here first.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how come dey doan own eet all?”

  “We had more and better weapons.”

  This was a concept he understood. “Ah,” he said. “Veectors and spoils.”

  It took forty minutes before we stood on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Everything that wasn’t Indian reservation sat on a narrow plateau between the Quileute and what I figured was Fox Creek, which rolled over a mossy crag down into the ocean about a half a mile from where I stood. Twenty feet below us, the Pacific roiled muddy green, crashing white foam over and around the black rocks offshore. Pretty much the same kind of property I’d seen on the Hoh reservation. Only a man-made breakwater away from having a nice little protected bay, safe from the murderous Pacific storms that rake this part of the coast for six months a year. It was full dark before we picked our way among the hillocks and fences and back to the homestead. Floyd was sitting in a lawn chair with his rifle across his lap.

  “Phone in the cabin’s been ringing,” he said. Turned out to be a message from George. He’d checked the answering machine this afternoon and was reporting that all five tax criminals had tried to call yesterday afternoon. Said they sounded a mite upset. Especially the Polster guy. Said he’s been practicing his spiel on Nearly Normal and was ready to, what he called “ream some ass” come Monday morning.

  I tried Rebecca at home, listened as my voice apologized for neither of us being there and then the clicks as voice mail forwarded my call somewhere else, only to be told by Rebecca’s voice that Dr. Duvall was unable to answer my call at this time, but that if I were to leave a message she would be sure to get back to me as soon as possible. Over sandwiches and beer, we decided it would be wise to sleep in shifts. No telling what the manly types were going to do after today. Lord knows there was no shortage of assholes in this town, and if there’s one thing a redneck can’t abide, it’s getting his ass kicked in public. We figured there was no sense in taking any chances. Four-hour shifts. First Floyd, then Boris, then me.

  Around nine, Boris excused himself and headed to his cabin for a siesta. Floyd got his rifle from the corner and went out into the yard. I turned out the lights and lay in the dark for a moment before snapping on the bedside light and dialing home. She answered on the first ring. “Hello.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey yourself,” she an
swered.

  I could hear the strain in the spaces between the words as we traded news of the past two days. She said she stopped at the office on Friday and that everybody’d made a big fuss over her and that she’d spent most of today getting her clothes together for the week. Doing laundry and taking stuff to the cleaners in a cab. How everything took three times as long with one arm. As for me…I kept it vague. Said I felt like I was making some progress, a statement that, although not altogether true, seemed somehow to validate my presence here. I left out the fight in the parking lot. Couldn’t for the life of me see how telling her that was going to improve the situation. When we ran out of news, we found ourselves listening to one another breathe over the line, as if we shared some terrible secret that neither of us wanted to be the first to utter.

  “I feel us drifting apart, Leo,” she said after a while.

  “Doesn’t seem like drift to me,” I answered. “Seems to me it’s you doing the paddling, not the tide.”

  “I’m just telling you how I feel.”

  “And I feel like nothing in my life is ever going to be the same again unless I say or do whatever it is you want me to say or do. Which, no matter how much my heart wants to agree, seems like some kind of betrayal.”

  “Compromise is betrayal? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Compromise is the art of nobody getting what they want.”

  “Stop being cute. Answer the question.”

  “If you don’t believe in what you’re saying, it is a betrayal. If you just agree so your partner will get off your case, well, what’s that? Not only don’t the two of you agree, but now the other person can’t even rely on you to tell them the truth.”

  “I see, then. You’re in charge of defending the truth.”

  I kept cool and didn’t rise to the bait. “Truth be told, Rebecca…I don’t even know what it is you want. Honest to god. I don’t have the foggiest.”

  The phone company was right. You can hear a pin drop.

  “I want a regular life. I want to go to parties with somebody who wants to be there with me. I want somebody to strive with. Somebody who I know is going to come home alive every night. Who’s not sitting in some alley staking out some drug-crazed something or other for a week at a time. A guy who doesn’t have to shoot his way out of sex parties and then deliver broken little girls back to their families. I just want a life, Leo. A life like everybody else’s.”

  When she put it that way, I knew Jed was right. Ending up like everybody else was my greatest horror. “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “Me either,” she sighed. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  I snapped off the light.

  25

  JUST AFTER NOON, KURTIS ARRIVED IN A RENTED JEEPCherokee. “Saw Uncle Carl and his beast on the ferry,” he announced. “They should be right along. He said they were stopping in PT for some rental equipment.” He looked around. “How bucolic,” he enthused. “I feel positively ruddy.”

  I told him to take Cabin Number Five. The sight of Kurtis sashaying toward the cabin, singing “Oh what a beautiful morning…” in an operatic tenor caused Floyd to raise an eyebrow my way. “Best B and E guy in the business,” I assured him. The look on Floyd’s face said he’d better be if he was going to walk that way.

  At ten, I’d sent Boris and the Boys off to make one last run at finding Ben Bendixon in Port Townsend. Having passed out in the middle of the afternoon, Ralph and Harold had been up since before the crack of dawn. Knowing their habits as I did, I’d locked them out. They work on the assumption that people are passed out rather than sleeping. To them, this means they can make all the noise they want, regardless of the hour. I’d heard ’em rattling the door around three A.M., trying to get to something to eat, but I ignored them. You snooze, you lose.

  When Boris woke me for my shift at five, they were sitting on the porch in the dark. Sullen and surly, they grumbled all the way to the refrigerator and their first cold one of the day. They cheered up a bit as they put together and then devoured scrambled eggs and toast. Washed down, of course, by a couple more beers. They got surly again, though, when I told them to wash their dishes and leave the kitchen like they found it. I guess nomads don’t usually do housework. They were still grousing when Boris packed them in the Blazer and went bouncing up the driveway. Just after one o’clock, Carl Cradduck’s motor home rolled into the driveway, followed by Robby and the rented cherry picker. I introduced Floyd to Carl and Robby. Floyd showed Carl where to park the RV. “Out of the field of fire,” Floyd said, gesturing at the tree line behind the house.

  “I got something to help out with that,” Carl said. He craned his neck and yelled into the RV. “Robby…we still got those sensors we took off those Nazi bastards?”

  “Yeah…somewhere,” Robby yelled back.

  “We did this wire job for the Pocatello, Idaho, police department. They had the paperwork to wire this white separatist group that they suspected of a couple of synagogue bombings, but they couldn’t get anybody inside to plant the bugs. Seems like every time they got anywhere near the place, the skinheads knew they were there. Fuckers lived in this compound thing, like a frontier fort, way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. So they came to us. Wanted us to see if we could figure out how they were surveilling the woods around their fucking fort.”

  “Motion sensors?” Kurtis asked.

  Carl nodded. “First thing we did was run a sweep. Before we ever got out of the van. The board lit up like Christmas. We sent out a fucking signal that jammed every TV and radio within a ten-square-mile area and then backtracked on the sensor signals. I don’t know where the hell they got ’em, but they’d gotten their hands on a dozen East German motion sensors. Same kind they used to patrol the Berlin wall.”

  As if on cue, Robby appeared at the RV door. He handed a cardboard box out the door to Floyd, who walked over and set the box in Carl’s lap. “Ya gotta see these suckers,”

  Carl said, pulling open the box and rummaging around inside. He pulled out a bird. A sparrow, it appeared to be. With incredibly long, skinny legs. “Is this a pisser or what?” he asked. “Ya just put the little fucker up in a tree, wrap the wire legs around a branch and the little things are virtually undetectable. Good for a hundred yards in every direction, long as you’ve got line of sight, of course.” He laughed. “Robby was nose to nose with the fucker before he figured it out.”

  Robby poked his head out the door. “I kept waiting for it to fly off. I’m way the hell up this tree, following the sensor signal, and this little bird is just hunkered down staring at me. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why he didn’t get the hell out of there. At first I thought he was, like, too terrified to fly off. Like he’d never seen some idiot human climbing up his tree in the dead of night. So I wave the signal reader at him and not only doesn’t he fly away, he turns out to be the damn signal.”

  He dropped the bird back into the bag and held the bag out to Floyd. “We got six, which is probably more than we need. Space them out.” He turned to me. “How deep is that tree stand?”

  “It varies…but maybe fifty yards until you get up to the road.”

  “Take them about twenty yards in and put them up above eye level. About as high as you can reach,” Carl instructed.

  “Aye aye, Captain,” said Floyd.

  “Take a radio with you so you can talk with Robby.”

  Floyd stopped at the RV for a handheld radio and then he started up the hill toward the tree line. Carl turned to Kurtis. “You have a look at the City Building on the way here?”

  Kurtis nodded. “I did a drive-by. Stopped at both the front and back doors. Standard-issue contact alarms. I’ll have to get up on the roof to know if they’ve got anything other than that, but the system’s pretty new, so I’m betting they’ve got a direct line down to the cop shop.”

  “You find me a pole?”

  “Back of the lot. Perfect. When you drive up the street, it�
�s right there in front of you. From the top, you should be able to see all the way down to the highway.”

  “Good.”

  “Somebody wire the cars already?”

  “First thing in the morning,” I said. “I got the makes, models and plate numbers. One of us can do it right there in the lot when they show up for work on Monday morning.”

  “Sounds together,” Kurtis said. “What am I taking in?”

  “Robby,” Carl bellowed. “Bring me the hard goods.”

  “What are you, crippled?” Robby shouted back. Carl pushed the button on his chair and backed over to the door. Robby’s arm appeared, holding a ziplock freezer bag half full of electronics. Carl reached up and took it from his hand and then drove over to Kurtis. “Got both magnetic and adhesive mikes.”

  He reached into the bag and pulled out a bronze disk about the size and thickness of a silver dollar. He placed it against the bottom of the aluminum arm on his wheelchair. It stayed there. “Depends on how old the cheap-shit furniture is. Old stuff is all metal. Use these. The magnet makes the battery last longer. New shit is all plastic.” He dropped the disk back into the bag and came out with another. This one bronze on one side, white on the other. Carl showed Kurtis, who took it in his hands and held it close to his face. “You just peel off the paper and stick it where you want it. Doesn’t even have to be dry.”

  “What else?” Kurtis asked. “I don’t much like carrying things in.”

  Carl held up his hand. “Got you covered.” He pulled out a dull metal tube about the size of a Magic Marker. “Problem with cameras has always been power. Never could get any parity between the size of the camera and the size of the batteries you needed to run the goddamn things. Got cameras the size of your thumbnail, for chrissakes, but you wanted to run the damn thing for a week you needed something the size of a car battery.”

  “That’s what I’ve been picturing,” Kurtis said.

  “Nah,” Carl said. “As usual, some Jap got his head out of his ass first. Asked himself the obvious question.” He looked from Kurtis to me. We were supposed to guess. “I give up,”