“He was downstairs protecting my back with the hose line.”
“He wasn’t protecting anything. Hell, he was on the porch most of the time you were in there dragging those people out. Outside on the porch. ”
“I don’t understand.”
“At a good house fire Tronstad’ll always back out on you. He’s backed out on me a bunch of times. That’s what he does, Gum. Tronstad looks out for Tronstad, and that doesn’t include going into a fire building if he can figure a way out of it. He had plenty of time to crawl inside and tap that fire. I would have done it. You would have done it. Sears would have 170
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done it, too, if he’d known you weren’t there. Tronstad didn’t make the effort, because that’s not what Tronstad’s about.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying you didn’t get those people dead. Tronstad did. I’m saying Tronstad cannot be trusted at a fire.”
“If I’d been there earlier, they would have gotten out sooner.”
“Maybe. But Tronstad wouldn’t have been helping.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I figured you were on his side.” It took me several seconds to realize what he was getting at. “That’s right. The white guys against the brother. I half expected you to split the bonds with Tronstad and blow town.”
“Geez, Robert. You should know me better than that.”
“I do now.” Johnson grinned. “Don’t worry. I been prayin’. If we can go this far without getting nabbed, we can go the distance. I’m convinced of it.”
Though I was thoroughly convinced of the opposite, I didn’t argue. Let him have his delusions.
26. WRESTLING WITH WOMEN IN THE DARK
W HOW COULD ANY of our lives turn out to be normal? Two men were dead, and Ted Tronstad was groping the recent widow like an inbred cousin at a clambake. I knew retrieving the bonds and handing them over to Tronstad would only make things immeasurably worse, but if I didn’t, he’d blame Sears’s death on me.
The fleeting thought occurred to me that he’d set up our meeting in a vacant house because it was a convenient spot for another murder, and that once he was in possession of the bonds, there would be nothing to keep him from silencing me. A conspiracy has no place for a man with a conscience, and Tronstad knew that. He knew I’d confessed to Sears and no doubt feared I would confess to others.
Any attempt on my life, or on Robert’s, seemed a dumb move on Tronstad’s part, but if you looked at everything else Tronstad had done since he found the bonds, he’d made a lot of dumb moves. Any sane person knew the police would focus on him if any more members of our crew died, but Tronstad’s reality didn’t always correspond to the real world.
When I got home, I found evidence that somebody had tried to force my back door: jimmy marks on the door next to the dead bolt. They hadn’t gotten in. Mrs. Macklin, who lived in the other half of the duplex, was an older woman with acute emphysema, and because she was tied to an oxygen bottle, she was usually home. “I haven’t seen nobody,” she said when I asked her about it. “Been sick all week. Can barely get to the bathroom. Can you come in and help me with my garbage?”
“Maybe later.”
I mowed Macklin’s lawn, took out her garbage each week, and picked up items at the grocery store for her. Twice she’d overflowed her commode by stuffing in half a roll of toilet paper, and twice I’d cleaned it up 172
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for her. There were certain people, you gave them an inch, they took a mile.
The prowler could have been anybody, but I suspected Tronstad, or
“Agent” Brown, the latter prospect infinitely more frightening than the former. While Tronstad was demented and dangerous, I figured as long as I had the bonds I could at least reason with him. Brown was an unknown quantity.
That evening I found my mother at the kitchen table in her tiny third-floor apartment on California Avenue, sitting in a chair she rarely moved from. She’d covered her bald head with a pink-and-white flowerprint bandanna, a gift from me. She’d taken to wearing hoop earrings, which, along with the bandannas, lent her a vaguely exotic air, like a gypsy or a Caribbean fortune-teller. Her face was pale and drawn, dark circles under her eyes not unlike the chronic circles under Tronstad’s eyes. Though we didn’t speak of it, I often wondered if suicide hadn’t crossed her mind. Given my current circumstances, it was easy enough to understand why people in dire straits resorted to offing themselves. There was a sullen comfort to be had in knowing you wouldn’t have to face the consequences of your actions. Chagrined that the thought had occurred to me, I did my best to put it out of my mind.
I sat on the worn sofa near the living-room window.
“What’s the matter, Jason?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been down for well over a week.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bring any of this on you. It’s just that I never in my wildest dreams thought I could be in this much trouble.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“I can’t.”
“Is it money trouble? You’ve been paying for so much around here lately. My rent. My prescriptions.”
“Mom, it doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“I wish you would talk about it.”
I took my mother to dinner down the street from her apartment
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building, at a Chinese restaurant, where she barely touched her food and I barely touched mine. Even though we knew she wouldn’t eat them later, we boxed up the leftovers and took them with us. It was dark when we got home. We’d spent the meal discussing politics, which she followed ardently and believed had deteriorated to a dismal state over the course of her lifetime.
“You want to come up and keep me company?” she asked. “We could watch TV.” Mother had been a reader her whole life, but the drugs wouldn’t let her concentrate on the front page of a newspaper, much less a book. I knew she detested the fact that watching TV, catnaps, and looking out the window had become the primary staples of her day.
“Thanks, but I have errands.”
“So late?”
“I love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too.” I kissed her brow and she gave me a long look before she closed the car door and walked across the sidewalk to her apartment building, dutifully carrying the plastic bag of pork fried rice and moo shu beef.
I waited for her to get inside, popped in a Built to Spill CD, and drove around West Seattle, shifting gears like a rally driver, taking corners as fast as the WRX allowed, using the familiar feel of the car and the long nervous minutes of insane driving in a fatuous attempt to restore my sanity. I drove past Ghanet’s place and found it dark and quiet, with a sign I couldn’t read from the street nailed to the front door. Dropping down the hillside to Beach Drive, I revved the motor until I was traveling sixty-five miles an hour, then eighty, eighty-five, ninety, passing the rare car on the road, driving like a dead man—or a man who wanted to be dead. Working on Engine 29, I’d come down here and picked up bodies produced by precisely this sort of reckless motoring. For reasons I couldn’t guess, I slowed to below the speed limit just seconds before a cop passed me headed in the opposite direction. He did a U-turn in the street and followed me for two miles, then abandoned the surveillance. No doubt some citizen with a cell phone had reported me, but once again, lady luck had thrown her hat into the ring on my behalf. After twenty-five more minutes of aimless cruising, I drove back 174
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down to the water near the lighthouse and headed east with homes, apartment buildings, and condominiums occupying all the available land on the hillside to my right. On my left lay a sandy beach, and beyond that the dark Puget Sound. I turned onto Bonair Drive and headed up the hill. Passing Hobart Avenue slowl
y, I kept driving and parked two blocks away. Carrying my keys, a pair of wool gloves, and a small flashlight, I hiked down the hill.
Perched on the side of the wooded slope overlooking the Sound, the Pederson home lay in a small cul-de-sac that had been notched into the hillside. Above it, a small greenbelt was forested with elms and maples, the trees only just beginning to lose their green. To the right on an embankment sat a high apartment house and parking lot, so that the Pederson place appeared to sit in a flat-bottomed hole. Although there was a Miata in the driveway, neither Bernard’s truck nor Iola’s Land Cruiser was in evidence. The nearest streetlight was burned out. Except for a light in the rear, the house was dark, the blinds drawn, and if anybody had taken note of my approach, I hadn’t seen them. The garage was to the right of the house and separated by twenty yards of grass and old concrete driveway. I walked through the grass, listening carefully for any cars on the road and mentally marking a large rhododendron in the yard as a place of concealment should I need one. Not far away on the Sound, a ferry slid across the black water. Except for the engine of a car below on Alki Avenue and some muffled music from inside a nearby house, the neighborhood was as tranquil as a mausoleum. Feeling my way across the uneven lawn, I kept the flashlight off until I was up against the garage. For the first time in a long while I got the feeling that this was going to work out, that I would retrieve the bags and clear the property without a problem, that Tronstad would disappear with his share and our troubles would be over. The flavor of success stuck with me until I found the door jammed—not locked, but binding on itself, as if humidity or the earth settling had kicked the door frame out of plumb.
It wasn’t until I switched on my flashlight that I spotted the figure at the corner of the garage, a woman in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. She was so still that at first I thought she was a mannikin. After a moment, I
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realized she had a gun, that it was pointed at my chest. “Hey there,” I said, trying to sound friendly.
“Don’t move, motherfucker.”
“Jesus. You’re not going to shoot me?”
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Is that you? You’re, uh . . .” I shined my light on her. It was the young woman who’d told me to stop dating Iola; the woman who nearly broke my thumb in the same way Brown had nearly broken it at the firehouse.
“Who the hell are you? Step into the light.”
“You’re Sonja. Sonja Pederson. I should have recognized the Miata. Gum. Jason Gum.”
“I know who you are. You’re the pipsqueak who’s been banging Iola. What are you doing here?”
“She’s your mother, for God’s sake. How can you talk about her like that?”
“She’s my step mother. Bernard’s my father.” She lowered the gun.
“Bernard is due home any moment. He’ll blow your balls off as soon as look at you.”
“He doesn’t know who I am.”
“You think Iola doesn’t tell him everything?”
“He knows who I am?”
“Maybe not by sight, but he knows more than you think. What are you doing sneaking around in the dark? You a Peeping Tom as well as having a Mommy fetish?”
“Don’t be crude.”
“I’m not the one banging a woman old enough to be my mother.”
“She’s not—”
“She’s forty-five.”
“I stopped seeing her.”
“Good for you. Now tell me what you’re doing here.”
I knew if I told her I was here for something I left in the garage, she’d scare me off with the pistol and search for it herself. The odds of her packing the three bags into her Miata and delivering them to my place were about a zillion to one. I was better off if she thought I was a Peeping Tom. She put the gun away, then walked over to me and grabbed my hand, 176
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twisting my wrist so the flashlight illumined my face instead of hers. She had a cigarette in her free hand, which explained what she’d been doing outside. “You spy on her? You go in the garage and masturbate?”
“Heck no.”
She exerted more pressure on my wrist. “Then, what?”
“Let me go, and I won’t come back.”
Without letting go of my wrist, she inhaled off her cigarette and examined my face. Despite the fact that she’d already been outside some minutes in a T-shirt and jeans, her hand was incredibly warm. She held my wrist, staring into my eyes. Using the hand with the cigarette, she began patting down my pockets for weapons. When I tried to resist, she clamped my hand tighter, and before I knew it we were wrestling. Without releasing the cigarette, she tried to get me in an arm lock. When I fought that, she gouged me in the groin with her knee, doubling me over. Then she put me into the arm lock and turned me into the building until the rough boards were scraping my cheek.
“You’re the second weakling to throw me around today,” I said.
“Weakling? Maybe we should take a picture of this, so you can remember which one of us has a face full of garage.”
She patted me down and released me. It was hard to know why I did what came next.
Like a lineman taking down a quarterback with a cheap shot, I fell on her. She hit the ground on her rump, and it knocked the wind out of her, while I struck my left knee on something hard, probably a rock in the lawn. The flashlight whirled off into the darkness, along with her cigarette. We rolled in a tangle. She was like a wildcat. Flipping her onto her back, I tried to hold her down while she struggled, but she was strong. What happened next was as strange as anything else in the past weeks.
Without warning, I slipped into a near-catatonic state. I simply went limp. As soon as she felt me go slack, she rolled over onto me and sat on my chest, her skinny haunches stretched across my ribs, pinning my arms, her head inches from mine in the dark. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You sick?”
“Yeah.”
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Letting go of my arms, she sat upright. “You going to throw up?”
“It’s not that kind of sick.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Lots of things. My lieutenant died three days ago.”
She felt like a bird of prey sitting on me. It was sexy, too. Her stepmother had ridden me the same way. I put the thought out of my head, but even so, I felt a twinge of sexual tension, a tension that almost supplanted the pain in my balls.
“You’re the firefighter who almost drowned?”
“Yeah. Let me up, okay? You win.”
She stood up, reached for my hand, and hoisted me to my feet. Just as she did so, a pair of headlights washed over us and a vehicle pulled into the drive beside her Miata. “That’s Bernard. Let me take the lead on this. If he knows you’re here to see Iola, he’ll kill you. Just let me—” Before she could finish, he was on us, having slammed his truck door and rambled over to the garage like a grizzly. He stood now in the glow from his headlights, having produced a gun twice the size of the weapon Sonja carried.
“Who the hell is this?”
Sonja wrapped her free arm around my waist. “Daddy, this is Jason Gum.”
“Who the freakin’ hell is Jason Gum?”
“I was just—”
“He’s my friend. We were talking.”
“Out here?” I followed his eyes as he glanced at my flashlight on the ground, Sonja’s smoldering cigarette in the grass, tendrils of smoke rising into the cockeyed beam of my light. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I told you, Daddy. We’re talking.” With that, she laid her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled of lavender shampoo, and I could feel her bony hip pressing against my leg, her arm tightening around my waist, a small, hard breast snug against my ribs.
“Jesus H. motherfrickin’ Christ,” he said. His truck headlights limned him, so I couldn’t see his features, just the bulk of him, and the bea
rd. And the Howitzer. He was larger than I remembered. His voice boomed, “Why weren’t you in the house?”
“I had a cigarette. You told me not to smoke inside.”
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“I thought you quit.”
“Just one.”
He looked at me. “You sneaking a smoke, too?”
“No sir. I don’t smoke, sir.”
“You lying, son? Because I can smell a liar a mile off.”
“No, sir. I’m not.”
He laughed. “You scared?”
“I’m scared that gun’ll go off by accident.”
“Goes off, it won’t be an accident.” He raised the gun and pushed the barrel forward until it was six inches from my brainpan; I could almost feel the bullet scorching my bones and flesh. “I shoot you, it will be deliberate.”
“For God’s sake, Daddy. No wonder my friends don’t like coming around.”
Lowering the gun, he laughed again, then stumped back to his truck, shut off the motor, locked it, and headed for the house. “Iola around?” he shouted.
“Haven’t seen her,” Sonja replied.
After he was inside, she let go of me, picked up the flashlight, and stubbed out her cigarette with the toe of her sneaker. “Six years ago at our cabin on Lake Roosevelt, he shot and killed a man. Shot him five times and got away with it. They said the man was a burglar.”
“Good grief.”
“A year ago, after she had too much wine, Iola told me the man he shot hadn’t been a burglar at all. He’d been her lover. After she sobered up, she denied it, said it was just the alcohol talking. To this day I’m not sure if she was lying or not.”
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