Child of Fire (23 page)

Or maybe she was trying to tell me to go get laid.

“Do you need anything before I go?”

“No,” Annalise said. “Leave the van, in case I need to run out for something.”

“Understood.” We left. In the parking lot, Cynthia turned to me. “I thought you said your boss hates you. She doesn’t look like she hates you.”

“I know,” I said. “Ain’t that something?”

I thought about Annalise, sitting listless when Cynthia opened the door. Was she dying? Was I watching her die?

I realized Cynthia was talking to me. “Whoa. Back up and start over please,” I said “I was somewhere else.”

She looked at me like
Are you serious?
“I said that my uncle is probably at his office by now. He goes there every day, no matter what.”

“Let’s try there first. But I expect he’ll stay at home. Does he live in one of the other houses on Hammer Street?”

“Uncle Cabot? No. He has a studio apartment in town now.”

That surprised me, but I didn’t say anything. We drove downtown, and Cynthia turned up a narrow side street. She parked. “That’s it.”

She pointed toward a run-down warehouse. I had to look at it twice to notice the
HAMMER BAY TIMBER
sign above the door. The outside was made of rough, unpainted wood. The walls had warped from the damp. This was a company that had fallen on hard times.

I opened the door.

“What should I do?” Cynthia asked.

“Go have breakfast. Or lunch. Or a cup of coffee. Park a block away from wherever you end up. I’ll come and find you.”

She told me where she’d be. I stepped out.

“Wait! What if something happens … if you don’t show up?”

“New York is nice in the spring.” I shut the door and she drove away.

I walked around the building first. I didn’t see anything except a back door beside an empty Dumpster, some tall weeds, and a high, dirty window with a pale light shining inside.

A gentle drizzle began to fall. I tried the back door, but it was locked. My ghost knife was in my pocket, so that wasn’t an obstacle for me, but I didn’t cut my way in. I walked along the other side of the building, ducking under the fire escape and running my hand along the rough wood.

I reached the front door. The warehouse loading ramp was just a step up from the ground. I peered into the windows, but they were too dirty, and the inside too dark, for me to see anything.

I felt a twinge below my collarbone. Another kid was gone. I looked around, trying to find the source of the feeling, but of course I couldn’t see anything. It could have happened anywhere in town. I gritted my teeth and pulled on the door. It was unlocked, and it creaked as I opened it.

The floor groaned as I walked on it. Enough light shone through the dirty windows that I managed to cross the floor without breaking my nose against a wooden post or tripping over the odd piece of furniture.

There was a flight of stairs against the side wall, and dim light shining from the top. I climbed them, and they groaned under every step. I took out my ghost knife—I wanted to be ready for anything.

“I can’t pay you!” someone shouted from the top of the stairs. “Whoever you are, I don’t have your money!”

I’d heard that shout yesterday. It belonged to Cabot.

I reached the top of the stairs. There was no doorway; the stairs simply opened into his office. I could smell the sour stink of old cigarette smoke.

Cabot was sitting at his desk with his head down on the blotter, a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside him. He didn’t look up. If I had been sent there to kill him, I could have put a bullet into the top of his head and been gone again with no trouble.

I looked around. The floorboards were warped, and the walls seemed to be buckling with age. A huge map of the Olympic Peninsula was tacked to the wall. It was yellowed and curled at the edges.

“Go away,” Cabot said again. He still hadn’t looked up. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said.

He started and looked up at me. His eyes widened with shock, he yanked open a desk drawer and stuck his hand inside.

“HEY!” I shouted. My voice boomed inside the room. Cabot was startled and froze in place. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already. Leave the gun in the drawer. You’ve been stupid enough with guns as it is.”

I walked toward the desk, pulled a chair around, and sat opposite him. “You should have locked the front door,” I told him. “What will you do if Peter Lemly comes here for a story? What if the mayor’s wife decides to pay you a visit?”

“Christ. Frank. I didn’t want anything to happen to him. I like Frank.”

“Oh, shut up. Every jackass that shoots the wrong guy talks that way. It makes me sick.”

He looked sheepish. He had the same thick dark hair as Cynthia and Charles, but it was shot through with gray. His chin was weak, and rimmed with folds of fat. His eyes were large with dark circles. He was just as rundown and creaky as this building, and just as depressing.

His hand was still in his desk drawer. He began to slowly move it, still searching for that gun.

I lunged out of my seat and slammed the drawer on his hand. Then I grabbed the top edge of the drawer and yanked it out of the desk. It flew backward and smashed the corner of his window before falling. Papers and pens scattered to the floor, but I focused on the heavy clunk of a handgun.

Another pistol. Cabot started toward it, but I shoved him back with all my strength. He fell against the chair and crumpled into the corner.

I picked up the handgun. It was a .45, and a little old-fashioned. Pulling back the slide, I saw that it was loaded but hadn’t been cleaned recently. Sloppy. Everything about this guy was sloppy.

“Go sit down,” I told him.

He moved like a little kid being sent to the corner, but he did it. “Who are you? What do you want?” he asked.

It was a relief to find someone who did not already know my whole history. “Just a guy doing a favor for a friend. What are you going to do, Cabot?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to go to jail. And I’m going to go bankrupt. I’ll probably have to sell the house on Whidbey and …” He was withdrawing into himself as he talked.

“Cabot,” I said again. He looked at me. “What are you going to do about Cynthia? About Charles? How many more guns do you have?”

“Oh,” he said. “Will you apologize to Cynthia for
me? I’d been drinking, and I was desperate, and … and I was worried about Charles—”

I laughed. “So worried that you shot at his sister?”

“Charles is sick,” he said resentfully.

“How sick?”

“He’s got a tumor or something. He’s lost a ton of weight—have you seen him recently?”

I thought about the tall, slender, dark-haired guy I’d seen at the Hammer Bay Toy office. I nodded.

“Well, he used to be fat. Big, porky fat, like a Samoan or something. But he’s just melted away. And he’s been having seizures.”

“What? Like epilepsy?” I pretended not to know anything. I wanted to see what he would tell me.

“Don’t know. He hasn’t been to a doctor as far as I can tell. We have the same doctor—the whole family does—and I know Charles hasn’t been to him. And he hasn’t left town, either, so he hasn’t been to see anyone else.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“About two years, I guess. It started right around the same time as …”

“As what?”

Cabot rubbed his nose. “As, um, the play-offs. We were watching the NBA finals, and he fell down in the bathroom. He wouldn’t let us take him to County. I think that was the first time. He looked surprised and kind of shocked, like it hadn’t happened before.”

“Is that why you tried to have him declared incompetent?”

“If he’s seriously sick,” Cabot said, his gaze sullen and his face stubborn, “he needs to see a doctor.”

“And if you get a couple bucks out of the deal, that’s just a happy side effect, right?”

“That’s not how it is.”

“If you say so.”

My needling got a rise out of him. He leaned toward
me, his voice getting higher and more petulant. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re not even a part of this family!”

“Thank God for that. I didn’t bring my Kevlar.”

He opened and closed his little fish mouth several times, then the wind went out of him. He sagged against the back of his chair.

“How do they do it?” he said. “My brother always knew just the right thing to do. He always made the right move. It was like he knew just what would happen. I’ve never been able to do that. I just follow my nose and try to do the smart thing, but I have no idea where it will lead.”

“You wouldn’t make much of a chess player,” I said.

“I suck at chess. Is that the secret? Chess?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter now. I’ve been sitting here, trying to decide if I should kill myself. I don’t think I have the guts for it.”

“Good. Prison is bad, but you can survive it.”

“God. At least I wouldn’t have to look at this anymore.” He shifted some papers on his desk and pulled out a slender newspaper. It was a copy of
The Mallet
. The headline at the top read
CABOT HAMMER ARRESTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER!

I took it from him and scanned the front page. It was a special edition, run especially to cover this story. The article was written by Peter Lemly and told the same basic story that Cynthia had been spreading. Cabot and Cynthia had a big argument; Cabot tried to shoot her but struck the mayor instead when he shielded her. Cabot was then subdued by a “visiting businessman.” For a few moments I was peeved that some other guy had gotten credit for what I did. Then I realized I was the businessman.

“Did you know,” Cabot started, talking to me like a
friend—didn’t the guy have any friends?—“my brother could make people do what he wanted. My father, too.”

“
Make
how?”

“It wasn’t like he voodooed their minds or anything. And he never blackmailed them, as far as I could tell. He just wanted something and other people wanted him to have it. When he bid on a plot of forest, whoever was handling the parcel awarded it to him. It was like he made them want what he wanted them to want. He just bent them to his will, without any effort at all. And he always knew how to handle people. He knew how to use the Dubois brothers, and when to hold them off. He could play Reverend Wilson like a radio.”

I twisted that around in my head until I sorted all the wants. “Isn’t Charles the Third doing the same thing with his toy company? Isn’t he putting out products that people are snapping up?” I remembered what Able Katz had told us: Hammer’s toys weren’t supposed to be a huge hit, but they were. I could have gone further, talking about the way the local townsfolk defended him like he was their king, but I wanted to see Cabot’s reaction.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. You know what’s funny? I never would have pegged little Charlie to be the tycoon type. Now he’s this reclusive business genius, spending all his time hiding in the tower, but I never thought he had it in him. He was such a fat, dorky little kid.”

I remembered the high, round room I’d seen at the top of the Hammers’ house. That must have been the tower. If I’d known, I would have slipped out of the library and confronted him. I made a mental note to tell Annalise about it. “Fat kids grow up,” I said.

“No, no, I don’t mean it like that. He wasn’t just fat. He was lazy and stupid. He never got a joke unless you explained it to him. Kids bullied him on the playground. He was that kind of kid. He used to talk about helping the poor or saving the whales, but he never had more
than a vague idea how to go about it, and he never … okay. Once, he decided that he was going to help some of the older folks in town. You know, retired lumber workers and their wives, they get sick or property taxes go up, and it’s trouble.

“So little Charlie decided to start a food drive. He must have been fourteen or so, and he’s as big as a whale. Everyone jokes that he’s going to be eating half the food himself, though not to his face, of course. But most people like the idea and chip in. We stored the food right downstairs in this building. It was quite a stack—I was surprised by how much support the kid got.

“But Charlie lost interest as soon as it started to be successful. He spent his afternoons playing video games on the couch while the cans and stuff collected dust.

“In the end, I distributed it myself. Those folks were really grateful to get the deliveries, and a couple of them asked when there would be another. I had to tell them that I thought it was a one-shot deal. They were pretty disappointed. Poor folks. Stuck in this town. This fucked-up town.

“So, I didn’t think the kid had a successful company in him. But he’s just as good at it as his father.”

“Why didn’t you continue the drive yourself?”

“What’s that?”

“The food drive. If it helped so many people, why didn’t you take over?”

“Well … that’s not the point I wanted to make.”

“I understand your point. Your nephew was this big loser who suddenly turned into a successful guy, and you didn’t.”

“Well, not that I’m a loser … wait. Scratch that. I
am
a loser. I’ve always been one. But I’ve had my family to back me up. Until now. Crap.”

“What changed for him? What changed for your nephew?”

I didn’t expect him to say
Must be that spell book his daddy gave him
, but I hoped for something more than this extended bout of self-pity. Instead, he said: “God only knows. My kids certainly don’t have it.”

He was wearing a wedding ring. “You’re divorced?” I asked.

“No. No, I’m still married to their mother. We love each other very much.”

I wasn’t interested in that. “How many kids do you have?”

“Four. Ages eight through fifteen.”

“Cynthia said you live in a studio apartment.”

“Well, yeah, I do, but they don’t. They live on Whidbey Island.”

“Is that right?” I asked. Cabot shifted in his chair uncomfortably. He didn’t like the way I was looking at him. If he’d known what I was thinking, he’d be even less pleased. “When did this happen?”