The Raft

THE RAFT

or the Case of the Barefoot Detective

by

Christopher Blankley

Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Blankley

Smashwords Edition

other books by Christopher Blankley

The Cordwainer

The Bobbies of Bailiwick

The Bobbies of Bailiwick and the Captive
Ocean

Zombpunk: STEM

Zombpunk: ARROW

That Nietzsche Thing

Prologue

Jerry knew he'd never get a good night's
sleep until something was done about the Raft.

He sure as hell hadn't gotten one last night
and he knew tonight he'd do no better.

Jerry stumbled around his kitchen, making the
motions of brewing coffee.

He huffed and paused, defeated by the seal on
the coffee can and looked out of the bay windows of his kitchen,
out at the panoramic view of the Puget Sound beyond.

Here he was with a front row seat to the
Extinction of the American Working Man. Bastards, Jerry cursed at
the black shadows of the boats floating out in the water. It was
raining, the clouds low and heavy, dumping a sheet of the signature
Northwest drizzle over the Sound. But Jerry could still make out
the mosquito fleet of tiny craft moored just beyond the shore of
his waterfront property. Goddamn Rafters, Jerry cursed again. It
was all their fault. Why couldn't the government do something about
them?

Linda came out of the bedroom with the dogs
in tow. She had their float toys, and they were scampering to
snatch them out of her hand. It was time for their morning exercise
and Linda was taking them down to the water for a swim. It was
their morning ritual, Jerry's wife and the dogs. The dogs would
swim for fifteen to twenty minutes, out and back, dutifully
retrieving the thrown float toys. They'd do it until they drowned,
Jerry was certain, if Linda's arm didn't always tire before the
dogs did. They'd come back soaking wet and leave wet paw prints all
over the hardwoods. They'd curl up before the pellet stove, lit or
not, and pant pools of drool onto the floor.

There was the thunder of dog feet on the
stairs down to the basement as Jerry returned to his hapless
attempt to make coffee.

Thirty years Jerry had spent at Boeing,
welding jumbo jets and the tail assembling for strike fighters.
Thirty years on the job and his hard work had bought him his dream
home. He'd built it mostly himself, on weekends and vacations. The
patch of waterfront property had been the most dear expense. The
commanding view of the Puget Sound, and the skyline of Seattle
beyond, was worth a pretty penny, at least it was back when Jerry
had bought it. Before the Raft. Now those vagabond,
good-for-nothing freeloaders were driving the home prices into the
toilet, stealing money from honest, hardworking folks like Jerry.
Who wanted to spend five to ten million dollars to look out at a
cluster of ramshackle, barely seaworthy eyesores? A fleet of
tax-dodging hobos. Not even Jerry. But Jerry was stuck with it.
Even if he wanted to, he couldn't sell his house. Not with the Raft
practically camped out on his shore.

The whole system was upside down. Guys like
Jerry couldn't catch a break, but the floating refuse out there
could happily shit all over Jerry and no one lifted a finger. Why
didn't the government
do
something? Clean up the mess. Even
the courts had told them that they could, that the Rafters didn't
have a legal leg to stand on. But still, there they all sat, out in
the Puget Sound – and almost every other major body of water in the
United States. It was a goddamn social phenomenon. It made Jerry
sick.

He finally had the coffee grounds in the
machine. He flipped the switch and watched the brewed coffee as it
started to trickle into the pot. Linda would want a cup when she
returned upstairs with the dogs. It was cold and rainy out there,
she'd need a cup to warm her up.

The whole thing was stupid. A stupid loophole
some smart aleck thought he'd found in the 2020 revised tax code.
The text stated that any US Citizen who failed to set foot on US
soil during the preceding tax year was exempt from paying taxes up
to a fixed maximum of two hundred thousand dollars.

It was the language that tripped up the IRS:
set foot on US soil. Some wise-ass interpreted this loophole to
apply not just to US Citizens abroad, but to any US Citizen that
literally didn't set foot on US soil. Sat up in a tree, for
example, for a whole calendar year. Some people actually tried it,
with varying and humorous success.

Of course, it was all a bunch of bullshit and
the IRS treated it as such. But when the tax protesters took to the
water and cast off on the inland waters of the US, they seemed to
grab the popular imagination. After all, there was a strong
motivation behind the attempt to dodge income tax, and a lot of
grassroots sympathy, with the base marginal tax rate topping over
forty-five percent.

The whole movement was known as the Raft. Not
a single vessel, but a whole fleet of ragtag, dispossessed ships.
Essentially anything that floated and kept a bum from setting foot
on solid ground. That was the Raft. With each and every deadbeat
skipping out on his fair share of the tax burden.

But damn it, Jerry paid his taxes, even on
his social security, something his father's generation had never
had to do. If Jerry could pay his taxes, why couldn't those bums?
The government needed to come in and arrest the lot. It was
obscene, the sight, floating out there flipping the bird at Uncle
Sam.

And on Jerry's doorstep, too. The politicians
back in Olympia and even Washington, D.C. didn't have to deal with
it. But Jerry did, every day. All those tiny little craft, each
holding a stinking hippie. God knows where they were all going to
the bathroom. In the Sound, Jerry wagered, and then that refuse
washing up on Jerry's beach.

It just wasn't fair. A guy who works his
whole life, does his time, pays his taxes, he gets screwed over.
But those deadbeats...

The coffee was ready. Jerry poured himself a
cup.

When Jerry first heard the screams, he was
not concerned. His wife was prone to hollering at the dogs if they
swam out too far from shore. But when her screams didn't die away,
he began to grow alarmed. He crossed the dining room to the window
and looked out through the rain-spattered glass. The dogs were out
of the water, rooting at something at the very southern edge of
Jerry's property. His wife was sprinting back towards the house as
fast as her age and bum knee would let her.

“Jerry!” she screamed up from the back
basement door. She screamed with such blood-curdling force that a
cold shiver shot down Jerry's spine. Something was wrong, very
wrong. He'd never heard his wife's voice betray such fear. Jerry
dropped his coffee mug on the dining room table, dumping its
contents across the oak surface. He sprinted for the basement
stairs.

His wife was standing at the door to the mud
room, her face sheet white.

They didn't speak. Jerry crossed the small
patch of lawn between the house and the water's edge, shuffling in
his slippers. “Leave it! Leave it!” he commanded the dogs, but they
ignored him, sniffing curiously at the dark mound. When Jerry was
on top of them, he smacked each animal roughly on the haunches,
sending them whinnying off in the frigid surf.

Jerry already knew what he'd find. The abject
terror in his wife's eyes had spoken volumes.

Jerry leaned over the mound gingerly,
struggling to keep his footing in the loose gravel of the beach. He
could feel his heart pumping a thousand beats a minute, the blood
thundering in his ears. He reached out and turned the dark mound
over. Behind him, Linda let out a horrified cry and began to
sob.

It was a young woman, or had been, her face
white, her lips blue. Her dark hair was a tangle of flotsam and
mud, wrapped in the heavy, coarse, hemp fabrics of handmade
clothes. But it was her feet that instantly marked her as a Rafter.
Jerry looked down and stared at her white, porcelain toes.

She was barefoot. The Rafters were always
barefoot. There was no need for shoes when you lived your days
aboard ship.

She'd died and fallen into the water. Jerry
looked out at the countless silhouettes that bobbed out in the
Sound, hidden by the haze of the Northwest morning. She'd died and
fallen off one of those vagabond craft and washed up on Jerry's
beach. She was dead. Back on US soil.

Jerry's gaze returned to her cold, dead,
sheet-white toes.

Chapter 1

Maggie's toes curled against the cold as she
piloted her launch towards Alki Beach.

It was far too early for Maggie to be out of
her nice warm bunk, and far too rainy for Maggie to be out and
about in a small craft on Elliot Bay. She shivered, half from the
weather, half from panic. It was far too early for Maggie to be
having so much emotional drama, too. She coughed and told herself
to keep it together.

She'd had a small panic attack as she'd
lowered her dinghy into the water, a few minutes of tears that
she'd been able to swallow back. Now, she would hold it together.
She was not going to make a scene. Perhaps five years ago she'd
have blubbered her way through a day like today, but five years ago
was five years ago. Today was different. Today was five years of
distance. Maggie could hold it together.

Maggie shifted her heading, changing course
out of the path of the speeding pleasure boat that had obviously
not seen her tiny dinghy. She bounced in the wake as the behemoth
passed, her small, electric outboard motor purring towards the
public beach. There was a single red-haired figure silhouetted in
the gray morning of the beach, and Maggie knew this marked her
destination.

She let a wave of panic build and wash over
her. She let her eyes water. Moments later, she was back in
control, but she didn't trust herself to hold on to it.

She was going to hold it together, she was.
She had to hold it together. If she let Rachael see her cry...

The phone had rung an hour earlier. The black
slab of an iPhone, the one Maggie kept on a charger in her galley.
It woke Maggie from a deep sleep, beeping rhythmically. Maggie had
to search her memory to identify the sound. It had been... well,
years since the phone had rung. Maggie only really kept it out of
habit, paying the monthly service charge out of what few dollars
still remained in her dryland bank account. She'd scrambled to
answer it, tumbling out of her snug bunk.

“Hello?” she'd asked, half expecting a
robo-call.

Silence.

Maggie was about to return the phone to its
charger, and herself to her inviting bunk, when a small voice came
from the speaker. “Maggie?”

Maggie's heart leapt.

The voice was instantly familiar – instantly
welcome and unwelcome at the same time.

“Rachael?” she'd asked the phone, still
holding it out towards the charger. Remembering the old habit of
holding a phone to your ear to listen to the other party, she
quickly brought it to the side of her head. “Rachael?”

“Hi- hi, Maggie.”

“What?” Maggie stammered.

“I-”

“Why? Why are you calling?” Maggie asked,
then realized she was being bitchy. “How are you?”

“Good, good,” the soft voice on the phone
coughed. “Look, I know I shouldn't call like this, but it's sort of
an emergency.”

Maggie's brain scrambled to think of what
sort of emergency it could be. What sort of emergency Maggie could
help Rachael with. “What's wrong?” she asked.

“You see, um, well...”

“What's wrong?” Maggie asked again, now
concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes. It's not me, it's... well, there's
no other way to say it... they found a body.”

“What?”

“A body, off Bainbridge Island. Washed
ashore.”

“Oh,” Maggie replied, her heart still
thumping away.

“Well, you see. The body, the girl... it was
a young woman... she was barefoot, you see.”

“In the water?”

“Yes, so you understand, everyone – the
police – are assuming she's a Rafter.”

“Yes.”

“And since I understand you're sort of what
passes for law enforcement out there...”

“No,” Maggie said strongly. “No, it's not
like that-” It really wasn't like that.

“But I was thinking,” Rachael kept on. Maggie
knew better than to interrupt, Rachael always said her peace. “I
mean, if it's going to fall on you to investigate this death... or
whatever you do... well, perhaps you wouldn't mind a shadow? You
know, someone from the media?”