Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (22 page)

With the room exploding behind us, we crawled into the bathroom just before things got quiet for the second time. Quiet enough to hear the shooter slam another clip into the weapon. Instinctively, I grabbed Marty by the shoulders and threw both of us into the bathtub. My head banged against the bottom. My vision swam as high-velocity slugs hit the cast-iron bathtub, ringing it, rocking it on its clawed feet as we huddled as far down inside as we could get, hoping to God the tub could withstand the onslaught. The air was thick with powdered porcelain as the hurricane of bullets scoured the finish from the tub.

I don’t know how long it went on for. Seemed like forever, lying there with Marty pressed to my chest, listening to chunks of steel-jacketed lead flattening against the cast iron. I think he reloaded at least once more and raked the room from one side to the other a final time, but I couldn’t be sure. It was all a blur.

And then…the eerie silence before the car engine raced and the bright lights swung across the trees leaving
us breathless and too scared to raise our heads above the lip of the tub, for fear of having it blown off.

I heard a bell ringing. Maybe two. And then a siren whooping in the distance.

“Cavalry’s on the way,” I choked out.

Marty didn’t answer.

Roddy was bent forward, cell phone pressed to his ear, staring at the floor. I was leaning back in the chair, checking out the acoustic ceiling tiles. My hands were still shaky and the sound of gunfire still rang in my ears as I sat in the trauma center of Vancouver General Hospital, waiting to find out whether Marty was going to make it or not. Somehow or other he had taken a slug in the left armpit. Apparently it had rattled around inside him and severed the subclavian artery.

I flew in the helicopter with him and watched as a trio of EMTs scrambled to keep him alive. As fast as they fed fresh blood into his arms, Marty leaked it into his chest cavity. About halfway there, the pace of things got frantic, and I could tell they didn’t think he was going to make it, but somehow he hung on until we touched down at the heliport, where an ER team awaited with a fresh supply of blood.

I’d called Peg as soon as they rolled Marty into the trauma center’s ER. Tried to talk her out of coming up until we knew something more, but there was no dissuading her. She got their youngest daughter, Stella, to drive. I figured they were somewhere in the vicinity of the border by now.

The squeal of rubber soles on linoleum jerked me to my feet. Roddy whispered a sign-off, pocketed his phone, and levered himself upright.

The doctor was the future son-in-law of every mother’s dreams. Tall, dark, and handsome, with a thick head of curly black hair, and a great set of Hollywood teeth.

I held my breath as he squeaked our way.

“Damn near bled out on us,” he said.

“But he’s all right,” I stammered.

“He got very lucky,” the doctor said. “The muzzle velocity was so low the slug just bounced off his clavicle.”

“It had already come through a wall and hit a cast-iron bathtub by the time it got to Marty,” I said.

“Saved his life,” the doctor said. “Those AKs usually make a hell of a mess. Pulverize everything in their path. Kill you from the shock alone. We grafted the artery back together. Until that heals, he’s going to need to take it real easy.”

“Can we…is he?”

He read my mind. “We’re keeping him sedated,” the doctor said. “They’re airlifting him to Seattle in about an hour. Can’t think of any reason he needs to be awake for that.”

Neither could I.

He walked over to the nurse’s station, scribbled something on a piece of notepaper, and handed it to me. “You can call operations for the details of your friend’s air transport.”

Before I could thank him, the overhead speakers began to squawk hospitalese. He held up a finger and listened intently. “Duty calls,” he said with a resigned shrug.

I shook his hand and thanked him for his efforts. He seemed to think it was nothing special and double-timed it down the corridor.

I made the call to operations. Turned out to be complicated. Nobody seemed to know anything about Marty’s airlift. I was fighting to retain my composure when the last guy figured out that the Seattle PD was sending its own helicopter for Marty, which was why the flight didn’t appear on anybody’s manifest. My blood pressure dropped precipitously as I wrote down the details.

I took a moment to calm down and then called Peg. She and Stella were north of Bellingham, headed our way with a Washington State Patrol escort. I could hear the hitch in her breathing as she waited for me to say something. I remembered what Marty said about how she always expected the worst when she got these kinds of calls, so I just blurted out the good news and the details of Marty’s arrival in Seattle. She burst into tears and broke the connection without saying good-bye.

When I managed to pull myself back into the here and now, Roddy was standing by my side. “We’ll need a statement,” he said apologetically.

I told him I understood. He clapped me on the shoulder.

“One hundred and seventy-five,” he said.

I said something terribly intelligent like, “Huh?”

“That’s the number of AK-47 shell casings they found on the lawn.”

Roddy had an officer drive my car back from the island, so by the time I finished giving my statement, the Tahoe was waiting for me in the parking lot.

I don’t remember the drive back to Seattle. By the time I got to Harborview Hospital, Marty had already been
pronounced to be in serious but stable condition and transferred to Swedish Hospital, about three blocks up the street.

I left the Tahoe in the Harborview parking garage and covered the distance on foot. It was raining buckets. By the time I got to Swedish, I looked like I’d been swimming. The old lady in the information booth took one look at me and started giving me directions to the ER. I assured her that I felt considerably better than I looked and she reluctantly told me where to find Marty. Seven-oh-three. West Tower.

If I’d been expecting another cop convention on the seventh floor, I’d have been disappointed. Two cops in overcoats formed a muttering knot along the right-hand wall. On the opposite side of the hallway a young female patrol officer sat with her hat in her lap. Other than that, the corridor was empty. If you closed your eyes, only the faint hum of electronics and the stale, recycled air reminded you where you were.

The cops unwound themselves and started my way. I recognized the one in the lead. Captain Andrew Hardy, a serious old-school cop and Marty’s direct supervisor. Hardy was a nondescript guy just this side of sixty, with a head of salt-and-pepper hair slicked straight back. He had a reputation as being a stickler for detail and a hard guy to get along with. He didn’t bother to introduce his toady.

He shook my hand. “What the hell happened up there?” he asked.

I told him. Took me a full ten minutes to get it all in. Like Marty, Hardy was a hell of a listener. “So whose boat did you guys rock?” he asked when I’d finished.

“Gotta be Junior Bailey,” I said.

He took a minute to digest what I’d told him. “OK,” he said finally. “We’re forming a joint task force with the
Vancouver PD.” He looked me dead in the eye. “You’re out of it now,” he said. “We appreciate your efforts thus far, but as of right now, you’re no longer part of this investigation.”

I kept my mouth shut. This wasn’t a guy to screw with. He could put me on seventy-two-hour remand as a material witness with a nod of his well-groomed head and the last thing on earth I needed was to spend the next three days in jail.

“Did you hear me?” he pressed.

“I heard.”

“’Cause you’ve got a reputation as a guy who has trouble taking no for an answer.”

“Dogged. That’s me,” I said.

He leaned in close. “Don’t fuck with me, Mr. Waterman. If you still had a PI ticket I’d be obliged to tell you to just stay out of the way. But you don’t. You’re just a civilian these days, so I’m telling you to get all the way lost here.” He cut the air with the side of his hand. “The mother needs an update, tell her to call my office.”

“I’m going to keep looking for Rebecca Duval for as long as it takes,” I said.

The air in the corridor was thick.

“They were right about you,” he said.

“Who’s they?” I asked.

He reached a hand back over his shoulder. The toady slapped a manila envelope into his palm. He held it out to me. “Here’s what you and Detective Sergeant Gilbert had working on the Duval missing person’s case.”

I took it from him.

He nodded toward Marty’s room. “Peg and the daughter are in there now. Then it’s going to be me and a police stenographer.”
He nodded at the female officer across the hall. “So it’s gonna be quite a while.”

For once in my life, I took the hint and headed for the elevators.

Ten minutes later, I was sitting behind the wheel using a damp roll of paper towels to dry myself and running the car heater on high. Having inventoried my options, I decided to see if I couldn’t catch up to the boys, on the off chance that one of their surveillance teams had seen something, anything. What
was
certain was that when “the boys” were your best option, things were about as bad as bad could get.

My frustration meter was redlined. I felt useless, like I was madly treading water and going absolutely nowhere. I had no idea what sort of trouble Brett Ward had managed to get himself into, other than it involved boats and quite probably that scumbag Junior Bailey. Worse yet, I was no closer to finding either Brett or Rebecca than I was when I’d started looking.

I got rock-star parking right outside of the Eastlake Zoo. I stood in the doorway for a minute, letting my eyes adjust to the cave-like gloom and then wandered inside. The place was deserted. One of the younger bartenders whose name I couldn’t recall was stocking beer glasses under the bar.

“Rolling Rock,” I said.

By the time I reached the end of the bar, he had a cold beer waiting for me. “Half an hour or so,” he said to my back as I moved on past. “They been sleepin’ in lately.”

I took the beer and the SPD envelope up to the mezzanine. I sat, sipping at the beer, looking out the window as
East Lynn Street fell steeply downhill toward Lake Union. Twenty-five years back, in looser times, I used to sit here with my friends and smoke pot and drink beer until the place closed. Nobody gave a damn. That was before the new puritans took over the city. Before political correctness became the rage and melted all of us into a single amorphous dung heap.

I sighed and opened the envelope. Marty had left nothing to chance. Patrol was checking the Madison Park condo hourly. Additionally, they’d gotten an “exigent circumstances” warrant and looked around inside. I read the report. No sign of any kind of violence. Nothing out of place other than the occupants.

Information Technology was monitoring all cell phone and credit card activity. The SPD techie had gone back three months, looking for a pattern of communications or expenditures that might show a pattern of behavior that would point us in one direction or another. The algorithm came up empty.

They’d interviewed everybody down at the morgue, including the janitor. Talked to Rebecca’s friends. Even talked to people at the gym where she worked out three times a week. Likewise,
nada
.