Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (5 page)

The derelict smokestacks of the old Seattle City Light steam plant seemed to be giving me the finger as I rolled up the grade, past ZymoGenetics and the back of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, up to the top of the hill, where a forest of concrete pillars suddenly sprouted on my left and the roar of the freeway began to seep into the car’s interior.

As I crested the grade, I checked the surrounding area. Three blocks down, along the front of REI, a knot of traffic shimmered in the rain. Brake lights threw jagged shafts of red on the asphalt. I slowed to a crawl. A moment later the light changed and suddenly the street was empty. I fed the car a little gas.

I checked the rearview mirror. Back at the bottom of Eastlake Avenue, a white Cadillac Escalade with British Columbia plates was moving uphill inside a self-generated cloud of mist, its otherworldly white halogen headlights bouncing this way and that as it navigated the minefield of potholes.

I crested the hill and veered hard into the right-hand lane, getting as far from the concrete divider as possible,
before swinging back to the left, gritting my teeth hard as I swung across three lanes, barely avoiding the concrete traffic island designed to prevent precisely this grossly unlawful maneuver.

I made it with an inch to spare and was halfway up the ramp, driving over the freeway, congratulating myself, checking the mirrors for cops, when I saw that the Cadillac had not only performed the same illegal maneuver but had also closed the distance between us by half.

I had a “hmmmm” moment. The first time I’d seen them, they had their lights on, and now the driver had turned them off. And it wasn’t like visibility had improved either. Quite the contrary. It was getting darker and drearier by the second. A steel ball bearing rolled down my spine. Why no lights?

I could understand how my scofflaw maneuver might have nurtured the worst instincts in my fellow citizens and I sorely regretted being such a poor role model, but the lights? The lights made no sense at all unless somebody was trying a little too hard to not be noticed. The
Twilight Zone
theme began to toot in my head.

A dry laugh escaped my throat as I eased up to the stop sign. “A bit paranoid or what?” my inner voice asked. Hell, on my worst day it took me several hours to piss somebody off enough to be following me over hill and dale. I’d been looking for Rebecca for only an hour. So…unless I was about to set new annoyability records…

Just as sanity was about to prevail, I checked the mirror again. The Escalade was standing still, wipers swishing back and forth, big silver raindrops plopping all around, the driver refusing to get closer to me. That’s when my other voice piped in.

“Only one way to find out,” it said.

Almost without willing it so, my foot jammed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, sending the car roaring up Belmont, the tires whirring for traction on the steep hill, the scream of the engine drowning out the rising weather.

A hundred yards up the hill I swung a hard right onto Bellevue. As the car fishtailed once and then righted itself, I mashed the brake pedal to the floor, threw the transmission into reverse, intending to jam the car into a narrow alley between apartment buildings. Or at least, that was the idea.

I used to drive a Fiat, a little POS whose only virtue was that it didn’t take up a lot of space and was relatively easy to push by hand. My recently acquired Chevy Tahoe, however, while far more commodious for a man of my dimensions, regrettably was also considerably less accommodating.

The scream of warping metal and the tinkle of broken glass made it apparent that both my depth perception and my driving skills had suffered the same ignoble fate as my wariness. The passenger side of my car was no more than an inch from the Sir Galahad Apartments. I checked the rearview mirror. It was gone.

Worse yet, the driver’s side was no more than a foot from the north wall of Bellevue Court. No way I could open the door. I stewed for a few seconds, resigned myself to the ignominy of it all, and lowered the rear window. Nothing like crawling around the inside of an automobile to give a man a little humility. Accompanied by a symphony of grunts and groans, I extruded myself over and around two sets of seats, and finally crawled out the back window feetfirst, where I stood precariously on the plastic bumper, hanging onto the
ski rack for all I was worth, looking out over the length of the Tahoe toward the rain-slick street.

Worst of all, my little maneuver had failed to fool my pursuers. Just about the time I had steadied myself on the bumper and looked back over the length of the car, they stepped into the mouth of the alley. Two of the strangest-looking dudes I’d ever laid eyes on. The little guy was under five feet tall. Big round glasses half the size of his head. Looked like Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto.

His partner was downright reptilian. Leather-scary. More zippers than a set of slipcovers. Big, square noggin sporting a platinum blond flattop hairdo. With lightning bolts cut into both sides of his head, he looked like something straight out of a comic book. Captain Carnal maybe. Definitely not something you’d bring home to mother. Or bring home, period.

Zipper-head curled a disdainful Elvis lip. “Tight fit,” he said.

“They’re not making alleys like they used to.”

He nodded at the broken mirror. “Looks bad,” he said.

“Speaking of bad looks,” I said, “you need to do something about yours, man. This leather zipper-head thing you’ve got going on here…”

The corners of his eyes narrowed. “Smart guy, huh?”

“Also, whoever writes your dialogue definitely needs to be replaced. That old film noir shit…”

Apparently I touched a nerve. The Elvis lip straightened itself. “You sayin’ I’m stupid?” he demanded.

“Perish the thought,” I deadpanned.

“You’re sayin’ I’m stupid.” Not a question this time. Apparently he’d had some previous experience along this conversational tack.

He took a step back and surveyed the scene. That’s when I realized that the other guy was nowhere in sight, but I didn’t have time to ponder. Zipper-head was looking for some way to get back to where I stood, without coming over the top of the car.

Mr. Moto popped back into view. They exchanged a glance.

“You best mind your own business and butt out,” Zipperhead said. “You been puttin’ your face where it don’t belong.”

“You followed me all over the city just to tell me that?”

“I see you again, I’m gonna fuck you up.”

“Providing you remember.”

He was going to go into it again. The stupid thing. I could tell.

Mr. Moto toddled around the back of the Escalade and pulled himself into the driver’s seat.

“He got blocks on the pedals?” I asked Zipper-head affably.

“Next time I’ll let you ask him yourself,” he promised.

I smiled. “I’ll leave myself a note on my BlackBerry.”

Without another word, he launched a karate side-kick at the front of my car. If he was trying to impress me, it worked. The whole car rocked from the force of the blow. I heard the headlight shatter and fall to the ground. He stepped to the left and duplicated the maneuver on the other headlight, with much the same result.

“Next time it’ll be your lights I put out,” he promised.

Before I could come up with another snappy rejoinder, he turned and ambled back toward the Escalade, slithering with a loose-hipped lizard swing as he crossed the street and climbed into the car.

I stood where I was until the Cadillac hissed out of sight.

By the time I got my car towed to the Chevy dealership and signed my life away for a rental car, it was quarter to nine. Took me another half hour to get over to the mall at Northgate and canvass the shoe emporiums, so, by the time I’d finished my first pass of the stores, they were less than a half hour from closing.

He must have been on a break or hanging out in the back room the first time I strolled by. Second time I walked past the All-Star Sports store, he was standing at the cash register chatting with a customer.

Richard Waters, aka Ricky, was a good-looking young fella. Smooth, even features and good hair. Bright red polo shirt with an embroidered logo on the chest. He’d put on a few pounds since his Millennium photo, but it was him all right. Probably eating more starches and less steak than when he was in the yacht business, I figured.

He handed a purple plastic bag to the customer and waved him on his way. Soon as the customer turned his back, the boyish smile disappeared and then, a coupla seconds later, so did Ricky.

I waited for one of the other clerks to ring up a customer, and then, with the counter area finally deserted, slid through the opening, past the “Employees Only” sign and into the dusty back room.

Floor-to-ceiling unpainted metal racks awash in shoe boxes. Dirty bathroom on the left, battered metal desk on the right. Nobody’d swept the floor in a month.

He had the back door propped open with a storage bin and was standing outside power-smoking a cigarette. His eye caught my movement.

“Hey, hey,” he said. “Didn’t you read the damn sign? You can’t be back here.”

I ignored his admonition and kept coming. When he flicked the butt behind himself and slid the storage bin aside, I bellied him back through the doorway and out into the service road that ran behind the mall.

A quarter mile of green dumpsters, cardboard balers, and loading docks. He tried to swim his way around me but I straight-armed him backward. While he fought to regain his balance, the door slammed shut on its own.

Half-a-dozen brightly painted garbage trucks were lined up along the back of the mall. The roar of diesels mixed with the whine of hydraulics to form a wavering wall of sound, punctuated now and then by the rap of metal on metal as the trucks banged the last flattened remnants from the big green trash containers.

“You crazy?” he yelled above the din. “I’m gonna have to walk all the way around the fucking building to get back to the store.”

“You don’t answer my questions you’re not going to be able to walk around the building,” I promised with a smile.

He took a step backward. His boyish face clouded. “You kiddin’?” he asked.

“If I was kidding, I’d be wearing a balloon hat and no pants.”

Somewhere in his head a lightbulb went on. “You’re the guy.”

“What guy?”

“The guy from the bachelor party. You’re the one who…”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

The admission had the desired effect. He showed me a pair of cautioning palms. “Hey, I don’t want any trouble here,” he assured me.

Guys like Ricky never do; that’s how they keep those boyish good looks. But something in his expression caught my eye. Something furtive and pained.

“I’m trying to find Brett Ward,” I said amiably. “He doesn’t answer his phone and his mailbox is full.”

“How would I know where he is, man?” he whined. “I haven’t even talked to the guy in a couple of months. We worked at the same place. Went out to lunch once in a while. Went to a Huskies game together one time.” He threw his palms at the ceiling and shook his head. “That’s it, man.”

The adamant denial struck a discordant note. He was trying way too hard to convince me that he didn’t know anything. “If you needed to find him, what would you do?” I pressed.

“Call his old lady, I guess,” he answered quickly.

“She’s missing too.”

“Then how in hell am I supposed to…”

I straight-armed him again. He staggered back two steps.

“I’m not feeling very patient,” I told him.

Ricky checked over his shoulder, thinking about making a run for it.

“I’m a lot quicker than I look,” I warned him.

He took me at my word. “Come on, man. I’ve got a wife, a kid, and another on the way. I need to make a living here. I can’t take any more of…”

“Any more of what?”

He pressed his lips together and looked away.

A lightbulb went on in my head. “I’m not the first person to come asking about Brett Ward, am I?” I tried.

He set his jaw and looked away. “I can’t, man,” he said finally. When he turned his gaze my way, his eyes were on the verge of welling over. Obviously, something had happened. Something that could make a grown man cry.

“What happened?”

He turned his face away again.

The scream of hydraulics filled the air, making it impossible to talk.

“They said they’d come back,” he said when things quieted down.

I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. An ongoing shiver ran through his body like an electric current. He flinched and hunched his shoulders.

“‘They’ who?” I pressed.

He shook his head and hunched harder.

I took a shot. “Blond flattop hairdo? Lightning bolts cut into the sides?”

Had he been able to tie his shoulders in a knot around his neck, I believe he would have. “That Koontz guy…,” he began.

I couldn’t believe it. “You know that guy?” I asked.

“He’s famous, man,” Ricky whined. “Jordan Koontz. He’s that Canadian mixed martial arts fighter who killed the guy in the ring up in Vancouver. Remember? The one who attacked the referee when he tried to stop the fight. Busted the ref’s neck. Banned from MMA for life. Ended up going to prison for a while.”