Chump Change (29 page)

Next night, Rachel came over for dinner. We whipped up a red pozole and made some jalapeño corn bread. We were snuggled up watching a rental movie named
Headhunters
when my cell phone rang. I reached for it with the intention of turning it off, but the Lewiston area code caught my attention, so I picked it up and wandered out into the hall.

“Leo here.”

“Waterman, this is Chief Wilder.”

“What can I do for you, Chie
f
?”

“Fred Simmons was attacked in his office last night,” he said.

“He okay?”

“Middlin,” he said. “Took a pretty good beating. Says it was Rockland Moon.”

“Why would he do that?”

“According to Fred, Rockland wanted your file.”

“Why would Rockland Moon want my file?” I asked.

“I’m guessing the way he sees it, you’re the one turned his world upside down. Everything he knows is gone. His papa ain’t no more. Three different banks started foreclosure proceedings on all his daddy’s properties this morning. Guy like Rockland Moon is gonna have to blame somebody. I’m figuring that somebody is you.”

He was right. Rockland Moon was just the kind of dim-wit who liked things simple. No Jungian synchronicity for Rockland. Just something easy. Somebody he could point a finger at, and then go beat on.

Good news was . . . Fred didn’t have my address. Just my P.O. box. Another posthumous victory for my old man.

“Thanks for the tip,” I said.

“We’ve got a county warrant out for him. Got CC pictures of Rockland entering and leaving Fred’s building at the time of the assault, so it’ll hold up. Between that and the charges from the Hardvigsen fire, we ought to be able to keep him inside until he’s too damn old to cause any more trouble.”

“Maybe you ought to keep an eye on Irene,” I suggested. “You know . . . just until this whole thing is settled.”

“Way ahead of ya,” Wilder said. “I’ve had a unit on her ever since I heard about what happened to Fred.”

He hesitated. I thought he was going to break the connection, but no.

“Keith Taylor did real well on the county civil service exam.”

“He’s a smart kid,” I said.

“Think we’re gonna give him a chance at the deputy job,” Wilder said.

“He’ll work out for you,” I said confidently. “I’m betting on it.”

Another pause.

“Funny thing . . .” he said. “But I just couldn’t get a straight answer out of his former supervisor as to why he left. That ol boy went around in more circles than a hula hoop.” He cleared his throat. “Something I ought to know?” he asked.

I decided there was. So I told him, the whole story. If he was going to hand Keith a badge and a gun, I figured I owed him the truth.

“Anything else?” I asked when I’d finished talking.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m still trying to work out how you two yahoos ended up with the two best-looking women in Nez Perce County.”

“God protects fools and drunks,” I said.

He laughed. “Keep your eyes peeled for Rockland.”

I told him I would.

When I yanked open the door of the Eastlake Zoo, Sly Stone was blaring off the jukebox about how all he wanted to do was
take you higher
, which, when you thought about it, had to be considered pretty much the theme music for this joint.

Boom shaka laka laka. Boom shaka laka laka.

I stood for a minute, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. Whoever said that everything changes and nothing stays the same had obviously never been to the Eastlake Zoo. The place looked exactly as it had twenty-five or thirty years ago. Don’t know why, but I found something comforting about that. Maybe it was that the older you get, the stranger and less familiar the world becomes, as people and things you just naturally assumed were gonna be around forever fall by the wayside and are replaced by something newer and supposedly better. I mean . . . they only take cash! How old school is that?

Boom shaka laka laka. Boom shaka laka laka.

The Boys had formalized the art of getting shit-faced into a system of unwritten rules second in complexity only to the U.S. tax code.

The way they saw it, as citizens of the world, they could hardly be expected to face the rigors of yet another day in paradise without a bit of
in situ
fortification immediately upon regaining consciousness each morning. And while consuming hard liquor while still horizontal was considered somewhat poor form, a few beers before rising were more or less de rigueur, as they tended to iron out the wrinkles, so to speak.

Boom shaka laka laka. Boom shaka laka laka.

Once up and tottering, a morning phlegm cutter or two served to clear the pipes for their daily spate of hunter-gatherer activities, which included, but were not limited to, piteous begging, overly insistent panhandling, and the much-maligned but ever popular Dumpster diving, for which they were so rightfully renowned.

Thus fortified, it was time for some exercise. A healthy citizenry is, after all, the backbone of a free society. So they stumbled from whatever flophouse they’d landed in the night before down to the Eastlake Zoo, where they further marinated themselves in a few mid-morning bracers, designed to firm both the chin and the resolve, before launching into coupla-three pitchers of beer while playing pool, followed, quite naturally, by coupla late-afternoon pick-me-ups and, of course, the obligatory aperitif before a dinner of peanuts, pickled pig’s feet, and beef jerky.

From the sound of it, they’d started early today. Soon as I rounded the corner of the bar, I could see what the hoopla was about. Harold Green was back among the fold, after spending the past thirty days in the King County lockup on a failure-to-appear beef.

That’s how it went with these guys. They’d get busted for some stupid misdemeanor, like pissing in public, get issued a citation, skip the court date, and get slapped with a failure to appear, so the next time the cops ran their name, there was a warrant out for them, which, when you can’t make bail, meant you did thirty in the King County slammer.

Looked like Old Home Week. Everybody’d crawled out from under their rocks to welcome Harold home. Nearly Normal Norman, Bernardo, Red Lopez, Heavy Duty Judy, Large Marge, Billy Bob Fung, No Pants Paul, Tommy, and Nancy. Even Larry the Leper, who I hadn’t seen in so long I’d assumed he was dead. And, as always, George and Ralphie and Harold holding down the center of things.

Somebody shouted my name. I signaled Mick the bartender for a round. The crowd went wild. Took me a full five minutes to work my way through the well-wishers over to where George was seated.

“Nice to see you back,” I said to Harold.

He lifted a glass to me. Tried to enunciate something, but couldn’t quite spit it out. I leaned in for a closer look. He was hammered out of his mind. Making up for lost time, I supposed. I patted him on the shoulder and then walked over and grabbed a chair from over by the snooker table and pulled it up next to George.

“You want to make a little money?” I asked him.

“Doin what?”

“Keeping an eye on Jules’s mail joint.”

This one was a natural. Eastlake Mail was on the same block as the Zoo. It was a little private post office, run by a guy named Jules Sparks, that catered to the local live-aboard community. Gave em someplace to swap parts, get packages, and buy stamps. Better yet, it was an insular little community, where everybody pretty much knew everybody else. The kind of place where a stranger was sure to be noticed.

“What are we looking for?”

“Guy’s gonna come looking for me. All he’s got is my P.O. box number.”

“So he’ll stake out Jules’s joint and wait for you to come get your mail.”

“That’s what I’m betting on.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Find him before he finds me.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Big ugly bastard. Real bumpy, oily face.”

“Starting when?”

“First thing in the morning. I think Jules’s is open from nine to seven.”

“Nine . . . man. That’s the middle of the friggin night.”

“Got to have it covered from open to close.”

George made his beer disappear. Mick arrived with a fresh pitcher.

I threw a hundred-dollar bill onto the table. “Get a couple of prepaid phones. Whoever makes him calls you. You call me.”

“Ain’t too many places to blend in up there.”

George had a point. Eastlake Mail sat on a little ingrown toenail of Louisa Street. Less than a hundred feet total. Perched up on the side of the hill overlooking Lake Union. Jules, two restaurants, a dry cleaner, a yoga studio, and a nail salon. The good news was that it was going to make it way easier to find Rockland. The bad news was that none of the businesses were about to let any of these guys hang around for more than, say, five seconds before they called the cops for a cuff-and-stuff.

“You’re gonna have to do this on the fly,” I said. “Keep doing walk-bys. Nobody stays in one spot.”

George poured himself another beer.

“Don’t forget the rest of Louisa Street,” I said.

“Can’t see who goes in and out from up there. I was him, I’d camp out in the parking lot behind the sushi joint.”

“Make sure you tell everybody to be careful. This guy’s one sorry-ass excuse for a human being. I don’t want anybody getting hurt.”

“Careful is our middle name.”

At which point, Red Lopez applied a bit too much power to the cue ball, which promptly jumped the rail, banged onto the floor, and disappeared beneath the snooker table. George smirked. “Like I said.”

Before heading back home, I made a dry run by the mail joint. I parked on Eastlake Avenue, down by Roanoke, and hoofed it back up the hill, checking cars, until I was satisfied I hadn’t already attracted any unwanted company.

The girl with the Bettie Page bangs, whose name I could never remember, was working this afternoon. We squeezed off a pair of smiles; she handed me my mail and I headed back outside, where I sorted through a week’s worth of Dumpster lining material while surreptitiously scoping out the neighborhood.

George was right. Anybody who wanted to see and not be seen would back into the last parking spot behind the sushi emporium and sit there making like he was waiting for his wife to get her nails done. Unless he planned to just walk up and shoot me in the head, whatever Rockland had in mind couldn’t take place here. Too many cars turning around in the cul-de-sac. Too much family foot traffic from Louisa’s restaurant. Buses rolling by on Eastlake Avenue every three minutes or so. Too much everything. Might as well just turn yourself in to the cops and be done with it.

Not only that, but the Eastlake neighborhood was a natural bottleneck. Less than ten blocks wide, squeezed between the freeway on the east and Lake Union on the west, bounded on the north by a drawbridge and on the south by the Mercer mess, Seattle’s knottiest and most enduring traffic disaster. Getting out of here, if you didn’t know your way around, was virtually guaranteed to be a nightmare.

I found what I was looking for in the mail. The title to Keith’s car. I’d had three or four calls already, but had stalled because I didn’t have the paperwork.

On the bottom of the pile, a small white envelope. Not sealed. No stamp. No address. I turned it over in my hands. Ran my thumb over the surface. Good stationery has a feel of its own. What I knew for sure was that Jules must have known the person, or he wouldn’t have put it in my box.

I started to open it, but stopped myself. I needed to focus, and wasn’t in the mood for surprises, good, bad, or otherwise, so I slipped it into my back pocket.

The onshore flow rushing in from Puget Sound was so filled with water it made my cheeks damp as I dumped the junk mail in the handy receptacle, put Keith’s envelope into my jacket, and started down Eastlake Avenue toward my car.