Chump Change (9 page)

I had a homily on my lips—something to the effect that the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day—but mercifully, I had a sudden spasm of lucidity and swallowed it. Way I saw it, we were already way over our
trite but true
limit; no sense getting things further out of balance.

He looked at me. “You were right,” he said, dejectedly. “I’ve got no future in law enforcement. The whole hearing thing is just for show. They’re throwing me under the bus.” His voice was heavy, like he was talking about somebody who’d died.

“Everything I own is in the car,” the kid said.

“Speaking of which . . . if you want to find your ride in the morning, you probably want to park it in the driveway.”

Didn’t have to ask him twice, or go through the whole
I couldn’t possibly impose on you again
thing. I liked that about him. I hit the gate switch and watched him walk toward the street. Rachel was suddenly leaning against my arm. Lucky arm.

“Poor guy,” she said softly.

“He’s about to reinvent himself,” I opined, sagely.

“Always a painful experience,” she said.

I’m not much of an absolutist. “Always?” I asked.

“Only fakirs volunteer for transformation, Leo. Real people . . . they’re forced into it. A spouse dies. They get divorced. They lose all their money in the stock market.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Stuff like that.”

“We can finish the movie in bed,” I said.

“I’ll go warm er up,” she said with a salacious grin.

“The VCR?” I asked.

“No,” she said with a leer.

She kissed my cheek and wandered back into the house.

The sweep of headlights pulled my attention out toward the gate. The kid wheeled the Prelude up next to the house and got out. He held a small gym bag in his right hand. I flipped the switch. The gates began to swing together.

“The guest room’s like you left it,” I said with a shrug. “The maids don’t come till Tuesday.”

Eight-fifteen on a rainy Sunday morning. Two floors below ground at the medical examiner’s office. Me, Rebecca, and two fresh-faced cops from the Techno-Crimes Section are staring at a bank of four computer monitors. How she came up with two city employees and all that equipment on a Sunday was testament to how little she appreciated being scammed out of a body.

We’d spent the past half hour studying the security tape of Gordon’s remains being picked up yesterday morning. As expected, the Idaho plate on the Dodge pickup turned out to be bogus. “Plate comes back to an ’83 Dodge Astro van from Spokane. According to DMV records, the van was scrapped in late 2004,” one of the nerds said.

Not to be outdone, the other guy announced, “Telemetry’s back on the woman.”

The screens rolled to Rebecca and another woman coming out of her office. I’d never really thought about what a great disguise being in mourning was. The ebony-clad figure, strangling a white lace hankie with a black-gloved hand, striding along next to Rebecca. Black maxi dress and boots, black head scarf the size of a tarp, and a pair of off-the-rack sunglasses big enough to hide her from the lips up. Coulda been anyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Marilyn Manson.

“Caucasian female,” the cop intoned. “Five foot six, a hundred and forty-seven pounds. Between thirty and forty years old. From the density of the leg muscles, and expanded lung capacity, the program suggests she probably runs several miles a day.” The camera followed the two women outside to the loading dock, where a pair of Rebecca’s white-clad minions slid the body into the back of the red Dodge Ram pickup truck with bogus Idaho plates. We watched in silence as the body was locked inside the custom camper shell and the keys were returned to the lady in black.

Some trick of light kept pulling my attention toward the driver’s door of the truck. I pointed with my finger. “Can you get us a close-up of the driver’s door?” The technology was amazing. Zoom, adjust the focus . . . zoom, adjust the focus, and suddenly we were there.

“See how square that patch is?” I said. “Right there in the middle of the door.”

“You’re right,” the closest cop said. “Looks like that square in the center has suffered quite a bit less paint fade than the rest of the door.”

“Some kind of advertising sign,” Rebecca said.

“The magnetic kind you just slap on and off,” I said.

“Is that helpful to us in some way?” Rebecca wanted to know.

“Everything’s helpful in
some
way.”

She folded her arms tightly across her chest and looked away.

“How about the back bumper?” I asked.

In ten seconds, the lens was scanning the thick layer of dust that had collected along the rear of the truck. Again, I pointed to the area that had drawn my attention.

“What’s that?” I asked.

The lens tracked back and forth across the area in question, several times.

“Might be a bumper sticker,” one of the techno-cops said.

“This’ll take a few,” one of them muttered. Keyboards went into high gear.

I motioned to Rebecca with my head. She followed me out into the hall. I had something I wanted to ask her, but not in front of the help.

“She touch anything in your office?” I asked.

“Never took the damn gloves off,” Rebecca said, bitterly. She was beating herself up for not having been more diligent. I could tell. I’d seen it before, lots of times. Unlike me, she was an engine that ran best on high-octane guilt. When I glanced over at the window, both techno-cops were motioning for us to come back into the room.

“The program says it reads
BANTAMS
.” He spelled it out.

“Chicken ranch, maybe?” the other techie said.

“How’s about a high school mascot,” I corrected.

Searched Washington high school mascots. Only one Bantams. Clarkston, Washington.

The kid was packing his car to leave when I pulled into the driveway. The rain had stopped. As I got out and walked in his direction, I could hear drops falling from the bare branches of the trees, and percolating into the ground.

“Guess I better get on with the rest of my life,” he said gamely. “I really want to thank you and Miss . . .”

“Rachel,” I said.

“You know . . . for putting up with me and all.”

“No problem,” I said.

“Oh . . . oh . . . I almost forgot. She said she had a full schedule today and that she’d call you later. She wanted to make sure I told you she said that maybe you could finish the movie later.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why, but that’s what she wanted me to tell you.”

I walked over and leaned against the Honda’s front fender.

“You still feeling that great need to
do
something?” I asked him.

“There’s nothing to do,” he said with conviction.

“Maybe there is,” I suggested.

He eyed me. “Like what?”

“Like seeing if we can’t find some kind of closure, maybe.”

“We?”

I shrugged. “For you . . . maybe provide a little impetus for getting on with the rest of your life.”

“What’d you have in mind?” he asked after a minute.

“A road trip,” I said.

“Where to?”

“All roads seem to lead to Clarkston, Washington.”

“Where’s that?”

“God’s country,” I said.

Took me the better part of the afternoon to put things together. By the time I’d packed a few clothes, a couple of sleeping bags and stashed some serious weaponry back where the spare tire used to be, daylight had packed his lunchbox and was heading for home. Rachel had gotten the message I’d left on her answering machine and called me back.

“Any idea how long you’ll be gone?” she asked.

“Not long,” I hedged.

“You be careful.”

“Always.”

“Did Keith get off okay?”

“I’m taking him with me.”

“Why?” she asked. “You hate working with other people.”

“Just seemed like the right thing to do.”

She thought it over. “Maybe if you guys get some answers, he’ll feel like he’s back in control of his life.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Even if it
is
an illusion.”

“It’s a good illusion,” she said.

The rest of it was just bye-bye, miss you too, kissy-face kind of stuff.

He was already in my car, waiting, when I turned on the house security system and locked the front door.

After years of squeezing myself into cars that were never intended for a guy my size, I’d moved up to a full-sized Chevy Blazer with all the bells and whistles. First one I bought got shot to pieces down in Tacoma.

Although my insurance company had been less than amused by the sixty-eight bullet holes, they’d been considerably more chagrined about the two direct hits it took from a rocket launcher. They’d ponied up for the price of a replacement, and dropped me like a bad habit. These days, I’m in the Preferred Risk Pool.

I buckled up and started the car. I asked the GPS how far it was from here to Clarkston. The cheerful female voice said: “Three hundred and eighteen miles.”

“Easy for you to say,” I mumbled.

I watched the sun crack an eyelid over Clarkston, Washington. The digital thermometer in the Blazer’s dash read forty-one degrees Fahrenheit. We’d rolled into town just after two
A.M.
and followed the GPS up into the hills overlooking town. I found an empty cul-de-sac awaiting tract homes and shut the car down for the night.

Over in the passenger seat, the kid was beginning to stir. The heater was blowing cold air, so I turned it off and started the engine. Took a full five minutes on high for the fan to chase the frost from the windshield.

The Lewiston Valley rolled out before us like a frozen quilt. I’d looked up Clarkston on the Internet, before we left Seattle last night. Strange kinda place. Sits in one state, but really belongs to another. Clarkston was really just a suburb of Lewiston, Idaho. Lewiston, which bills itself as Idaho’s Only Port, provided all of what would generally be considered Clarkston’s “city services.” Clarkston, however, maintained both a vestige of independence and a slice of Washington state’s considerably more lucrative tax pie, by maintaining its own independent school district and a substation of the Asotin County Sheriff’s Department.

The kid buzzed the power seat up into the sitting position and stared out through the windshield. He ran a hand over his face and said, “At least you can see why people stopped here.”

“Huh,” I said.

“What rivers are those?” he asked.

“The Snake and the Clearwater,” I told him.

“That’s why there’s people living here,” he announced.

“I suspect that’s true,” I said.

“That’s what always bothered me about Harriman.”

“What’s Harriman?”

“The town I come from in Nebraska.” He yawned and then gestured over the wide valley with his hand. “Here . . . you can see what the attraction was, but Harriman . . . you know, I could never figure out why anybody stopped there in the first place. It’s nothing but a big, wide-open space. The North Platte’s forty miles off. I mean . . . why there? . . . why not ten miles up the road? Or twenty.” He shook his head. “All I could ever think of was that somebody must have busted an axle, or needed to give birth, or just run out of the gumption they needed to keep pushing west, cause other than that, there’s no good reason to stop in Harriman at all.”

“Let’s go find some breakfast,” I said. “I’m starving.”

Grabbing the shift lever was as far as we got.

I heard the whoop-whoop of the siren in the second before I caught sight of the police cruiser sliding to a stop about three inches from our back bumper. I turned to the kid. “Put your hands on the dash and leave them there,” I said.

I watched as a truck-sized county mountie took his good ol boy time getting out of the patrol car. He had that general unhurried indolence that cops seem to get after a while on the job. If money changes everything, so does carrying a gun on your hip every day. Kinda skews your view of the world.

I took my own advice and kept both hands on the wheel as he hitched up his belt and sauntered up to the side window. The blue light coming through his windshield told me he had the dash cam running. I buzzed the window down.

“Morning, officer,” I said.

He had a wide, pockmarked face covered with the sort of oily skin that never really clears up after adolescence. His gold American flag nameplate said he was Asotin County Sheriff’s Deputy Rockland Moon. The deputy was chewing gum. His right hand rested casually on the butt of a holstered automatic.

“What you fellas doing up here?” he asked.

“Waiting for morning,” I said.

“Comes in regular,” he commented.

Before I could come up with a snappy rejoinder, he said, “License, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”

I opened the little pocket in my sun visor and found my registration and proof of insurance. I made it a point to move slowly as I twisted myself up onto my side and pulled out my wallet. Sliding my Washington driver’s license out from under my Costco card, I handed the paperwork out the window to the cop. He gave me five full seconds of his most baleful stare.

“Be right back,” he said, finally.

I watched in the mirror as he got back into his patrol car and began to run my paperwork through the system. These days it takes about two minutes. He let us sit there for ten, then lumbered up to the window again. “Car belongs to you,” he announced.

“You don’t say?”

At which point, the deputy joined the legion of misguided souls who don’t find me funny. Humor’s relative, I guess.

He bent at the waist and poked his big head in the window.

“You boys mind if I have a look through the car?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I mind.”

I could hear the kid squirm in the seat.

Deputy Sheriff Moon nodded like that was what he’d figured.

“Got something to hide?”

“Just exercising my constitutional rights,” I said.

Now he was amused. “Your constitutional rights, huh?”

“You know . . . things like probable cause. Those sorts of silly things. Kind of things keep the ACLU so busy.”

I was betting the farm that a couple of ACLU lawyers showing up on his doorstep was somewhere in the vicinity of this guy’s worst nightmare. He confirmed my assumption by going all smarmy on me.

“Well . . . I don’t know, Mr.”—he looked down into his hand and grinned—“Waterman . . . you know, you find a couple of guys sitting in a car way the hell out here . . . middle of the night . . . you gotta wonder. You know what I mean?” He stopped just short of winking at me.

“Oh . . . you mean the blow jobs,” I said cheerfully and waving a diffident hand. “We finished those hours ago.”

First thing he did was pull his big head back out of the window. Took him five full seconds to decide I’d been kidding.

“You think that’s funny, do you?” he demanded.

“Not when done properly,” I assured him.

Now he was certain . . . he didn’t like me at all.

“Lemme see your ID,” he rumbled at Keith.

The kid started to reach. I put a restraining hand on his arm.

“He’s not driving,” I said quickly. “He doesn’t have to show you anything.”

Keith cleared his throat and began a serious investigation of the headliner.

The result was predictable. Deputy Dog here desperately wanted to go all Mississippi 1963 on me. The old splay me out over the hood of the Blazer and call me “boy” kind of thing. I was betting there was a bullwhip somewhere in this moron’s morbid little power fantasy.

Fortunately for both of us, he was smarter than he looked. The world wasn’t like that anymore, and Deputy Rockland Moon was smart enough to know it. He was probably just tech-savvy enough to know that gaps in the dash cam footage were damned hard to explain, no matter how far out in the friggin woods you lived. Besides, for all he knew, those damn Asotin County techies were saving it all up there in The Cloud someplace. Whatever the hell that was.

Having failed to intimidate me, he immediately abandoned Mr. Smarmy in favor of Sergeant Sullen. He unceremoniously flipped my paperwork into my lap, and stood by the car window, with his feet spread wide and his fingers laced together in front of his fly, as if he was holding himself up by the balls.

I ignored the looming presence of his crotch, and took my sweet-ass time putting everything back where it came from, folding the paperwork perfectly and patting it back into place with great care. When I finally looked his way again, he was giving me the hayseed, Grant Wood version of the evil eye.

“I’ll remember you,” he said, and then stalked off in slow motion.

He punished us by futzing with his radio knobs and seat belt for a full minute and a half before finally backing his car out of the way at something akin to the speed of lava. He followed us, half a block behind, all the way down the mountain, through the center of Clarkston, and across the Main Street Bridge into Lewiston, Idaho.

I checked the mirror at the second Idaho traffic light, and he was gone.

Ranching and pulp mill work started early. Not that I had any personal experience with such earthy pursuits, but it was six-fifteen in the morning and the Chat ’n’ Chew Cafe was packed to the rafters. Keith and I had to wait ten minutes before a table opened up and another five or so before the waitress showed up with the menus and ice water.

She was about my age. Good-looking. Sturdy and freckled. One of those country women who looked like she could haul your ashes in the morning and then plow the back forty that same afternoon. She had a thick head of wavy hair that looked like it had once been ginger-colored, which I thought seemed just about right for her freckles and fair complexion. Looked good on her, anyway.

“You boys know what you want?” she asked.

“Something big,” I said with a smile.

“The Big Valley Breakfast,” she said. “Three eggs any way you want em, home fries, three strips of bacon, three sausage links, biscuits and gravy.” She waved her pencil. “Guaranteed to get you through the morning.” She grinned.

“Sounds great.”

“Coffee?”

“A gallon or so of the leaded.”

She laughed and turned to Keith.

Keith . . . well, the kid spent the next five minutes wanting to know what was
in
everything on the menu. How many calories was it? How many grams of fat? Was it gluten free? Locally sourced? If it involved chickens, had they been well treated as pullets? It went on and on. She was remarkably patient with him, considering how busy the joint was. Eventually he settled on three of those little restaurant boxes of Kellogg’s shredded wheat and some no-fat milk. Yeah . . . and of course, hot chocolate.

I watched as she stuck our order up in the window with about a hundred others and then hurried toward the back of the house.

“What’s with you and that cop?” Keith asked.

“He rubbed me the wrong way.”

“Man . . . I thought we were going to get arrested.”

“If I’d let him go through the car, he’d have found the firearms I’ve got stashed in the back,” I said. The kid looked so horrified, I headed him off at the pass. “They’re all legal, man. I’ve got permits for every one of them, but that old boy would have kept us down at the cop shop until he checked and double-checked on every one of them, and sitting around some hick police station is definitely not how I plan on spending my day.”

He seemed surprised. “You think we’re going to need weapons?”

“I think it’s better to have them and not use them than it is to need them and not have them, if that makes any sense to you.”

He said it did.

By the time I’d shoveled the last of the fried potatoes into my overstuffed face, the place had cleared out. Far as I could tell, in this town, if you were still eating breakfast at seven, you automatically qualified for full malingerer status.

Across the room, the younger waitress removed whatever elastic contrivance was holding her hair back and shook her auburn tresses out. Our waitress had her head in the kitchen door, giving orders in Spanish.

Wasn’t till we had the place to ourselves that I’d noticed that the whole Chat ’n’ Chew Cafe operation, maybe sixty seats or so, was staffed by only four people. Our waitress and the younger girl, who, now that I looked at her, looked a whole lot like the older woman, and two Mexican guys manning the kitchen.

The younger woman had corralled her locks again and was doing that ponytail thing they do with a rubber band, when suddenly the front door burst open and banged back against the wall. Nobody came in.

“Ginny,” a voice called from outside.

Took the older woman about a second and a half to get over to the open door.

“Get outta here, Boyd,” she said to somebody standing outside. “Swear to God. You violate that restraining order, I’ll call the cops on you. I’ve done it before; I’ll do it again.” She kicked the wall in frustration.

“Ginny,” the voice called again.

The younger woman finished putting her hair up and leaned back against the counter. “Go away, Boyd,” she yelled toward the open door. “You ain’t allowed to be here. You know that.”

“Ain’t allowed to come inside is what it says,” the voice from outside said.