Last Ditch (3 page)

I
settled for
the loan of a Kevlar vest and took what I considered to be prudent
steps to
protect us. We had a first-class alarm system installed in the house.
Rebecca
and I now locked our cars in the garage every night, instead of leaving
them
strewn about the driveway. She was car-pooling to work with Judy Benet.
I made
it a point to meet new clients in busy public places in broad daylight.
We
consoled ourselves by telling each other that these precautions were
appropriate for the late nineties and what's more, long overdue.
Neither of us
believed it for a minute, but for some reason, neither of us was
willing to
abandon the illusion, either. Go figure.

While
I
normally only carried a weapon when it seemed likely I might need one,
these
days I didn't go to the John without considering the question of how
many
rounds I was carrying. The judge's trial began in a couple of weeks. I
figured
that once I testified, the threat was over. At least I hoped so.
Despite our
best efforts, the strain was wearing us down. Without consciously
willing it
so, lately, more often than not we found ourselves staying at home,
watching
the boob tube in darkened rooms. I spent the nights lying awake
listening to
Rebecca toss and turn and trying to remember what programs we'd watched.

My
sleep
patterns had been a mess ever since Frankie's little visit. I'd taken
to dawn
runs around Greenlake as a way to work off some of the stress. I hated
running,
but what the hell, I was up.

It's
a little
under three miles around the lake. When I was a kid, I'd run around and
around
until I lost interest. Back then, it was more of a swamp than a lake.
These
days, they pump it full of reservoir water to keep it pretty, and if I
manage
to jog around it once without pulling a muscle or projectile vomiting
it makes
my whole day.

I
always start
and end at the south end of the lake by the Mussert Shell House. It's a
dark
little glen with an attached parking lot and the only part of the lake
that
doesn't directly front a city street. I figured if I started and ended
there, I
could make all the noise I wanted and not bother anybody. After all,
wouldn't
want the sound of my puking and wheezing to keep anybody up. It never
occurred
to me that it was also an excellent choice for a kill zone.

I
was walking
in circles out at the end of a twenty-foot floating dock that juts out
into the
lake, trying to catch my breath and spitting into the water, when he
walked by
on the path, giving me a curt nod of the head before disappearing
behind the
Shell House.

He
should have
gone shopping at Eddie Bauer first. Or maybe REI. Gotten himself a nice
earth-tone Gor-Tex shell, some chinos, a pair of waterproof
wafflestompers and
a FREE TIBET button. If he'd blended in better, he and his partner
would have
ended up back in Vegas with the hookers, and I, in all probability,
would have
ended up dead. As it was, he stuck out like a barnacle in a béarnaise
sauce.

About
forty
years old and twenty pounds overweight, he'd greased his hair into an
old-fashioned pompadour with a sharp part on my side. Bob's Big Boy.
Not only
was he wearing the last leisure suit in America, but the poster boy for
polyester was also carrying a four-foot floral arrangement wrapped in
newspaper. Flowers for his girlfriend. Long-stemmed. Real long. At
five-fifteen
on a Tuesday morning. Every hair on my body suddenly stood on end.

The
fact that
they were here at this time of the morning meant they'd been casing me
for a
couple of days and knew my habits. The fact that I hadn't spotted them
meant I
was getting old and sloppy.

I
reached
behind me and tried to bring the automatic out from under the back of
the vest,
but I was sweaty and everything was stuck to me. Before I got my hand
to the
gun, he came roaring back around the corner of the building, sprinting
down the
asphalt ramp toward the landward end of the dock, spewing flowers in
his wake.
A pair of blue steel nostrils the size of my fists now protruded from
the front
of the flapping newspaper. He was no more than twenty-five feet from me
when he
let fly with the sawed-off shotgun, emptying both barrels. Double ought
buck
shells contain what amounts to four thirty-two-caliber projectiles,
coming at
something like a thousand miles an hour. Three of them hit me directly
in the
Kevlar vest. The fourth, although I didn't know it until later, entered
the soft
flesh of my left arm just above the elbow. At the time, I was too busy
to
notice. The last image I had was of Mm, still in full stride, cracking
the gun
and reaching into his pocket for more shells.

The
impact blew
me completely off the end of the dock, sending me down into the dark
water,
where my primal urge to breach and breathe was instantly overcome by
the
certainty that if I so much as poked my head above the surface, he'd
blow it
clean off.

I
groped around
in front of me in the murky water and found one of the concrete-filled
drums
which had been sunk in the lake to hold the dock in place. The ribbed
metal was
cold and slick with algae. I wrapped both arms around the barrel and
pulled
myself to the bottom of the lake. The water was about six feet deep and
teeth-chattering cold. I'd been out of breath from running, and
whatever air I
had in my lungs had been driven out by the impact of the slugs. I'd
only been
down about ten seconds, but shotgun or no shotgun, I had to breathe.

With
the last
of my strength, I pulled myself past the submerged barrel, pushed hard
off its
surface with my feet and came up under the dock. I held my nose and
mouth with
my hand, forcing myself not to sputter or gasp. I eased my lungs full
and
looked up. Through the cracks between the boards, I could see the
outline of
his feet silhouetted against the gray morning sky. He had no reason to
be
careful; he'd seen the slugs hit me full in the chest. He was standing
out at
the end, waiting for me to float up so he could pump another load into
me.

As
I moved his
way, I pulled the nine-millimeter from the small of my back and thumbed
off the
safety. I moved slowly, walking on the bottom, making sure I didn't
create
ripples. I got right between his feet, put the muzzle of the gun tight
against
the treated boards, checked the angle to make sure it was perpendicular
and
pulled the trigger three times. He hit the deck like he'd been dropped
out of a
helicopter.

I
swallowed
some more air, dipped my head under the water and pulled myself out
from under
the dock. He lay with his face no more than a foot from mine, rocking
in agony
and moaning, his eyes screwed shut, both hands clutching his groin. I
was so
close that when I shot him in the forehead, I saw hair fly from the
back of his
head.

I
didn't have
time to dwell on it. The sound of squealing tires jerked my head toward
the
parking lot. His partner had probably been watching my car, in case I
changed
my morning routine. The sound of two weapons had brought him running.

I
heard him
shout. "Lamar, you okay?" He waited a minute and then tried again.
"Lamar, come on, answer me, boy."

I
stood
shivering in the chin-deep water using the now-departed Lamar as a
shield. The
partner poked his head around the corner of the building and then
quickly pulled
it back. He was blond and younger.

"Lamar,
can you hear me?" he shouted.

I
reached under
the front of the vest and tore off one of the extra clips which I'd
taped to my
chest. I put it on the dock next to Lamar's nose. A small stream of
blood
rolled down the side of the dock and into the water beside me. In the
distance,
a siren was winding our way. Somebody had called the cops. I mouthed a
silent
prayer.

I'll
give the
kid credit for loyalty or maybe some sort of overdeveloped sense of
male
bonding. Even with an approaching siren whooping in his ears, he wasn't
about
to leave his buddy. He came out from the building in a combat stance.
Moving
quickly, waving a square black Uzi from side to side, spinning as he
searched
for a target.

He
spotted the
body. "Oh, shit, Lamar," he cried.

He
never saw
me. When he looked to the right, I bobbed up out of the water, steadied
both
hands on the edge of the dock and shot him in the chest He staggered
backward
and then sat down on the pavement with his legs spread out before him
like a
child at play. The Uzi slipped from his fingers, ratcheting off several
rounds
as it hit the pavement and then suddenly everything went quiet. I was
still
standing in the water, shaking uncontrollably when the cops arrived and
pried
the automatic from my stiff fingers.

STILLMAN
AGAIN
SPOKE directly to Judge Downs. "Your Honor, please let the record show
that Mr. Waterman's assailants have since been positively identified as
Lamar
B. Highsmith of Winnemucca, Nevada,
and Johnny Dale Smits Jr.
Of Hayden Lake, Idaho. Mr. Highsmith
was pronounced dead at
the scene, the victim of multiple gunshot wounds. Mr. Smits will be
appearing
as a witness for the prosecution later in these proceedings." "So
noted," she said.

They
said I
missed his heart by an inch, but if I were to judge, I'd say I must
have nicked
it. Faced with the death penalty for aggravated murder, Johnny Dale
Smits
rolled over like a trained seal. Once he started talking, they couldn't
shut
him up. In return for life without possibility of parole, he confessed
to
everything but the Lindbergh kidnapping. The grand jury had been
particularly
interested in the part of his story about how the judge had insisted
that
Felicia Mendoza must not be shot, how he wanted what he called "that
little
greaser" to suffer big-time before she died. I heard that one of the
grand
jurors fainted during Smits' vivid depiction of the crime, and that a
veteran
court stenographer had to be excused.

A
week later, a
scant forty-five minutes after Judge Downs issued her final
instructions, the
jury delivered a verdict of aggravated murder in the first degree, with
a
recommendation for the death penalty.

On
my way down
the courthouse steps after the verdict, Rebecca clung to my good arm
with both
hands. About halfway down, Tracy Tanaka of KOMO TV-9 shoved a
microphone in
front of my face. "How do you feel about the verdict, Mr. Waterman?"
she asked.

I
answered
without thinking. "I feel lighter," I said. "Much lighter."

Tracy
made a disgusted face and
sprinted up
the steps toward Dan Hennessey. Rebecca hugged my arm tighter.

First
I tried
the zoo, but Terry, the bartender, said they hadn't been in for the
better part
of a week. "End of the month," he explained with a wink. "This
time of year, they probably gone to the beach."

Terry's
phrase
"gone to the beach" was absolute testimony to the flexibility of
language. In polite society, the notion of having gone to the beach
conjures
the heady aroma of tanning unguents and salt air, the images of
colorful umbrellas
and graceful children cavorting o'er sparkling sand. In this case,
however, the
phrase "gone to the beach" meant the Boys, having swilled the last of
their monthly stipends, were temporarily broke and sleeping down on the
waterfront in Myrtle Edwards Park. A monthly pilgrimage which provided
not only
a scenic marine-environ suitable to the season, but front-row
panhandling
access to the swarms of cash-heavy tourists who strolled the area
during the
daylight hours.

Harold
Green,
Ralph Batista and George Paris had once been local people of some
repute. They
were the remnants of another age, the last mortal remains of my old
man's
grass-roots political machine and my most tangible connection to a
famous
father who, to me, had become little more than the collection of tall
tales
which his life had engendered.

Whenever
I can,
I like to find them a little work. Relatively sober, they make great
surveillance operatives. They can hang around a building forever and
nobody
notices them. They're invisible. Mr. and Ms. Clean White America have
systematically trained their optic nerves to exclude the poor and the
homeless.
So untidy, you know.

I
used to
wonder about this selective vision. At first, I went along with the
traditional
wisdom which said that the sight of society's dregs simply hit too
close to
home, for most people. That the destitute merely provided a grim and
unwanted
reminder of the tenuous nature of our own purchase on middle-class
life.
"There but for fortune go I" and all that. Lately, I think maybe it
goes a bit deeper.

I've
come to
believe that these vagrants unwittingly stumble into the minefield of
our
deepest unacknowledged fears. You know the ones. The voice that wonders
just
how long you're going to be able to keep fooling all of the people all
of the
time. The insistent whisper that questions if you really deserve all
the
blessings you have and knows, with absolute certainty, that the answer
is an
unequivocal no fucking way.