The Bum's Rush (24 page)

"What now?" Jed asked as we cruised past.

"Go up to the light and take a right."

He followed directions. "Keep following the wall,"
I said as we headed north down 144th. Piece by piece, a
steel-and-Plexiglas Metro bus stop extruded itself into the headlights'
path.

"Pull over up here. Up past the bus stop," I said.
Jed slipped the car to the curb, shut down, and turned off the lights.
We were at the north side of the complex. Ryder Avenue Northwest. Even
in the ghostly purple light, decline peeked out from the untrimmed
shrubs, littered low with cans and bottles, decorated above with shiny
bits of windblown refuse stuck crookedly up among the knobby roots.

Middlebrow 'burbs working their way toward low. A
scant three blocks from the strip malls, which even here lit the night
to the point where no stars were visible in a clear sky. Probably
changed hands and lost a lot of equity when they put this pig of a
project in across the street. They'd fought in court for years, but
eventually lost out to the powers that be. From across the narrow road, the
view from the front windows must have been like being in the warden's
house of a maximum-security prison. All wall.

We opted for geezer easy, dragging the green metal
trash container from the bus stop to the base of the wall, climbing up
and over in two long steps. Easy. Getting down the other side was,
however, another matter. When I was a younger man, I could jump from
considerable heights and land lightly, feathering down quietly,
bouncing once on the balls of my feet as if the dictates of gravity had
been waived. Nowadays, something has changed. Something scientific, I'm
convinced. My specific gravity, maybe. It must be something like that,
because lately, if it's much more than, say, six feet, I hit the ground
with all the wild-eyed finesse of a dairy cow flailing down an elevator
shaft.

My single source of solace was that Jed was even
worse, landing piteously, splatting like a rotten melon, barely missing
a thick little rhododendron whose pruned, upraised fingers would surely
have probed him unspeakably. Instead, at the last moment he landed on
his side in a great whoosh of air Like some subterranean digging
creature found beached in beauty bark.

We both checked for broken bones and chipped teeth
as we limped along the sidewalk next to the buildings. Building
thirty-seven. We were looking for seventeen. Thirty eight. Wrong way.
To the rear march.

Half a block up, I stepped out into the street to
look at the handy map. Even beneath the swirls of spray paint, I could
see that the place was drawn out like a wheel. The hub was the office,
along with the fitness center, a couple of pools, and some sort of
communal party area. The buildings fanned out from there in groups of
eight, eventually reaching the round border road that we now were on.
The spaces in the corners, where the circle met the
square of the outside wall, were little mini-parks and play areas. How
nice. Seventeen was closest to the hub five streets up. I stepped back
up on the sidewalk and started in that direction.

"Doesn't look so bad," Jed commented as we walked along.

At first glance Overtake Village was much like any
other ant-colony apartment complex. I'm sure they wanted it that way.
When you forcibly inject thousands of recent immigrants into as chichi
and trendy a community as Bellevue, you better do everything possible
to be unobtrusive. Of course, it hadn't worked. After a protracted
court battle, the result was that Bellevue now had both a right and a
wrong side of the tracks.

West of the interstate was the Bellevue of old
Bellevue Square German car, pinkie-in-the-air rich, spread out along
Meydenbaur Bay and Lake Washington, hiding behind gates and shrubs all
the way up to Medina, where Bill Gates was building the missus a quaint
little bungalow about the size of Grand Central Station.

East of the highway, always the more commercial
poor relation anyway, had been thrown to the dogs of development and
diversity and summarily swallowed whole. As its opponents had so loudly
insisted, Overtake Village had merely been the beginning. Hindsight.

The cars were an odd mixture of older American gas
hogs and thrashed imports. Almost nothing new. In the first recreation
area we passed, the basketball stanchions held netless rims that had
been bent all the way down like dejected lower lips. Jed put a hand on
my arm.

Up ahead, several bodies moved about in the shadows. I kept walking. Jed tagged along. "Are you armed?" he whispered to my back.

"Thought you said it wasn't so bad," I said. Asian
kids. Out crawling cars. Looking for trouble while their parents were
out killing themselves, working double and triple shifts, earning a
living. Four, maybe five of them, wearing the uniform of the day.
Prison chic. Huge saggy pants over expensive unlaced Nikes. Enormous
hooded sweatshirts, hood up, covering knitted watchcaps pulled down
nearly to their eyes. They milled around, pretending they didn't see
us, bouncing to the beat of their internal hip-hop. I kept walking.
They had their choreography down. The collective body language screamed
that they'd done this before.

The tallest of the group, pushing six feet, leaned
back against the peeling hood of a red Camaro, extending his crossed
feet over the sidewalk, forcing me to either walk in the flower bed or
step over him. I stopped and looked down at his shoes and then back up
at the kid. He was maybe seventeen, with the broad, flat face common to
Southeast Asia and the lifeless eyes common to wannabe gangstas. The
other four, all younger and smaller than Mr. Feet, began to flare out
in a loose circle as we passed. I kept my eyes on Mr. Feet. If there
was going to be trouble, and there sure as hell was, it would come from
him. I probably should have tried harder to talk us through it, but it
had been a hell of a day, and I'd long since used up my ration of
patience.

"This here is a toll road," he said without moving. "You don't say."

"Yeah, but I do." He showed me an acre of teeth, then looked past Jed toward his buddies.

"Nice shoes," I said. "You blow somebody for them?"

His wide nostrils flared and the black eyes
twitched, but I'll say this for the kid, at least he wasn't into idle
chatter. No threats. No snappy rejoinders. He bumped himself off the
car. We stood no more than a foot apart. He covered my eyes with his
for a long moment and then looked down at the space between us and
turned away. With a resigned shrug, he stepped around to the left into
the gap between cars and took a single long stride out toward the
street. Just one.

For a kid, he was good. In a single oiled motion,
he pulled his left hand from his coat pocket as if to steady himself on
the hood and then, using the car for leverage, pivoted himself quickly
back my way. His right hand came straight over the top, airmailing a
wicked pair of brass knuckles straight at my forehead. I could smell
the cheap metal as it whisked just over my head. If I hadn't been
ready, he would have checked me into either the hospital or the
graveyard.

I moved all of me two feet to the right and stepped
quickly into the breach, kneeing him in the balls while the force of
his own blow still carried him toward me. With the snap of a sail, my
knee drove the sagging crotch of his pants the two feet back up where
it belonged. The force of my knee nearly lifted him from the ground. A
round mouth sucked in a huge chunk of air. Both hands flew to his groin.

I grabbed him by the back of the hood, spun him,
and drove his face down onto the hood of the Camaro with a long, hollow
bong. His nose made a noise like the snapping of a stale Saltine,
mostly crisp but a little doughy in the middle.

The cap came off in my hand as he slid to the
pavement. He fought so hard for breath, he hadn't even noticed his
nose. I turned toward Jed and the others. Just Jed. The others were slapping soles and fading blurs in the distant streetlights.

"Nice friends," I said.

"Jesus, Leo. You didn't have to--"

"Yeah." I smiled. "I do kinda feel like Bernie Goetz."

When I got through with the laughing fit, I wiped my face with my hands and stood upright.

"I think I'm getting giddy," I said. "Let's go. I don't want to have to worry about those little pricks being behind us."

I took him by the arm and marched him around the writhing figure on the sidewalk. "What about--"

"He'll be okay," I assured him. "Once they clean out their drawers, the others will come back for him."

He kept looking back over his shoulder as I hustled
him up the sidewalk, moving around the loop until the much distressed
Mr. Feet was out of sight. i

I changed the subject. "How do you want to handle 1 this?"

"Firmly."

"We gonna talk our way in or are we just plain going in?"

"We're going to try the former and be prepared for
the 1 | latter. I think when she hears what I have to say, she'll come
around."

We continued up the sidewalk until the little blue
sign on the corner said 7-14. Seven-oh-three was on the top floor of
the building, hardly more than a good piss from the back door of the
indoor pool. The smell of institutional chlorine levels and fresh paint
swirled about our heads as we stood on the ribbed concrete on either
side of the door.

Jed tugged the knitted part of his brown leather
jacket back down around his waist and then found my eyes. He nodded. I
pounded the door hard five times and waited.

From behind the door, "Who is it?"

I pulled my license from my pocket, held it up in front of the peephole for a second, and then snapped it shut.

"Seattle Police, Miss Mendolson. Open the door."

Jed's eyebrows formed a pair of question marks.
Hearing a scratching noise on the inside of the door, I stepped back to
the far rail. The door opened on two inches of gold chain. One
frightened brown eye peeked out. I took two quick steps forward and hit
the door with my hip, tearing the cheap hasp from the door frame,
sending the woman reeling back into the room. I grabbed Jed by the arm,
propelled him into the room, and locked the door behind us.

She wore a burgundy sweatshirt with "Harvard"
emblazoned across the front, a pair of gray sweatpants, and fluffy
black slippers. No longer reeling, however, she held an aluminum
baseball bat in what appeared to be a pair of skilled hands. Down at
the end. No choking up. Her feet were spread and moving. She held the
bat high and waved the end at us, kind of like Edgar Martinez sitting
on the fastball. Her stance suggested competence born of repetition. I
kept my distance.

"You're not the police," she said. "You get out of here, you hear me? You get out of here."

We stayed put. "No. We're not the police," 1 said.
"My name is Leo Waterman." I reached into my pocket. She became more
agitated, moving around in the batter's box now, more like the manic
twitchings of Gary Sheffield than the calm resolve of Edgar Martinez. I
held up my license. "I'm a private investigator. This is Jed James." He
waved a business card. "Mr. James is vice chairman of the King County
library board." Take that.

I'd expected her to wilt. No such luck. She dug in. Moving back in the box. Wiping out the rear line.
Spreading her stance and leaning pugnaciously out over the plate like
Albert Belle doing his famous impression of Mike Tyson brandishing a
big twig.

"You get out," she repeated.

Jed picked up the ball. "You can have us or you can
have the police. Take your pick." He suddenly moved across the room to
the wooden apple box working overtime as an end table and lifted the
receiver from the white princess phone. "Make up your mind, honey. Tell
me how you want it. Either put down that bat and talk to us, or let's
let the cops sort this out." He started to dial.

The bluff worked. "Stop," she said after Jed pushed
the second button. Jed paused, finger poised. A series of thin wrinkles
I hadn't noticed before crept out from her eyes, and her mouth turned
down. She flipped the bat out onto the blue carpet where the dinette
set would have been. She put her hands on her hips and turned her back
on us, wandering behind the breakfast bar back into the kitchen.

"It's over," I said soothingly. "Relax. We're going to try to help you as much as we can."

She was every bit as sharp as everyone had said. It
took her only about ten seconds to regain her composure and think her
way through it.

"Bullshit," she said under her breath. She turned
quickly and moved toward the bat. I was standing on it. She began
yelling. "You're not going to call the cops. If you two were willing to
call the cops, you'd have done that already. You would have showed up
with them."

She took another step toward me.

I shook my head. "I generally try not to hit women," I said. "But there have been exceptions."

She stepped right up into my face. "You think you're pretty tough, don't you now, Mr. Detective?"

"It's in the thug handbook." I gave her the scout's honor sign.

"Thou shall not get beat up by librarians."

"I want to see an attorney," she said.

I poked my thumb over my shoulder. "You're in luck.
Jed's an attorney. As a matter of fact, he's my attorney, and a damn
fine one, I might add. I couldn't recommend him more highly."

She stepped around me and faced Jed. "If you
actually are an attorney which I doubt then you're an officer of the
court, and I am telling you, as an officer of the court, that I, as a
person with rights, want to consult an attorney." Same routine I'd run
on Gogolac.

"You'll do time," Jed said quietly. "Eighteen
months minimum. I don't care who your attorney is or how spotless your
record may be grand theft, public funds, a position of trust a
considerable sum. If you get real good representation, and I mean
stellar advice, maybe you get to do it in King County instead of at a
state school, but either way, you do some time. The public will demand
it."