Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (26 page)

“Aye, aye, Captain,” he sneered.

As he slid even with me I put a hand on his chest and looked him dead in the eye. “Don’t get cute here, Brett,” I warned. “Remember, I’ve got your wallet, your cell phone, and your car keys. Just put the boat under the dock and get back on board.” I leaned in closer. “I found you once; I can find you again.”

He started off. I stopped him again. “I’ll make finding you and killing you my life’s work.” The look in his eyes said he believed me.

I stood at the rail and watched as he used the emergency paddle to move the boat into place. Once he was next to the dock, he gave it a hard paddle, ducked his head, and disappeared from view. A tense minute passed. And then another. I was beginning to worry. He’d been under the dock for what seemed like quite awhile when I saw a hand pop out and grab the dock’s ladder. Two seconds later he was scurrying upward like a spider monkey. About halfway to the top, one of the ancient rungs suddenly gave way. I held my breath as he caught himself with his arms and pulled himself high enough for his foot to find the next rung.

“Damn ladder’s seen better days,” he groused as he climbed back on board.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Where to?”

“To see a man about a gun,” I said.

The timing was perfect. By the time we motored back to Seattle, tied
Yachts of Fun
to the outside guest dock at the Elliot Bay Marina, and caught a cab back to my car, it was nearly two in the morning, a tad late for the rank and file, but just about the time Joey Ortega was starting his work day.

If the local crime scene were a movie, Joey would be in the credits as the executive producer. That’s what he did; he produced things. You needed a cold piece, Joe would produce it. You needed your very own armored car? No problem. A flamethrower? Diesel or unleaded? You name it, Joe could produce it. All for a price, of course.

While I hadn’t availed myself of his services in a number of years, and certainly wasn’t to be counted among his circle of friends, assuming he had one, which I doubted, Joe and I were nonetheless joined at the hip. Joe’s father, Frankie Ortega, had been my father’s chief persuader and hatchet man for the better part of thirty years.

Right after their final attempt to pry Big Bill Waterman’s estate from my trust fund had failed, a bitter SPD police captain confided to me that the department estimated that Frankie Ortega was, in some capacity or another, involved in something like twenty-five murders and disappearances,
nearly all of which were, in some way or another, connected to my old man’s dirty dealings.

I think maybe Captain Crunch figured this awful rev-elation would so unnerve me that I’d feel guilty and call a press conference where I’d tearfully give the money back to the city and apologize for my father’s myriad transgressions. Much as I hated to disappoint, I’d long since decided that none of that had anything to do with me. I was just a kid when most of it was going on. Joey Ortega and I used to pitch horseshoes and play Wiffle Ball in the backyard on summer days, while inside the house, Frankie and my father sautéed their schemes. Hell, right after I got my first driver’s license, we even double-dated several times. The Lombardi sisters, Connie and Donna.

Unlike me, however, Joey had relished the idea of taking up where his father left off, and unlike Junior Bailey, he was good at it. While Frankie had handled the wet work personally, Joey outsourced. All Joey did these days was produce things.

I didn’t have his number anymore, but I knew where to find him this time of night. Ever since we’d grown up and haired over, Joey had operated from the upstairs offices of a gentleman’s club on Lake City Way, about five miles north of downtown.

Like every other strip club owner in King County, Joey found himself subject to constant harassment from bluenosed local authorities, whose mission in life seemed to be ridding the world of nocturnally inclined young women and those naughty young men who were inclined to incline them.

As a result, the joint’s name had changed innumerable times over the years, as drug and prostitution allegations
had necessitated closing down for a week and slinging “Under New Management” banners across the front of the building. The club’s name morphed from semi-clever monikers such as Camelot, to somewhat racier titles such as Pole Position and Volcanic Eruptions, and, back in the late 1990s, to my personal favorite, Starbutts. These days, it went by the name of Club Exxxtacy. The management, of course, never changed. Only the banners.

Cost us twenty bucks apiece to get in the door. I nudged Brett along in front of me. The joint was nearly deserted. Without dozens of sweating bodies to soak up some of the sound, the booming music rattled the fillings in my teeth as we shuffled inside. A brace of bored bartenders leered at us like hyenas over a carcass.

Brett immediately became fixated on the prodigiously appointed young woman communing with a brass fireman’s pole at the near corner of the stage. I butted him with my chest to keep him moving, bumping him toward the back corner of the room and the little fire hydrant of a guy leaning against the brick wall.

A tired-looking waitress was on us like a lamprey eel, bellowing over the music about a three-drink minimum, but I shook her off and kept nudging Brett forward. The door was painted the same color as the wall and didn’t have a knob, making it nearly invisible until you were right up on it.

A pair of high-resolution surveillance cameras tracked our progress across the floor. The guy at the door was as wide as he was tall. Looked like George Raft was his tailor. I watched his eyes flicker as the Bluetooth earpiece
whispered sweet somethings in his ear, and then heard the soft snick of the electronic lock.

He nodded at me. “Just you,” he said, pulling the door open. The door was wood on the outside only. The rest of it was steel, half as thick as a bank vault.

“Keep an eye on him for me,” I told the guy. “He has a tendency to get lost.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he assured me.

By the time I mounted the second stair, the door had automatically locked behind me, and the boom of the music had faded to silence. I mounted the dozen or so stairs and turned left. The office door was wide open.

Joey was alone in the office, which was how he’d managed to stay out of the slammer for all these years. Joey talked to nobody. You wanted to talk to Joey, you had to come to him. And whatever you wanted wasn’t going any further than the two of you, because you two were the only ones in attendance.

He spent a great deal of time and money making sure nobody bugged his office and he never, absolutely never, did business on the phone.

He looked a lot like his father. Maybe five-foot-seven and a hundred-and-forty pounds. Same wavy black hair and pencil-thin mustache. Same narrow face and black watchful eyes that never missed a thing.

He came out from behind the desk and threw a bear hug on me. “Hey, big boy,” he said with a grin. “Been a long time.”

“Too long,” I said and pulled him tight to my chest.

He stepped a yard away and looked me over like a lunch menu, smiled, and gestured magnanimously toward the
yellow leather chair in front of his desk. “Siddown, siddown,” he said as he gingerly made his way back to his desk chair.

I watched as he eased himself onto the seat with extreme care. I wasn’t going to ask, but he caught me watching and told me anyway. “Hemorrhoids, man,” he hissed. “Gotta have something done.”

“Sorry to hear about it,” I offered.

“Not as sorry as I am,” he assured me. He pinned me with his little ebony eyes. “So what’s up?”

I told him. Not all of it. I left out the stuff he didn’t need to know. He listened intently and without comment.

“Fucking Colombians,” he said when I’d finished. “They’re the ones pushing all the scag out of B.C. Up there, you come up with half a ton of pure, you got it from the Colombians.”

“I need a gun,” I said.

He made a “you gotta be kidding me” face and shook his head. “Not your thing, Leo,” he said.

He was right, of course. In the twenty or so years I’d been a private eye, I’d never carried so much as a pocket-knife, let alone a gun. The way I figured it, you didn’t need a gun unless you intended to shoot someone, and since I didn’t, I had no reason to be heeled.

“Something with a hundred-yard range and serious stopping power.”

“I repeat, Leo. Guns ain’t your bailiwick.”

“Maybe some kind of night vision sight too.”

“You need a gun like a fish needs a bicycle.”

“And it probably best be waterproof.” I shrugged. “You never know.”

He leaned back in the chair and thought it over. “Gimme a few days. I can put you on some serious contractors. I can…”

“I haven’t got a few days,” I said. I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time. “Got about twenty hours.”

Joey ruminated for another minute and a half. “Better get you something you can squirt like a garden hose then,” he said finally.

“Something easy to use,” I said.

“This is coming down at night?”

I said it was.

“We’ll get you tracers, so you can see where they’re going. Makes it easier to zero in on what you’re aiming at.” He rolled his eyes. “You know, in case, God forbid, you ain’t much of a shot.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You need it tomorrow?” he said.

“Yeah.”

He heaved a sigh and held out his hand. “Where’s this boat now?”

“Elliot Bay Marina.”

“Over by Magnolia?”

“That’s the one,” I said.

“What’s the name of this barge?”

I told him. He made a disgusted face.

“Cute,” he said and got to his feet. “One good thing about the Colombians is that they mind their own business. They got a beef it’ll be with this Junior guy. You give ’em what they came for, and they’ll take it and leave. Anything happens after that gonna come from this Junior guy. They ain’t gonna do his dirty work for him.”

I liked the sound of that because it meant Junior and his minions would be on a short leash until the exchange was completed. Whatever Junior and the pervo twins had in mind for us would have to wait until the heroin changed hands. It wasn’t much, but if I held any edge at all, that was it.

I got to my feet. “Thanks.”

He made a pained face. “Be careful, Leo. You’re in way over your head here.”

“I know,” I admitted.

“I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

At the bottom of the stairs, the door swung open on its own. The pulsing music and the flashing lights hit me on the face like a bucket of spit. I was still coming to grips with the sensory overload when the door closed behind me. Brett didn’t notice I was back. He was too busy hitting on the waitress.

For want of a better plan, I took Brett home with me. I locked us in my bedroom and pocketed the old-fashioned skeleton key. Because my bedroom windows overlooked the garden and were not visible from the street, my insurance company had insisted the windows be equipped with burglar bars. That meant the only way out of the room was either over or through me, and I didn’t figure Brett was up to either. Fortunately for both of us, neither did he.

We slept, if that’s what six hours of nightmares could be called, in the same bed, fully dressed, each of us lost in our personal house of horrors, until my eyes popped open
and the digital clock informed me that it was 10:07 in the morning.

To my left, Brett lay sprawled on his back, one arm thrown over his bruised forehead, snoring lightly. He had a fat upper lip and his cheeks were scraped up pretty good. Random blood spatter decorated the front of his shirt like a Jackson Pollock painting.

I rolled to the right and dropped my feet onto the floor. My shoulder throbbed. I reached up to scratch the side of my head and inadvertently hit my ear. The pain nearly blinded me. I groaned and flopped back onto the mattress, gritting my teeth, waiting for the red cloud to clear.

By the time I was ready to sit up again, Brett was groaning himself to consciousness. While he was in the shower, I threw his clothes in the washing machine. By the time we’d dried his duds, cleaned ourselves up, and choked down breakfast, it was damn near noon. All the while, a little voice in my head was counting off the hours. Ten hours and fifty minutes, it whispered as we backed out of the garage.