Hard Cold Winter

For Mom and For Dad, with Love

They took me to the library and let me run

I
STOOD ON A DARK
road, on the north side of the ship canal that wound like a lazy snake off Puget Sound. Wind coming off the water stripped another twenty degrees from a night that was already below freezing. No homeless in the little park across the canal tonight. They knew better. Stay in one place too long, and this cold would kill you.

The road was empty. Normal for midnight on a Saturday, but the place might have been just as quiet at noon. Across the road from me was a row of small warehouses lining the canal. A few of the warehouses boasted unbroken windows and exterior lights, weak sixty-watt dots that barely cracked the gloom. Most of the business owners had given up, and boarded up. A neighborhood on the final and fastest part of its downslope.

One feeble lamp dusted specks of light over black letters painted five feet high on the warehouse nearest me. After a decade or two of erosion by rain and wind, the words were barely visible on the cracked wood siding.
LONERGAN REPAIR LLC
.

Nobody in sight.

But lots of cars.

Not all grouped out in front of the Lonergan building. Nothing that obvious. But parked here and there along the road and on the side streets were Camaros and Beemer 6 convertibles and higher-end Toyotas with aftermarket racing gear. I’d marked the cars when I’d circled around, getting a feel for the place. Cars for young guys, guys with money to burn. The resale value of my old blue Dodge pickup wouldn’t buy a set of rims for most of them.

There was one guard, watching me from the driver’s seat of a Ford Excursion thirty yards up the road. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the Ford’s engine. So he could keep the heater going.

My cell phone showed no signal here. Not surprising. There would be no calling ahead to announce my arrival.

I walked across the road and up to the warehouse, and around the side of the building toward the water. My breath made visible puffs in the air. The leather of my hiking boots creaked. I’d bought them when I’d returned home to Seattle to stay, less than a month before, and they weren’t completely broken in.

The back of the warehouse faced the canal. On the loading dock, six steps up from the pavement, the big metal rolling door was down. Light shone from underneath, where the rubber stripping was cracked with age. I could hear the faint sound of many voices inside, blended together.

At the far side of the dock was a human-sized door, also closed. A man leaned against it, smoking a cigarette, looking at me. With only the dim light coming across the water, neither of us could see each other clearly. He had a walkie-talkie to his ear. Maybe complaining about the cold to his partner, who was warm and cozy in the Excursion.

I walked up the steps and across the loading dock.

“Willard called me,” I said.

He glanced down at the bleach-stained Mariners sweatshirt I was wearing. My grandfather’s. Now mine. I’d inherited it along with almost all of Dono’s other worldly goods ten months ago, the last time I was in Seattle. But I still tended to think of the house and everything inside of it as his.

“What’s your name?” the guard asked. He was a beefy guy, about two bucks and change and taller than me. He’d weighed closer to one-ninety when he’d bought his black sport coat. His biceps and shoulders strained the fabric. Maybe it was intentional.

“Get Willard,” I said, stepping a little closer. The guard’s eyes caught the scars on my face, held there. His jaw went a little slack.

“O-kay, Chief,” he said. “I know who you mean. Stay right here.”

He knocked twice on the door, his eyes still on me, and it opened a crack. He went in. Light flooded out onto the dock, and I caught a glimpse of a slim girl lifting a tray of drinks from a bar, and another guard in another black sport coat, glowering at me before the door closed.

When it opened, light didn’t come booming out again. There was no room for it, not around Will Willard.

Willard was one of the largest men I’d ever known. It wasn’t just his height, or weight. He was massive. Like a granite block from a quarry, cut to man-shape and set loose.

“Get in here,” he said. His voice had come from the same pit, pieces smashed to gravel and turned over and over in a concrete mixer.

I followed him into the bright interior of the warehouse, the light provided by dozens of work lamps and the occasional tiki torch. Half a dozen circular tables covered in green felt were set up around the broad room. Six or eight men sat at each, playing cards. Each table had a dealer, and a wooden shoe from which the dealers swept cards across the felt. All of the dealers were female, dressed in black blouses and short black skirts. All of them looked attractive from where I was standing. If it wasn’t for the warehouse setting, it could have been the back room at any tribal casino in the state.

“Nice setup,” I said.

“Portable,” Willard said. “It all fits into a moving van.”

I wondered if he counted the hot dealers as part of that truckload. “This a regular thing for you?”

“Regular enough.”

Enough to mean he didn’t have to set up other jobs, I guessed. Wil
lard was in the same line of work as my grandfather had been. They had been partners, on occasion. Burglaries. Robbery. Whatever paid. With his giant size, Willard was way too memorable to work up front, but he could handle a steering wheel or a welding torch better than most. Reliable. And a bigger brain than anyone would expect, behind that Cro-Magnon brow.

“Is it yours?” I said.

Willard didn’t reply. I waited, watching the tables. The card games were simple. Blackjack or Texas or variations of stud. The players were all male, and all under thirty. An even assortment of white and Asian and Indian, outfitted in Seattle Hip—laser-straight blue jeans and thick boots and plaid button-downs and logo T-shirts too expensive to look new. I guessed them for the sons of tech movers and venture capital shakers, or maybe they were rising stars themselves. Every once in a while, one of them would glance over at Willard. He had that effect.

I recognized one player. Reuben Kuznetsov. He hadn’t spotted me yet. If I was lucky, he would stay focused on his cards.

“It’s a partnership,” Willard said finally. “I take it on the road. Kick a little up to whoever has the territory. Everybody wins.”

“Way cool crowd.”

He exhaled slowly. “It is what it is. Kids sick of online poker want a taste of the real thing.”

And an underground game, staffed by thugs and dealt by babes, would make a hell of a lot cooler story for them than driving out to the Indian reservations to join the blue-hairs. Judging by the cars outside, I put the buy-in somewhere in the low five figures. With a third of it going to the house, for the privilege.

“You’re using a jammer,” I said, stating the obvious. No way any of this was winding up on some geek’s Twitter feed.

Willard almost sighed. “It’s not enough. We have to put all the gadgets into a box, just to keep the idiots from snapping pictures. It’s like taking away a hype’s syringe.”

“So why am I seeing all this glory?” I said.

Willard walked slowly around to the back of the room. I followed
him to the small bar. It was a real bar, with sinks and soda guns, with the whole thing on casters for easy transport. A petite girl with a waist-length fall of dark brown hair stood behind it. She gave us both a big smile.

“You want?” Willard said to me.

“If you mean a drink, I’ll take whiskey. Neat.”

“You got a brand, handsome?” asked the bartender.

“Anything Irish,” I said.

“Faithful to your roots,” said Willard.

“Dono would have enjoyed this.” I nodded at the room. The bartender poured us both two fingers of Jameson 12 in crystal lowball glasses. Posh.

“Here’s to him,” said Willard, “I miss the son of a bitch.”

We drank. I was enjoying the first icy touch of air in my throat chasing the liquor when someone put a hand on my shoulder.

“I know this fucking face,” said Reuben K. “Well, half of it, anyway.” He laughed at his own joke. So did the short guy standing behind him, on cue.

“Reuben,” I said.

Reuben Kuznetsov was the eldest son of a Bratva crime boss, in the loosely affiliated Russian mob. His father, Old Lev, wasn’t the only boss with a thumb on the North Pacific coast. He swung more weight and spent more time in Siberia than in Seattle. But connected was connected. And Reuben K lived his life in the decadent West, free from consequences.

“The fuck you doing in Seattle, Van?” he said. Reuben was all extremities. A big square head balanced on his neck, big hands and big feet stuck onto sinewy limbs. He stood close, leaning his high forehead down like an oily sunlamp. “I heard you went into the Army. Killing for your country.”

“All good things,” I said.

“My people could have told you to keep your ass out of Afghanistan. No way you win in that shithole.” He looked me over. “You need work? I have work for somebody like you.”

“Just visiting.” I nodded at Willard, standing as expressive as a marble column behind me.

Reuben brushed some imaginary dust off the sleeve of his glossy blue 38-long jacket. “Too bad. Good money.”

“RuKu,” said Reuben’s buddy, looking back at the table. “Game’s back on.” He was a fireplug. Short but wide as hell, with huge trapezius muscles in search of a neck, and stuffed into a silver Raiders jacket. A constellation of anabolic acne on his forehead.

Reuben ignored him. “Hey, Willard,” he said. “I still want to get that cage match idea rolling, yes?” He mimed punching. “This crowd could go for a little blood.”

“Next year,” said Willard.

“How ’bout next weekend?” Reuben jabbed me on the shoulder. “You should get in on that, Van my man. I remember you. Fucking werewolf.”

“Catch you later, Reuben,” I said.

He grinned and smoothed his slick brown hair back in place. “Nobody fast enough for that, Shaw.”

Back when I was a teenager, and Reuben not much older, he was running a whorehouse made up of Novosibirsk girls buying their way into the land of opportunity the only way they could. Reuben sampled the goods as much as he sold them. And he was prone to beating up customers who liked his favorites. The smart johns didn’t fight back. Old Lev could make it much worse. The whole situation had given Reuben the idea he was a badass.

Reuben’s silvery friend gave me what he thought was a hard stare as they drifted back to the table.

I looked at Willard. “Like I said. Way cool crowd.”

“I told you. I kick up to whoever owns the area. Lev’s reasonable.”

Willard drained the last of his Jameson, put the glass down on the bar. He was looking out at the tables, but his focus was somewhere else.

“It’s my niece,” he said. “Elana.”

I stopped in midsip. “I remember.”

“’Course you do.”

“I thought she moved east somewhere.”

“And back to Seattle and then south and back here again, for a couple of years now.” He waved a shovel-blade hand. “None of that is the point. The point is that she’s not here. Not tonight, and not last night, either. She was supposed to be working the tables.”

“She’s not checking in?”

“She left me a message last night to say she was sorry she didn’t show up for work, but she was headed out to the Peninsula. To her boyfriend Kend’s cabin, up in the Olympic Forest.”

“And she said she’d be back for tonight?”

“Yeah. I got the impression the trip was a last-minute thing. Maybe a party. I didn’t think much about it. But I couldn’t reach her today. And she didn’t show during setup. That’s when I called you.”

“Elana do that a lot? Blow off work to party?”

“She’d done it before.”

“No cell phone towers in the mountains. If she decided to extend her weekend through tonight, she couldn’t tell you.”

“I know that,” he said, exhaling heavily.

“But you called me.”

“Elana’s easy to read. There was something in her tone, I guess. Too calm. Too flat.”

Not like the Elana Coll I remembered at all. A girl of fire, or ice, but not much in between.

“Anything wrong in her life right now?” I said.

Willard grunted. “She’s her own person. She insists on it. You know that.”

I watched the room for a minute. The games were slow. Inexperienced players, taking their time with every decision, trying hard to look like the guys they’d seen on TV.

“What do you know about Kend?” I said.

“I’ve met him. Here, in fact. Not this location, but Elana brought him to a couple of the card games we had during the past year. She was showing off a little, I think. Kend seemed all right. Less spoiled than most of these little shits.”

“He’s rich?” I said.

“He’s Kendrick Haymes.”

The curve balls just kept coming, low and inside. “Haymes as in . . . ?”

“Haymes as in,” Willard confirmed. “Nobody starts a question with those words unless the family’s fucking loaded, do they?”

The name Haymes was on a lot of buildings around Seattle. Hell, all around the western half of the state and a few beyond. Kend was a hell of a catch for any girl, especially one with Elana’s jagged background.

Willard would have been the black sheep of most families. But Elena’s parents, Willard’s sister and her husband, had been aggressively committed burnouts. Stoned all day and calling it spiritual. Elana had lived with them in whatever mobile home or camper van they’d squatted in that year. If they were away dancing around some tree in some jungle, she might accept a little help from Willard. Somehow she had survived.

As hard-assed as my grandfather had been, I knew even back then that my home life could have been worse.

Willard tapped his knuckles on the bar. “Tomorrow night I got to have this whole damn room set up in Portland. In California the day after that. Besides, I don’t know shit about finding things in the woods.” He looked at me. “You do.”

“Tell me you can narrow that down.”

“The cabin’s on private land in the east part of the national park. Inholder, they call it. I got the name of the road it’s on.”

“Some of those private tracts cover thousands of acres,” I said. “But forget that for a minute. Is there some reason you’re not calling the county sheriff about Elana? Besides the usual history with you and the cops.”