Stagger Bay (3 page)

“Was,” I repeated.

Elaine nodded. “Apparently Karl started dealing drugs, and he was killed in a shootout with a Stagger Bay police officer. They found a handgun and a large quantity of marijuana in his possession. The officer was cleared.”

“That makes me feel much better, it being deemed justified. But why are you still on it? Seems to me your debt would die with him, you don’t owe me a thing.”

“You’re his family, and I know he’d want me to,” she said as if by rote. “We’d already been working on our investigation for a while when he died, so I thought it best to finish it.

“And I have finished your part at least; you’ll be going free as soon as I’m done filing the paperwork.” She appeared pleased with herself.

I figured she just might have a right to be but ignored that, groping further – a ship-killing iceberg loomed beneath the placid surface of her words. “Karl was helping you on an investigation? Into what?”

“Well, it occurred to Karl that, since he knew you were innocent, the real killer had to still be out there. For the past seven years he’s been playing detective, putting in quite a lot of legwork on it I might add. I myself have only been involved for the past three years, since I moved to Stagger Bay and met Karl.

“Then I got a hold of this DNA thing and had an independent lab in the Bay Area run the tests,” Elaine continued. “Yours didn’t match the samples from the crime scene, and the rest is history.”

“What did Karl find out? About the real killer, I mean?”

“Nothing he ever shared with me,” she said hurriedly. “You know, you’re entitled to $100 a day for your false imprisonment. That comes to about a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Great,” I said, cracking a smile.

“Don’t count on it anytime soon,” Elaine said. “The check would come out of Stagger Bay’s general budget. That much money could break the county, and they’re fighting the payout.”

“I guess we can’t have it too easy, can we?”

Elaine stood, we reprised our awkward handshake around my cuffs; then she was gone. And as quick as that, with no formality at all, I was free.

Chapter Six

I was scared spitless of my homecoming, the entire long bus ride back to Stagger Bay. Angela was dead and now Karl as well. Sam’s lack of communication made it plain he wanted nothing to do with me, and last time I’d been here most of the town stood in line to show what they thought of me.

Wife gone, house gone, possessions gone, reputation gone. No job and no money in my pockets besides a puny handful of gate dollars. My prospects were glowing.

I’d done my time up in Del Norte County, so the bus brought me into Stagger Bay from the northern end. New housing crowded the outskirts of town that hadn’t been there when I went up: palatial McMansions looking like they’d be more at home in Beverly Hills, or in Silicon Valley housing the dot.com moguls. A lot of active construction sites, mainly right on the coast line.

It was just after dawn when the bus entered town, and I looked across the Bay at the Pulp Mill – it was the third largest such mill in the world, supplying jobs to a lot of people. The last time I’d been here, its twin stacks had vomited a foul effluvia 24/7 that could knock the nose right off your face if the wind was right.

Now both stacks were idle, no smoke coming from either of them. Squinting from my distant bus-borne vantage, I saw no sign of activity in the plant itself, and its huge multi-acre parking lot was empty.

The Greyhound swung down Fourth Street past a short row of chain fast food franchises and came up on what passed for a bus terminal in Stagger Bay: a one room building the size of a big city newsstand.

A short kid was leaning against a beat-up white ‘70s Lincoln Continental as the Greyhound chuffed into the terminal. Spiky red hair, bright blue eyes with a bony jutting chin, and wide shoulders with big meaty hands hanging at the end of long arms: the spitting image of his uncle – and of his father too I suppose.

I had no luggage to wait on, so I walked right up with my heart pounding.

“Sam?” I asked.

He nodded blank-faced and hip bumped erect off the car in one fluid motion. The way his shoulders rolled as he ape-shambled to the driver’s side door was like watching a home movie of me and Karl at that that age.

Sam climbed in without so much as looking at me. I got in my side with equal enthusiasm. The seats were chapped leather but still comfortable.

I snuck peeks at him as we drove, but he kept his eyes glued to the road. Despite that attentiveness he was a suck-ass driver, tail-gating and cutting off cars as he swerved from lane to lane in the big old Connie. I kept my opinion of his driving skills to myself as, to tell the truth, he drove exactly like his uncle.

“Look,” Sam said out the side of his mouth, sounding distracted, as if I didn’t even have his full attention in this oh-so-heartfelt moment. “We got to be clear from the git go. I got too much on my plate right now to be wasting my time holding your hand. Still, Uncle Karl wouldn’t have liked it if I turned my back all the way on you, so I’ll try to watch out for you a little bit while you get back on your feet. But know this: We’re not going to be friends.”

Sam continued. He’d obviously practiced this speech for a while, probably memorizing it daily in front of his bathroom mirror ever since he’d heard of my imminent return. “You can forget the whole father/son thing, it ain’t going to happen. We ain’t gonna be swapping spit here. First thing first, let’s get you in a motel.”

I gritted my teeth but kept my own puissant smile in place. “I don’t have enough for a room. I was hoping maybe I could shack up with you till I get on my feet.”

He shifted his face out of neutral long enough to snicker. It sounded just like my brother laughing at me. “Ain’t that a bitch?” Sam said. “I thought you got a butt-load of money for seven years of wrongful imprisonment. But that’s just like the rednecks in this hick town: always scratching, barely able to keep things afloat. Hell, the whole county’s about bankrupt.”

His face went blank again. “Anyways, I don’t have any room at my place.”

I scoped out the car’s interior. Heaps of dirty clothes were piled in the back, and toiletry articles were scattered on the floor. Sam was living out of his car.

“It’s all right, I’m sure I’ll have a place to lay my head by the end of the day,” I said. “So, how do you get by? What do you do?”

“This and that, as if it’s any of your business.”

“Oh,” I said. “I get it.” And I did: he was in whatever semblance of the Life this podunk town could support. If he was homeless I figured crime didn’t pay much in Stagger Bay. “I’d’ve hoped Karl would set you up a little better.”

“Fuck you, you old hypocrite,” Sam said in casual tones. “Know what I remember about you? You were either working, or sleeping so I had to tiptoe around the house, or drinking, or sleeping it off – in which case I had to tiptoe around some more. Then you were gone and Mom was dead, end of story.

“Far as I’m concerned, Karl’s my real dad – you was just a sperm donor. He was there, you wasn’t, remember? Uncle Karl taught me everything I know. He went straight and went clean when he took me under his wing, even if I don’t pretend to be. I won’t have you bad-mouthing how he raised me.”

“He went legit? Elaine told me he was dealing again, that’s how come he got shot.”

“You are an old fool,” Sam said, favoring me with a pitying look. “Karl was straight edge, he didn’t even smoke cigarettes. Listen to you, believing in a cop’s lies over your own brother.

“Uncle Karl always knew how jealous you was of him. You were the junior partner, Karl was the bad ass,” Sam said, glancing over at me to enjoy his harshness.

“But he’s dead and gone, ain’t he? And all I’ve got now is you?” Sam asked, his voice suddenly choked. “Then I’m truly out of luck. I’m on my own here all the way. You’re useless to me, what good are you to anyone?”

There were so many things I could try to say to that, but instead buttoned my lip. He wouldn’t trust anything that came out my mouth. If I wanted him to hear me in future I’d have to snarl in resonance with him, choose only the words I knew he’d hear rather than the ones I wanted to say – but I suspected there wasn’t going to be much opportunity for that.

“I’ll be getting out here,” I said.

Someone hit their horn and leaned on it as Sam swooped the Lincoln to the curb. As I got out an immaculate candy-apple red Cougar hotrod tore around us, narrowly missing Sam’s rear bumper.

I couldn’t get a good look at the big blond man driving the cherried-out Cougar as it roared past; the morning sun’s reflection obscured his features behind the window. But his face was pointed right at me through the glare, and I had a good idea what kind of expression was on it. I was surprised he didn’t give us the one-finger salute for punctuation.

As I stood on the curb I looked back at Sam, but he stared straight ahead as though near collisions didn’t even get his attention.

The situation didn’t seem to call for any heartfelt goodbyes. I started walking and Sam pulled back out, blended obnoxiously into the traffic flow, and was gone.

Chapter Seven

I was on Fourth Street, the one-way thoroughfare running south through the heart of Stagger Bay, turning into Highway 101 above and below town limits. This was the neighborhood folks called Old Town.

Back when Stagger Bay was first founded, the second thing they did after massacring the local Indians was build Old Town, a rickety warren of wall-to-wall whore houses and bars conveniently adjacent the waterfront. By the time we’d moved up here from Oakland in the ‘90s, the original shacks and hovels of that frontier red-light district had mutated into it’s present day architecture, mainly brick multi-stories heavily retro-fitted to earthquake resistance.

We’d come up here because the cost of living was cheap, and I thought I could finagle a job in one of the lumber mills or on a boat. Unfortunately the logging and fishing industries were already withering on the vine by that point, and Stagger Bay was pretty depressed – I’d been lucky to get the job at the soda distributor.

Then, a few years before the Beardsleys were murdered, some bright boy decided to build the Mall on the south edge of town – half the local mom & pop businesses folded, unable to compete with those big box chain stores. That was a real stake through the heart for Stagger Bay.

Driving through Old Town in back then was like sightseeing in a ghost town, what with all the darkened storefronts and whitewashed windows. There’d been trash in the gutters and newspapers spinning in updrafts; it was pretty run down.

Old Town’s empty squats had been crowded with homeless transients, pan-handlers, drug addicts and other low-end would-be outlaws – up from the Bay Area chasing welfare checks. The Stagger Bay Police Department had a beat cop annex there but closed it down because there was ‘too much crime’ – that one had been laughed at on all the late night network talk shows.

Our hookers were an especially sorry bunch, mainly speed freaks missing a few teeth and dressed in thrift-store chic. Angela always felt sorry for those working girls; she wanted to stop and do an emergency makeover whenever we passed one by.

But Old Town had changed a lot since last time I’d seen it. Now it looked like someone had come through with a broom and swept all the wild life away. Walking down the street, all I saw was decent citizens, not a wannabe-an-outlaw in sight.

It was also booming with new construction and renovation: Toward the waterfront the Andersen Mansion loomed above the smaller interposing buildings, sporting a new paint job. A work crew was power washing the side of a building across the street from me. On the next block a guy telescoped up in the bucket of a cherry picker was doing some kind of work on a bronze art deco façade spanning the second story of the Emporium, our sole vintage department store. A designer coffee shop and a chain bookstore were doing brisk business on the block I currently walked down, and lots of quaint little boutiques and art galleries dotted the cross streets to either side; I didn’t recognize any of them from before.

Even though all this had nothing to do with me, it still didn’t feel too bad to see the old neighborhood on its feet again. After all, it wasn’t Stagger Bay per se that expelled me from my family so rudely; it was the featherless bipeds infesting her that did the dirty deed.

It was a little confusing, though. Like I said before, the fishing and logging jobs had pretty much dried up years ago, small business was still limping, and we had no industry – someone was doing some real fast talking to convince this much investment in a dead-end podunk town like Stagger Bay.

No one on the streets seemed to recognize me, which was fine. But I saw more than one person shopping or driving by that had been pretty bloodthirsty when I was on trial.

No complaints, I was lucky to be alive and free. A backwoods place like Stagger Bay, I reckon they would’ve saved the state a lot of money in the old days; maybe just strung me up from a tree, photographed themselves smiling around my stretch-necked corpse and sold copies of the snapshot as souvenir postcards.

Chapter Eight

I turned east on E Street and cut across Fifth, the one-way main drag paralleling Fourth in the opposite direction. I was in the neighborhood Angela, Sam, and me had once called home.

When we first bought our house it was what realtors liked to call a ‘neighborhood in transition,’ meaning property values were low enough for a family starting out to leverage themselves a mortgage – as long as they didn’t mind drug dealers to one side of them, and nightly drunken brawls on the other. No biggie: I chastised the worst neighbors into minimally acceptable behavior after we finagled a mortgage out of my double shifts on the loading dock.

There’d been a reason for the neighborhood’s chaos, and for all the riffraff that used to infest Old Town. Round about the time we first came here, in a celebrated class-action lawsuit resulting from Stagger Bay’s refusal to pay General Relief to qualified professional transients, a federal judge forced the county to pay the highest disbursements in the state.