The Bum's Rush (10 page)

"A quick report. Let's start with the fact that the girl definitely left town on her own."

"You sure?"

"Trust me, my man. She took her computer and her
phones with her, and I'm not talking laptops and cellulars here. I'm
talking full-size computers and hardwired phones. She's moved in
someplace."

"Her personal things are missing, too. She's neat. She took out the garbage. She emptied the refrigerator. She's gone."

"What now?"

"We're going to need to spend a little money."

"Oh?"

"I've spent all last evening going through her
personnel file and her personal correspondence. She's got a father and
a brother living on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We're going to
need to send somebody up there to see if she's showed up."

"You know somebody?"

"I did a little contract work last year for a PI in Detroit named Tim Miller. I was thinking I'd contact him."

"What do you figure for cost?"

"Depending on traveling time, it's no more than a
couple of days' work for a good man. Just long enough to talk to the
neighbors and tradesmen. You know. Has either of them upped his egg
order from a dozen a week to two, that sort of thing. Out in the
country, it won't take very long. Everybody knows everybody else's
business."

"Do it. Anything else?"

"I gave my cousin Paul her credit card information.
He's gonna run it through the bank's system to see if she's been using
them. Maybe get us a lead that way."

"What do we do while this is going on?"

"We wait."

"I hate it," Jed groused.

"I understand. This is the kind of thing for which
the cops are best qualified. Our little private search is either going
to play itself out in the next week or so, or it's not going to play
itself out at all."

"Okay. Okay. Listen, I gotta go."

"Later," I said.

I returned the phone to its cradle and massaged my
neck with both hands. Last night, after watching the Sonics whip the
Portland Trailwhiners, I'd fallen asleep at the kitchen table with the
Mendolson and Terry lives spread out beneath me. It was like a bad
horror movie. I'd dreamed of being pursued. I'd dreamed of my father. I
was being chased through an enormous old house, a mansion really. 

The place was thick with cobwebs and oily gray
dust. The furniture was covered with smudged white sheets. I don't know
who was chasing me, but the house was riddled with secret passages and
hiding places, stairs and chutes to nowhere, moving walls. I was
looking for a door to the outside. No matter how many times I went up
and down the stairs, I never entered the same room twice. Every door
led to a new room. All the while, my old man was on the sidelines
exhorting me, pushing me on. "Don't let 'em get you, Leo!" he'd yell as
I raced by. "They're gaining on you, kid. Pick it up! Pick it up!" I
could outrun my pursuers, but I couldn't stay ahead of the old man. No
matter where I went, he was there on the sidelines, a small American
flag stuffed in his big fist, shoving me onward. "Pump those arms, my
boy; pump those arms," he chanted.

I was still running when I jerked myself
perpendicular at six-thirty this morning to find my entire body tied in
a throbbing knot. Why wasn't I surprised when the twisted form in the
bathroom mirror bore a striking resemblance to Quasimodo. Arrrrrrgh.
For want of either a peasant girl or a bell rope, I shuffled in to bed.

By eleven-thirty, I'd staged a minor recovery. Five
hours supine, a full pot of coffee, and a half-hour shower had loosened
me sufficiently to facilitate sitting upright and dialing the
telephone. I would, however, never play the piccolo again.

My first call had been to Ron Tubbs. Ron was in the
third year of a five-year plan to put his twin daughters Kathy and
Katie through Whitworth College, a plan of sufficient fiduciary
magnitude to hasten lesser Kuwaiti princes to the welfare line and, it
goes without saying, definitely a bit much for a guy who works for the
Department of Licensing. That's why I and every other freelance, skip
trace, bail jump, no-account operative who needs any
official information connected even vaguely with motor vehicles
immediately calls old Ron. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Or vice
versa.

He had one of those stubby drawls indigenous to northwestern Florida. "Wadda ya need?"

"I need a driver's license picture."

"Current?"

"Old. Ten, fifteen years."

"That there is iffy and a full unit, my friend."

I figured that my current financial status could weather a hundred bucks for idle curiosity. "All right," I said.

"Tell me, podna."

I read him what I'd copied from the presumptive death certificate.

"Raymond, Washington. Where in holy hell is that?" he asked.

"It's down there on the way to Astoria, isn't it? You know, like when you go down to Seaside, Oregon. Like that."

"I do believe you're right, old buddy. Now, what would that be? Grays Harbor or Pacific County?"

"Pacific, I think."

"'That's even more iffy, then. Those rednecks are fresh outta the twelfth century. Paper clips are high tech to those old boys."

"Do what you can," I said. "Put anything you get in
a FedEx envelope and next-day it to me. I'll next-day back and pay both
ways."

"It's a done deal, champ," he said before hanging up.

On a lark, I called information and asked for Raymond, Washington. "Have they got a newspaper?" I asked.

I could hear the tick-tick of buttons being pushed. 

"There's a Willapa Harbor Herald."

"Could you connect me?"

"Certainly, sir."

She answered on the second ring. "Herald.''

I was only halfway through telling her what I
wanted when she interrupted me. "Oh," she said. "That's way before my
time. You'd need Mr. Bastyens to help you with that. He's our editor.
He's been here since the ice receded. He knows absolutely everything
about Raymond and the Willapa Valley. You couldn't possibly find a
better source than Mr. Bastyens."

"Well, thanks a lot. Could I speak to Mr. Bastyens?"

"He's not in right now."

Arrrrgh. I left my name and number and then hung up.

I limped into the office and riffled the Rolodex
until I came up with Tim Miller's E-mail address: sleuth znet.com. My
old LCIH gave a soft eep as it hummed to life, sending a familiar
series of colored icons dancing merrily across the bottom of the
screen. I had, during these past months of inactivity, become addicted
to surfing the World Wide Web, spending entire days exploring odd
topics, decoding pictures of dubious moral merit, and conversing about
absolutely nothing with other similarly disposed idlers from all over
the globe. I was a hopeless case now. A shambling ruin of a man. The
Internet and I were stuck with each other in perpetuity.

I clicked open my mail software, pasted in the
address, and typed Tim everything I had on Karen Mendolson. Send. I
watched, mesmerized, as the bar filled the little box and the message
went through. Good thing I'd discovered the Web a long way past my
five-joints-a-day period, or I would surely have been found in some
dank cellar, gaunt and wasted, staring moronically at some particularly galling dialogue box.

That little task completed, I shut down and dialed
Rebecca at the King County medical examiner's office, where she toiled
as a forensic pathologist.

"Howzabout lunch?" I said when she hit the line.

"Do I know you?"

Strife was to be expected. I hadn't called in a
couple of days. Somewhere along the way it had been decided, by a
process to which I had for some reason not been privy, that anytime the
lines of communication failed in any way and for any reason, I would
unfailingly be to blame. We had, after all, if you deducted the
three-plus years I'd been married to Annette, only been dating
regularly for nineteen years.

We've known each other since grammar school. She is
the sole issue of a shore-leave relationship between her mom, Letha,
and an alcoholic merchant marine who to this day remains nameless.
Throughout grammar school, Rebecca had always been the tall girl who
knew the answers to everything. Her mother had worked three jobs to get
Rebecca through medical school. As if in penance, Rebecca had pledged
to see her mother through old age. We had long ago forged an unspoken
understanding that whenever Letha went to her eternal reward, we would
sit down and decide what to do next about our relationship. Letha, for
her part, was taking full advantage of the fealty. Current indications
suggested that, like certain heavy water isotopes, she could be
expected to have a half-life of slightly over twelve thousand years.

"Someplace nice," I offered.

"Now I'm sure I don't know you."

"Swear to God I'll change."

"Ah," she said. "It must be that Leo."

"I called last evening and made us a res at Palomino," I said, naming her favorite room.

"You are the sly one, aren't you?"

"I know the way to your heart."

"Straight through the sternum with a number-seven saw." I could actually hear her smiling.

"By the by," I said, "who did the autopsy on Lukkas Terry?"

"Tommy. Why?"

"Something I've been working on," I mumbled.

"Working. You mean Mr. Moneybags has been working again? Your ass is officially healed, then?"

I quickly changed the subject."Could you ask Tommy--''

"No way," she said firmly.

"Come on," I wailed.

"No way," she repeated. "I will not be duplicitous
with a colleague. There's no way I can ask him anything like that
without him knowing I'm asking for you. I won't do that. If you want
information from Tommy, you'll have to ask him yourself. Besides that,
you know how he likes to torture you, Leo. It's one of his few
remaining joys in life."

No shit. Nothing old Tommy Matsukawa liked better
than getting me locked in a room full of heaped, piled, burned,
bullet-riddled, head-through-the-windshield, eye balls-hangin'-down
dead bodies. I'm no more squeamish than the next guy; hell, I've seen
considerably more than my share of gore, and don't for a minute think I
don't understand that people who work with the dead can pretty much be
expected to develop a sense of humor that's a tad out of the
mainstream. Even with all of that, though, old Tommy was a bit much. No
sooner did I set foot in the building than he would go out of his way to share
with me the choice parts of whatever grisly carcass he was working on
at the moment. At first I thought he was just being friendly in a
macabre sort of way. Like he wanted to share his work and all that.
After all, truth be told, it does take a certain savoir faire to fully
appreciate the finer points of a good abscess. Later, I came to realize
that what he really had always wanted was to bowl in Rebecca's pagoda,
and he quite rightly saw me as a serious impediment to that end.
Rebecca, for her part, remained wildly amused.

"I'll be down in half an hour," I said sourly. "Meet me out at the corner. I'd rather talk to Tommy on a full stomach."

"Chicken," she sang.

Don't forget there's no parking in the lot because of the construction," Rebecca said as we crested Ninth Avenue.

"Still?"

"It's so bad I've been taking the bus."

"That's bad," I sympathized.

"It's even worse over in my neighborhood. The whole
north side off of Fifty-fifth is closed. Some big gas company project.
If you live there you have to park out on Fifty-fifth and walk in.
They've dug a trench all the way across the top of the hill. I have to
drive all the way up to Thirty-fifth Avenue and then come around the
back."

Harborview Hospital loomed ahead. The King County
medical examiner's office occupies the southernmost dungeon hi the
Harborview Medical Center complex on lower Ninth Avenue, hard by what
in Seattle passes for the ghetto, a hodgepodge of apartments and
duplexes rolling down the south and west faces of the hill toward
Pioneer Square and South Seattle. They're all named Something Terrace.
Yes ler Terrace. Harborview Terrace. In Seattlese "terrace" means
"projects," as in the public housing variety. The medical examiner's
office was the last outpost on the frontier of justice. Fort Hematoma. 

I turned the Fiat east on Alder and back again to the left on Terry.

"There, in front of the apartment building," Rebecca said, pointing with a long, manicured finger.

I sprinted past, U-turned in a driveway, and slipped the Fiat to the curb on the west side of the street. Neat as could be.

"Thank goodness," Rebecca said as I helped her from the car. "I can't believe you still haven't had this car fixed."

"It is fixed."

"I must be overly sensitive. Traveling at a thirty-degree angle was beginning to unsettle that wonderful lunch we had."

She took my arm as we marched our way down to
Jefferson and turned left back toward Ninth Avenue, where we emerged
from the shadows into brilliant sunshine. To the south, Mount Rainier
stuck up like a salacious silver tongue. To the north, the green dome
of Saint James Cathedral rose above the utility lines.

"Did you tell Tommy I was coming?" I asked as we strolled along.

"Of course."

"Thanks a bunch."

"Anytime."

"He's probably been rummaging through the freezers thawing out particularly luscious tidbits for me."

"Probably," she agreed.

"You just feel guilty."

"Who?"

"You."

"Guilty about what?"

"For kicking his ass in the sixth grade." Tommy
Matsukawa, Rebecca, and I had all served our middle school sentences
together at Denny Middle School.

She released my arm and inspected the treetops. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

"I can still see you sitting on his chest, holding him by the ears, banging his head off the blacktop."