THE FOURTH WATCH (41 page)

As Jack prayed, people entered and lit candles
or kneeled in the pews. By 9:30, when the Priest entered behind a
robed acolyte holding a Bible aloft, there were perhaps twenty
people in a church that could comfortably hold five
hundred.

The Priest was old and bent with age, his hands
and face liver spotted. He blessed himself. ''In the name of the
Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit."

The congregation responded, "Amen".

"May the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the
Love of God and the Fellowship

of the Holy Spirit be with you all."

"And also with you."

"Let us Pray."

Jack prayed deeply, feeling his unspoken words
deep in his heart. He said the Mass quietly along with the Priest,
drawing it deep within him. The traditional solemnity of it
bringing peace into his heart. After Communion, kneeling again in
prayer, he felt the Eucharist working within him, healing and
fortifying him.

When the Mass was over Jack went back into the
Sacristy and introduced himself to the old Priest, and thanked him
for the service. Father David MacNaughton invited him back to the
rectory. They had coffee and talked about their respective
parishes. Jack declined an invitation to stay for lunch, explaining
that he had a luncheon appointment. He shook the old Priest's hand.
It was frail, like holding hollow bones. He thanked him for the
coffee and hospitality, and caught the trolley north.

*****

"HOW'S KATO,"
Louis Smythe wanted to know straight away.

They were seated in a small lunch bar called
Emily's on 131st Avenue near the waterfront, in an area known as
Pike Place Market. It sat high up on one of the city's hills, and
they could see the bay, its water black and churning with white
caps, the wind snapping the flags of ships toward shore.

"They don't really know," Jack told
him.

Smythe had been waiting when Jack arrived. He
was a skinny, scruffy item. His hair was long, pushed back over his
ears, uncombed, and hanging like greasy twine out of a baseball cap
down onto his shoulders. His eyes were buggy, ice blue and
aggressive. He had crumbs in his unruly beard.

"Why not?"

“Like I told you on the phone, Mr. Smythe ...
"

"Louis."

"Louis then," Jack said, the gun shot wounds
have basically healed. He is breathing on his own now, there is no
reason to believe that his motor functions are impaired ... but the
head injury ...”

"Is he brain dead?" Smythe asked
bluntly.

''No.''

"How do you know that?"

"They can detect sensation and, I don't know,
electronic impulses and activity or whatever. "

"There are two major parts of the brain you
know," he said, crunching on a bread stick. “The part that makes
you an animal - lets your body work and function, lets you dig
mushrooms out from under roots of a tree with your snout and that
sort of thing - and the part that makes you human, lets you
remember and communicate and enjoy life. How do they know that part
two is working?"

"They, his doctors, are satisfied that ... if
he comes out of the coma ... he could be alright." ''I'm not
satisfied."

“Nevertheless, that's the doctors'
diagnosis."

Smythe squinted an eyeball at him. Jack looked
back at him. Finally the newspaperman grunted. "So what's your
gig?"

"My gig?"

"Yeah. Why are you here, why should I tell you
anything that Kato asked me to find out, about Loading Dock or
anything else for that matter?" Smyth raised an eyebrow at him.
"Why should I take you around."

''I'm not asking you to take me around," Jack
said, a little gruffly, "I'm going to meet with these guys whether
... "

"Why did you lie to me?" Smythe
snapped.

"Lie to ... "

"Yeah, lie? You told me you're an investigator
working with Knight's office."

"I told you I was helping Kato look into ..
."

"Lies. You're a fucking Papist."

Jack gawked at him in silence. Louis Smythe sat
back and let the waitress put down a basket containing a fish
sandwich and French fries in front of him."

"Where's my beer?" he barked at her.

''I'm sorry, Sir," she said, startled. ''I'll
bring it right over."

Smythe ignored her. ''I don't trust fucking
Priests," he said to Jack, "especially the

kind that lie." The waitress fled.

"I didn't lie. I never said I wasn't a Priest,
I just didn't bring it up."

"Why not'?"

This was not going as Jack had planned at all.
Smythe was asking him rapid-fire questions, acting hostile, as if
he were interviewing a politician about cash bribes. "Sometimes it
makes people uncomfortable."

"Like me."

Jack changed directions and took a turn asking
questions. "How'd you know I was a Priest'?"

''I checked you out."

''Then you did a poor job of it, because
otherwise, you would know that Mike Knight is my best friend, that
we grew up together, and that Priest or not, I don't take crap from
sleazy looking little creeps like you."

Smythe roared with laughter and banged the
table, and pointed at Jack, 'That's the ticket!

Just looking for a little backbone, old
boy!"

Many of the other diners had turned to look at
their table. Smythe ignored them. "Where is my fucking beer!" he
yelled at the waitress as she approached with Jack's plate. She ran
for the bar and returned in a flash, putting a sweating bottle of
Newcastle Brown Ale down in front of Louis Smythe before placing
Jack's grilled chicken salad and seltzer water down in front of
him. Jack said to her, "Maybe I'll have a beer," he pointed at
Smythe' s whatever he's having is fine."

"Quite right," Smythe told him, and then to the
waitress, "and bring me another one while you're at it, seeing how
it takes forever to get a drink in this pathetic establishment.
"

Jack stared at Louis Smythe for a time. Louis
just looked back at him, his eyes dancing with merriment. "What
have you got against Priests?"

"Oh, I don't know," Smythe told him, "general
concerns. They fill the people with false dreams of a grand, yet
future paradise, while in the present those people suffer. The
dogma they dole out placates the masses who are taxed to line the
pockets of the few who get paradise in the here and now. They rob
them of their nickels and dimes with their collection baskets so
that they can build shameful palaces and drink wine from golden
goblets; that sort of thing. I also don't like it that they bugger
little boys."

Smythe attacked his sandwich. Jack stared at
him slack jawed across the table.

Finally he said, “Well listen, Mr. Smythe, I
want to thank you for your time, its been ... unusual... but not
particularly helpful," Jack slid his chair back, stood up and
dropped his napkin on the table, his beer and salad
untouched.

"Don't be an arse," Smythe told him, bacon and
lettuce flying from his mouth. "Sit down, I'm not accusing you
personally. Kato likes you, so you're probably alright, plus I have
some good stuff to tell you before you meet with these Loading Dock
people."

Jack thought about it a minute, then took his
seat. "Well then, Louis, I'd like you to get to it -and without too
much more color."

Jack worked his way through his salad as Smythe
guzzled beer and ticked his way through the next morning's
interviews.

"Santamano is not your guy. He's almost 60
years old and makes big bucks. He gets a piece of the action from
each of his guys. Commissions on their commissions. He's worked for
the company for more than twenty years, he lives with a Malaysian
girl that he's lived with for about as long, and who thinks ten
bucks is a lot of money."

More beer was demanded from the terrified
waitress.

“Are they married?" Jack asked, after a fresh
round was delivered.

Smyth cackled, "I don't know, probably not. He
did two tours in 'Nam. Grew up a Lutheran in Iowa. But service in
Vietnam had a way of dampening religious zeal I'm told. Most likely
he bowed and scraped in front of some stone Budda with incense
burning and old folks chanting to satisfy her family, what's the
difference? Point is he owns a house in Taiwan that would be worth
two million in Seattle, probably paid ten thousand U.S. for it, has
a couple of kids and makes twenty times as much money as he needs.
He's not your guy."

"Let me guess, you know who it is?"

''Nope. I know who it isn't"

"Okay, who else isn't it?" Jack asked
wryly.

'Well, depends what you mean. None of these
guys is 'it' in terms of who shot Kato and the girl. Now there's a
guy here who works in the loop that the shooter is in, but I don't
know who it is. But another guy it isn't is Lin Tasi."

"How come?"

''Nobody trusts him."

Jack's eyebrows went up. "Sounds like a good
reason why it is him."

"That's because you're a dope and an
amateur."

Jack decided to ignore Smythe's ridicule. "Go
on, please."

"Come on, old fellow, you can figure this out.
They watch him all the time. He's got great territories because
he's a local. Taiwan, though he and Santamano cover that together,
Japan and South Korea. Those should be - and in fact are - prime
markets, and Loading Dock is doing big numbers there."

"So why don't they trust him? Is he stealing
from them?"

"No, worse than that. He is not growing the
business, which Ray Santamano can't like. How can that be? He is
either diverting the business to a competitor, implicating a little
industrial espionage which, ironically, is subsidized by a salary
from Loading Dock, or his clients don't like or trust him. Point
is, they are watching him, so he can't be the guy."

Smythe went through the rest of the list,
reviewing each of the players. "How do you know all this stuff?"
Jack asked when he was finished.

''Because I'm brilliant."

"I see."

"And I have a spy."

"A spy? You don't say."

"Oh but I do. And you're going drinking with
him this very night."

"I don't drink,” Jack told him.

''I noticed,” Louis Smythe said, admiring the
impressive collection of empties piled against the wall on Jack's
side of the table.

*****

WHEN THEY LEFT
Emily's the rain had stopped and the blustery, swirling winds
off the bay had dissolved the fog and blown the cloud cover away.
In the middle of summer, the Great Northwest experienced more than
eighteen hours of sunlight a day. In the dead of winter the
opposite is true. Now, on the cusp of December, it was getting dark
in the late afternoon. A translucent moon rode the faded sky amid
the million stars that were starting to spark.

It was cold. Jack turned the collar of his
jacket up. ''It stopped raining," he said.

"Wow, maybe you are a detective," Smythe told
him.

They trudged east toward the waterfront, their
breath smoking in front of them. "So who is this 'spy'?" Jack
asked.

''Names Twice Fucked."

"
Really
," Jack said.

"Well, no, not really, but that's what they
call him."

"How come?"

"Well, it's a bit of a long story."

The story went like this: Twice Fucked, his
name was really Martin Davidson, Marty, had been a spider for
Sea-Tac Central Loading Company. A spider was a climber and a
dodger. What that meant was that he lived his work between falling
containers and swinging booms. His job was to direct the mammoth
containers, weighing tens of thousands of pounds - and swinging in
the air on guide wires - down from the ship's deck and onto trucks
or rail cars. The containers locked into the transport chassis or
flatbed cars, and into each other in stack mode. Spiders maneuvered
the giant boxes into place and locked them down. Well to make a
long story short, Smythe told him, one day a container clicked down
into its lock-slot just as nice as you like. The problem was,
Marty's hand was between the chassis and the container and the box
snipped it off clean. Marty was running around screaming and
holding his stump, which was gushing blood like it was coming out
the end of a hose. Someone finally tackled him and wrapped a belt
around his arm, and they got him over to the hospital. So right
there he's once fucked, what with losing the hand and all. Well, so
then when Marty finally got out of the hospital and recovered and
all, of course he wanted to go back to work. What else is he gonna
do, am I right? Problem was, STC had no use for a one armed spider
and after an appropriate amount of time had passed, they sacked his
ass.”

"You're kidding me," said Jack.