THE FOURTH WATCH (45 page)

Skids worried a nail and thought about it. This
thing was getting weirder by the second! Walter had told him about
the crazy time the Priest had out in Seattle. And now the spook in
the dumpster had to be Tell Me.

He called Walter's cell again. This time he
answered. "What?"

“That is some dopey message on your cell phone.
It's like a retard is playing with the buttons or
something.”

“Yeah, yeah...whattaya want Skid
Mark?”

"Well, listen to this, the cops just
found...um...an African-American male... in a dumpster up off Wall
Street," Skids told him a little breathlessly.

"You're shitting me," Walter said, "is it Tell
Me?"

"Gotta be, don't you think?"

"Who cares what I think. Go find
out."

"I called Timmy..."

"And?"

"He's checkin' it out. He'll call me
back."

"Fuck that. Go down there and hang around. Find
out cause of death. If he was shot ask about ballistics. Too much
to hope that it's the same gun that shot Kato, but find out anyway.
See about the autopsy plans and all that."

"Okay."

Walter hung up. Jesus, he thought.

*****

JACK SAT PRAYING
in the hospital room. He had his Bible open on his lap, his
lips moving silently. Michael Knight's machines huffed and beeped
in a monotonous cadence. Six weeks now. Kato seemed to be getting
smaller. Jack put the book down and pinched his eyes. He got up and
went and stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at his
friend. Except for the slow rise and fall of his chest he seemed
dead. Jack went to the window and looked down at the traffic
snarled on Belmont Street without seeing it. He thought about the
insane ending of his trip to Seattle. About the mayhem that ensued
the morning after the Alcantera murder at Loading Dock. No one knew
anything, everyone shocked. What was it all about? They wanted to
know. He wished he knew.

He turned back and looked at Mike lying there.
He frowned. Is his head in a different position? he wondered.
Cocked a little to one side? Couldn't be, he told himself. Just
wishful thinking.

31

Seattle, 1988

THE WAR FOR
the drug trade raged on in Seattle unabated. RAT turned out
to be a formidable foe. Sal was winning, but at a significant cost.
The Colonel had a solid foothold in Chinatown now, what there was
of it, and was helping. Actually, the Colonel was now a General in
the Chinese Army.

Chinatown gangs killed RAT soldiers with
impunity, where ever they could find them. They hunted them in the
rail yards, grabbed their dealers off the streets, interrogating
them with gruesome efficiency, but learned little about the
hierarchy of the organization. And RAT struck back hard, without
mercy or fear. It would be, for them, in the end, a losing battle,
but the war was already costing Sal handsomely. The cops were not
the least bit happy with the bodies that were piling up, and the
graft he was paying had doubled. He was piecing off action to the
Asian gangs for their support and losing valuable soldiers of his
own. RAT was fighting on two fronts, but doing so fiercely and
showing no signs of giving in.

Juan and Carlos had infiltrated the rail yards
in Portland and Seattle, but RAT' was insular. Carlos had a man in
the Portland yard who had managed to work his way into the
organization. He was an experienced dealer, and had secured a
territory on the city streets, selling mostly smoke dope and heroin
supplied by RAT. But it was just as Carlos had said. The guy would
call a number and get a call back. He'd go where he was told, pay
cash for his stash and call the number again when he needed more.
When he called he'd be told what would be said when he was called
back. A code word that would tell him it was okay to deal. The
people he met were never the same. The phone number he called was
never the same. He never got a sniff of what was going on up
above.

They also had guys living with the bums in the
yards in both cities, but the information pipeline was as dry as
rope. The upper echelon of RAT was a secret enclave.

And so it went.

*****

JAMIEO JONES WAS
a low-life. He liked booze and dope and hung out around the
rail yards in Seattle, where he could usually find someone to front
him a meal, and a place to crash and maybe a taste. He was born
James Lansing McClendon into a wealthy, but dysfunctional, Dallas
family that turned him into a runaway by the age of 15. A black
dope dealer that took him under his wing started calling him
Jamieo, and he liked it. His last name came from a bad heroin habit
that the dealer called a 'jones'.

He was tallish, rake-handle thin, gaunt and
twitchy. His face was a mess of acne scars. Sometimes, if he felt
the spirit move him, he'd huddle up with the rest of the rail bums
at 'Work A Day', a temporary labor outfit that put guys to work for
a day or two here and there. That's how he ended up at Hillsil
Construction.

It started out like it was gonna be just
another gig, a few days max, but then he liked the work and took to
it pretty good. He was kind of a laborer. Humping bundles of
shingles up and down ladders, running for stuff at work sites, like
that. But they liked him and kept on keeping him on, paying him
under the table, and day to day telling him to come back tomorrow.
He was closing in on three months, the longest he'd held a job in
his memory.

His boss was this guy named Elvin Tembo. An
asshole of almost mythical proportions. Everyone on the job site
hated him. But Jamieo got along with him okay, and he was the guy
telling him to come back. The days wore on, the pay envelope kept
coming on Thursday - it was good.

Elvin Tembo loved vodka and hated his wife, so
he never went home from work. Pretty soon he was buying Jamieo
drinks and burning his ear off every night at a dump called 'The
Last Leg', two blocks south of the construction site on Belverton
Avenue in Southeast Seattle. It was there, one night, that Elvin
told him about his boss, Alan Hillsil.

"You think that prick makes all his money in
construction?" Tembo asked.

''I don't know about that," Jamieo told him,
shaking his head.

"Well, don't you worry, he's loaded.
Sonofabitch has got it comin' at him from all angles."

"Yeah?"

Elvin was wasted, even more than
usual. He looked like a
Dick Tracy
character leaning over his drink. Eyes, nose and
mouth all pinched up in the middle of his face. Ugly purple lips
like sideways rubber worms sucking at the rim of his glass. A head
as square and flat as a stove-top, and black-blue hair that looked
like it had been ironed down. His eyebrows were kind of upside
down, like ''U's'' that were stretched out, but not uniformly.
Itchy Brother. "Dope is where the real money is" Tembo told him
confidently.

"Yeah?"

"That the only thing you can say."

"Huh?"

Elvin Tembo ordered more drinks.

"Listen, this guy sells dope up and down the
coast. Uses the hobos to carry it for him. He don't know I know,
but I seen it happen. I seen the money and the dope going through.
Hillsil is never there when it happens, different guys all the time
coming and going, but then I see him later."

"What happens later?"

"Well it took me a while to figure it out, but
everytime I see the stuff go through, these same four guys show up.
They go in the office and they got the money with them. I mean I
never see the money, but it's the same suitcases and all. Then the
guys leave without the suitcase and the next day a different guy
comes, his accountant I think, and the suitcase goes with him. A
few days later it all happens again. Unbelievable!"

Jamieo shook his head at the wonder of it
all

*****

A WEEK LATER
, Jamieo was back at the yard, visiting with neighbors,
hungry and looking for a warm fire to sit in front of. He wandered
across the tracks, between a couple of broken down cars, the sky
ink black and dusted with silver stars, toward the glow of a fire,
and a rotund figure silhouetted beyond the sparks. A spic was
cooking something that smelled delicious on a spit. The spic
claimed it was rabbit, but it looked suspiciously like cat. It was
tasty though, whatever it was. He had a jug of whiskey and he was
generous with it. Before long the two of them were best pals and
telling stories and Jamieo found himself telling the story about
this Hillsil guy and his band of dope smuggling hobos. The spic was
fascinated and kept the booze coming so Jamieo kept talking until
all of Elvin Tembo's speculation had been set forth.

*****

SAL WAS FEELING
the years. Getting on toward fifty now, he had been in the
life for more than twenty-five years. From the jungles of Southeast
Asia, through the barrios of LA, to the streets of Seattle, the
strain and stress of the danger and the killing, and the deals and
the wars, and the traitors had ground him down. He showed little
outwardly. He had some gray around the temples, had put on a few
pounds around the middle. His doctor had him taking pills for
cholesterol and depression during the winter months. He had no
family. His team and his business were his center. He had sex
regularly with a variety of different young women, but his
enthusiasm for the randomness of it was diminishing. Five years now
in Seattle and he was still in the middle of a blood bath. He
needed a change. He wanted to get started with the move east. He
never thought he would think that.

He was wealthy. Richer than he ever imagined he
might be. After the move east, maybe he could retire. Hand the
reigns off to a successor of his and the Generals choosing. Get out
before someone took the reigns from him in a hail of bullets when
he least expected it. Then maybe he could live out a decade or two
in peace. Maybe find someone nice and settle down and go to the
beach, or craft fairs on Saturday afternoon - and just watch the
world go by. He sighed and looked out the window at the bay and
knew that his destiny would not include those things.

Rain snakes slithered down the big sliders that
led out on to the balcony. It wasn't raining, it was just the blow
back off the Sound. It was dark but the bay was moonlit and there
were long, wispy clouds sailing the sky among the stars. The move
east was, in fact, taking shape. They had their mark. Were putting
people in place, imbedding them in a company called 'The Loading
Dock', in a place named Natick, Massachusetts, taking their product
through the Port of Worcester by train. Juan had the train thing
figured out. They'd figure out the extraction of the product he
knew. Getting a spot on a container was the most important part,
and that was in the works. The move would come in the next couple
of years, if he could stabilize the Seattle market.

Sal was thinking about what he was going to do
for dinner when the phone rang. He grabbed the cordless off the
counter in the kitchen. "Hello."

"We got him," Carlos said.

Sal smiled. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Carlos told him. "Its this fuckin' guy
that ... "

"Hey!"

"What?"

"Shut up and meet me at the shop."

"When?"

"Now, you're gonna buy me dinner."

"But I ... "

"Now, Carlos," Sal told him and hung up in his
ear.

*****

CARLOS SAT DOWN
across the table and smiled.

"Fucks the matter with you trying to tell me
that shit on the phone?"

Carlos nodded. "Yeah, sorry."

"You're like the idiot son I never
had."

"Sorry."

Sal shook his head. "What do you
have?"

A waitress came to the table and put a schooner
of beer down in front of Sal.

"What can I get you, Mr. Carlos?"

"Carlos isn't drinking yet, Wendy," Sal said.
"We'll call you over when we're ready, okay?"

"Sure thing, Mr. Sal," she said and beat a
hasty retreat. You didn't question Mr. Sal.

"Jesus, Sal, I'm dying of thirst over here,"
Carlos complained.

"Shut up, Carlos and tell me."

And so he did. Sal listened intently. When
Carlos was done, and sat back in his chair, a smug smile of
satisfaction on his face, Sal said, "So, just so I'm clear on this,
Carlos, your information comes from a drunk, who told a drug
addict, who told it to a bum, have I got that right?"

"No," Carlos said, ''well, yeah, but we checked
it out!"

"How?"

Carlos looked down at his hands on the table.
"We've had this for more than a week."

Sal's eyes narrowed. "Is that
right?"

"Aw fuck you, Sal. See that! See what you just
did, you dick. My information sucks because of where it came from -
and then you're pissed that I didn't tell you sooner. I knew you'd
break my nuts if I brought it to you without checking it out, and
now you're breaking my nuts because I didn't. Fuck you,
man!"