Salvation Lake (A Leo Waterman Mystery) Read online

  Also by G.M. Ford

  Nameless Night

  Threshold

  Leo Waterman Series

  Who In Hell Is Wanda Fuca?

  Cast In Stone

  The Bum’s Rush

  Slow Burn

  Last Ditch

  The Deader the Better

  Thicker Than Water

  Chump Change

  Frank Corso Series

  Fury

  Black River

  A Blind Eye

  Red Tide

  No Man’s Land

  Blown Away

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 by G.M. Ford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503936850

  ISBN-10: 1503936856

  Cover design by Kerrie Robertson Illustration Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places, entities, or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  About the Author

  Red Lopez was a spitter. When Red told a story, it was best to get yourself alee of something waterproof, lest you end up looking like you’d been run through the Elephant Car Wash.

  “So we was comin’ down Yesler,” Red gushed. “Me and George and Ralphie.”

  Everyone had found cover, except the guy they called Frenchie, who was so tanked he probably thought it was raining inside the Eastlake Zoo.

  “And you know, ’bout halfway down the hill, the Hotel Cairo there on the corner?”

  Everybody nodded. Thus assured, Red went on.

  “There’s this big ol’ black mutt laying there on the front step lickin’ his nuts for all he’s worth—I mean, just havin’ a party with himself—and George looks over to me and says, ‘Man, I wish I could do that.’ And you know what Ralphie says?”

  He threw a liquid leer around the bar. Having heard the story three or four thousand times previously, the cowering crowd was prepared.

  “Ralphie looks over at George and says, ‘I don’t know, man . . . maybe you ought to try to pet him first.’”

  The place came unglued. As they yukked it up, chairs chattered on the wooden floor, backs got slapped and then slapped again, somebody repeated the punch line al castrato, and another wave of unbridled merriment tsunamied about the room.

  This was an easy crowd to amuse. It wasn’t lost on them that their alcohol problems had more or less turned them into lepers, a fact which made them somewhat disinclined to make value judgments regarding one another’s atrocious behaviors. Something about pots and kettles, I’d always supposed.

  There were, however, limits to even this well-lubricated amiability, most of which revolved around the pressing need to stay liquored up at all times.

  You didn’t want to be stealing anybody’s money. Not because they were much into money, but because money was the gateway to booze, which, for them, constituted the very nectar of survival.

  And you particularly didn’t want to be spilling anybody’s drink, unless you were in a position to immediately replace it. So when Billy Bob Fung lost his balance and belly flopped across the table in the far corner, things got contentious in a hurry.

  Even among the drunk and destitute, Billy Bob was considered a world-class sponger. While guys like George and Ralph and Harold supported their drinking habits on meager pensions and Social Security checks, Billy Bob supported his by showing up at the Zoo. No one could recall Billy Bob ever having bought a drink for himself, or, for that matter, for anybody else.

  Billy Bob, the rickety pedestal table, and about three gallons of beer hit the floor simultaneously, sending a flotilla of peanut shells and a tidal wave of suds rolling across the floor like the Banzai Pipeline.

  Needless to say, Large Marge, as the owner of said suds, was less than amused. She’d been around long enough to know that Billy Bob wasn’t good for the spillage, and that what she’d imagined to be the makin’s of a cozy afternoon buzz was presently seeping through the ancient floorboards.

  “Goddamn you,” she shouted as she hauled herself out of the chair. “Look what you done, you freakin’ idiot.”

  I waited for the foamy wave to blow past my boots and then scrambled to my feet. After the yelling and finger-pointing died down, they’d work things out “in house,” so to speak, a designation which, thank heaven, didn’t include me. No . . . I just stopped by the Eastlake Zoo now and then, to buy the boys a couple of rounds and see how my old compadres were weathering the slings and arrows.

  Harold Green, George Paris, and Ralph Batista were the last known survivors of my old man’s political machine. For twenty-seven years, Big Bill Waterman had milked his seat on the city council for every dime it was worth, keeping a small army of functionaries hard at work, covering his tracks and laundering his ill-gotten gains.

  When the big guy finally blew a heart valve and fell stone dead on University Street, the whole felonious facade had come tumbling down in what seemed an instant. Grand jury indictments fell from the sky like winter rain. The lucky ones just got fired. The less fortunate spent time as guests of the state, prior to joining their fallen comrades in the life au naturel.

  The rest of the mob I’d inherited somewhere along the line. Kind of like I’d inherited my old man’s money, when I turned forty-five. For a long time I’d been pissed off that my trust fund didn’t find its way into my pocket a whole lot sooner. I got over it though. When I look at it now, I don’t think any reasonable person could have concluded that I was the kind of guy who’d have invested the money wisely and then skulked back to his cubicle the following Monday morning. Not even close. They’d given me the money back then, I’d have blown it for sure. Turned out my old man was a pretty good judge of character after all.

  Besides . . . being forced to earn a living while I waited for the family pile to fall my way was pretty much the reason I’d spent twenty years working as a private eye. Despite the nicks and cuts, the bruises and the bullet holes, there’s no denying that the experience shaped my life in ways nothing else possibly could have. It’s like my namesake Leo Tolstoy said: too much prosperity is bad for people, in the same manner that too many oats are bad for a horse.

  I was sidling toward a quick exit stage left and reaching in my pocket for a twenty to throw onto the bar, figuring I’d replace the spilled beer and return this sylvan glade to its usual state of bucolic bliss. No such luck though.

  A sudden movement in the corner of my eye pulled my head around. Billy Bob had struggled to his knees and, with the aid of a chair, was trying to force himself upright. I watched in horror as Marge snarled and drew back a size 14 work boot. The look in her bloodshot eyes left little doubt. She was gonna drop-kick Billy Bob’s head into the next area code.

  What saved Billy Bob from oblivion was that the chair he’d been using to lever himself upright suddenly skidded on the wet floor and went clattering off into the darkness, sending him face-pl
anting back to the beery boards a nanosecond before the boot whizzed past his head like an angry comet.

  George lunged out of his chair. “No, Margie,” he croaked. “Don’t . . .”

  What transpired next would become the stuff of myth. Still oblivious to the fact that Marge was attempting to collapse his noggin, Billy Bob once again tried to regain his feet, only this time, when he reached out for support, the first thing his fingers came into contact with was Marge’s skirt, which he promptly latched onto with both hands.

  Whatever mechanical contrivance kept the skirt closed was never intended to withstand the weight of a grown man. Took about a half a second of tugging before Billy Bob’s weight popped the fastener and the skirt settled onto the floor like a patchwork parachute, leaving Marge standing there in work boots and a pair of camouflage boxer shorts—Mossy Oak, if the label was to be believed.

  I have no doubt she would have stomped him to jelly had she been able to free her boots from the skirt. As it was, however, she looked like she was dancing the tarantella as she struggled to free her feet from the encircling mound of fabric.

  George was weaving across the floor like a deranged halfback, figuring he could scoot Billy Bob out of range before Marge was able to extricate herself. Instinctively I began to move in that direction too. No sense letting anybody get hurt here.

  I was halfway across the floor when my feet had other ideas. Next thing I knew, I was staring at the tips of my cowboy boots, wondering how the hell they got all the way up to eye level, the answer to which, unfortunately, was not long in coming.

  I landed flat on my ass, with all the grace of a cow flailing down an elevator shaft. Baboom. Every glass in the joint rattled. My spine felt flattened. I was sure I was paralyzed. And that was before I realized I’d landed in a huge puddle of beer and that, in addition to being crippled for life, I was now ball-dripping wet.

  Like I said, this was an easily amused crowd. The place came unhinged again. Everybody pointing at me and whooping it up for all they were worth. Even Marge forgot her Billy Bob death wish and was laughing her ass off.

  And then the strangest thing happened. Like a dream scene out of an old black-and-white movie. In the wink of an eye, everything went completely quiet. I mean it went from rattling-the-rafters laughter to total tombstone silence, like somebody’d flipped the “shut-up” switch.

  I looked over at George. He was standing in the middle of the floor, weaving back and forth like he was dancing the fox-trot. His bleary eyes were fixated on something over by the bar. I pushed myself to my knees. I could feel my ass dripping beer back onto the floor. I winced and looked over at the bar.

  And there she was. Standing at the corner stool, taking it all in. Her eyes bounced from Marge standing there in her drawers to me on the floor and back again.

  “You kinda hadda be there,” I said.

  Her facial expression said she wasn’t amused.

  “I should have let Eagen have his way,” Rebecca Duval said disgustedly. “He wanted to send a couple of uniforms down to haul you in as a material witness.”

  Rebecca Duval was the chief medical examiner of King County. In the sixth grade, she’d told me she was going to grow up, go to college, and become a pathologist. Swear to God. Looked me right in the eye and laid out her life for me. I, of course, was immediately smitten. We’d been more or less inseparable for twenty years or so, at which point she’d experienced a spasm of lucidity and decided she’d had enough of me and what she termed my perpetually adolescent behavior.

  Unfortunately for all concerned, the new Mr. Wonderful turned out to be a devilishly handsome yacht salesman and drug runner named Brett Ward. A no-brain asshole who went down in a hail of bullets when he tried to rip off the wrong people. To this day, I get pissed off every time he crosses my mind.

  The Eagen she mentioned—the one who wanted to have me arrested as a material witness—had to be Timothy Eagen of the Seattle Police Department. Last time I saw him he was a lieutenant. Probably a captain by now, but either way, he hated my big ass the way Ahab hated that whale.

  I climbed carefully to my feet. I pretended not to notice the trickle of beer seeping from the seat of my pants. “Material witness to what?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “I’m not at liberty to say. You’ll have to get that from SPD. It’s their case. I was just going to be nice and give you a ride but”—she flicked her fingernails in my direction—“but . . . you know. Like this?” She shook her head. “There’s no way you’re getting in my car.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but she headed me off at the pass.

  “I’ll meet you at the office,” she said, and then walked away. Halfway down the bar, she read my mind, stopped, and turned back in my direction. “This isn’t the time to channel your inner idiot, Leo. Just drive yourself down to the office and get this over with. Don’t give Eagen an excuse to roust you. Nothing would please the man more.”

  She threw a disgusted hand in the air. “I’m not sure I could stand that much gaiety.”

  I watched her back recede until the front door opened and a bolt of pure white light assaulted my eyes, before the door swung closed. Click.

  The King County Medical Examiner’s Office occupies an entire city block up on the west side of Pill Hill. Nothing special, just a nondescript white office building that could have as easily been an insurance company. Rebecca had a plush corner office on the fifth floor, but her coat spent way more time there than she did. She spent her time down in the basement with the stiffs. You lived in King County and died violently or under any kind of suspicious circumstances, this was where you ended up, till they got things sorted out. Rebecca was the senior sorter-outer. Sorta.

  They called them “examination rooms.” Probably because it sounded better than “the room where they cut you to pieces and spread your guts all over the place.”

  They were expecting me. Margot the receptionist held up four manicured fingers as I dripped up the hall in her direction. Not wishing to chat, I leaned left and headed directly for the elevators. She toodled me good-bye.

  Examination room four was way down at the end of the hall. The big one with the seating area for spectators on the other side of the Plexiglas window. Rebecca was seated at the desk, shuffling through some paperwork. Eagen and another guy, probably his driver, were slouched over a couple of metal folding chairs along the north wall.

  Eagen was a skinny little turd with a salt-and-pepper comb-over pasted across his pate like a sleeping hamster. He pushed himself upright and shuffled over in my direction. The closer he got to me, the more amused he became.

  “You piss yourself?” he asked with a grin.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m expecting the sphincter to go next.”

  “Always the smart-ass,” he growled.

  “It’s a cross to bear.”

  “Gentlemen,” Rebecca interrupted. “How about we dispense with the ribald pleasantries and get down to business.” She got to her feet and started across the room.

  The minute her back was turned, Eagen jabbed a bony finger in my direction. “I haven’t forgotten about you, dirtbag. Don’t you ever think I have. Not ever.”

  “Gosh and golly, I’ll have to sleep with a night-light,” I assured him.

  A while back, I’d talked a friend of mine into helping me extricate Rebecca from the mess her late husband had gotten her into. Happened that Marty Gilbert, in addition to being a badass and one of my oldest chums, was also a lieutenant in the Seattle Police Department. Go figure. Paths not taken and all that rot.

  We were up on Vancouver Island, turning over rocks, looking for Rebecca, when somebody decided the world would be a better place without us. They sent several hundred rounds of automatic weapon fire tearing through the little knotty pine cabin where we were spending the night. Marty took a bullet in the shoulder and came real close to bleeding out, right there on the floor. I’ll never forget having to call his wife, Peg. I get the chills whenever it cr
osses my mind.

  Eagen and most everybody else in the SPD held me personally responsible for Marty’s plight, an indictment which, even I had to admit, was not altogether without merit. That Marty survived his injuries, took early retirement, and moved Peg and himself down to San Diego to be near the grandchildren didn’t much matter to Marty’s former colleagues on the SPD. As far as they were concerned, my status was, and would remain in perpetuity, lower than whale shit.

  Corpses are big-time conversation stoppers. Something about dead bodies always reminds me that there’s more to being alive than the sack of flesh and bones we walk around in. I know it sounds weird, but stiffs have always reminded me of junked cars. Like the once-beloved family station wagon, sitting out there in the field with the tires flat and weeds growing in the windows. To me, whatever spark, celestial or otherwise, animates a human being disappears back into the galaxy at the moment of death, leaving behind little more than the rusted shell of some broke-down Buick.

  Two corpses? Well that’s a whole ’nother matter, isn’t it? Rebecca emerged from the darkness wheeling two stainless steel autopsy tables. From across the room, all I could see was two pair of feet moving my way, bright green toe tags flapping in the breeze like pennants. The pair on the left were pink and puffy and clean. The pair on the right were covered in rough calluses and the kind of dirt that doesn’t wash off.

  I could feel Eagen behind me as I stepped between the tables. What the two stiffs had in common was that Rebecca had worked her magic on both of them. They’d been sliced and diced from stem to stern, split down the middle like capons, and then sewn back together, with something akin to red fishing line. Other than that, they could easily have been from different planets.

  Pink Feet was in his early forties. Couple inches over six feet. Hundred eighty pounds or so. Looked like he made it to the gym on a regular basis. Wavy black hair with a good cut. Well nourished. Looked like he’d had his chest waxed. All smooth and hairless. Mr. Metrosexual poster boy.

  I picked up his hand. His flesh felt like chilled putty. His nails said he’d had a professional manicure in the not too distant past. For reasons I didn’t understand, I patted the back of his lifeless hand several times, almost as if to, in some belated way, comfort him, then set the hand back on the table and turned to the other guy.