I WALKED UP THE HILL to catch my ride. The rain had finally abated after a long final drizzle, but the tree leaves and gutters were still dripping.
A metallic blue Forester wagon pulled up to the curb, so new that the chrome trim gleamed even under the gray sky. The driver rolled down his window halfway. He was a college-age white guy, with a long face and even longer neck with a pointed Adam’s apple. Tufts of dirty-blond hair poked out from under his bright red wool cap.
“Selbey?” I said.
“And you’re Mr. Varrick. Cool,” he nodded. “Pike Place, yeah?”
I climbed into the backseat. The Forester had that leather-cleaner smell of showroom cars, along with just a hint of sativa smoke.
“If you need a ride back from the Market, I can hang,” Selbey said. He banged the gas and the Forester lurched into a gap in the traffic. Selbey didn’t match his pristine suburbanite ride. He wore a dull gray wool sweater over a T-shirt I could tell was paper-thin just by the collar. His jeans were frayed at the knees and a two-inch split showed at the thigh seam.
“Nice car, man,” I said.
“Bought it for this gig. Gotta spend to make, you know?” His head nodded along with unheard music.
“I know,” I said. “Kend told me you were his go-to wheels right now.”
“Hey, you know Kend?” Selbey’s face fell. “I heard on the news. He was a cool guy.”
“He said you were solid, too. That’s why I called.” I found myself imitating Selbey’s parrot-like head bob.
“Yeah? That’s all right. I liked him.”
“I’m trying to let people know. Like maybe have a gathering or something. For his tribe.”
Selbey gave me a big grin in the rearview mirror. The Forester drifted a little out of its lane. “That’s very cool of you, man.”
“Problem is, some of his friends, I just know their first names or nicknames from Kend. No phone numbers. It would help me out if you could tell me where he’d been going. So I can get in touch with them.”
“Uh. Hey, I’m just allowed to drive people where they send me, you know. I can’t just go anywhere.”
“It’s cool.” I laid two bills, a twenty and a hundred, across the shoulder of the passenger seat. Held them there with my hand. “So you take me to the Market, and Faregame gets the twenty bucks and we’re done with them. Then you can do whatever you want. Free country, man.”
Selbey’s eyes were working triple-time, between me in the rearview and the money and the traffic down Olive. “I suppose it’s okay to drive you someplace myself.”
“Car payments are steep. You show me the list of the places he went. I pick one, and we’ll go there.”
He couldn’t hand me his phone fast enough. “Under the spreadsheet app. That logs all my rides.”
It was easy enough to sort by Kend’s name. He had taken forty or fifty rides during the past month with Selbey. I scrolled through and used my phone to photograph the whole list. A lot of the destinations were obvious—his apartment, downtown at the Columbia Center and the HDC offices, his neighborhood in Lower Queen Anne.
One location stood out, in the southwest part of the city, almost to Burien. Kend had made at least ten visits to it. Two during the daytime, the rest in early evening.
“What’s this one?” I said, showing it to Selbey. He was busy running the yellow light through Pine Street and waited until traffic had stopped us to look.
“Yeah, that’s the long trip. Twenty-five bucks from his house. It’s just a building, man. I figured he worked at the place part-time. Here we are.” He stopped the car in the middle of the brick road at the Market, and took back the phone to press a couple of buttons. I signed off on the ride. A car pulled up behind us and honked.
“Take me there,” I said.
“You sure you know Kend, man?” Frowning wasn’t a natural expression for Selbey, but he gave it a shot. The car behind us backed him up by laying on the horn.
“You ever meet Elana? How hot was she?” I said.
“So hot,” Selbey said, unable to keep from laughing.
“Help us out,” I said.
Selbey popped the Forester into gear and we zoomed off as the car behind us stalled, still honking.
THE ADDRESS FROM KEND’S phone turned out to be a brown brick-and-cinder office building. It had seen better decades. The front wall showed as many FOR LEASE signs as iron-barred windows. Selbey dropped me at what he said was the same spot where Kend had gotten out of the car on every visit. We exchanged fist bumps and the two bills and he zoomed away, probably happy to be out of the neighborhood.
I was the only person visible on the street. The eroded brickwork showed a lot of very old graffiti. The four-story building wasn’t even interesting enough to be tagged anymore. Besides a couple of homeless guys sitting across the road from the back half, the block was just as lonesome all the way around. What the hell was Kend Haymes doing here?
Then the dreary anonymity of the office building struck a familiar note. I’d never been there before. But I had visited another location a whole lot like it, and recently.
On my way back to the front entrance I spotted the satellite dishes. Two of them, up near the roof on the south corner. Brand-spanking-new, with cables leading down into a rough hole in one of the top floor windows.
I kept my distance from the front doorway. There was a steel intercom with a keypad. Dial the right number and reach the right extension, back when the building had phone service. I thought about the kind of security I might install for myself, and then edged just close enough to see the camera. It was inside the lobby, pointed through the glass door where it could get a clear view of anyone standing by the intercom. The camera wasn’t the ancient closed-circuit type that would have matched the building. It was a new wireless model, and crudely bolted high on the wall.
It would be good to see inside the building, and confirm my suspicions. It would not be good to have my face on camera doing it.
The building had fire exits, steel doors one inch thick on ball-bearing hinges. Old doors like that could be opened from the outside with a large special key, more like a wrench than a house key. With proper tools, a crowbar and a sledge, I could force the steel door or beat the lock. I didn’t have tools. I didn’t need them.
Twenty feet from the fire exit, embedded flush with the building’s brickwork, was a black metal box that looked like a very small safe. A Knox-Box. Used by fire departments to gain access to the building without the trouble and expense of chopping big holes in the doors and windows. At the center of the Knox-Box was a little hinged cover, and under the cover was a keyhole, slightly rusted from disuse. The SFD would have a master key that fit every Knox in the area, and I had the equivalent. No one was nearby. I used Dono’s lockpicks and had the box open in moments. Inside was a set of keys and one larger hollow hexagonal tube that looked sure to fit the fire exit lock.
Abracadabra.
The downside, of course, is that fire exits are also hooked up to extremely loud alarms, with flashing lights and automatic alerts to the nearest fire and police stations. Most burglars give them a wide berth.
Unless the burglar is pretty damn sure that someone has disabled the alarm already. I inserted the hexagonal tube and turned. The fire door opened to blessed silence.
Whoever had greased the fire alarm hadn’t cared enough to hide their work. The metal doorframe near the latch been pried open and peeled back. I could see where someone had crudely bypassed the circuit, leaving the disconnected wires exposed. The young professional criminal that I used to be grimaced at the hack job.
I ran up the stairwell to the next floor. It was completely empty. No walls, no furniture, just a dusty void waiting for renovation. I took a moment to mark where the other stairwells were located. One in each corner.
On the fourth floor was a dank hallway with glued-on linoleum and blank eggshell-colored walls that had more scuff marks than paint. There was a freight elevator, and a single windowless door with cheap wooden veneer leading to the interior.
I listened. Under the normal hums and clicks of office heat ventilation, there was something else. Voices and music, in a very staccato beat.
Inside the windowless door was a longer hallway, which led to an open space beyond. The voices and music were coming from televisions. Many televisions, with the sounds of bumper jingles and cheers and rapid-fire announcers competing for dominance.
. . . Villanova, with half the game to go, needs to . . .
. . . Hess, for three! That makes him five for seven . . .
. . . superb engineering that turns your carpool into a carnival . . .
Then all of the broadcasts were drowned out by a very enthusiastic roar of live male voices. Somebody’s team was doing well.
There was a rubber wedge on the floor of the hall, for propping the door open. Just as useful for keeping the door closed behind me. I shoved it underneath, as another burst of appreciative shouting and claps came from around the corner. Before the celebrating had died down, I risked a glance.
Someone had transplanted a sports bar into the middle of the barren office space. Ten flat-screens, arranged on tables in a semicircle, with cushioned chairs and sofas at the circle’s center. Eight or ten men lounged in the chairs, watching the games. Their backs were to me, and I took advantage to extend my look.
From behind, it was hard to assign a type to the men seated on the sofas and chairs. They ranged between twenty-five and fifty. Expensive haircuts on most. A couple of business suits. Today was a Tuesday. The executive types might be blowing off afternoon at the office to be here.
One young guy in jeans and a puffy winter coat was seated on a swivel chair off to the side. He wasn’t watching the games. Instead he typed away on a laptop with frenzied concentration, occasionally tapping the wireless headset in his ear.
There was one last man, over six feet tall and brawny, with sparse black hair and a thick beard. He stood by a table stocked with booze and an ice-filled cooler underneath. As I watched, one of the spectators raised a piece of paper and the bouncer walked quickly forward to grab the proffered slip and take it over to the laptop jockey.
That was why the building’s derelict exterior, with its shiny satellite dishes, had been so familiar. Willard’s mobile card game operated on the same principle. A dull layer of paint disguising a gold brick.
I’d heard of operations like this, but never seen one in person. A ghost book.
Washington State was hard-nosed about online gaming, and sports betting in particular. A Class C felony, last I knew. If a state resident wanted to play anything heavier than their company’s March Madness pool, they needed a go-between. The ghost book was the middle man. Live viewing, and up-to-the minute gambling. The book would be set up in an unobtrusive location, and relocated whenever necessary. A few trusted high rollers would be clued in to the new spot. And if those gamblers wanted to stay part of the inner circle, they would bet like they meant it.
This was a bigger cash cow than Willard’s little rolling casino, however. The geek at the laptop would be working the phones and instant messaging as well as the whales in the room. He’d have stolen or false identities to lay down bets with international sports books via satellite. The gamblers would pay the ghost book a hefty percentage, win or lose, on top of whatever the bookies themselves charged. It might be the only heavy game in town. It was definitely for suckers.
Like Kend. It was clear where all of the trust-fund kid’s allowance, as well as his Porsche, had evaporated.
The door behind me thumped. Someone was trying to open it and running up against the rubber wedge.
Time to leave. I checked my mental map of where the nearest corner stairs were, as the door banged again, and someone shouted Hey! from the lobby. I stepped into the room and sprinted past the screens for the stairwell door.
The bouncer reacted pretty fast, but there was half a showroom’s worth of furniture between us. The men hollered in confusion as he crashed through their midst. I had a thirty-foot lead when I hit the door. I took the stairs three at a time, sideways, like running downhill with a full ruck.
At the bottom, there was another fire exit. The alarm on the fire door had been disabled just like the first one I’d seen, with the disconnected wires exposed to the air. I yanked the makeshift circuit apart and touched the exposed wire back to its other half.
The bouncer, still two flights up, wheezily tried to shout again. It sounded like someone had stepped on a rat. That was the last thing I heard, before the alarm kicked in. A shrieking pulse filled the air, so loud that it went beyond deafening and into blinding. Halogen lights began to flash in a disjointed rhythm.
I ran out the door. Behind me, I could imagine the gamblers, their bets and the game forgotten in the sudden panic, scattering like roaches.