THE ROUGH FEEL OF the cobblestones underfoot in Pioneer Square brought back a memory from my childhood. My mother had brought me along while she shopped or maybe visited friends who worked somewhere nearby. I didn’t recall many details—I couldn’t have been more than five years old.
It wasn’t too many months after that when an evening commuter, in a hurry to get home at the end of a long day, hit the wrong pedal and jumped the curb and took her out of my life forever.
But the visit to the square had been a good day. I remembered my mother pointing out the intricate ironwork on the tall pergola that curved gently around the western side of the square. It may have been a weekend. There were a lot of people, or it seemed like it to me, and dogs on leashes, and the flocks of pigeons I chased without malice around the cobblestones.
At one point I think my mother picked me up—probably to get me to settle down a little—and through the long strands of her straight black hair I could see the exuberant colors of a dozen kinds of flowers, all set out for sale in big plastic buckets along the sidewalk.
That was the sum total of the memory, just people and birds and flowers. And my mother’s hair, lifted on the breeze. I could remember the feeling of her nearness far better than I could recall her face, on that day or any other.
Julian Formes lived in a three-story brick building at one of the corners of the square. A nice address for a paroled felon. An art gallery took up most of the street level, with the upper floors given over to loft apartments. The building retained some vestige of style from a century ago, with arched porticoes and ornamental carved stone between each story. But the modern Plexiglas-and-steel entrance spoiled the look, like welding a Caterpillar tractor grille onto a Rolls-Royce.
The day was overcast and drizzling. Regular folk rushed along the edges of the little piazza with its ironclad benches and massive black totem poles. The interior of the park was surrendered to the homeless. Most of them sat quietly and stared into space or muttered to themselves as they slumped low against the insistent damp mist. The more energetic ones tried prospecting spare change from the stream of citizens walking past.
If Formes had been the man who’d clocked me with the shillelagh at Dono’s house, then he would know me by sight. I risked walking past the building to get a closer look. The door required a key card for entry. Past it was a foyer with old-fashioned brass mailboxes on the wall. Pendleton Court was painted in old-timey script across the leaded glass of the inner door.
A young guy in a conservative blue suit and striped tie under his Burberry raincoat came out of the building in a rush. He stopped suddenly and checked for something in the messenger bag he had slung over his shoulder and pivoted around to go back in. He took his wallet out of his coat pocket, swiped it on the key-card reader, and disappeared inside.
I kept walking to the end of the block and turned around to walk back. When Burberry came out again, running even faster, he slammed right into me.
“Sorry, dude,” I said.
“Jesus,” he said, and raced off.
When he was out of sight, I took his wallet from under my jacket and removed the key card from it. The card worked just as well for me as it had for Burberry. I dropped the wallet into the mail slot next to the brass mailboxes. A glance at the boxes showed one near the top: FORMES—309.
The lobby of the building was heavy on the historic ambience. The stairs were marble and the banister thick oak, maybe even original from a century ago.
I took the stairs to the third floor. Number 309 was just off the elevator. It had better locks than its neighbors, heavy Schlage bolts. I knocked softly. No answer.
Even with Dono’s excellent set of picks and a little snap gun to force the lock, it took me five minutes of careful work before the second bolt gave up the fight. I was out of practice. Rangers use less subtle methods to deal with stubborn doors, like shotguns loaded with breaching rounds.
It was an open and airy space, with broad windows getting the most out of the overcast day’s sunlight. Sparse. There was only one chair in the living room, a low-backed green thing that had seen better decades. A large table with a dust cover thrown over it was against the wall. The built-in shelves in the room were bare, as were the kitchen counters.
I closed the door behind me and locked it again. I went into the kitchen and checked the trash. Easiest way to guess if anyone was in residence. The plastic can was two-thirds full, mostly with take-out food containers from different restaurants.
I gave the bedroom a quick toss. Formes lived like an especially poor but tidy college student. One heavy coat in the closet. A few pairs of pants and shirts, each neatly folded and tucked away in the single dresser. A small TV, angled so it could be watched from the meticulously made bed.
I was starting to think Formes did all his work somewhere else until I tried the hallway closet. The only thing in it was a large red metal tool cabinet on wheels, three feet tall. The kind mechanics use to keep every wrench close at hand. I tried the top drawer and found wires in multiple gauges and soldering gear. In the large bottom drawer, a dozen new off-the-shelf cell phones, still in their packaging. The brand was the same as the ones used in the bugs at Dono’s house.
Bingo. Julian Formes, you are about to have a very bad day.
A glance under the dust cover on the table in the living room yielded even more. A large Mac laptop, closed and sleeping. A disassembled transmitter, with delicate tools laid out in orderly rows next to it. And a thick black leather carrying case.
I unzipped the case to find rows of thumb drives, each tucked into its own little pocket. Some of the small metal rectangles had a letter or two written on them in blue permanent ink.
Three of the drives were labeled DS. Two others CL.
Dono Shaw. Cristiana Liotti.
I powered up the computer and plugged one of the DS drives into its port on the side. The computer pinged happily, and a window popped up, asking me for a password to the drive.
Encrypted. Son of a bitch. My sudden fantasy of listening to the audio recording of Dono’s shooting, of finding the shooter and maybe the diamonds, too, in one swoop, vanished as quickly as it had come.
I thought about my options. The smart thing to do was turn around, pretend I hadn’t been there, and tell Guerin to unleash his hounds on Formes. The police had plenty of computer-forensics wizards. They could break Formes’s encryption. And Guerin could probably break Formes, too, getting him to spill on who’d hired him.
Then again, maybe not. The warrants and computer work would eat up a day or two at minimum. Formes could hide behind his lawyer at every step. And maybe destroy the evidence. The whole process could take weeks and might be a dead end. I had four days.
I didn’t care too much about whether Julian Formes ended up back at Walla Walla State Pen. I wanted the man who’d put a bullet in Dono’s brain, and the more I learned about Formes, the more he looked like just a hired hand. He didn’t even seem to own a gun.
Guerin could eventually paint Formes into a corner, but I could do it faster.
I found an empty duffel bag in the bedroom closet and filled it with Formes’s laptop, the thumb drives, and the more expensive tools from the rolling cabinet. I replaced the dust cover on the table. With a black marker from the cabinet, I wrote “TRADE YOU” in big letters across the fabric, with the cell number of Dono’s burner phone below it.
I was about to leave when another idea popped into my head. Formes’s bug was still in my jacket pocket. I took it out and glanced at it.
The bug’s battery had a full charge. It could work.
I dialed my own number into the keypad on the bug. My phone beeped, and when I answered it, I could hear the ghostly echo of my own movements in the room. In Formes’s tool cabinet, I found duct tape. I taped the phone to the underside of the table.
It wasn’t nearly as slick as Formes’s work in Dono’s house—I could listen only so long as I didn’t hang up or until the battery on the bug gave out. But until then I could hear everything in the room.
See how you like it, you little fucker.
I locked the door behind me and left the building out of the alleyway door.
Keeping a close watch on Formes’s building was going to be a problem. There were no restaurants or bars or other handy places to hang around within spitting distance. If I stayed in a single place on the street, I’d stick out like one of the totem poles.
Unless I could blend in.
I jogged back to the pickup truck in the parking garage across from the square to drop off the duffel bag loaded with Formes’s laptop and other gear. I took off my barn jacket and grabbed a paint-stained hoodie out of the bins in the backseat.
There was a trash bin in the alley, its lid left unlocked. I spent two minutes grinding the hoodie into the muck and slime of the bin’s interior. The garbage smelled like rotten cabbage and spoiled meat. So did the half-shredded Mariners cap I found in it. With the cap on and my hood pulled up, I was ready for the red carpet, Pioneer Square style.
Only one bench had a view of both the front and alley doors of Formes’s building. It was occupied by a semiconscious Chinese man with spittle at one corner of his mouth. I stood ten feet from the bench and stared at him until something in his slack mind recognized the signals of potential danger and he slowly got up and moved away, closer to the others.
Van Shaw, tough guy. Just another tiny debt I could mark on the tally, waiting until I got my hands on whoever’d shot Dono. Maybe I would have the chance to tune the bastard up a little before I served him to Guerin.
And I was going to turn him in. I’d worked too hard to create a life away from all this crap with guys like Hollis and Corcoran and Willard. No matter how much I might like to see the shooter fry, killing him myself would just be stupid.
Might feel good, though. No harm in thinking about that.
I had an earpiece plugged into the phone. If anyone passing by noticed and thought it strange that the smelly homeless guy had cell-phone service, they didn’t remark on it. The white noise of the empty apartment on the open line threatened to become hypnotic. I kept alert by scanning the face of every person who walked past the apartment building.
After about twenty more minutes, I spotted Formes. My burglar, no question. The curly white hair was distinctive and longish, like a little cape over his ears. He was short and stooped, and wore a red Puma football jacket over jeans with high-top sneakers. His skin had an unhealthy-looking yellow undercoat, his lined face resembling crumpled parchment. Too much time hidden from the sun.
I watched as Formes went into his building. Soon I heard the clunks and clicks of him opening his locks.
I had made sure Formes would see my writing on the table cover from the doorway. Through the bug I heard footsteps, and then a high, clear voice said “Fuck” very distinctly. That sentiment was repeated many times, with increasing force.
Welcome home, Julian.
A lot more footsteps. Pacing and fast. He was figuring out what to do. Call me at the number I’d left? Get help? Flee town?
After a few moments, silence fell. I heard something like water running, maybe from the kitchen. A creak. Then a bump of furniture, very close. Maybe he was sitting down in the chair at the table, looking at all the nothing I’d left him.
“It’s me,” Formes said, and I nearly jumped. His high voice sounded like it was right next to me. I had to hand it to him—the man could build a hell of a bug.
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Formes said. He’d called someone, and I was only hearing his side of the conversation. “Look. Look. We got problems, damn it,” he said.
“We shouldn’t talk like this. But it’s bad. I need some help here.” There was a lengthy pause before Formes spoke again. “No, in person. You should see this shit. Uh-huh. No, no way. You’re my first call, I swear. You think I’m stupid? Customer is king, you know it. I’m your guy. Yeah. I’ll be here.”
I heard movement and then Formes swearing a few more times. Indistinctly in the background, another voice, then another, and I realized he’d turned on the television in the bedroom.
So Julian had called one of his clients, and help was on its way. Beautiful.
Guerin should be in on this. He had a chance to at least see the players involved, even if there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest them yet. I sent him a text message: OUTSIDE FORMES HOME PIONEER SQ. SHOOTER SUSPECT EN ROUTE. GET HERE NOW.
I went back to scanning faces, trying to place the client. The lunch hour was in full swing, and the crowd streaming and jostling along the sidewalk made it hard to get a good look at every person who entered the building before his or her back was turned. A FedEx delivery guy, in and out in three minutes. A good-looking brunette in a dress too light for the weather. She held the door to let a tall man in a dark suit into the building behind her. Two banker types, looking grim and purposeful and athletic enough to be muscle. Somebody inside buzzed them in. A portly guy with an umbrella and a fedora hat swiped his own card to enter.
I heard the doorbell buzz in Formes’s place. No one was standing outside at the intercom. The client must already be inside, one of the people I’d seen enter.
Footsteps, then the sound of the door opening.
“I told your boy he needed to come.” Formes’s high octave.
“He’s busy, Julian.” A man’s voice, rasping and amused. “What goes on?”
“You got eyes, man. All my shit’s gone. My computer, the backups, everything here. The motherfucker was probably waiting on me to leave. I wasn’t gone more than an hour or so.”
The other man grunted. “‘Trade you,’ ” he said, reading what I’d written on the dust cover. “What do you suppose he wants to trade for?” The touch of a Midwest accent. Chicago or maybe farther south. I remembered the news articles after the robbery. The dead robber Burt McGann had been from Illinois.
“Hell if I know,” said Julian. “I don’t really give a damn. I never plan to see the sucker again. The other night was too close.”
Boom. The last of my doubts that Formes was talking to the right client vanished. I glanced at my watch. Twelve minutes since I’d texted Guerin. Come on, damn it.
“So how much hurt are we in, Julian?”
Formes snorted. “You-all? Nothing. I know my shit, okay? My stuff’s locked up tight. Anonymous voice accounts, and A-one encryption on the backups. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy having all of it in somebody else’s pocket. I’m out of town, as of now.”
“And you gave us everything?”
“Shit, Boone. You got everything I got. I delivered, right? It’s not my fault the mark wound up in a fucking coma.”
Boone. I had a name to match the voice.
“But you did go back to his house to get your little toys,” Boone said to Formes.
A cold wash went down my scalp that had nothing to do with the drizzle. I was up and moving across the park at a fast walk.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that,” said Formes. “I just didn’t want to leave any trail behind me. It’s done.”
“Pack what you need,” Boone said in his sandpaper rasp. “We’ll give you a car.”
“Okay,” said Julian. “I just want—”
Then there was a loud thump and a grunt of effort. My fast walk became a run, weaving through street traffic and pounding up and across the hood of a stopped car, hearing underneath the angry honks and shouts from the drivers a horrible coughing sound through the earpiece, over and over.
The sound of Julian Formes being strangled.