I came up out of a sleep so solid and blank it was like a gray concrete wall. I was facedown on my bed. It was dark. My mouth tasted bad.
Something had woken me. A noise. I shifted a little, and the muscles in my neck creaked painfully. I was lying in the same position since I’d collapsed on the bed … when? After the party. The latest party.
The digital numbers of my alarm clock glowed blurry red in the black room. Four in the morning, almost. I was gingerly turning my head to rest on the other side, even out the twist in my neck, when the noise happened again. My new cell phone ringing. My graduation present to myself. The ringtone still sounded weird.
The phone was somewhere in the pile of clothes on my floor. I used my arms to pull my body off the bed—getting vertical was way too much effort—and fumbled around for the little hard rectangle in the pile. The ringing had stopped and started again by the time I found the phone.
I didn’t know the number. I hit the green ANSWER button and grunted into the phone.
“Van? Fuck, man. Oh, fuck. Is that you?” Davey. His voice was hushed and even more hyper than usual.
“Yeah,” I said. My tongue was thick. The days since graduation had been one long rolling kegger. Davey and I and a handful of other Emmett Watson High grads crashed one party after another for different cliques and different schools. There’d been a couple of girls and at least one fight. Last I remembered, Davey was going home to sleep off some of the fun.
“Van. Oh Jesus. I need you to come here, Van. Please.”
“Right, right. Okay. I’m … I’m near Broadway. In a store. Oh, Jesus.”
“Slow down. Are you busted? Is this your phone call?”
“No, no. God, I wish. It’s Bobby, Van. Bobby Sessions. He’s dead.”
Bobby Sessions. Davey’s connection for selling weed—and maybe more crap besides. Dead.
“Van?” Davey’s voice cracked. “Please, man. They’re coming.”
“Who is?” I was pulling on clothes with one hand. My hangover was gone, a miracle cure.
Davey exhaled a slow, shuddering breath. “I don’t know. We went to meet some guys Bobby said he knew. At the reservoir. Bobby had some shit to sell, he had it in the trunk of his car, and we went to meet them. He said he’d give me a discount if I’d help load the stuff, but I think maybe he just didn’t want to go alone.” Davey laughed, a brittle cough.
The reservoir was only a couple of miles away. I pulled my boots on over bare feet. “What happened?”
“Fuck, Van. They didn’t even talk to us. They were older guys. Badass. One of them, he just looked at the second one and said ‘Okay,’ and the other guy shot Bobby. Then they shot at me, but fuck, I wasn’t waiting around. I’ve never run so hard. I’m still shaking. Oh, fuck, Van.”
Told you. You colossal retard, I so fucking told you.
I found the keys to Dono’s Chevy Cavalier on the floor in the hallway, where I’d dropped them the night before. “I’m coming to get you. Tell me what store.”
“That place for Christmas, with the fake plastic trees and dolls and shit. They chased me across Broadway, and I cut through a yard, and I was in an alley—”
“Slow down. I know the store. Did you break in?” Maybe an alarm would bring cops. Not great for Davey, but better than getting dead. The Cavalier started up with an outraged roar, and I eased off the gas.
“Yeah. I was going to go right out the front, but I think they’re already there. On the street outside. I don’t know what to do, Van.”
“Stay tight.”
Maybe I should just call 911 myself. No, that was the fear talking. Don’t ever involve the cops, not ever—I could almost hear Dono growling in my head. No good ever came from those assholes.
Dono was out of town. He’d put up with sitting in the crowd for Watson High’s graduation ceremony in the Seattle Central Community College gymnasium. After we’d finally thrown our caps in the air, he clapped me on the back and told me he’d be on the road until Monday and not to burn the house down.
I turned onto 14th Avenue almost on two tires, overcorrecting with my free hand and nearly sideswiping a parked station wagon. Two minutes away, if I caught some air going over the hills.
I could hear Davey hyperventilating through the phone, even above the grind of the transmission. “Jesus, Van. I can’t be part of Bobby and all this shit. I can’t.” He was crying, I was pretty sure.
“I’ll be there.” I dropped the phone just in time to yank the wheel with both hands and sail through the red light on Thomas Street. The phone clattered to the floor, out of reach.
I raced past the black void of the reservoir, a half-acre expanse of water with no lights inside the high fences and very few outside. Good place for a murder. None of the homeless camped around the grassy edges of the facility would bother much about gunshots in the dark, so long as the danger didn’t come their way.
Davey had said the men had killed Bobby immediately. What the fuck had Bobby been selling? It must be coke or hash, something worth more than a trunkful of bad weed. Fucking Bobby Sessions. Dumb on so many levels, he needed a map to find his way to stupid.
The only thing Bobby’s killers hadn’t counted on was how fast Davey Tolan could run. Like a cat with battery acid sprinkled on its tail.
The Christmas store was near Harvard Avenue, not far from Broadway, Capitol Hill’s main artery. I saw only a couple of cars moving on Broadway. There was no movement at all two blocks west, where the business district started giving way to cheap studio apartments.
The sun hadn’t touched the sky in the east yet. It was starting to rain. I flipped the wipers on and forced myself to slow the car. To think. I wished Dono were in the passenger seat next to me. I tried to picture him there. What he might say.
Two men, Davey had told me. Would they both have chased him on foot? One might have gone back to their car, trying to get out in front of Davey and cut him off. They’d probably have cell phones, staying in touch with each other. Checking every doorway and trash bin until they flushed Davey out.
They sure as shit wouldn’t give up. Davey had seen them shoot Bobby. They’d risk a lot to make sure he didn’t get away.
So what, then? They probably knew that Davey was still in the area, but no more than that. If they’d been close enough on his heels to know he was hiding inside the Christmas store, he’d never have had a chance to call me.
I slowed as I neared the next block and took a right off of Harvard. Letting the Cavalier glide, like I was looking for an open space. The Hill never has street parking, but everybody tries.
The car caught up to a lean guy with a black cap walking parallel. He turned and stepped closer, bending to try to peer in my window. A sharp, goateed face. Wet and angry. He wore a stiff-looking leather coat. I kept pretending to search for parking as I cruised past.
Three doors farther down was the Christmas store. Holiday Haus, it was called. Not that anyone was calling it much in early summer. The place was shuttered. Dead season.
I drove around the corner. A service alley ran the length of the long block, between the row of shops and the looming apartment buildings behind it. The alley was wide enough for trash trucks to drive through and empty the bins.
When the Cavalier was level with the alley, I stopped and turned off the headlights. The alley was well lit. I could see all the way down, maybe seventy-five yards to the other end. Nothing moved. The rain was a little harder now. Another minute passed.
Then someone leaned out of one of the doorways, three steps up from the pavement of the alley. Just a dark torso and head, like a silhouette target. The figure stayed there for a few seconds, looking at my idling Cavalier. Then it faded back into the doorway.
It could be somebody waiting to catch his ride to the early shift. Or grabbing a smoke in the alley because his girlfriend won’t let him light up in the apartment.
But I caught the same vibe from him as I had from the rat-faced guy out front. Way too edgy to be a citizen. Bad-asses, Davey had called them. Stone killers, for a few kilos of junk.
Fuck, this was not how I was supposed to be spending my graduation week.
It wasn’t too late to get the cops here. The precinct was barely ten blocks away.
But if the cops grilled Davey—and me—they might want to talk to Dono, too. Maybe even start wondering why he was out of town. Would the attention be a problem for him right now? What was he into?
I could handle it myself. Had to.
Okay. So look at it the way he would.
The first need, always, is an exit route. At least one open path that will stay clear. The Holiday Haus was only a third of the way down this side of the alley. It wasn’t too far to make a run for the car, if I could get Davey out of there.
Too many moving parts, Dono would say. One man whose location you know, another on the move. And maybe they had even called for help. Too many gears that might grind me up.
So improve the odds, boy. If you can’t simplify the situation for you, make it more complicated for them.
I put the Cavalier next to a fire hydrant and left the doors unlocked.
There was a small pile of broken cinder blocks against the apartment building wall by the alley. I leaned down and picked out a piece about half the size of a thick paperback. It had a good heft.
In the alley I jingled my keys and put the chunk of cinder block up to my ear, like it was my phone.
“Hey,” I said into the chunk, “it’s me. Just getting home.”
The silhouette was still standing in the apartment building’s doorway. I went up the stairs, sluggishly, fumbling at the keys.
“Fuck no,” I said, chuckling, “I’m not that drunk. Not yet.”
Up close the silhouette became a man, a jowly white guy around thirty with a blue parka and hair cut so short that most of his head was scalp. He leaned against a wall covered with a hundred flyers for bands and shows and furniture for sale. I nodded to him as I approached.
“Hang on,” I said into the chunk. I looked up at the guy. “Locked out?” I said.
He shook his head once, cheeks wagging, and turned his attention back up the alley.
I nodded understanding and went past him, still jingling the keys, and as I came to his blind spot, I spun and smacked him hard on the back of his bristly skull with the flat of the cinder-block chunk. He fell forward onto his knees. I hit him again, in the same spot, and he collapsed completely, face-first onto the landing. Blood spattered off the chunk onto his parka.
Oh, shit. I’d panicked and hit him way too hard. The hood of the parka had fallen over the side of his face like a shroud. I tugged it back to look at him.
Breathing. Maybe. I felt the side of his neck. Yeah. Definitely a pulse there, or maybe that hammering was all me. Then he exhaled, and his warm breath made a wisp of vapor in the night air.
My fingers on his neck were an inch above a thick line of ink. I pulled the parka back farther. The tattoo went down past his collar, some messed-up design of arrows and swastikas and the top half a couple of letters in Gothic script—NF.
I’d seen the art before. Nation’s Fist. A white-power bunch, mostly rural and definitely small-time, compared to the bigger supremacist gangs that made their trailer payments running drugs or guns in the Northwest. None of the Hitler lovers could push any real weight, not compared to the Mexicans or the newer Russian families.
But they were sure a shitload tougher than just Davey and me.
It wouldn’t be long before Rat-Face finished checking the front of the block. Would he stay out there? Or come back here to meet his buddy?
I quickly rummaged through the skinhead’s pockets. Not easily. He was two hundred pounds of deadweight lying facedown and wearing a thick parka. He had a cell phone, more like a walkie-talkie, and a bunch of random crap like candy and half-chewed toothpicks.
Stuffed into his waistband was a target pistol, a Ruger Standard. I could smell burned powder under the bite of the cold air. Probably the same gun that had shot Bobby Sessions. I’d never liked Bobby, but the sight of that gun made me feel a little better about hitting the skinhead with a brick.
I stuffed his walkie-talkie in my pocket. The gun was a tougher choice. I didn’t want to carry around a murder weapon. But I really didn’t want this asshole to wake up and come after Davey and me with it. I tore one of the flyers from the wall and wrapped the pistol’s grip to take it with me.
I glanced around. No movement up or down the alley. I took a deep breath and flew off the landing steps, running all the way to what I prayed was the right door for the Holiday Haus. It had no window and no knob on this side, just a spring lock. I had to peer closely to see that the door had been jimmied. I stuck my fingernails in the gap and pulled it open a few inches.
“Davey?” I said into the darkness inside.
A sudden rustle of movement. “Van?” His voice was so soft that I hardly heard it.
“Let’s go, damn it. Come on.”
“I can’t.” A whispered wail.
I swore to myself and slipped through the door, into the void. With the front windows shuttered, the shop had the devouring blackness of an underground cave. I didn’t dare move, in case I knocked over something large and noisy.
“What the fuck, man?” I said.
“Wait.” More rustling, and I realized that Davey was crawling closer to me. I knelt to meet him. The Ruger in its paper wrapping banged on the floor tiles, and I put it down. Fucking thing was cursed.
“We have to go, Davey. Now, while he’s still on the street.”
“Wait, goddamn it.” I could hear his palms slapping the floor as he crawled, but I still couldn’t see a thing.
I smelled something sharp. Piss. Davey had hosed down his pants.
“We have to run for it, D. Right now.”
“I can’t—” he said, and I reached out blindly and grabbed him. One of my hands caught him by his long hair. I clamped my other hand over his moaning mouth and shook him like a dog on a rat.
“You move, you moron, or I will leave you here. You understand? You want my help, you do what I fucking say.”
He stopped making noise and nodded, over and over, until I let him go.
I felt for the knob of the door behind us. “We’re going right. Dono’s car is just up the street. Don’t look around, just run.” If Rat-Face was anywhere nearby, at least we’d be a moving target.
I swung the door open, and we exploded out into the alley. The electric lights were blinding after the pitch black of the shop. I squinted and kept going, hell-bent for the end of the alley. Davey’s footsteps behind me, fast and light. We sailed past the high landing where I’d conked the skinhead. I couldn’t see his body through the glare of lights and the blur of our run. We ran. Around the corner, sneakers skidding on the wet pavement, the Cavalier ten yards up by the fire hydrant and shining like dawn.
Then I was slammed sideways by a bullet train. I bounced hard off a parked car, reeling. Something smashed my ribs, and all the air was gone from the city, just like that. I was on my knees. Davey’s voice, then a cry of pain. Hands pulled me up, and I saw a big fist curled and ready, way up over my head. Bad. I ducked. The fist hit me on top of my skull, making a light that put all other lights to shame, and I heard another yelp. I fell back against the car and stayed there.
I saw Davey. He was on the ground, scrambling like a bug. The skinhead was lurching toward him, clutching his hand. I pushed at the car, seeing if I could stand. Yes.
The skinhead saw the movement and turned back to face me, slowly. The side of his head was dark with blood. Right. Because I’d hit him. No brick in my hand now. He lurched my way. I tried to get my fists up where they might do some good.
A wasp flew past my head with a snap. The skinhead and I both turned to see where it had come from. Rat-Face was running toward us, up the wet slope of the hill, twenty yards away. Another snap and flame spouted from the gun in his outstretched hand.
I threw myself toward the skinhead. We crashed together like exhausted linebackers and collapsed to the sidewalk as Rat-Face fired again. He was much closer now. I tensed. The next bullet would tear through my guts.
A shot sounded, then another. I looked up and saw Davey, still on the ground, sitting up with the skinhead’s Ruger in his hand. He fired over and over into Rat-Face, who was already sagging to the pavement. Somebody converted the Ruger for auto, Dono’s voice said. It’ll keep shooting as long as he holds the trigger down. Davey had a stranglehold on it.
The skinhead wasn’t moving. Hadn’t moved since we’d hit the ground together. Out cold again? In the flashes from Davey’s shots, I saw a little black hole in the skinhead’s face, just under his right eye. His other eye was open, unseeing. The tip of his tongue showed between his teeth.
I had to move. Up.
Davey’s hands were still around the Ruger and still pointing at Rat-Face’s limp form on the ground. The gun was empty, its breach locked open. I swatted it out of Davey’s hands. He had his driving gloves on. No fingerprints. I’d teased him about those dumb-ass things before, but right now they were better than money.
I hauled Davey to his feet and got us staggering toward the Cavalier. We leaned into each other.
I got the driver’s door open somehow and shoved Davey across the seats. He didn’t make a sound. A woman’s voice yelled from up on the apartment block, asking what the fuck was going on. I fell into the car, started the engine, and hit the gas so hard it took the tires two seconds of spinning and spraying rainwater to grab the road and launch us up the hill and away.
Leave the headlights off. I opened the windows to listen. No sirens that I could hear. Okay. We had a few minutes, maybe. Think. Two bodies on the ground behind us. We were seen. The Cavalier was seen. Somebody could have called in the license plate.
“Van,” Davey said.
“Shut up.” The Cavalier wasn’t in Dono’s name. If the plates were run they would match another owner of a Chevy in the same color or maybe even a false identity of Dono’s. Either way it was a dead end. If we could ditch it.
I could still get us out.
Davey had one hand on the dashboard, his forehead resting against his arm. “Holy shit. We made it. We’re alive.”
I rolled the windows back up and made myself ease off on the gas. We rolled up Pike. A block to our left, police cruisers flashing red and blue at the reservoir. They’d found Bobby.
“I shot that dude,” Davey said. “I thought he shot you, and I just—Oh, fuck me. I can’t believe it. Did you see?”
Although I really wanted Davey to shut up, maybe it was better that he talked. Vomit out all the words now. Because I was sure as shit counting on him to keep his mouth shut after tonight.
The best thing right now was to get off the streets. The Cavalier could stay hidden in the garage until Dono got back into town. Safest place. I’d calm Davey down and drop him at home. We could talk through this whole freaking night later.
“You want to hear something funny?” Davey said. He made a noise that was half whine, half laugh. “In the shop back there. When you grabbed me?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you were Dono. I thought that you’d brought him along and I just hadn’t realized it before that moment. I would’ve sworn it was him. You scared me so much I forgot to be scared. You know?”
“Yeah.” I knew. I knew exactly how scary my grandfather could be.