Hard Cold Winter (8 page)

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.

I
T HAD STARTED RAINING
again during the few minutes I’d been inside. I was drenched by the time I made it to the nearest bus stop, and still dripping when I caught the next one headed uptown.

The ghost book had been blown. Whoever was running the game would have to move locations, and leave the televisions and satellite dishes behind for the fire department to find. I had considered waiting around to watch the show. But there was no point. I’d seen what I could see, and I had no car to follow them, whoever they were.

It had been a bad week for that book. Besides my visit spooking the regulars, they had also lost Kend. Judging by his parched bank account, he might have dropped enough cash there to be considered a gold-star mark.

Something didn’t fit, and I let my mind relax, watching the drops stream down the window. By the time the bus connected with the arterial, I had it.

Kend was visiting the ghost book at least once every few days, based on his rides with Selbey. But his available funds were down to zip every month within a week after his allowance.

So what money was he gambling with? Was he selling things? I thought about his Porsche Panamera. Two years old, signed away, and no money deposited in his bank account for it. If Kend had sold it, he might have taken cash under the table.

Or maybe he didn’t sell it. Maybe it was given as payment, to cover what he already owed somebody. I searched my memory and came up with the name on the sales record: Torrance X. Broch.

Kend gambles. Kend needs money. Kend goes to the kind of guy who lends money to people who gamble it away, and when he gets in over his head, he gives the shark six figures’ worth of automobile. That could be it.

So then the question became: who was Torrance Broch? I didn’t know the name. Then again, I didn’t know many loan sharks. They swam in different seas than the ones Dono and Willard navigated.

I did know a few bookies, though. One in particular had probably thrown customers to every shark in town. He could tell me about Broch, if he was still shambling around. And if I could find whatever rock he was under.

My cell phone was in my inside jacket pocket, the only completely dry spot on me. I pulled up one of the handful of numbers in my contact list.

“Ganz and Quinlan,” answered a female voice.

“Van Shaw. Calling for Ephraim.” From across the center aisle, a gaunt woman in a tan pantsuit and pink parka frowned at me. She had a face that looked as though she frowned more than she blinked.

“One moment please, Mr. Shaw,” the voice said.

I waited. The woman across from me made a little grunt of annoyance. I gave her a smile that was two teeth too wide to look sane. She turned away, rolling her eyes.

“Van, hello,” said Ephraim Ganz quickly. Ganz did everything quickly. He probably took the stairs when he lunched with clients at the Space Needle because he found the elevators too slow.

“Hello, Ephraim,” I said. “That’s a new receptionist.”

“I married the other one, and she won’t answer the phones anymore.”

“Congrats.”

“You’ve been back in Seattle, what?” he said. “A few weeks, I hear.”

“You’re annoyed that I haven’t called?”

“I’m astounded that you’re calling at all. In trouble already?” The last time I’d been in Seattle, Ganz’s legal maneuvers had kept me from spending a lot of years sitting on a built-in bed, staring at steel bars.

“No trouble,” I said. “At least not your kind.”

“I wish I could say that sounded encouraging.”

“Is Fred Fogh still a client of yours?”

“No. Not for some years now.” Ganz’s voice was dry enough to mop up the rainwater puddle I had left on the floor of the bus.

“Was he too cheap to keep paying your retainer?” I said.

“You remember Freddy well.”

“Then you and I don’t have to dance around attorney-client privilege.”

“Not unless you’re inquiring about anything that happened during the two excruciating decades within which I deftly handled Mr. Fogh’s concerns.”

“Nope. He’s still in business, I take it.”

“Freddy is what Freddy is.”

“You know where?”

Ganz laughed. “He switched attorneys. It would take much more than saving a few pennies to get him to switch taverns. The Laughing Friar. You know where that is?”

“On Meeker. Thanks.”

“My pleasure. Say, if Freddy looks to be in need of representation, you remind him that I don’t hold grudges. My door’s always open.”

“You said he was excruciating.”

“So I’m pragmatic. It’s a flaw.” He hung up.

Ganz hadn’t asked me why I was looking for a pocket-change bookie like Fred Fogh. He was probably in the habit of not asking questions.
The kinds of answers his clients gave might make him an accessory before the fact.

MOST OF THE LIGHT
inside the Laughing Friar came from neon signs. The main room was long and narrow and smelled of dry rot. There were three booths at the end. All of them were empty. A few old men who had the look of permanent fixtures propped up the bar.

The bartender was no younger than the customers, but he was a little more vertical. He watched me from the moment I entered the door, eyes as narrow as the sides of dimes.

“Freddy here?” I asked.

“Don’t know him,” said the bartender. His downy white hair made a tangled ring around his bald head, with the same thick pale tufts for eyebrows and covering his forearms.

“Sure,” I said. “He’s only been coming here since the Civil War. I’ll wait.”

“Not without a drink, you won’t.”

I wanted to ask him about the house wine, but decided that wouldn’t further my interests. Each of the regulars was nursing a bottle of Budweiser, or Coors, or Miller. The microbrew revolution would never storm the gates of the Friar. I bought a Bud.

I sat in the back booth where I could see the door, and thought about Kend, and Elana. Mostly Elana. Why was she with a guy like Kend Haymes? Sure, Kend must have seemed like a catch. Megabucks family. His own place. Even close to good-looking. Everything a girl might want, on paper.

Unless the paper you were talking about was Kend’s bank statement. Zero was zero, whether it started from mutual fund dividends or working a double shift at Arby’s.

Had she known about his gambling? Had she loved him anyway? Or at all? I thought about the love notes I’d found in their apartment. Sticky notes not stuck to anything. Stuffed haphazardly in a drawer. But not thrown away or burned in a fury, either.

My beer was empty. I bought another.

Elana was smart. And the picture of Kendrick Haymes I was piecing together looked like a guy who couldn’t successfully hide his gambling addiction from the woman who shared his life. So she must have known. And chosen to stick by him. I didn’t know if I admired that or not.

My phone buzzed with a text. It was a reply to the message I’d sent Kend Haymes’s friends early that morning. The answer came from Barrett Yorke, the elfin girl holding the champagne in the wedding picture.

Meet us A. Borealis on 5th
at nine tonight
.

Couldn’t fault her for wasting words.

At three fifteen Fred Fogh walked through the door of the Laughing Friar, moving slow enough that I had all the time in the world to recognize him. He was probably pushing seventy now, thinner than he’d been fifteen years ago, and buried under multiple layers. I counted two worn dress shirts and a moth-eaten green cardigan and a brown raincoat and a fishing hat and a scarf. The ruddy skin of his face sagged like wax off a pillar candle.

The bartender nodded to Freddy and jabbed a thumb in my direction. Freddy saw me and stopped. There was a flash of panic on his face. When I raised a finger off the bottle in greeting his expression shifted to puzzlement. He risked coming a few steps closer.

“I know you,” he said. “Right?”

“Yeah.”

He gave himself another dozen seconds to think about it, then shook his head. “Frigging brain,” he said, “Half the things now, I remember that I remember them, but that’s about it. Tell me.”

“I’m Dono Shaw’s grandson.”

He stared at me, mouth drooping to match his jowls. “Jesus. Jee-Zuss! You really are.” He plopped down opposite me in the booth, bringing a waft of nickel cigarillo. “Christ, how could I forget those black peepers of your grandpa’s. What’s your name? Wait, don’t say it. It’s the same as his name, of course, stupid bastard I am. Donovan.”

“Van. Good to see you, Freddy.”

“You too. Jesus. Dono Shaw.” Fogh gave another shake of the head, or maybe it was a shudder. He dropped his wet hat on the bench next to him. His hair was still brown, but the color was buoyed by liver spots on his scalp.

“Sorry about your grandpa. I woulda known who you were right off, if not for—” He waved a fingertip at his face, miming lines at the same places where the scars marked mine. “Been a long time. It must have been at the Morgen, last you saw me.”

“Taking bets from Albie.” Luce’s uncle had liked to play the horses at Emerald Downs without having to drive the half hour south.

If the ghost book I’d found this morning was action for high rollers like Kend Haymes, then Freddy Fogh was the bookie for the guys who trimmed Kend’s lawn. Freddy would probably get altitude sickness if he ever covered more than a couple of grand.

“Right, right, Albie.” Freddy’s face lost a little of its excitement. Maybe his memory caught up enough to remind him that Dono and Albie were in the ground now. “So, uh, you here to put something down yourself? I got a good line on tonight’s Thunderbird game.”

“I need some information.”

“Ah.” Noncommittal. Freddy angled his head where he might see out of the corner of his eye, in case any of the bar’s regulars had somehow managed to lurch within earshot.

“I want to know about a guy named Torrance Broch,” I said.

“Know what?”

“Know anything. Where he is. What he does. Start with that.”

“Sure. And what’s your own line of work nowadays?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Who ever said that?” His eye twitched again toward the bar. “’Course you’re not a cop. You don’t have that look, like you own the whole frigging place. In fact, at first I thought maybe you were some kinda muscle, sent here to push on me a little.”

“You underwater?”

Freddy made a noise like coughing out a cotton ball. “Not seriously or nothing. I just need a little extra cash until the Saturday games.”

“Sure.” There it was. The dry palm wanting for grease. I was throwing money around like confetti lately.

“I got about eighty bucks in my pocket,” I said, “not counting bus fare. You give me everything you have on Broch, we’ll decide what that’s worth.”

“You’re joking me.”

“That’s the offer. You want a drink, too, it’ll come out of your cut.” My beer bottle was empty and I clinked it. “Or do I leave now?”

“Hang on, hang on. I can tell you who T. X. Broch is. He’s a bear trap. He sets up big-money games and tries to get suckers to overextend, so he can squeeze them long-term. He’s into legit businesses, too, used cars and auto lube joints, I think. But most of his money comes from squeezing vig out of guys.”

“Do people really still say that? I thought ‘vig’ went out with phone books.”

“Hey, screw you, too.”

“You said he’s the house for big games. Does he run sports?”

Freddy traced one of the innumerable scratches in the tabletop with a nicotine-stained fingertip. “You wanna stay clear of him, Van.”

“Big Bad Broch.”

“I’m not shitting you. He may not be the Gambino family but he’s still plenty. One of my regulars? He had a sure thing and he wanted to lay it down big. More than I could cover. I heard he borrowed twenty thousand off of Broch.”

“And the sure thing wasn’t.”

“
And
the next thing I know, the poor son of a bitch is in the ICU at Overlake. Broch’s guys took their time on him, with the number of things they broke.”

“Busting bones is kind of the daily grind, for a loan shark.”

“You don’t understand me. I mean Broch did this the same frigging day. He knew my guy couldn’t pay it back, not anytime in the foreseeable. Broch coulda milked him forever, but how much would he get? A hundred a week? He let my guy make his bet, and by the time it went in the shitter Broch had already decided the poor prick
was worth a lot more as an object lesson. The twenty large didn’t mean squat.”

“Decisive.”

“Fucking nuts.”

“Has Broch made any permanent lessons?”

Freddy stared at me. “Eating through a tube isn’t enough for you?”

“I mean it. Is Broch a killer?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe? It’s not anybody’s first choice, not even for an animal like T. X. Broch.”

He was right. Loan sharks dealt in pain, not death. You can’t squeeze a dead guy. Murder didn’t even make a great example to others, because if enough people heard about the killing, the cops would, too. Better to populate a whole ward at Overlake than to knock one deadbeat off.

Broch lent money. Kend needed money, if he wanted to keep gambling. Broch probably ran the ghost book, too. But why might Broch kill Kend? Haymes still had his trust-fund thousands coming in every month. Plenty more juice to be had there. Was Kend in so deep that he had threatened to go to the cops?

Freddy was watching me, not wanting to interrupt my reverie.

I put my four twenties down on the table. “Okay. I’ll give you what I’ve got. But you keep your nose up. Tell me if you hear anything more about Broch in the next week.”

“I’ll ask around, yes indeed,” said Fogh, taking the bills and folding them three times before slipping them into his cardigan.

“Good luck with Saturday.”

Fogh nodded and waved a happy hand at the bartender, who continued to give me the stink-eye as I left. He was warming to me, I could tell.