Black River (21 page)

Monday, October 23

4:21 p.m.

“T
ry the county auditor,” she
suggested. “Already been there,” Corso said. “And the
accounting office. And county records.” Before she could
respond, he said, “And I have been assured that hard copies of
the material I’m looking for are to be found somewhere in your
files.”

Wearily, she checked the clock. “It’s
closing time. You come back tomorrow and maybe we can—”

“I really need it tonight,” he interrupted.
He gave her his best smile.

The woman shrugged. “Then you’re out of
luck, buddy,” she said. “If Marcy were here, it might be a
different story.”

“Marcy?”

“On vacation with her sister. Maui. Two
weeks.” She checked the clock again. “I’m from
ccounts payable. I’m just holding down the fort until she gets
back.”

Corso waited. The woman leaned over the counter and, in
a stage whisper, said, “Not to speak ill of the suntanned, but
King County better hope she comes home in one piece.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because otherwise she might take her filing
system to the grave with her, in which case nobody is ever going to
find anything in here again.”

She turned her back on Corso and began to straighten
up. Pushing things around on the desk, sliding the chair in. When she
walked to the long line of gray file cabinets and began to push the
lock buttons, Corso piped up. “I’ve got an idea,” he
said.

She stopped and looked dubiously over in his direction.
“Such as?”

“Such as, the bill I’m looking for went out
sometime in the last half of last year. Can you find the paperwork
from that time frame?”

“Yeah, “ she said. “But she
doesn’t file the material by date or category. Or by any other
method I’ve ever heard of.” She waved a disgusted hand.
“We’d literally have to start at the front and work our way
back to find what you’re looking for.”

“Maybe not,” Corso said.

She raised an eyebrow and went back to pushing
buttons.

“Which one has the accounts payable for the last
half of last year?”

She stopped and walked eight feet down the row of
identical cabinets. She patted the next-to-last one. “Someplace
in here.”

“Open it up,” Corso suggested.

This time, she gave him the other eyebrow.

“Please,” he said.

With a sigh, she thumbed open the latch and jerked With
a sigh, she thumbed open the latch and jerked the drawer out.

“Just open the drawers in that cabinet and pull
out whatever appears to be the biggest file. If that’s not the
one I’m looking for, I’ll go away and leave you
alone.”

“The biggest?”

“Thickest. The one with the most
pages.”

She looked at Corso and then the clock. She bent at the
waist and pulled open the bottom drawer. Then the next and the next
and finally the top one again. She slid the top two closed and reached
into the third drawer down. “No contest,” she announced.
“This one’s way bigger than anything else in
there.”

She used her foot to close the remaining drawers as she
perused the file. “Hmmmm,” she said. She looked Corso over
again.

“What is it?” Corso asked.

“Jury expenses.”

“That’s the one.”

She hefted the file in her hand. “Biggest one
I’ve ever seen.”

“Could you make me a copy?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I look like a guy who’s kidding?”
he asked.

Corso pointed to the sign on the wall.
COPIES
, $1.00
PER
PAGE
.

“I hear it’s gone up to two bucks a
page,” he said.

“Three,” she deadpanned.

“Damn Republicans.”

Monday, October 23

7:45 p.m.

F
orced onto a jury, torn from their friends
and families, sequestered in a downtown hotel for months, the jurors
tended to take it out on the menu. Surf and turf. The thirty-six-ounce
porterhouse. Don’t forget the cheese sauce for the asparagus.
Once the revenge factor burned off, most seemed to settle into a
routine. Some ended up eating hardly anything at all. By the time it
was over, juror number 3 was living on cereal and dry toast. Juror
number 5, on the other hand, never met a cheesecake he didn’t
like. Corso figured he’d either spent his out-of-court hours on a
treadmill or he’d gained fifty pounds.

That’s how they had them listed: Jurors 1 through
12 and then 13A and 14A, alternates. The expenses incurred by each
were itemized on separate documents. He’d started at juror
number 1 and was working his way toward the back. He’d been at
it for nearly two hours, and was only halfway through, when the
waitress came out from behind the counter again with the coffeepot.
Without looking up, Corso said, “No, thanks.”

“We close at eight,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, without looking up.

“Maybe a little earlier so’s I can make the
ten bus.”

Corso began to laugh. “No shit,” he
said.

“Hey, now, mister—” she began.

He pointed to the page with his finger. “Big as
life.” He turned the page and then the next. “Every night.
Same damn thing.”

“You okay?” she asked.

He looked up and smiled. “Depends on who you
ask,” he said. He sorted through the pile of pages and selected
half a dozen, which he folded into fourths and stuck in his inside
jacket pocket. He threw a twenty on the table and slid out of the
booth.

“You got anything smaller?” she asked.

Corso threw his arm around her. She drew the steaming
pot back as if to defend herself. Corso kissed her on the cheek.
“Tell you what. You throw away the rest of those papers for me
and keep the change. How’s that?”

“Works for me,” she said, without
hesitation.

Corso patted her shoulder once and headed for the
door.

The sky was black on black. A flash of lightning
skittered above Elliott Bay. A cold winter rain angled in from the
south. Corso cursed silently, wishing he hadn’t left the Subaru
up at the hospital this morning before court. Especially since
Dougherty had never stirred, and he’d been forced to spend an
hour and a half talking with Joe Bocco’s leg-breaker buddy,
Marvin, whose entire stock of misinformation seemed to be garnered from
ESPN.

Corso turned his collar up and began to lope uphill.
Despite the effort, he couldn’t keep from smiling. Wait until he
told Dougherty. Give her something else to think about, other than
David.

By the time he reached Ninth Avenue he was beginning to
pant, so he slowed to a walk. Rain or no rain, he didn’t want to
be winded when he told her the story. Ahead in the distance,
Harborview Hospital peeked out from a curtain of rain, its edges
wavering and uncertain against the sky. He stopped under the canvas
awning of a print shop and shook the rain from his clothes and
hair.

Standing there, brushing at himself, facing away from
the street, with the rain snapping and popping against the awning,
Corso never heard it coming. He was still muttering to himself,
practicing his delivery to Dougherty, when the steel wire slipped
around his neck and dragged him to his knees.

His first instinct was to get his fingers between the
wire and his neck. He clawed at his throat until the warm wetness
whispered it was too late. His head felt as if it might burst. He tried
to throw himself onto his back, but his assailant could not be moved.
His eyes burned, his vision was beginning to blur. The next-to-last
thing he saw was another set of legs in front of him on the sidewalk.
And then the shoe starting at his face. He jerked his head to the left
and, in that instant before the shoe connected, he saw the black
Mercedes sitting at the curb with the doors open.

Monday, October 23

7:51 p.m.

A
s
the four men slipped the ropes through their gloved hands, lowering the
casket into the frozen earth, the birds went silent, the sky went
white….

Suddenly Corso was awake, his ears pricking at the
sound of the voices.

“We’ll put him where we put that Ball
motherfucker. He like goin’ down there so bad, we let his ass
stay there till kingdom come.”

Another voice, farther away. “He come around
yet?”

“Startin’ to.”

“We want him awake. I don’t want to be
carrying that shit.”

“We gonna do that again? Make ’im carry his
own weight?”

“You want to do it?”

Close voice chuckled. “You know what I been
thinkin’, man?”

“What’s that?”

“I been thinkin’ this whole fuckin’
mess started with that asshole in the truck that we was supposed to pop
but what was dead when we got there.”

“Yeah.”

“And how that was like a hit we got paid for but
didn’t do.”

“You got a point here?”

“And now we end up doin’ a hit we
ain’t
gettin’ paid for. All kinda
evens out in the end. It’s like one of those ‘meta’
things of yours.”

Corso was wedged along the floor in the backseat of a
moving car. His hands were tied behind his back. A foot suddenly
pressed hard against his neck, driving his face down into the rubber
floor mat. “You stay real still, hombre,” a voice said.
“We just about there.”

Seemed like an hour, but it couldn’t have been
more than three minutes until the car began to slow, and then it turned
and they weren’t on paved road anymore. He could hear the whisk
of grass and brush on the undercarriage as the car eased along.

“We’ll put him down with the other
one,” the voice from the front seat said.

The car glided smoothly over a series of bumps and then
swung in a slow circle and eased to a stop. The shoe on the back of
his neck was replaced by the feel of cold metal. “Easy
now,” the voice behind him whispered. Above the sound of rain
beating on the car, he heard the click of the door and the shift of
weight as the driver got out and opened the rear door.
“Ready?” the driver asked.

The guy in the backseat grabbed Corso by the belt.
Another pair of hands gripped his shoulders, and in a single heave he
was dragged from the car. He landed on his chest in the wet grass. He
heard a pair of doors close. “Look,” he heard Backseat say.
“Fuckhead’s feet are starting to float. We need to add
some more weight.”

“Better put two on nosy man here,” Front
Seat said.

And then they had him by the elbows and were jerking
him to his feet.

“Gotta get up and walk now, nosy man. Not like we
gonna carry your ass or nothin’.”

When they began pulling on his arms, Corso realized he
couldn’t feel his hands. His knees nearly buckled from his own
weight. He staggered slightly, regained his balance, looked around. Two
of them: one nearly as tall as he was, long black hair worn in a
ponytail. The other was a troll, a short dark specimen with a
pockmarked face and one ear noticeably higher than the other.

“Get movin’,” the troll said.
“That way, down the end.”

Corso looked around. Something was familiar, but he
couldn’t quite fathom what it was. “We figure you like it
here so much,” Ponytail said, “we’ll let you
stay.”

And then Corso saw the bright light reflected in the
water on his left. He looked to the south and saw the marsh and,
beyond, the Briarwood Garden Apartments. They were parked on the levee
that defined the northern extreme of the Black River marsh. Beneath the
low sky, the water was stippled by the falling rain, its wavering
surface broken here and there by grassy hillocks and broken-tooth
stumps protruding above the surface. Along the edges, reeds and clumps
of bulrushes waved in the wind like signal flags.

The only light came from the Speedy Auto Parts sign up
the road. As he followed the reflection back across the marsh, he saw a
pair of feet sticking up from the water. The shoelaces had burst, the
bloated ankles were three times their normal size, pumped floating full
by the expanding gases of death, forcing the feet up and out of the
water as if the owner had dived into the muck and stuck.

They’d driven as far as they could. Three
concrete pylons blocked the grassed-over road that ran along the top of
the levee. Ponytail walked around and stood directly in front of
Corso. In his right hand he carried a silver automatic with a gray
silencer screwed onto the front. “Open your mouth,” he
said. When Corso failed to comply, he dug the barrel hard into
Corso’s solar plexus. Corso grunted and leaned forward. Next
thing he knew his mouth was filled with metal and the pressure of the
suppressor clicked on his teeth, forcing him up straight. “You
just stand real still, nosy man,” Ponytail said, pushing
Corso’s head back as his partner began to untie Corso’s
hands.

The steady rain beat down onto his face, wetting his
cheeks, forcing his eyelids to flutter from the aerial assault. With
the final strand removed, his arms flapped around to his sides. His
wrists burned, and he could feel the cold blood struggling to move in
his fingers. Slowly, the silencer slid from his mouth.

Ponytail motioned with the automatic. “That
way,” he said.

Corso hesitated, only to be propelled forward by a blow
to the kidneys.

“Move your ass,” the troll growled.

Corso rubbed at his wrists as he lurched forward; his
hands were beginning to tingle as he stepped between the pylons into
knee-deep grass.

Ahead in the darkness, the road was blocked by a pile
of rubble. The troll passed by on Corso’s left, hurrying up to
the pile. He pointed at a spot about halfway up the pile. “This
one,” he said. “This one first.”

As Corso approached, he could see that what had
appeared to be a pile of light-colored rock was, in reality, a pile of
broken concrete. Somebody’s driveway, jackhammered to pieces,
loaded into a truck, and surreptitiously dumped along the top of the
levee. “Here,” the troll said again.

The shards varied between six and eight inches in
thickness, smooth on the top, wavy and rough with aggregate on the
bottom. The troll slapped the pile with his hand.

“Come on, asshole. Hurry up.”

The chunk of concrete was shaped like a triangle. Three
feet in length. Nearly that long at the base, tapering to a point at
the apex. “Let’s go,” Ponytail said, prodding Corso
forward with the silenced automatic.

Corso bent his knees, got his left forearm beneath the
jagged piece of stone, and straightened his legs. Must have weighed a
hundred and fifty pounds. Corso lurched under the weight, adjusted his
grip for balance, and turned back the way they’d come.

Ponytail held his gun by his side as he backed up,
beckoning Corso forward with his free hand. “Come on,” he
said.

Corso moved carefully. His head roared and throbbed
from the strain. Mindful of his footing, he shuffled along beneath the
burden, until he was parallel with the submerged body, where Ponytail
held up his hand.

“Dump it over the side,” he said.

Corso staggered to the edge of the levee. The marsh was
six feet below. It wasn’t until he noticed the wavering,
stippled surface of the black water that Corso remembered it was
raining. He bent at the waist and let the chunk of concrete fall from
his arms. It thumped onto the steep slope, rolled end over end, and
stuck, point down, in the shallows.

“Go get it,” the troll said.

Corso did as he was told, sliding down the muddy bank
into the cold ankle-deep water. Unable to get under the piece, he was
forced to lift it with his arms. He staggered and went to one knee,
then righted himself and straightened up.

The troll was in the water with him now. Water up to
Corso’s shin was over the troll’s knees. He waved Corso
toward the half-submerged corpse, a dozen feet from shore. “Put
it over the legs,” he ordered. “Right behind the
knees.”

By the time Corso was in place, the frigid marsh water
covered his knees. Three feet beneath the surface, the remains of Joe
Ball lay festering and bloated, his torso held beneath the shimmering
surface by another piece of concrete.

For some odd reason, Corso was overcome with the urge
to be gentle. As if to spare the dead further indignity, he carefully
placed the stone across the backs of the knees and let it go. When he
straightened up, the protruding feet were gone. In another month, the
gases would dissipate and the weight would push the corpse into the
bottom of the marsh, where the body would begin to come apart. Small
pieces of flesh would float to the surface, where, one by one,
they’d be discovered by the birds and eaten, until finally
nothing remained of Joe Ball save metal and bone.

“Let’s go,” the troll said.

Corso had to pull his feet from the gurgling muck one
at a time as he labored back to the levee. His throat was constricted,
but his mind was racing, trying to find a way out. Stifling an
overpowering urge to run, he clawed his way back to the top of the
levee and got to his feet. He knew he wouldn’t get thirty feet
before they shot him down and dragged him back to join Joe Ball,
facedown in the muck.

“Let’s go. Do it again,” the troll
said.

Corso steadied himself and retraced his footsteps back
to the pile of broken concrete. They walked on either side of him, out
of each other’s line of fire, guns at the ready. The second chunk
of concrete was nearly square and harder to carry. Corso had to keep
adjusting his grip as he shuffled along the berm and finally let it
fall from his arms and roll, end over end, down into the water.

“One more,” Ponytail said.

Corso was beginning to shake. From fear, from the cold
rain—he couldn’t tell. Music was playing in his head now,
voices and organs, getting louder and louder, something he’d
never heard before. As if, all his life, he’d carried the sound
track of his death inside himself, waiting, all this time, for the
credits to roll and the end to be at hand. His legs wobbled as he
started back. The troll prodded him in the side with his gun.
“You get this one, nosy man,” he leered. “You make us
carry it, I’m gonna put a couple in your balls. Let you lay
around a bit before I cap you.”

He moved forward as if he were sleepwalking. The music
was blaring now. Morose and multivoiced, it filled his ears.
“This one.” Ponytail pointed to a jagged piece of concrete
slightly smaller than the others. As Corso grabbed it and began to
lift, the side of the pile collapsed, sending a dozen pieces of
concrete bouncing down into the grass at the troll’s feet.
“Goddammit,” the little man screamed, rubbing at his ankle
with his free hand. He growled and grabbed the offending piece of stone
from the grass and hurled it out into the marsh, where it landed with
a splash. “Son of a—”

He didn’t get all the words out before a movement
in the marsh jerked his eyes from Corso. The snap of six-foot wings
cut the air as a great blue heron took flight. Corso shifted his
burden, getting his hand and elbow beneath it, and then, with every
bit of strength left in his body, shot-putted the concrete at the
troll.

It landed on his ankles. The troll howled like an
animal and fell over onto his back, screaming at the sky. He had one
foot jerked free when Corso landed on him, driving the breath from the
small body. Corso had both hands on the gun when the flat report of
Ponytail’s silenced automatic split the air. Corso saw the back
of his left hand explode in a mist of blood and bone but hung on with
his right, allowing his momentum to pull the gun from the little
man’s grasp, as he slid down the side of the levee on his
stomach. He fought for traction with his knees and then brought the gun
to bear. He felt the tug of a bullet at the collar of his coat, before
he heard the sound of the gun.

Ponytail had covered half the ground when Corso
squeezed off his first round. It took Ponytail high in the right
shoulder, spinning him nearly around in a circle, sending his gun off
into space. He fell to one knee, then quickly jumped up, looking
desperately around his feet for his weapon.

Corso crawled to the top of the bank.
“Don’t” was all he said.

Ponytail clutched his damaged shoulder and stood still.
A scraping sound pulled Corso’s vision toward the pile. The
troll had extricated his other foot and was now kneeling in the grass.
“Over here,” Corso said, but the little man merely curled
his lips and spat down onto the ground. Corso pointed the gun in his
direction and let fly. The slug hit a chunk of concrete about two feet
from the side of his head, sending a geyser of stone and dust into the
air. The troll ducked behind his hands.

“Over here,” Corso said again. This time
the little man struggled to his feet and hobbled across the levee to
his partner’s side.

“Keys are in the car,” Ponytail said.

Corso started for the car.

“You better drive far away,” said the
troll. “ ’Cause this ain’t over, motherfucker.”
He jabbed a finger at Corso. “We gonna find you. Maybe not
today. Maybe not tomorrow. But you can make the rent on it.”

“Find that fat cunt in the hospital too,”
said Ponytail with a smile. “Take care of her big ass, once and
for all.”

And then his lips moved again, but Corso couldn’t
hear the words because the music was deafening now, rolling out of
every pore of his body. As he raised the gun, the music reached a
crescendo and stayed there, pounding in his head like hell’s
hammers.

From a distance of eight feet, Corso shot the troll
between eyes. The man’s face was a mask of astonishment as he
sank to his knees and then fell backward onto the ground,
twitching.