The Big Both Ways (11 page)

“Naw, she’s just a little bitty girl. But I’m plenty hungry. I just
took my first lesson in rowing a boat.” Slip rolled his shoulders to try to make himself seem bigger. The big man smiled.

“Got a little girl with you. Heck, we should be able to come up with a good place for her to sleep. No sense a child should have to put up with this nonsense.”

“We got some more wood up under the bridge we could build her a little crib,” the skinny man said, holding out a shriveled cigarette to Ellie.

“Well, aren’t you sweet.” She smiled, taking the cigarette, then fishing a stick out of the fire to light it.

From the south came a rumble along the tracks and the big man fished in his pants pocket for a watch. “What the hell? There ain’t a northbound train due until morning.”

Some of the men shrank away from the fire. The moon was higher in the sky and its thin light showed the hoboes skittering away over the rocks and logs.

The rumble came faster and thinner than a heavy freight. “What the hell?” Jake said, looking up toward the tracks.

A little switcher engine pulling two small crew cars came to a stop. This was the kind of rig that usually pulled crews out to where the tracks needed repair. The engine stopped well short of the bridge. Its lights went out and the engine idled down.

“I don’t like this,” Jake said. As he stood up by the fire, the first cries came from the men in the darkness.

The moonlight caught the figures of men running in every direction. One man fell and others fell upon him with sticks flailing, arching toward the ground, the fallen man’s legs kicking against the stones.

Slip grabbed Ellie’s arm and turned to the south, back toward the beach where the dory and the girl were. The men swinging clubs against bone sounded like wood cutters. They mostly wore leather windbreakers and knit caps. There were at least three who appeared to be giving orders and they wore trench coats and fedoras. Some of them had badges but Slip could not see any uniforms.
The thugs started to drag hoboes toward the fire. One of the men in a long coat had an electric torch, which he shined in their faces as they lay writhing on the ground.

Slip and Ellie ducked into the woods. They could hear sobs as men cried out in pain and they heard curses as the bulls barked orders. Ellie turned back and saw Jake lumbering after them. He made four strides before he was set on by two bulls who cracked him down and set to work on breaking his legs. She stopped running and started back.

“Ellie, what the hell?” Slip said.

“They’re going to kill him,” she said as she picked up a beach stone the size of a small coconut. Slip took two steps to follow her before his legs were cut out from under him by a stout little man using a pick handle for a club.

“Where you think you’re going, fella?” the rat-faced man in a leather windbreaker said as he started in on Slip. He got three good licks in, the first searing against Slip’s nose and splitting his upper lip. The second cracked a handful of ribs on his left side, and the third one he didn’t remember, other than he heard the sound of another voice nearby crying out in pain.

SEVEN
 

Annabelle wrapped the wool blanket around her shoulders. The smell of wet wool made her feel as if she were wrapped in the skins of dead animals. Buddy tapped his bell and the girl dozed off to a restless torpor, not sleeping but not awake.

She sat up suddenly to the sounds of the riot through the trees. Someone was walking down the beach. She could hear footsteps tumbling the stones. Some of the stones were big. Men were crying out in pain: once, twice, and the voice would go silent. The clattering beach rocks came closer. She stuck her foot out from underneath the umbrella.

“Ellie?” she whispered.

The voices blended with the waves swooshing up on the beach.

“Hey,” she said weakly as Buddy started to sing and rattled his little bell.

“Somebody’s here,” she whispered and tried to sink down deeper into the bow of the tiny boat. Buried in the very bow of the boat was Slip’s coat. In the coat was a .38-caliber revolver. She held it in both her shaking hands and pulled the hammer back with her tiny thumbs.

George Hanson remembered the cake. Now he sat at the table by himself. The kids on the street had gone in for their dinner and the silence that had followed sat like an unwanted guest at the table. The cake stayed on the counter wrapped in the blue box, the string still tied neatly.

He had known the cake would go uneaten. It had only been a year. This would have been the boy’s tenth birthday. He didn’t know why she had wanted to buy the cake in the first place. Why not just stay away from such things?

Benny had died of influenza and George knew it was pointless to start asking questions. But it bothered him that all of his investigative skills were useless in the death of his own son. Every second of every day was filled with risk, particularly for a boy born frail as Benny had been. The threats were everywhere and the opportunity for illness crowded around him like mosquitoes on a warm night.

George sat at the table trying not to ask any questions. Questions only drove him deeper into the dark. George had cried and had eaten the meals their neighbors had brought after Benny died. He had gone out by Green Lake to the cemetery and tended the plot during the summer. But that was as far as he was going to go. The rest of the grief he refused.

The clock ticked on the sideboard. Emily stayed upstairs. She said she had a headache and that may have been true, but George knew she was lying face down on Benny’s bed both wanting and not wanting to vomit up the cold stone that her grief had become.

George left the dining room table, went upstairs, and stood by the bedroom door for a moment. He remembered the nights he had stood by his son’s door and listened to his labored breathing. He felt the dread that had crept over him then. He felt it still as he listened to his wife’s sobbing.

He turned from the door, went downstairs, and spread his case files out on the kitchen table. When Emily got up he would warm some supper for her.

Fatty had stood him up at the steam baths. Apparently the fat man was more afraid of Tom Delaney than he was of a felony assault rap. That was all right. Fatty was a man caught in the middle. He didn’t really have the temperament for a Floodwater goon, and he certainly didn’t have the aptitude for law enforcement. The facts of the steam bath assault were ugly enough that once Fatty was sure George would use them, the fear of the public scandal might make him lose some of his prodigious appetite. George would give him more time to get in good with the Ben Avery investigation and then would put the bite on the fat man again.

The cops in Everett had traced the car David Kept had been dumped in to a motor court up north of Sedro Woolley. A blonde woman had rented a cabin for herself and a man. She had paid cash, and she had forgotten to sign the register. The kid who had handed her the key said that the man with her didn’t look right. He said he looked like a hitchhiker; he had a bindle of clothes and a box slung over his shoulder. She was driving a Lincoln and didn’t look like a hobo. It just wasn’t right.

The Everett cops had interviewed union members along the docks in Everett but no one was particularly helpful. There was a shop steward named William Pierce who had worked closely with Dave Kept, but Pierce (the report from the Everett P.D. noted) had “kept his mouth shut tighter than a bug’s ass.”

The only break in the case had come when one of the union boys had gotten so nervous about the questions he bolted and left town. When they went to his house to talk to the wife, they found a leather case that had belonged to Dave Kept. The case had blood stains on it and the wife claimed to know nothing about where it came from. Only that “a beat-up blonde and some palooka wearing a red logger coat” had dropped it off. They didn’t take her into custody but had men parked out in front of the house to watch who came and went. George had taken notes from his conversation with the Everett police. On the bottom of the last page he had written the address.

George liked working at home, all the more so since Benny had died. Work felt like something useful. Work kept the sickness of grief at bay. He liked asking questions that had answers.

One of George’s street sources had told him that just before Ben Avery had been killed he had been on the trail of Ellie Hobbes. Avery had been hunting her down, asking questions, frantic questions the sources seemed to think.

He looked at the thick pile of notes on this case he was not supposed to be working on, and just before he turned to the next page, he got up, opened the box, and cut himself a large piece of birthday cake.

With white frosting on his fingers he turned the page. A patrolman had taken the street lead and tracked the logger down to an old man down in Hooverville who had rented him a coffin to sleep in that night. “Oh, Lord,” George said out loud, and licked his fingers. “What kind of mess did you get yourself in?” Then he took another bite of cake and sat up straight as he heard his wife coming down the stairs.

Ellie was twenty-eight years old and she liked men, in a vague and unenthusiastic sort of way. She liked men in the same way some people liked racehorses: it was fun to rate them and some of them were even beautiful, but you couldn’t imagine yourself owning one. So now, standing above Slip with his head cracked open, Ellie felt a sinking kind of fear. Not so much for the man before her or the fact that he might die, but a leaden kind of despair that, like it or not, she had come into possession of this battered logger and couldn’t simply leave him.

She had killed the man who had been beating him. She had picked up a stone and brought it down on top of his head. When he fell on top of Slip, she knelt over him and struck down three more times until she was certain he had stopped moving. There were men lying all over the field who were unconscious or worse. The Floodwater goon was dead and she knew she would have to
carry the memory of killing him with her for the rest of her life. If she had any regrets about killing him it was only that: the blood and the sparkling red stone, the feel of his blood on her fingers would be with her forever now, like an unwanted lodger who had decided to stay.

They were far enough into the beach fringe that neither the firelight nor the moonlight would give away their position. She rolled the corpse off Slip and leaned over him in the dark.

“Slip, come on, get up,” she said, as she slapped his cheek. “Come on now, they’ll start looking for this guy soon. Let’s get back to the boat.” But there was no answer. Slip was warm and the blood from his nose kept flowing down his chin, so he must still be alive.

She tried to drag him by his arms but it was hard, particularly over the rough ground under the trees, and when she tried to drag him by his feet she could see that his head kept hitting hard against the stones and she figured that wasn’t going to work. She had thought of him as thin but the tightly bunched muscles hidden under his layers of shirts made him much heavier than he looked. So she took off the dead man’s belt and tied Slip’s wrists together. Kneeling down, she draped one arm around her shoulder and let the other ride around front like a sling and then she stood up. She pulled down on his wrists to keep the weight up high on her shoulders, and by leaning forward she was able to drag him down through the beach fringe toward the boat.

Men were calling out and moaning for help as she fought her way through the tangle of woods below the railroad tracks. But there was no new outcry that she imagined would happen once they found the dead man with the leather coat next to the trees.

She fell once and came down hard on a small spruce tree, which knocked the wind out of her. Slip’s weight lay so heavy on her back that she thought she might suffocate right there. But she rolled over and regained her strength. The wind was still hissing
through the trees and the slushy sound of the waves on the cobbles was louder now than the voices of the men by the fire. She wanted to call out to Annabelle for help but she didn’t dare, and she didn’t want to leave Slip in case she couldn’t find her way back before the goons found their dead comrade.