Prologue
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
George Orwell
Overhead, wind whips through the trees. The moon plays hide-and-seek behind swaying cedars and twitching firs. It shimmers, a flawed crystal in the clear winter sky, and its luster dims the scattered fires of countless distant suns. Underfoot, a thick blanket of snow covers the forest floor. The cold is cruel, indifferent. Today is the shortest day of the year.
His plodding footsteps puncture the icy snow. He is bent forward under a considerable weight, and his legs ache with fatigue. He staggers, rights himself, continues on. He has been in this forest many times, but never before in the stillness between midnight and dawn. It is a plagued thing, this stillness.
He blinks away tears that turn to ice on his cheeks. The air is frigid, sweet with pine and spruce and hemlock. He stops abruptly and listens, but there is only the murmuring of the wind and the moaning of the trees and the sharp gasps of his own labored breathing. He fills his lungs and exhales a billowing cloud of steam. His heart hammers against his ribs.
Now is not the time to rest, however, and he forces himself to press on. The site is only a couple of hundred yards ahead. As he trudges through the snow, he allows himself a moment of despair. Not sorrow, or regret – he has done what was necessary, no more and no less, and he is here, in the woods, to finish the job. Despair, he knows, is neither sorrow nor regret. Despair is merely an indulgence, a brief retreat from purpose and duty, a chance to acknowledge that life takes a man where it will, not where a man wants to go.
As a general rule, however, he is more inclined to action than reflection. He shakes his head vigorously from side to side, like a dog coming out of the sea, to drive all uncertainty from his mind. His world is ruled by violence and pain, not guilt or conscience or remorse. He does not understand people’s obsession with, or morbid fear of, death. Death is life’s one certainty, a reliable truth in a world where truths are hard to come by.
He stops again. Ahead, in the gloom, the trail split into two paths.
“Finally,” he mutters under his breath. He shifts the burden on his back; it is awkward and heavy, but the knowledge that he is close to the site lightens the load. He puts aside all distracting thoughts – now is the time for single-minded concentration. He reaches into an outer coat pocket, retrieves a small flashlight, loops the lanyard around his left wrist.
He continues on, through the fork in the trail, and counts the paces. At ten, he stops and turns the flashlight on. A crisp red circle appears in the snow. With a grunt, he unclips a strap and dumps the weight onto the ground. It lands with a dull thud. He squats down, shines the light, finds the zipper on the snowboard bag, tugs on it. He wrinkles his nose, cautious, but it is too soon, and too cold, to worry about the smell.
He stands and reaches for the moon, stretching the cold, cramped muscles of his back and shoulders. He bends forward at the waist, pointing his fingers at his toes. He stands straights, swivels right and left. He holds his watch up to his face, squints at the illuminated dial. Twelve minutes after two.
He squats again and retrieves a pickaxe from the bag. The pickaxe is well-balanced and has a pleasing heft. Its head is drop forged, made of hardened carbon steel. The pick is beveled and newly-sharpened. The handle is contractor-grade fiberglass.
He paws at the snow with an oversized glove, clears a patch, and tests the frozen ground with the tip of the pick. He smiles. It’s time to finish the job.
Time to dig.
Chapter 1
Sunday, June 15, 3:00 p.m.
It didn’t feel like three in the afternoon inside the Space Room Lounge. In fact, it didn’t feel like any time at all. The Space Room was dark and haphazardly lit, and the walls were covered with crude renditions of the cosmos – blurred galaxies, cockeyed planets, and vast swathes of tiny smudges that passed for stars. In here, the real world drifted away, faded into temporary irrelevance.
This was my favorite bar in Portland.
“Good afternoon, young man.”
I nodded as I settled onto a barstool. Three in the afternoon is early for a cocktail, at least by most people’s standards, but I try not to be a stickler about these things.
“Old Fashioned, right? No ice?”
My search for a witness had come up empty. No one I’d talked to admitted seeing, or hearing anything about, an alleged hit-and-run at the corner of Eighty-Second and Division a week ago Tuesday. That spelled bad news for my client, a downtown attorney who was representing the accused. Fortunately for me, I had lots of practice delivering bad news.
“You must be a mind-reader,” I said.
Junior, the bartender, wasn’t a mind-reader. He did, however, have encyclopedic knowledge about the drinking habits of his regular customers. In defiance of his nickname, Junior was bald, wore bifocals, and sported a bushy white handlebar mustache. Here, in the Space Room, he invariably wore a pair of black pants, a plain black t-shirt, and a creased black leather vest. I don’t know how he dressed when he wasn’t here – I’d never seen him anywhere else.
Junior and I didn’t address each other by name. In fact, I’m not sure he even knew my name, which was fine by me. As someone who had achieved a certain notoriety in this town, I’d developed an appreciation for going unnoticed. It was another thing I liked about the Space Room – in here, I was just an Old Fashioned, no ice.
“I know you go in for bourbon,” Junior said. That got no argument from me. He set a clear tumbler on the bar between us. The tumbler had four straight sides and a thick bottom. Perfect. Junior looked up at me, over the tops of his bifocals. “You wanna try a straight rye today?”
I watched as he poured a jigger of thick liquid – sugar cane syrup - into the tumbler. Several years back, Junior had swapped out the syrup for sugar cubes, for reasons known only to him. Eventually, he’d switched back to the syrup, also without explanation, and that was that.
“No, thanks,” I said. At the moment, I wasn’t in the mood for surprises. “Maybe next time.”
Junior shrugged and put a dash of bitters into the glass. Angostura aromatic bitters, to be precise. Junior was very particular about his bitters. “Ryes tend to be a little spicier,” he said. “Bourbon stays in the casket longer, so it’s usually smoother and sweeter.” It wasn’t like Junior to be so chatty. Maybe he’d been sampling that straight rye himself.
Next, and last, came the liquor. As far as I was concerned, bourbon was bourbon, but Junior considered himself something of an authority on the subject of whiskeys in general, and bourbons in particular. Now, he stroked his mustache for a moment before selecting a bottle of Booker’s. I was so intent on the proceedings that I nearly jumped onto the bar when my phone began to vibrate in my shirt pocket.
“Shit!” I said. Junior looked up again, but only for a second. The marginally odd behavior of a middle-aged white guy, evidently, was way down the list of strange goings-on at the Space Room. I squinted at the caller identification, which read RH. I cleared my throat and touched the screen.
“Dave Grady,” I said.
“Dave, Roy. You got a minute?”
Roy Helm was a retired FBI agent, now working as head of security for a large Portland-based utility company. As recently as a couple of years ago, Helm had been my supervisor, at a time when I was still working for the Bureau myself. Now, he was making big money in private industry, while I scraped by as a private investigator, tracking down fickle spouses and phantom hit-and-run witnesses.
“Sure.” I thought it best not to add that I was sitting in a bar in the middle of the afternoon. “What’s up?”
Two weeks ago, Helm had called to offer me a job at Northlight Energy. His call had come as a surprise – we’d had a complicated working relationship, to say the least – but I’d begun to give serious thought to getting out of the PI business, and Helm had made all the right noises. After a long discussion about the job, and a couple of days to think it over, I’d called him back and accepted the offer. I’d made it clear, though, that I still had some loose ends to tie up before I could start work at Northlight, and Helm said he understood. I should have known better.
“I need you here, Dave.” It was classic Roy Helm – straight to the point, and focused exclusively on the requirements of Roy Helm. As usual, he spoke in quick, staccato bursts. It was a habit I found exhausting. “I’ve committed the unit to take on some new responsibilities, and I can’t make it work until you’re on board.”
Junior stirred my Old Fashioned and planted the tumbler in front of me. I nodded my thanks. “I understand, Roy,” I said. “I thought we’d already had this conversation. There are still a couple of cases I need to wrap up. I’m doing my best, but it’s going to take a little more time.”
Silence. I pictured Helm drumming his fingers on a desktop, letting his breath out in a long, slow exhalation. “Work with me, Dave,” he said. “Tell you what. Be here next Monday morning, first thing. That’s a week from today. That should give you all the time you need. We’ll have to-”
Screeching tires, followed by what sounded like a thunderous explosion, shattered the serenity inside the bar. “Later,” I said into the phone, and cut the connection. “Call 911,” I told Junior, whose eyes were now as big and round as the coaster under my drink. I slid off the barstool and rushed through the inky blackness of space, past Mars and Venus and Jupiter, to the front door.
Outside, I squinted against the dazzling sunlit afternoon. To my left, where 48th fed into Hawthorne, an old maroon-colored Chrysler had slammed into a grey four-door compact, the make and model of which were impossible to identify. Pieces of shattered safety glass, twisted metal fragments, and a broken side-view mirror littered the pavement, and the air was heavy with gas fumes.
The Chrysler was an Imperial, improbably long, with gunsight taillights. It was an unusual sight – in Portland, one of the country’s greenest cities, you don’t find many steamboat-sized luxury sedans. The front end was nearly unscathed, but smoke and steam were billowing out from under the hood. The driver was an elderly white male who wore overalls and a greasy Caterpillar ball cap. He stepped out of the car, wobbly on his feet but unharmed.
The compact was another story. As near as I could tell, it had been struck squarely on the passenger side by the north-bound Imperial, while moving east on Hawthorne. The violent impact of the collision had propelled the compact sideways, in the same direction in which the Imperial had been traveling, into the oncoming lane of traffic and nearly to the sidewalk on the north side of Hawthorne. Neither driver nor passengers, if there were any, had gotten out of the car. I stepped off the sidewalk and began trotting across the street, toward the compact, just as darting tongues of bright orange flame erupted from a dark puddle of liquid next to the front passenger-side tire.
I cursed under my breath and broke into a run, listening for the keening wail of sirens. Instead, I heard only the hissings and grumblings of the Imperial and the sharp, insistent crackle of fire.
“Call 911!” I shouted at the onlookers, who were gathering at a safe distance on either side of the now-burning compact. Its passenger side was caved in, an indicator of the speed at which the Imperial must have struck it.
I ran around the front end of the compact, to a driver’s side that appeared undamaged. Beneath the undercarriage of the car, the flames writhed and blossomed, like the petals of a deadly flower. A loud popping sound, an angry hiss. The radiator, I thought. At this distance, only a few feet away from the fire, the heat was like a living thing.
Inside the car, a woman was slumped forward in her seat. Only her seat belt had prevented her from striking the front dash or being thrown against the door. There was no sign of air bags. Either none had activated, or the car had been manufactured before they became standard safety equipment.
I stripped off my sports coat and wrapped it around my left hand and forearm. With my left hand, I attempted to open the door. The latch moved, but the door didn’t budge – it was locked. I took a step back and moved forward, bringing the heel of my left shoe up and toward the window with all the force I could muster. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. The third time, a spiderweb of cracks shot through the glass. With a final furious kick, the spiderweb exploded, and bits of safety glass rained down on the driver’s motionless body.
I cleared out the rest of the glass with my left arm. Reaching inside the doorframe, I pulled up the lock switch and wrenched the door open. Black plumes of smoke now began to fill the interior of the car. The driver’s eyelids fluttered rapidly. She was alive, but unconscious. I spotted the seat belt release and yanked on it until it unlatched and the seatbelt went slack. The woman slumped forward. I caught her and struggled to untangle her from the seatbelt, even as my field of vision grew smaller and smaller, and the world began to spin….
#
I opened my eyes to a riot of swirling red and blue lights and the sound of water being forced through hoses at high pressure. I was on a portable stretcher, next to a Portland Fire Bureau truck, and a burly young firefighter was fiddling with an oxygen mask. “I’m good,” I managed to say, and sat up. It was a decision that I regretted instantly. I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach, and feverish, all at the same time.
“Sir,” the firefighter said, “you need to lie down and relax.”
I shook my head. “What about the driver?” The words dropped from my mouth like pebbles.
“She’s gonna be okay.” The firefighter adjusted the straps of the oxygen mask. “That was some crazy shit you pulled.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Crazy.” I pushed myself up and off the stretcher and stood.
“Sir,” the firefighter said, but I just held up a hand and looked around. Hawthorne, I could see now, was shut down for a couple of blocks in both directions. PFB was out in force, and the compact, having been subjected to thousands of gallons of water, was now steaming rather than smoking. A mixture of funky odors filled the air. Lots of things in cars are flammable – gasoline, oil, hoses, upholstery, tires – and none of them smell good when they burn.
“Damn. Is that Dave Grady?”
I turned around, slowly. A Portland police sergeant was staring at me. He looked vaguely familiar.
“Yeah,” I said, studying him. “I know you.”
The sergeant smiled, revealing a smoker’s teeth. I put him in his mid-40s, with a comb-over and a salt-and-pepper mustache.
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “You were my FTO, back in the day. That was a long time ago.”
That was a long time ago, I thought. I’d spent the last three years as a PI, following ten years as a Portland cop, then ten more as an agent in the Portland FBI office. Somehow, I’d turned fifty in the process. While working the road with PPB, I’d served as field training officer to dozens of baby cops.
“Thorne,” I said. “Steve Thorne. Right?”
He nodded. “You really should lie back down.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Suit yourself.” Thorne gestured in the direction of downtown. “Why don’t we move out of the way?”
We began to walk west along Hawthorne. I was still dizzy, and my throat fell raw. “Hey,” Thorne said, “I read about you in the papers. That Alvarez business. What a crock of shit. Sorry you went through that.”
I shrugged. “Thanks.”
We walked for a couple of minutes without talking. Thorne glanced over his shoulder. “Speaking of bad news, I guess you know about Sammy Hong?”
I stopped. Sammy Hong was another PPB officer, an old-timer like Thorne. Back in the day, I’d known him well. Too well.
“No,” I said. “What about him?”
“Aw, shit.” Thorne tugged on the collar of his ballistic vest. “I figured you must’ve already heard.” His gaze dropped to the ground. “Sammy’s dead. A patrol unit rolled up on his rig a couple of nights ago, parked under the Hawthorne Bridge. What I understand, he ate his gun. Poor bastard.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Poor bastard.” Sammy Hong and I had worked graveyard patrol together in East Precinct, way back when. I hadn’t talked to him in twenty years.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I was, too, but not for the reasons Thorne might have imagined.
