Stand Down (2 page)

That's what we were working on now—­the reno. The trash had been hauled away. The piano had been collected by a piano restorer and carted off to be refinished, tuned, and stored until it was safe to come back home.

Originally, the house had been insulated with layers of cedar shavings that, over time, had been reduced to little more than dust. After evicting a family of raccoons that had taken up residence in the attic, we vacuumed out the smelly remains. With that gone, along with the reeking wallboard, the place smelled almost civilized. Jim had come up with an elegant redesign. By sacrificing the third bedroom, he was able to give Mel and me a master bedroom suite that included two separate bathrooms and two walk-­in closets.

The master-­bedroom plans alone were enough to send Mel over the top with delight, but after that, the project seemed to have stalled out. The challenge now was nailing down a busy contractor and getting him to commit to doing the job in a timely fashion. That was what I was hoping to accomplish today. Only then would we be able to apply for permits and start actual construction.

“I know about the meeting with Jim and that contractor later today,” Mel said with a frown, “but aren't you also scheduled to see Harry? He's due to be released from rehab anytime now, isn't he?”

Making Harry I. Ball's house wheelchair accessible was currently my other pressing home-­remodeling issue. While waiting for the project in Bellingham to get under way, I—­along with Jim's help—­had been running point on the renovations to bring Harry I. Ball's house into compliance with his current wheelchair-­bound status. His project, too, had been plagued with delays. Now, even though we were down to finishing touches, they all had to be completed, inspected, and signed off on before Harry could be released from rehab to go home.

I nodded. “The foreman told me yesterday that they expect to be done by the end of this week. That's the goal, anyway.”

“And you've got Marge lined up to look after him once he's back home?”

Marge Herndon was the crusty retired RN Mel and I had first encountered when I'd hired her to come look after me after my bilateral knee-­replacement surgery. The woman was about as warm and fuzzy as a Marine Corps drill sergeant, but she knew how to get the job done, and she had kept me on the straight and narrow as far as rehab was concerned. Harry Ignatius Ball, aka Harry I. Ball, was a tough customer under the best of circumstances. Now, stuck in a wheelchair, with both legs amputated above the knee, I knew he would be a demanding and difficult patient.

“She's willing,” I answered. “She's supposed to show up this morning to meet him for the first time, then we'll see what happens. If those two lock horns, it could turn into World War III.”

Standing with one foot out the door, Mel turned back long enough to give me a genuine grin. “I'd love to be a mouse in the corner when that happens. Between Harry I. Ball and Marge Herndon, my money's on Marge—­all the way. She managed you just fine, and I'm betting she'll be able to handle him, too. Harry won't know what hit him.”

“Drive carefully,” I warned her, giving her a good-­bye peck on the cheek. “It rained hard overnight. They're saying to watch out for standing water on the roadways.”

While Mel took the long elevator ride from our aerie down to the parking garage far below and drove up four sets of ramps to street level, I went out on the balcony and stood waiting for her to emerge. If Mel had known that I did that every morning, rain or shine, when she left for work, she would have thought I was being a sentimental fool, but I couldn't help myself. Now I knew how it felt to be the spouse of a cop heading out the door for a day of confronting the bad guys. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be the one waiting at home, knowing that my beloved would be at work some ninety-­one miles and at least two hours away in good traffic. More if anything went wrong along the way. Yes, karma is definitely a bitch!

So is change.

I walked back inside and made myself another cup of coffee. Then I sat down on the living-­room window seat and looked out at the Space Needle. That iconic piece of Seattle's skyline has taken on a whole new and much darker meaning these days. It was where all of our lives had taken a sudden turn in a new and unexpected direction.

T
HINGS HAD STARTED
going haywire almost three months earlier, on the Friday, two weeks before Christmas. Mel was back in her bathroom getting ready for our evening out while I sat in this same window-­seat perch looking at the red and green lights, including the glowing Christmas tree that topped the Needle's flying-­saucer-­shaped roof. Ross Connors had scored the Needle's lower level for a Special Homicide Investigation Team Christmas party. If Ross had been using state funds for the event, he probably would have had to call it a “Holiday Party,” but since he was paying for the whole thing out of his own pocket, he would, as he told me, call it whatever the hell he wanted.

The ­people from all three S.H.I.T. squads—­the ones in Spokane and Olympia as well as our Seattle-­based one—­along with their spouses/partners were invited. Ross was also springing for hotel rooms where necessary. We all knew what the real deal was. It was really a thinly disguised post-­election celebration. When the polls had closed the previous November, and when all the votes were counted, Ross Connors had won again despite all the predictions to the contrary. He was still the Attorney General because countless ­people had crossed party lines to vote for him. The problem was, Ross was the exception. All the other statewide office holders, including the governor himself, now belonged on the “opposite side of the aisle.” I hadn't a doubt in my mind that Ross's Christmas party was a poke in the nose at all those folks—­a way of letting them know that he was the last man standing.

As for his ­people, those of us privileged to call Ross Connors “boss”? We really were “his ­people.” Ross had used that same considerable political savvy that had won cross-­party-­line voters in creating S.H.I.T. He had collected a diverse set of ­people—­always the ones he thought most skilled in getting the job done—­and had molded us into a cohesive whole, a team in every sense of the word. If this was a Christmas party, we were all going, and that included the two guys in the organization who describe themselves as “non-­observant” Jews.

The event was due to start promptly at six. It was five fifty-­five when Mel emerged from her private domain at the far end of the hall. Dressed in a long, ruby-­red dress with her long blond hair swept up onto her head, she would have been at home on any Hollywood red carpet. So would the shoes—­amazing bright red stiletto heels made by a guy named Jimmy something. They matched her dress perfectly. In four-­inch heels, she was only slightly shorter than me. In honor of the evening, she was carrying a small, glittery clutch rather than one of her more customary suitcase-­sized purses.

I had sat there, waiting for her and holding her coat. Standing up, I slipped it over her shoulders and inhaled a hint of perfume.

“It's spitting snow,” I said. “How about if we take the car and use the valet?”

“Come on,” she said. “It's only three blocks.”

The thing is, I was well acquainted with almost every inch of those three blocks. Doing rehab in the aftermath of my knee-­replacement surgery, I had done more walking than ever before, trudging alone through Seattle's Denny Regrade neighborhood. I knew full well that the Space Needle was a mere three blocks away from Belltown Terrace's front door, but I also understood that those three blocks are lined with mature trees whose roots have, over time, played havoc with nearby sidewalk surfaces. Not only is the concrete lumpy and bumpy in spots, it's also riddled with cracks and iron drain covers that are the natural enemy of misplaced feet, especially ones in very high heels.

“Besides,” Mel said, “it'll be fun, and I promise to hold on to your arm for dear life.”

“Right,” I said, “as in the blind leading the blind.”

Someone once told me, “Happy wife; happy life,” so we walked, laughing and talking through spattering snow that we both knew would never stick. We crossed Broad at Second then walked up the north side of the street as far as Denny, which we crossed at the light.

Walking along the grassy berm between Denny and the Pacific Science Center, we were almost at the valet parking entrance at the bottom of the Space Needle and the Chihuly Glass Garden when I heard the first hint of sirens—­lots of sirens.

When you live downtown, you grow accustomed to sirens. You learn to differentiate between those of the fire engines and aid cars at the Seattle F.D. station over on Fourth. There are the short bursts from patrol cars that usually indicate traffic stops. Those are especially annoying in the wee hours of the morning, just after the bars let out, when the traffic guys are busy taking drunks off the street. But this was different. This was something more. It sounded like a car chase to me, coming southbound toward us along Elliott. Suddenly, sirens blossomed all around us as police vehicles from all over the city converged on the area. There were cars coming northbound on the avenues from downtown and cars coming down from Queen Anne Hill.

Car chases are inherently dangerous. The potential for tragedy—­for death and serious injury—­is always there, whether it's on a deserted highway in the middle of the night or on a city street in broad daylight. A car chase during rush hour on a dark and rain-­slick city street was insanity itself. Someone else must have come to that same conclusion. The sirens went silent, and I surmised that orders to break off the chase must have been given. The cops got the message. They backed off, all of them. Unfortunately, the crooks didn't.

Let's just say that guys who set out to make a living by robbing banks usually aren't the sharpest pencils in the box. The only place smart bank robbers show up is on scripted television shows. And bank robbers who would pull off a heist in Ballard then head into the city center in rush-­hour traffic, hoping to make good their escape, exhibit a particularly astounding brand of stupidity. But that's what these two dimwits had done. They had somehow convinced themselves that if they just made it into the downtown core, they'd be able to blend into traffic and disappear.

In the old days, bank tellers would slip dye packs into the crooks' tote bags that would stain the robber and render the money unusable. These days, tellers have access to packets of bills that come pre-­equipped with GPS locator chips. All the teller has to do is activate the chip before slipping it into the bag, and voila. That money is invisibly findable with no car chases necessary. I'm sure that's one of the reasons the chase was called off. The chip was working. The good guys had all the time in the world to track the bad guys down.

So far the two boneheads hadn't figured that out. I heard the squeal of tires behind us as they came screaming up past Western and onto Denny. Then, to my amazement, a set of headlights weaving in and out of oncoming traffic, turned off Denny and onto Broad with other drivers slamming up onto sidewalks in desperate attempts to escape harm. Obviously, the maniac behind the wheel hadn't gotten the memo that Broad is no longer a through street.

Instinctively, Mel and I both headed for higher ground although Mel didn't start up the grassy berm until after she'd pulled off those damned shoes. We were standing side by side when the robbers flew past us, herding their stolen Range Rover between rows of stopped cars and tearing off mirrors and door panels as they went. The Range Rover slewed sideways directly in front of us then accelerated up Broad.

I knew what was going to happen long before it did. A vehicle turned off Fourth. The then, with oncoming traffic apparently stalled, the unsuspecting driver made the left-­hand turn into the Space Needle's valet parking area. The speeding Range Rover, driving in the wrong lane, smashed into them midturn, T-­boning them, hard.

You can go to movie theaters and watch all the computer-­generated mayhem you want, but none of that compares to the real thing—­to the terrible crash followed by the sickening, grinding sound of twisting metal coming to rest. And then, out of the sudden silence that followed the carnage came the haunting sound of not one but two wailing car horns. They sounded like sentinels announcing the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we knew it.

By then, Mel and I were both moving, toward the action rather than away from it. There would be other cops in the neighborhood soon, but we were closer than anyone else, and in what would soon turn into a massive traffic jam, we'd get there before anyone else could, too. If the crooks, whose car was closer, managed to exit their vehicle and tried to take off on foot, we'd be able to restrain them.

Not surprisingly, neither of them—­dumb and dumber—­had been smart enough to wear a seat belt. They had both been ejected from the vehicle. We found them lying on opposite sides of Broad. I located the first one on the north side of the street, lying with his head cracked open like a broken watermelon on the sharp edge of the curb. I didn't need to check for a pulse to know he was a goner.

The other guy, the passenger, had slammed full-­tilt into a metal utility vault on the far side of the street. Mel reached him at the same time several passersby did. She knelt briefly and dropped out of sight. When she straightened up, she caught my eye and gave me the thumbs-­down. So that one was dead, too—­no great loss there. Subsequent computer-­generated reconstructions of the collision estimated that the two dunces were doing seventy and still accelerating when they slammed into the turning vehicle. There was no sign that the driver ever touched the brakes.

Knowing those guys were dead, Mel and I turned our attention toward the other damaged vehicle. It was only then that we realized, with growing horror, that what we were seeing, stalled in the middle of Broad, were the still-­smoking remains of Ross Connors's Lincoln Town Car.