Stand Down (3 page)

Even months later, recalling that horrific scene that changed all our lives was enough to shock me back to real time. I set down my coffee mug and headed for the shower. An hour or so later, when I left Belltown Terrace, I turned right on Second and drove all the way down to Olive and used that to make my way up to Harry's rehab facility on the far side of Capitol Hill. That's the official name for that particular neighborhood, but due to all the hospitals based there, locals generally refer to it as Pill Hill.

In the old days I would have turned right on Broad and over to Fifth to make that trip. Not anymore. For one thing, the city's traffic engineers have fixed it so Broad no longer goes anywhere useful. Besides, I avoid Denny and Broad as much as possible. That's where the accident happened. It's where Ross Connors and his driver, Bill Spade, lost their lives, and it's also where Harry Ignatius Ball lost both his legs.

Just glancing up either of those streets is enough to bring back vivid memories of that nightmarish scene. Ross's aging Lincoln Town Car had been hit so hard that both ­people on the driver's side of the car—­Bill at the wheel and Ross seated directly behind him—­had died on impact, crushed to death when the stolen Range Rover plowed into the passenger compartment, ending up with the Rover's front bumper crushed up against the Town-­Car's drive shaft.

Momentum from the collision carried the two conjoined vehicles into a nearby light pole with enough force that the pole toppled over. It landed on the roofs of both cars, crumpling metal like so much tissue paper and sending a jagged edge of roof into Harry's lower thighs, nearly severing his legs. The weight of the pole on top of the roof was the only thing that kept him from bleeding to death on the spot.

I had reached in through the wreckage and checked both Bill and Ross. Neither of them had a pulse. They were gone. By then, Mel was on the far side of the car, reaching in through the shattered passenger window and trying to comfort Harry, who was howling in pain. Looking at his legs, I was sure he was a goner, too.

The nearest fire station, at Fourth and Battery, was only five blocks away, but in the sudden snarl of stalled traffic, it could just as well have been in Timbuktu. It seemed to take forever for them to get there with the jaws of life. In fact, an EMT, a young woman, jogging from the station and carrying a first-­aid kit, arrived long before anyone else or any other equipment. She was small enough to maneuver inside the tiny space left in the vehicle and somehow managed to fasten two tourniquets around Harry's upper thighs, thus saving his life but dooming his legs. In the meantime, I was left with nothing to do but wish I could slam my fist through someone's face, preferably that of the stupid driver, who was already dead.

Mel and I had set out for the Space Needle just minutes before the party was scheduled to start. It turned out that Ross, too, had been making an uncharacteristically late entrance. I found out later that Harry's car had developed a fuel-­pump issue on his way into the city from Bellevue. When he'd called Ross to let him know he'd be late, Ross had insisted that he and Bill drive over Lake Washington on the I-­90 bridge, pick Harry up, and bring him to the party. I've always been struck by that old saying about no good deed going unpunished, but having Ross and Bill dead because they'd done nothing more than give Harry a ride was too much.

The jaws of life were not yet on the scene when I realized that if most of the other partygoers were already upstairs, I was the one who would have to deliver the bad news. And so I did, pushing my way into the Space Needle lobby and through the line of holiday revelers waiting for the elevator. ­People protested vigorously as I fought my way to the head of the line and flashed my badge in front of the boyish-­faced operator.

“Skyline Banquet level,” I snarled at him. “Now!”

Without a word, he allowed me into the elevator, barred the other waiting passengers by means of a velvet-­covered rope, closed the door on them, and pushed the buttons. We rode up in utter silence. “Wait here,” I ordered. “I'll be coming right back down.”

Just inside the door stood a waiter holding a tray of glasses filled with bubbling champagne. I was tempted to grab one of them. In fact, I was tempted to grab them all and swill them down one after another. Instead, I stopped short and scanned the room.

It took a moment for me to locate Katie Dunn, Ross's secretary. She was talking to Barbara Galvin, Harry's secretary and the cornerstone for Unit B of Special Homicide. Finding both women together was a stroke of luck. Katie must have caught sight of the look on my face. She turned away from Barbara and hurried toward me, with Barbara, also sensing something amiss, close on her heels.

“Beau,” Katie asked, frowning, “whatever's the matter?”

With no time to lessen the blow, I blurted it out at once. “There's been a car accident down on the street. Ross is dead, and so's his driver. Harry may not make it, either.”

Katie's face drained of all color. “Oh, no!” she whispered. “Ross is dead?”

I nodded. Without a word, Barbara sprinted for the elevator.

“Go with Barbara,” Katie said to me. “I'll hold the fort here. Keep me posted.”

When I entered the elevator, Barbara was already there, white-­faced and furious, screeching into the operator's face. “Go, damn it! What on earth are you waiting for? Go now!”

But I had made a believer of the poor guy. He waited until I stepped on board before pushing the
DOWN
button. By the time we hit the ground level, Barbara was out of her sequined heels. Holding them in one hand and a tiny beaded clutch in the other, she sprinted out of the elevator and left me in the dust as she pushed through the crush of ­people waiting for the long-­delayed elevator.

I caught up with Barbara only because she was stopped short by a uniformed cop trying to maintain a perimeter around the crash site. “She's with me,” I told him, holding up my badge. “Let her through.”

We reached the wreckage while firefighters were still maneuvering the jaws of life into position. Despite protests from more than one first responder, Barbara shoved Mel out of the way. “Don't you die on me, you bastard!” she yelled at Harry, snatching his hand from Mel's. Bad as things were, Harry focused his eyes on Barbara's face and favored her with a tiny grin.

“Do my best,” he whispered. “I'll do my best.”

Believe me, the relationship between Harry I. Ball and the reformed punk rocker, Barbara Galvin, had nothing to do with an office romance. It was more like a love/hate, father/daughter kind of thing.

At that point, one of the firefighters simply picked Barbara up and carried her away from the wreckage, bringing her over to where Mel and I had taken refuge on a piece of sidewalk slick with shattered glass. “Keep her here and get her shoes back on,” the man growled at us. “We need this woman out of our way!”

Another firefighter appeared behind him. “Okay,” he said. “We've got permission to land the chopper on top of KOMO.”

The snarl of traffic, growing worse by the minute, made transporting Harry to a hospital by ambulance a nonstarter. The building for the local ABC affiliate, complete with a helipad on its roof, was almost directly across the street. In moments, they had Harry out of the crushed vehicle and onto a gurney, rolling him across the street and toward the building to the helipad. Once at Harborview Hospital, a team of the ER docs tried valiantly to save his legs. It didn't work. His legs were gone, and soon, so was everything else, S.H.I.T included.

Within weeks of Ross Connors's funeral and while Harry was still in the hospital, the governor—­the one from the “other side of the aisle”—­had appointed a new attorney general, whose first order of business was to disband Special Homicide altogether. Suddenly we were all out of a job. Well, not all of us. Mel was one of the younger ones, and she'd already decided to make the move to Bellingham before the axe fell. But the rest of us—­the old duffers—­were out of luck. For right now, I was keeping busy wrangling construction projects. What I'd do later on when all the plaster dust settled was something I mostly avoided contemplating.

I found a parking place on Cherry and trudged half a block in the wrong direction to find the applicable pay station, grumbling to myself the whole way about the loss of old-­fashioned parking meters. They might have eaten every bit of change out of your pocket in the blink of an eye, but at least they were right there by your car. You didn't have to go searching for them.

I was back on Boren and about to walk through the automatic doors into the lobby, when Harry hailed me by name. Turning, I saw his wheelchair parked some fifty feet away from the door under a bus-­stop-­like shelter designed to keep smokers away from the building and out of the rain, at least, if not out of the cold. I had wheeled him up there more than once, so he could have a smoke.

Coming closer, I saw that Harry wasn't alone. Standing nearby was Marge Herndon herself, the hoyden who had looked after me during my bout with postsurgical rehab. She was smoking like a chimney, and so was Harry. He looked happier than I'd seen him in months.

“Hey,” he said, waving his burning cigarette in her direction. “Thanks for putting me in touch with Margie here. She came by just now to introduce herself. She got here a few minutes early. The woman is a gem.”

Are you kidding? They'd barely been introduced, and Harry was already calling her Margie? I had known the woman for months without ever getting beyond the basic Nurse Ratched stage. And he thought she was a “gem”? I regarded the woman as an absolute terror, one who had run roughshod over me for what had seemed like months rather than weeks.

I nodded in Marge's direction. “Good to see you,” I said.

“Same here,” she muttered tersely in a way that told me that even though Harry had scored big with her, I had not.

I knew in that moment that, once again, Mel had been right, and I was wrong. In the course of a single cigarette, or maybe two, Marge Herndon had Harry I. Ball eating out of her hand.

It was enough to piss off the Good Fairy.

Clearly, since Marge and Harry were getting along like gangbusters, my planned introduction as well as my continued presence weren't required. I chatted for a few minutes, then, excusing myself, I found my car, complete with paid-­for-­but-­unused parking time, and made my way down the hill to I-­5, where I headed north.

J
IM
H
UNT HAD
located three possible contractors for us. This one, Don Hastings, the last one on the list, lived in Smoky Point, a tiny ex-­burb north of Everett.

Don had done jobs for Jim Hunt several times in the past, and he and his ­people had done quality work. He had also handled projects in towns stretching from Everett all the way to the Canadian border. That meant he had contacts and working relationships with ­people in planning departments from here to there. Those connections were bound to streamline the permitting process. More to the point, he had a crew based in Arlington that was finishing up one job and would be ready to tackle another within a matter of weeks.

We'd taken proposals from the two other construction outfits—­so we had three estimates altogether. Jim had warned us that the one from Hastings would most likely come in as the priciest one of the three in terms of up-­front cost, but I've learned over time that you get what you pay for. And I'd already made up my mind to sign on the dotted line long before I found my way to Don's office, located in a converted garage next to his residence on the outskirts of town. I stayed long enough to meet the man in person and write a deposit check that would put the wheels in motion, then I headed north again, leaving Don and Jim Hunt huddled together over a stack of plans spread out across a drafting table.

Once on I-­5, I tried calling Mel to let her know the deed was done, but when her phone went straight to voice mail, I didn't bother leaving a message. She was probably busy, and I'd be there soon enough to give her the news in person.

Although I was glad to have the project out of my hands and in the care and keeping of a competent professional, I was a little blue about it, too. I had been so preoccupied with dealing with the housing issues that I'd had little time to think about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

Between my years at Seattle P.D. and the ones with S.H.I.T., I'd spent almost all my adult life in law enforcement. It's not just a career. It's a mind-­set and a way of life. There are far too many stories out there of ex-­cops who, having pulled the plug on working, end up taking their own lives. Of course, that wouldn't be me. For starters, I had Mel. I was determined to spend every possible moment with her. She had her own career path now—­a complicated career path—­but what the hell was I supposed to do with my spare time? Take up golf, for Pete's sake? That seemed to be working for my friend, Ralph Ames who, along with his wife, Mary, was now living—­and golfing—­at a development called Pebble Creek which is somewhere in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Ralph had tried unsuccessfully to interest me in golfing. It just didn't take.

Twenty miles out of Bellingham, I dialed Mel's number again. This time I did leave a message. “Hey,” I said. “I signed the contract with Don Hastings. Things moved faster than I expected. Since I'm sort of in the neighborhood, I thought I'd see if we could grab a quick late lunch. Call me when you have time. I'm about twenty minutes out.”

It was frustrating to know that Mel was in a complicated situation at work and that, other than offering her moral support, there was little I could do about it. As far as I could tell, Mel's tenure as chief had been completely devoid of a honeymoon period. It had become clear all too soon that Mel's selection by the city council and city manager had been made over the mayor's strenuous objections. Mayor Adelina Kirkpatrick was a typical small-­time politician. The mayor was a lifelong Bellingham resident who knew where all the bodies were buried while Mel was new to town. Mel had learned that the mayor had fully expected Assistant Chief Austin Manson to be handed the job of chief, a move that had been thwarted by both the city manager and the city council. That meant Mel's relationship with the mayor had started out on the wrong foot and had stayed that way.