Every Day Above Ground Read online

  Dedication

  For our Mia

  A penny to share

  your thoughts, we add another

  to make art from dreams,

  and a third placed between those

  for all the rest of your days

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  My house was nothing but bones. A rigid lumber frame of two stories and an attic, the windows defined by perfect squares and the doorways tall rectangles. Sky and only sky between every line, like the drawing of a small and painstaking child.

  I was balanced at the peak. The carpenters and I had completed the trusses earlier in the day, and I wanted to check the joists against the house plan before the sun finished its dive below the horizon. The house was set on a rise at the top of the block. It was the tallest thing for a quarter mile, if you ignored the evergreen trees. So when the black Nissan Altima paused in its slow drift in front of the property, I was looking almost straight down on the car from sixty feet off street level.

  The Nissan pulled in to the curb and the driver stepped out. He looked up the stone steps that followed the rise, up the framework of the house, up to me. He raised a hand in tentative greeting.

  “This the Shaw place?” he called.

  “More or less,” I said.

  The man was a little older and a lot smaller than the national average. He wore a black watch cap and a jean jacket still stiff from the factory, and gray Carhartt dungarees over bright white sneakers. His smile flashed a full allotment of teeth. A white barcode sticker was visible through the Nissan’s spotless windshield.

  “You’re looking for Dono,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on up.”

  The small man walked quickly around the car to the stone steps. I unclipped the safety tether and clambered down to hang by my fingers, and dropped with a boom onto the plywood sheeting that formed the rudiments of a second floor. The whole structure smelled of cut pine and sap, pleasantly heavy in the July heat.

  I hadn’t built subflooring on the first story yet. When I climbed down I was standing on a bare concrete foundation. My visitor came to the top of the stone steps and halted. He had nowhere to go. The steps used to meet the porch of the old house, and would again someday. But for now they ended in midair, like one side of a small Aztec pyramid. We looked across the six-foot gap at each other.

  “Dono died,” I said. “Early last year.”

  His broad smile vanished in a wink. “Christ.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I did.” His gaze shifted quickly past the scars on my face—everybody’s first stop—to my black hair and black eyes, which were a match for Dono’s. “I know you, too, though we ain’t met. Dono’s grandson, yeah? I’m Mickey O’Hasson. Maybe he mentioned me?”

  “Sorry. I don’t recall.”

  “A long time back.” Up close, O’Hasson’s blue eyes were lively and clear, belying about six decades of hard living on his face. He stood barely over five feet tall and the cap and sneakers made up a full inch of that. The good-humored smile crept softly back onto his wide freckled face, like beaming was his natural expression.

  He inspected the edges of the steps, where scorch marks stood out fresh and bold against the pitted stone.

  “What happened here?” he said.

  “This year hasn’t been much better.”

  “And so you’re rebuilding. Good. It was a real nice place.”

  Nice might have been pushing it. But it had been home, once. “When did you last see Dono?”

  “Thirteen, fourteen years.”

  “You just get out?” I said.

  O’Hasson stared at me. Then the intricate lines around his eyes crackled in squinty amusement. “How’d you figure?”

  “Your jacket’s brand-new. Pants and shoes, too. The car’s a rental, and it’s fresh washed. Straight from the airport, maybe.”

  “Near enough.” He shook his head. “I remember Dono saying you were a real terror. He meant it good.”

  I hadn’t needed the clothes or the car to make O’Hasson as one of Dono’s crowd. My grandfather had been a thief, a robber, and in his younger days the kind of terror that nobody would call good. If this little guy was an acquaintance, then he had probably been an accomplice, too.

  “You come to Seattle just to find Dono?” I said.

  “Not just that. But he was high on my list.” He glanced around at the empty yard. “No roof material yet? I guess you have to get the drying-in done pretty quick.”

  “You know construction.”

  “I know it rains a lot in Seattle. You can’t leave framing out in the weather like this forever.”

  “I’m gambling on a dry summer.”

  “While you come up with the dough?” Those bright blueberry eyes narrowed in calculation, before he shrugged and nodded at the lapsing sun. “Quitting time. It’s Van, right? Same name as your granddad, Donovan, but people call you that?”

  “Good memory.”

  “Well, if you’ll let me bend your ear a little, I’ll buy the suds. ’Less you got somewhere else to be.”

  I didn’t. Hadn’t for a few months, not since Luce Boylan and I had broken up. I spent half of each day in one of the part-time jobs I’d managed to scrounge up, and the other half working on the house. Which was no longer an option, until I could afford the rest of the construction. The bones would stay bare.

  And I had to admit, O’Hasson had me curious why a man would seek out my grandfather, first thing after tasting the air outside.

  “Might as well,” I said.

  I locked up the tools in the big backyard shed, which had somehow survived the blaze, and changed into a t-shirt that was a couple of stains cleaner than the one I’d been wearing to monkey around the sap-covered lumber. O’Hasson followed my clattering Dodge pickup down to Madison and farther east, to a tavern called Lloyd’s Own. It wasn’t a dive—the neighborhood was too upscale for that—but it was away from the foot traffic and I could sit and think in peace.

  O’Hasson and I settled into a booth at the back, away from the handful of patrons staining their lips with buffalo wings. He kept his cap on. Pem, the skinny hipster kid who worked the two-to-eight shift, drifted over and asked if I wanted a Guinness, like usual. I did. O’Hasson ordered the same. He glanced around at the walls, which were laden with County Cork
landscapes, and then at Pem.

  “A black boy pulling the taps in a mick bar,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  He waved a hand hastily. “Just a long time since I been anyplace where people didn’t stick to their own. Since I been anyplace at all. It’s an okay thing, is what I mean.” His left hand kneaded at the bicep muscle of his right arm. Across the room, Pem set the half-full pints of stout on the bar to settle.

  O’Hasson nodded. “They pour it right in this place. ’S why you like it, yeah?”

  “And no one gives a rip if I’m covered in sawdust.”

  “You do that work professional? Making houses?”

  “Real contractors do the heavy lifting. I just pitch in with what Dono taught me.”

  “Right, he was a builder. I’d forgotten that.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose sheepishly. “He taught you other stuff, too.”

  A statement instead of a question. I waited.

  O’Hasson gave his arm one last squeeze. A tiny scab crested one of the veins on the back of his bony hand. I’d had a few scabs like that myself, left by IV needles.

  “I’m not prying,” he said. “Dono mentioned some things, while we were in Nogales, last time I saw him. You remember him making that trip?”

  I did, now that O’Hasson mentioned it. Most of the thieving I’d done as a kid had been with Dono. But not all of his jobs had included me. Occasionally he’d cut out for another area of the country, leave me with cash for food, and come back in a week or two. Open-ended. I sometimes knew where he was, and rarely knew exactly when he’d be back.

  It had always pissed me off, being left behind. The Nogales job had been one of those. I’d been about sixteen years old. Dono had come back with fifty grand.

  “You set that job up?” I said.

  “Yeah. He tell you about it?”

  “Not so you’d notice.”

  “Well, it was solid. Very solid.”

  Pem brought our pints, placing them dead center on cardboard coasters. A cell phone burred from somewhere in O’Hasson’s stiff jacket. He fished it out—an Ericsson four or five gens old—and looked at the screen. He hesitated a beat before muting its ring and setting it on the table.

  “Dono did the box work in Arizona,” he said once Pem had left. “Faster than anybody I ever saw.”

  I’d once watched as Dono opened a Sentry combination dial just by feel, and that was near impossible for any boxes built in the last three decades. The days of stethoscopes and dexterity were long past.

  “He was good,” I said.

  “Damn good. Always figured I’d set up another job with him someday. But time passed, I had other work, somebody dropped on me for a different thing, and that’s when I started my seven-year vacation. That doesn’t matter.”

  O’Hasson leaned in so suddenly he was in danger of knocking over his pint glass.

  “What matters is why I’m here. It’s very big. I thought Dono might want a piece.”

  “Moot now.”

  “And I’m damn sorry for that. Here’s to him, and those we’ve lost.” We took a pull on our glasses. I always liked the first sip, when I got some of the foam with the beer. O’Hasson grasped his arm and gazed mournfully into space for a respectfully slow count of three before hitting me with the question I knew was coming.

  “You keep up with it?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Not regular?”

  “Not at all.”

  Which wasn’t the whole truth. Recent events had given me reason to knock some rust off, greasing alarm systems and finding myself in places people didn’t want other people to go. I still had the touch. Just not the same motives as when I’d been my grandfather’s apprentice.

  “This is serious work,” said O’Hasson. “A small fortune for each of us. Even better, it’s practically clean.”

  “Practically.”

  “I mean the ownership of what we’re talking about is—well, nobody’s laid eyes on it in something like twenty years. It’s forgotten.”

  I drank my beer.

  “So tell me what you think,” he said.

  “I think nobody forgets a fortune. Small or not.”

  O’Hasson smiled and drummed his hands lightly on the tabletop. “Not if they’re in their right mind. But our guy isn’t.” He glanced around to make sure no one had moved within earshot during the last ten seconds.

  “I spent the last three years of my time in Lancaster. You know it?” he said.

  “Near L.A. Maximum sec.”

  “Yeah. Shithole. They’re all shitholes, I figure. Anyway, I got myself a job as an infirmary attendant. It’s an easy pull. Lotsa downtime. You get to talking. One of the other attendants, he tells me about this patient he looked after before I came along. Alzheimer’s got its hooks into the unlucky prick.”

  “Why didn’t they let him out?”

  “Who the fuck knows. Maybe that was in the plan before he croaked. Or maybe being senile made him more dangerous than ever. Point is that the geezer was off his nut. Especially at night, when he got tired. He thought my buddy was his cellmate from half a lifetime ago. He mumbled about everything. Jobs he’d pulled, scores that other people pulled, and he started talking to my attendant friend about a safe.”

  “Your friend have a name?”

  O’Hasson tilted his head. “Let’s keep that—what is it?—need-to-know. Just like I didn’t tell him I’d be talking to Dono. Safer for everybody, yeah?”

  The little man’s grin stretched wide enough to make his eyes squeeze tight. “This nutjob used to be the prime West Coast runner, when heroin was making its latest comeback. Supermodels looking like junkies. Whole new generation.”

  “Runner for who?” I was getting caught up in the story, despite myself.

  “The big man in Los Angeles. Karl Ekby. You know who he was?”

  “I do not.”

  “Doesn’t matter, he checked out a long time ago. But he was the heaviest. Any horse that flew into Seattle from the Golden Triangle, the nutjob would be right there with Ekby’s cash. Back and forth, twice a month, regular as Amtrak. He had a cover business here and everything. And every trip, he’d skim a little. Expected, really. Hazard pay.”

  “Let me guess. The runner saved all that cash in his safe.”

  “Naw. He was even smarter than that. He bought gold. Kilobars, you know, the thin ones? A fucking investment. Those he put in the safe.”

  “So he had a pot of gold,” I said. “And his cover business was named Rainbow Incorporated.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “And you’re not, which is the craziest part of this whole fairy tale.”

  “Hey, I figured it was bullshit myself. But my buddy had enough real facts that we could check it out. Taking our time so nobody notices, right? The building where the runner had his office is still here in Seattle. I’ll bet anything that his safe is still hidden under the floor, right where he said. Shit, if the building owners ever came across a pile of fucking gold, it’d have been big news, right?”

  “If there was ever any pile of gold to be found.”

  “Well, it’s worth a look, isn’t it?”

  I finished my glass. Pem saw it from across the room and tilted his head in a question. I waved him off. Story time was about over.

  O’Hasson’s phone rang again. His hand reached for it automatically before pausing.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m gonna hit the latrine.”

  When I came out, O’Hasson was still talking on the phone, leaning against the wall of the booth with his shoulders relaxed from the hunched urgency of our conversation. His wolfish grin had softened. He nodded along with whatever the speaker was saying. A wife, or a girlfriend, I guessed.

  He hung up and pocketed the phone as I approached.

  “I’ve never cracked a safe,” he said. “I need a sure bet, somebody I know.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know you enough if you’re Dono Shaw’s
family. Come on.” He licked his lips. “We go in, we tear up the floor. If the safe’s there, we open it.”

  “And then?”

  “Whatever’s there, we split three ways.”

  “Your buddy is a generous guy,” I said.

  “The clock’s ticking. That building’s due to be torn down. And a third of a score is a shitload better than having all of nothing.” O’Hasson shrugged like it was obvious. “I’ll hang on to his share until he gets out in a few weeks.”

  “Damn trusting, too.”

  “I’m not crossing him.”

  He meant it. Whoever O’Hasson’s unnamed buddy was, he’d put some fear into the bargain.

  I shook my head. “It’s not for me.”

  “You’ll get your end. Right there on the spot,” he said.

  “No.”

  O’Hasson’s face twitched, struggling to shore up his habitual grin. The effort failed.

  “Where’d you get that?” He thrust a finger at the left side of my face. “During a job? That why you’re so gunshy?”

  “In Iraq,” I said.

  “So you served. All the more reason life owes you a little something.”

  I pointed at his black cap, mimicking his jab. “Your turn. Unless you want to stick with that bullshit about working in the infirmary.”

  He glared at me a moment before reaching up to remove the cap. What steel-wool hair he had was high and tight, not much different than the standard Ranger cut. He turned to show me his right side. A surgical scar made a smooth curve from the top of his ear to the base of his skull. It was fresh enough that I could see pockmarks where stitches had been.

  “Gli-o-ma,” he said, stretching out the syllables. “A tumor.”

  “That why they let you out? To get treatment?”

  O’Hasson grunted. “No treatment. Not this time. They opened me up, took one look, and that was enough. Shit’s all around the blood vessels.”

  “You seem to get around all right.”

  “Not much to it, not yet. My arm gets numb.” He pressed a hand into his bicep. “Face and neck, too, lately.”

  He was right. The clock was ticking fast.

  “So if you were the one in the infirmary, who was your generous friend?” I said.

  “An attendant, like I said. I told you, I checked it out. Everything jibes with what the senile old fuck told him. Look.” He reached out and grabbed my wrist. “I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t hack it, okay? It’s no problem. There’s a fucking fortune, believe me, I can do whatever it takes.”