Every Day Above Ground Read online

  Hollis grunted. “And Mick got himself shot with a tranquilizer. Now the hunters have a dying burglar instead of the man they wanted. Whoever that is.”

  “I’m still in the dark about that,” I said. “I don’t know what the connection is between O’Hasson’s prison attendant and Claudette’s silent partner in Pacific Pearl. I have to guess that they aren’t the same man, since the attendant has been locked up in Lancaster Pen for years.”

  “Another reason why he sent Mick to take the risk,” Hollis mused.

  My glass was empty. I took the half-empty bottle of tea from Corcoran. The screw top came off with a twist of my fingers and I poured another inch, more lost in my head than thinking about the motions.

  “I also don’t know who the hunters are, or why they are so hell-bent on catching Claudette’s partner,” I said. “It’s possible that they murdered Claudette after forcing her to tell them about the gold, to get to him. They’ve spent weeks, and maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to trap him at the safe. They’ve installed a camera at Pacific Pearl to watch for people coming and going. They’re still watching now.” I shook my head. “It’s not about the gold. Not for them.”

  “What if,” said Hollis, brightening, “the four million is just the tip of the mountain. Some of those big drug operations spend that much on bribes. Maybe there’s a huge pile of the lovely stuff somewhere.”

  “Also possible,” I said.

  “Still doesn’t explain why Mick O’Hasson isn’t fertilizing a field somewhere,” Corcoran said.

  “What would you do?” I offered. “If you were the hunters? You lost your trap at the safe, but gained O’Hasson.”

  “I might try to use Mick as the new bait,” Hollis said after a moment’s thought. “Pretending to be him.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “O’Hasson is the hunters’ best bet to lure Claudette’s unknown partner out in the open.”

  “Screw that,” said Corcoran. “O’Hasson put a match to the building, didn’t he? And then disappeared. That’s gotta look hinky. If I were the dead woman’s partner, sure as shit I wouldn’t be sticking my neck out right now.”

  I nodded. “He’s playing it safe. But he does think O’Hasson has his gold.”

  Hollis was keeping step with me. “The girl.”

  “Mick’s daughter, Cyndra,” I said. “Two meatheads—one of whom works at Pacific Pearl—tried to grab her in Reseda. Somebody gave the goons orders. Maybe the partner, maybe the prison attendant, or both. Grab Cyndra, and they think they can force O’Hasson to give them their gold back.”

  “Shitbirds,” Corcoran said. “I’d fucking kill ’em, it was my kid they went for.” He spat with surprising distance, the gob arcing over the rail and joining the other precipitation. I made a mental note to wear a hat walking past Corcoran’s building in the future.

  “Cyndra’s with Addy now,” I said. “She’s safe. And the hunters are at a stalemate. O’Hasson is useful bait, but the silent partner is too gunshy.”

  “Entertaining as all this crap is,” Corcoran said, “why do you give a rat’s ass? Nobody’s offering to trade you for nothing.”

  Hollis looked at me, blue eyes shining with amusement. “You don’t want the little fellow to get killed, now do you?” he said.

  “You’re shitting me,” Corcoran said, staring. “He tried to cook you.”

  “Not me,” I said. “The hunters.”

  “Oh, well, that makes it okay.”

  “It’s the girl, Jimmy,” Hollis said. “Van can’t let the girl lose her father.”

  Corcoran threw up his hands. “The moron’s dying anyway.”

  “All the more reason,” said Hollis.

  “Fuck that. And fuck you, Shaw. Your priorities are seriously out of whack.” Corcoran got up and opened the sliding glass door. “Dono would never be such a chump.” He slammed the door behind him.

  Tiny beads of rain trickled down the cap of the balcony railing, collecting into fat drops that hung for an instant before falling and breaking apart on the next rail down, repeating the cycle. Hollis tilted his glass high, waiting for the last drips to finish the journey.

  “You know,” he said after a moment, “it’s always a shame when Jimmy’s right.”

  I kept watching the rain.

  “A week ago you were hemming and hawing over whether to stay on the straight path,” said Hollis. “Not something I’d fret about myself, but okay. We all make our own choices. Now you’re all knotted up inside about O’Hasson, who has no one to blame but his own self. The way I see it, you dodged a speeding train, and you should give thanks and be done.”

  “Jimmy meant I should be focusing on the money, not the girl.”

  “I know what he meant,” said Hollis.

  “I agree with him.”

  Hollis stared at me, and I met his baffled gaze.

  “Four million in gold,” I said. “That’s the key. Before long, both sides—hunters and the silent partner—are going to risk a meeting. And the gold has to be right in the middle, or nothing happens. Somebody’s going home with it.”

  Hollis straightened in his chair. The white hairs on his arm popped with goosebumps.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  The screw top of the tea bottle was still resting on the plastic tablecloth printed with magnolias. I tilted the little disk of metal on its side and flicked it with a fingertip, sending it spinning across the table.

  “I’m thinking we need to crash the party,” I said.

  Age Twelve, December 21

  For once, I didn’t mind taking out the trash. While hauling the heavy load out to the bins, I spotted the bright yellow coffee cups smashed against the taut plastic of the Hefty bag. I knew those cups.

  I pulled the drawstrings loose, letting out a swampy waft of wilted vegetables. There were three twelve-ounce cups in the bag. All from the same coffee shop called Armond’s, up on 19th. All three brought in from Granddad’s truck, one each day during the past three days. He’d been going out at weird hours, really early or really late, always telling me it was contracting work. Not a chance.

  He was staking someplace out. Maybe the house he and the two men were planning to burgle.

  Burgle was the word, I hoped. Not rob. Robbery meant guns, or at least something violent and threatening, and that was exactly the kind of work Granddad had promised me he wouldn’t do.

  But he was still carrying the Colt. I’d checked every night, while he was reading and I was mostly watching TV downstairs. The small automatic was always in the right-hand pocket of whatever jacket he’d been wearing that day.

  A house job meant burglary. That would be okay. But there were plenty of businesses around 19th, too, and I guess some of them might have enough cash to make a robbery worth it, especially around Christmas. Would Granddad really hit a place so close to home? He hardly liked working in Seattle, much less on the Hill. I wasn’t sure.

  I’d have to see for myself.

  Armond’s coffee shop was across the street from an elementary school, and the playground made a good place for me to hang out with my bike. It was so early that the sun wasn’t up yet. I was barely up myself. Only the cold kept me awake. I tried sitting on the merry-go-round, but its metal was so freezing my butt got numb in like a minute. Instead I got up and walked around the play structure, gloved hands shoved into my pockets and head squished down into my collar. My breath made white puffs in the air, even through my scarf.

  I’d worn my darkest coat and sneakers to stay over at Davey’s the night before, and told Davey and his mom that I had to leave super early to join Granddad on a construction job. Davey’s mom fussed but told me I should be proud of helping out. Davey made faces at me from behind her. He and I had stayed up late—too late, it felt now—messing around with Mario Kart on their Nintendo.

  Granddad might not buy coffee at Armond’s again today. But people had patterns, and they liked to stick to them. That’s what he had said when he was teac
hing me what to look for when casing a place, to see when it would be empty. I guess this would be ironic or fitting or something, me now watching for him.

  But man, it was cold. I hoped he’d hurry up. The lights had just gone on at Armond’s, and the store glowed like a fireplace. Bet they had hot chocolate.

  I didn’t have to wait much longer—twenty minutes of frostbite creeping into my toes—before our black Chevy pickup came down the street. I ducked behind the play structure, near my bike lying on the ground like a dead dog. Granddad pulled up to the curb and got out and went into Armond’s. He was wearing his barn jacket and blue jeans and sneakers that were a big pair of the ones I was wearing. We’d bought them at the same time at the Payless, the week after he’d brought me home from the foster house.

  I grabbed my bike and coasted to the gap in the fence. The school was closed up for the holidays, but the gate was only attached with a little click-lock, the kind I’d learned to beat even before Granddad went away. I wheeled the bike through and relocked it, and ducked behind a parked car.

  Granddad came out, fresh cup of coffee in his hand, and got in the Chevy and pulled away.

  Here came the tough part. Following the truck without him seeing me. The sky was brighter now, and the roads mostly quiet. I leaned in and pumped hard on the pedals and the bike sped down the sidewalk.

  I was going to lose. In the first block alone, Granddad made twice the distance I did. If he hadn’t stopped for a few moments at a five-way intersection, I’d have given up already. He angled to the right, out of view, and ten seconds later I flew through the same stop sign without hesitating.

  We were running alongside Interlaken Park now. The sidewalk was cracked and every couple hundred feet there was a telephone pole just waiting for me to smack into it. I’d lost the Chevy. I pedaled harder. Up ahead, I saw his lights as the truck turned left, following the edge of the park. A Roto-Rooter service truck was in my way. I swooped around and in front of it to cross the street. Its brakes squealed, but I was already zooming after Granddad.

  The road was just a single lane. Houses on the right, and a thick wall of trees and brush leading down into a small ravine that bordered the park on the left. Cars parallel-parked against the single shallow sidewalk made the road even tighter. I used them for cover, half coasting and half kicking it down the easy slope, hoping no one would come backing out of their driveway to mash me.

  Granddad’s Chevy, just fifty yards ahead and brake lights flashing. I skidded to a stop, my rear tire leaving a black streak on the asphalt.

  Oh shit, he was backing up.

  No time to jump off the bike. I let it fall and went with it, my shoulder thumping painfully into the pavement.

  Had he seen me? If so, I was going to look pretty stupid, lying on the sidewalk behind a parked Corolla. And then one hellacious storm would follow.

  Twenty seconds passed. The Chevy didn’t appear. Instead, I heard the sounds of shifting gears and, faintly, the truck’s engine turning off.

  I risked a peek above the Corolla’s hood. Granddad hadn’t gotten out of the truck. He was just sitting there, parallel-parked at the curb.

  Okay. Was he casing one of the houses? They were nice houses, sure, at least as good as ours and a lot newer. But not nearly the kinds of places that would have security guards, like Granddad and the two men at our house had been talking about. The most they would have to worry about here would be a family dog.

  I picked up the bike and, still hunched way over behind the line of cars, wheeled it back up the road. When I was around the bend, I sprinted with it across the street and into the first line of bushes at the ravine.

  Hiding my bike was easy—just lay it down in the clumps of ground ivy and scotch broom and it was invisible. It was a lot harder to make my way back to the Chevy through the trees. I had to go ten yards down the ravine’s slope to where the brush thinned out to even start. Brambles caught my pants on every step, but at least I couldn’t be seen. Granddad would have kicked my ass for spying on him.

  At last I had gone far enough that I guessed I was near the Chevy and I could climb back toward the road, pushing the hanging evergreen branches aside. When I finally saw it, the big black truck was shockingly close. Granddad’s dark head right there. I dropped flat on the wet ground.

  He was just watching the road, it looked like. Waiting for someone to leave? I edged another yard forward to get a view of the houses down the road. The grass smell made my nose run.

  I didn’t know any of the houses. But I did know one of the cars in one of the driveways. A green Ford Taurus, with a Balewood School bumper sticker.

  The redheaded man’s car.

  Granddad sat there for two hours. My pants had soaked through from the wet ivy and mostly dried again with the heat from my body. Ten times I thought about inching back into the trees and leaving, but I wanted to know. Even the shivering didn’t make me quit. He might be proud if I could ever tell him.

  Like all the houses on the narrow road, the redheaded man’s home—if it was his home—was close to its neighbors and elevated a little bit from the road. Not as steeply as our house, which was on top of a rise, but enough so there were stairs leading from the driveway along a rock wall that faced the sidewalk, curving upward to meet its front door. The house was brown and two stories and partly sheltered by a couple of leafy trees on the small slope of its front yard.

  Just a house. Nothing unusual. So why was Granddad so intense about it?

  The redheaded man came down the steps from the side of the house, got into his car, and pulled out of the driveway. Granddad had ducked down in the truck. It was kind of funny, me hiding from him hiding from the redheaded man. The Taurus drove down the road, and a moment later, Granddad and the truck did, too.

  I stood up and brushed myself off and fought through the last of the brush to the road. It felt great to finally be standing. I wiped my nose on my sleeve, for about the hundredth time.

  So Granddad was following the tall redheaded guy. Or staking out his house, or both. I had thought they were partners.

  “Hey,” said a girl’s voice from across the street. “What’re you doing?”

  Ah, crap. I hadn’t seen her standing behind the trees in front of the house.

  “Uh,” I said.

  The girl came down the steps. She looked about my age, maybe a little older. Definitely taller. Her black t-shirt had a picture of the Tick and the word spoon in red letters that were flaking with age. It was cool.

  Then I noticed that her hair was the same color as the redheaded man’s. Not cool.

  “A snake,” I said quickly. “I saw one.” That would scare her off.

  “Yeah?” She hurried across the road. “Where?”

  Dang. “Uh. Back there. It went this way.”

  “What kind? A rattlesnake?”

  I didn’t think there were rattlesnakes in the city, though whenever we drove out to the woods to shoot, Granddad had warned me to watch my step around logs and rocks. But I didn’t want to look dumb if the girl knew for sure. “No, a garter snake. Black and green.”

  “Oh.” Clearly disappointed. She folded her arms—no coat on and it was still crazy cold out—and looked around at the grass and ivy. Her orange hair fell in her face and I realized she was wearing slippers instead of shoes, which were getting wet.

  “I think it’s gone,” I said. No reason she should stand around waiting for a fake snake.

  “Okay,” she said, but didn’t move.

  “Well.” I shrugged. “Bye.”

  “I’m Kassie,” she said before I’d taken two steps.

  “I’m Van.” Shit, I should have lied. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to see her again.

  “Do you live on this street?”

  “No. Just riding around.”

  Kassie nodded like she’d expected that. “I’m the only one, I think. It’s boring here during vacation.”

  Wait, maybe the house wasn’t hers, or the redheaded man’s.
Maybe they were visiting or something.

  “Do you go to Balewood?” I said. “I saw the bumper sticker.”

  Kassie nodded again. “What school’s yours?”

  “Hovick. Middle School,” I added in case she thought I was a fifth-grader.

  “Do you want to watch TV?” she said, looking at her feet. “Or I got a PlayStation.”

  Really? I didn’t know anybody who had one of those yet. I didn’t want to play, not really. But it would let me see inside the house. Maybe the redheaded man had something lying around that would tell me what score they were planning. Or why Granddad considered him a threat.

  I’d have to be gone before he got back. The redheaded man knew who I was.

  “Okay,” I said. “But then I gotta go home.”

  “Cool,” said Kassie, smiling. We walked across the street toward the house. “What’s Hovick like?”

  “Like hitting your head on the desk all day,” I said.

  Kassie laughed. Which made me happy, somehow.

  Thirteen

  Addy came out onto her porch before I had turned off the truck’s engine. This was getting to be a habit, her dashing out to meet me. She shifted her weight anxiously from side to side, causing Stanley to rock with her like a dance partner. If the rain hadn’t been pelting down, she might have come right up to my window.

  “Cyndra’s run off,” Addy said as I came up the walk.

  “Just now?”

  “I came home from the grocery store and found her gone. Her backpack, too.”

  “That pack has everything she owns. She wouldn’t let it out of her sight, even if she were just walking up to 15th for a Slurpee. Did she steal anything?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “So she’s not burning bridges. She’ll be back.”

  “I don’t like it,” Addy said.

  “Me either. But we can’t tie her to a chair.”

  Still, my previous worries came creeping back, about what sort of trail Cyndra might have left on her journey to Seattle, and maybe to my address. I was sure there was more that the clever twelve-year-old hadn’t told me about her father’s plans.