He pulled off his tangled blankets, belched, and tasted bile. He rubbed his gut.
When was the last time I ate?
The tin door to his shack rattled again.
I’ll kill Sweet Sue for making that racket!
“Mister Mayor, ya gotta get up.”
Gus swung his feet to the dirt floor and sat on his cot, elbows on thighs, and cradled his head in his hands. Then he ran a hand over the stubble of whiskers on his face. Slowly, it sunk through the fog in his brain. The voice yelling wasn’t Sweet Sue’s.
Gus staggered to the door and moved the heavy metal trunk he’d placed there. It was his insurance that no one could push the door open without him knowing. Dead drunk or not, his old cop instincts kicked in when trouble was about to kick him in his face.
When he pulled the makeshift door open, Muffler Man stepped back on his good leg. His face puckered up and his faded blue eyes stared over Gus’s right shoulder at nothing. He had his signature plaid wool scarf around his neck.
At the sight of Gus’s murderous scowl, Muffler Man hitched back a step. “We got bad news,” he said. He half turned around and nodded at the small woman standing behind him. “Me and Bets here, we been hollerin’ a long time.”
Gus looked around Muffler Man at Bets, who seemed scared as a kid about to be whipped. She didn’t return his look but bent her head and hunkered down inside the worn pea coat dwarfing her skinny body.
Gus had slept in his clothes and couldn’t remember the last time he’d changed them. His stink hung close. He felt like hell and looked worse. “Where’s Sweet Sue? Why the hell are you bothering me?”
Even with his alcohol-hazed brain, Gus knew something had gone very wrong in the camp. Like it or not, he’d been elected the “go to” man by its inhabitants. That’s because he was an ex-cop. Once the word had gotten out in the homeless camp set up below St. Mark’s Cathedral, Sweet Sue had started calling him “Mr. Mayor.” The label stuck. So did the responsibilities. He’d questioned himself. Why stay? But then he’d shrug. Why not!
Maybe it was Sweet Sue, the thin old relic who’d attached himself to Gus. The man had been drifting since he was a boy. He’d been called a tramp and a vagrant then, and not the niced-up label of homeless. Sweet Sue liked to say that he was Mr. Mayor’s “aide-de-homeless-camp.” Then he’d laugh his high-pitched cackle.
Just about everybody in the camp went by a street name. Sweet Sue’s came about because he liked to suck on hard candy and told over and over about hearing Johnny Cash sing “A Boy Named Sue” in San Quentin.
Mudflat Manor was a loose collection of pitched tents, tarps, and a few lean-tos set on the wooded hillside below the Episcopal cathedral. When the rains came, the place was a muddy, slippery slope. But Gus kept the camp clean, so to speak, so that the Seattle PD and the do-gooders, including the big church’s minister, left them alone. Gus didn’t allow dope dealers or druggies-he could be persuasive. And he made damn sure there weren’t any syringes or used condoms littering 10th Street in front of the cathedral. That way, the police and uptight citizens in the Capitol Hill neighborhood could pretend the homeless squatters didn’t exist. If they did, then they’d have to do something about them.
Gus let alkies like himself stay-if they didn’t make trouble. A core group of drifters and homeless came and went with the seasons. Before he’d gotten the news about his daughter and went on his bender, some had already left and headed south. It was closing in on November. The rains had started and the temperature dropped the last few nights.
Muffler Man’s fingers twitched at his pants legs. He looked away from Gus and mumbled, “I gotta say this: Sweet Sue’s hurt bad.”
Gus grabbed Muffler Man’s arm. “What happened? Where is he?”
Muffler Man stammered. “Huh-huh-Harborview. A dope dealer beat him up. He was a b-b-big black man. Wore his hair in them funny kind of braids. Sweet Sue tried to stop him peddling his dope. Had all kinds on him-kinda like a one-stop drugstore.”
“Why the hell didn’t you get me?”
Muffler Man stumbled back into Bets. “We tried. Honest. But you was worse’n dead-out cold.”
“Did the cops come? How’d Sue get to the hospital?”
Bets wrung her hands behind Muffler Man, her face crumpling like a child’s about to cry.
Muffler Man shook his head. “He dragged off old Sue, said he’d teach him a lesson. Billy found him in the alley up by the brick apartments. He had kicked in Sue’s face. We called 911 from a pay phone and said we’d seen this body and where and hung up, quick.”
Bets raised her hand to catch Gus’s attention. “Mr. Mayor, I went to the emergency room at the hospital and asked if someone found on Capitol Hill had been brought in. They said yes, he was being operated on. I got scared and didn’t stay. I was afraid they’d ask questions or call the cops on me.”
Gus groaned and rubbed his shaved head. “When did this happen?”
“Last night. Late-like.” Muffler Man wrung his hands together.
Gus glanced at his watch, forcing his eyes to focus. It was almost noon. He shivered. It was getting colder.
He nodded at Bets. “You did good.” She dimpled and smiled. Then Gus added, “Can you give me any other description of the man?”
“He had a long kind of a blouse on.” Bets peered down at her clothes and then shyly back to Gus. “It had a picture of that singer on it…” She paused, her face distressed. Then she started humming and her face brightened. “Bob Marley. That’s who it was. No, not the bad man who hurt Sweet Sue. I mean the face on the shirt. Bob Marley.” Then Bets backed up, as if she’d done something wrong.
Gus smiled to reassure her. His teeth hurt; everything on him ached. “Way to go, Bets. Now, heat me up some water. I need to clean up and take care of business.”
Gus made it to the hospital an hour later, his face raw from shaving because he used an old blade. He’d put on decent clothes, a pair of clean Levi’s and a T-shirt under a Mariners jacket. He kept them stashed in a plastic garment bag for emergencies. He didn’t want a nurse calling security when she saw him, hollering to get the bum out of the hospital. Gus knew he could pass, at first glance, as a middle-aged, common Joe; someone with a house, a wife, and a kid he was putting through college. He’d had them once-he could play the part. The hospital security wouldn’t shuffle him off.
Gus also had a stash of cash in a bus station locker and a drop mailbox in his name at a place on Capitol Hill. That’s where he received his disability check. It was a kiss-off from the San Jacinto Police Department: leave the force, get out of the state, and don’t come back. Gus had been working a child molester case where a six-year-old kid died after being repeatedly raped. Following a four-month trial, the monster got off on a technicality. Gus couldn’t let him do it to another kid. The boy’s bruised body, his face like an angel’s in one of the cathedral windows, haunted him. He saw him in his sleep and would wake up crying. Hitting the bottle didn’t make the images go away. So Gus tracked the guy down, tailing him day and night and stoking himself on good old Jose Cuervo. When the guy took off on Highway 101 to get out of town, Gus followed him. On a lonely stretch, Gus did some fancy tailgating that he had learned in police academy training, fished the asshole in his Toyota off the road and over an embankment. The car rolled and then caught fire when it hit bottom. The perp toasted inside. Better than going to hell, the way Gus figured it.
Of course, the San Jacinto PD had their suspicions but didn’t work the case hard. Gus’s captain didn’t do much talking, but some suggesting. So Gus left the department after eighteen years, with a couple of commendations, a hearty handshake, and the warning, “Don’t come back.” Same held true for his marriage. “You’ve changed and I can’t live with you anymore,” his wife had said. She kept the kids and booted him out of the house.