He was a hard man to like as well as a hard man to know, unless you were cut from similar cloth. I wasn’t sure I liked him much, at least not yet, but I was pretty sure I understood him and could work with him. Time would tell if Tamara, as young and high-strung as she was, felt the same.
6
Jake Runyon
Back in his element.
Little twitches of life in him again.
Funny way to feel, walking among the homeless and the derelicts shivering in the gray cold of Franklin Square. But you couldn’t control something like that. He’d been numb for so long, ever since Colleen died. No, before... from when the chemotherapy hadn’t done any good and hope faded and he’d been forced to face the fact that he would lose her. So numb he could barely function, walking around like a zombie — days and nights of the living dead. So numb after she was gone he couldn’t even lift his .357 Magnum, much less shove it into his mouth and eat it. Three nights of that, three nights of sitting numb and sweat-soaked with the gun as heavy as a slab of granite on his lap before he’d faced another fact: he didn’t want to die yet. That had numbed him even more, because the desire to live seemed like a betrayal of Colleen, a mockery of her suffering.
The decision to leave Seattle, the move to San Francisco, the attempts to contact Josh... all done numbly. Even the need for work, something to occupy his time and thoughts, had been a dull need motivated more by inactivity than desire. The job application and interview, the call saying he’d been hired, the second call putting him to work on this Spook business — none of it had made him feel any less empty. Numb this morning, numb at the agency office, numb at Visuals, Inc. It wasn’t until he’d left Bill and walked over here that he’d begun to regain some awareness, to feel again. For the first time he was smelling this city, the dank effluvium of its streets. Feeling the cold, tasting the salt in the wind. Just vagrant twitches of his senses, but sharp enough to cut through the numbness. Like when you woke up with your arm asleep and for a while you couldn’t lift it or move your fingers and then all at once the tingling started, little pinpricks of life returned.
He knew this kind of urban environment, maybe that was part of it. The streets, the down-and-out who lived on them, the predators who hunted on them. Seattle or San Francisco or any city you could name, it didn’t make any real difference. The streets and the people were essentially the same. His element, no question. He was at his professional best out here on the squalid sidewalks, the needle- and bottle-strewn gutters. He’d been away from the streets too long, hadn’t really worked them since his days on the Seattle PD before the car smash that had killed Ron Cain. The Pike’s Market area downtown, before they cleaned it up; West Seattle and the railyards and the terminals along the East Waterway and the Duhamish Waterway. His beat. His dirty little world.
The five years with Caldwell & Associates had made Colleen happy, but not him. White-collar work in better neighborhoods, among the middle-class and the gentry. Mostly safe, and mostly without either challenge or any real satisfaction. Much smaller agency here, operating out of far less opulent quarters than Caldwell’s, and just two people to answer to — a mismatched pair, if he’d ever seen one, but even so a business relationship that seemed to work. Maybe this Spook case was atypical of the kind of jobs that came their way; could be he’d end up handling the same type of mostly boring, by-rote investigations he’d been given at Caldwell. And maybe not. Bill had been in the game a long time, public and private both, and he’d had his share of dealings with rough trade; you could tell it by the questions he asked, the way he handled people, and you could see it in that craggy, beat-up face of his. Solid rep, and willing to take on a lowdown case like this one, the kind the bigger agencies like Caldwell wouldn’t have touched. Tamara Corbin was no amateur, either, despite her age. Sharp and sharp-tongued, streetwise and nail-tough under her deceptively soft exterior.
Thoughts while he walked, between brief conversations with the inhabitants of Franklin Square. Another indication of life stirring in him again. He hadn’t done much thinking the past four months. Mostly just shut his mind down while he went through the zombie motions of daily existence. The way he felt now, with his mind working again, didn’t mean rebirth; he wasn’t going to wake up whole again some morning. Forming a close bond with Josh wasn’t going to happen, either; no illusions about that. But it he could just reach an understanding with his son, then that combined with work should make getting through the days easier, a little more tolerable.
The square was mostly grass and shade trees, a small playground, a fenced-off soccer field in the middle — downscale neighborhood park like any city park that had been taken over by the homeless. Piles of personal belongings were scattered on the grass and footpaths, on a couple of picnic benches; a dozen or so men and women, one of the women young, with a baby slung in a harness over her shoulders, were huddled among the belongings and along the soccer field fence, alone and in pairs and small groups. None of them was a big, dark man in a red and green wool cap. And none would talk to him, once he admitted that he wasn’t a cop, unless he offered money first. He doled out spare change and dollar bills, got noninformation in return. Big Dog? Never heard of him. Delia, Mac, Pinkeye? Never heard of them. Spook? Eyes averted, mouths clamped shut. “We don’t want nothing to do with murder, man,” one of the men said.
Wasted effort until he approached an old woman sitting alone, cross-legged, on a blanket at the far end of the fence. Next to her was an ancient backpack: in her hands was a container of what smelled like Chinese takeout. She was eating with a plastic spoon, smearing the food into her mouth. Thin, dried out, so wrinkled her blotched face seemed almost mummified, age anywhere from mid-sixties to late-seventies. Bundled up in a worn, patched coat and tattered wool scarf, strands of wispy gray hair showing at the edge of a once-white headpiece like the ones women wore back in the forties. Snood? Something like that.
She fixed him with bright parrotlike eyes when he approached her. He flashed a dollar bill and her eyes got even brighter. “What you want for that, laddie?” She made a cackling noise, showed him a greasy gap-toothed grin. “Delia ain’t no woman of easy virtue, you know.”
He told her what he wanted. The grin stayed put; so did the brightness in her eyes.
“Big Dog, yeah, I stay clear of that critter,” Delia said. “Junkyard dog, that’s what he is. Mean. Bite your hand or chew up your leg, you get too close to him when he’s had too much wine.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Ain’t afraid of dogs, laddie? Mean junkyard dogs?”
“No,” Runyon said. “Where can I find him?”
“You another cop?”
“Private investigator.”
“Like Kojak, huh? No, Kojak was a cop. What you want with that Big Dog?”
“He knew Spook. You know Spook?”
“Sure I knew him. He’s dead. Killed.”
“Who killed him? Big Dog?”
She cackled again. “Rip your throat out, that junkyard dog, not shoot you with a gun.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Shot Spook? How’d I know? I wasn’t there.” Delia tapped her temple with a bony forefinger. “Crazy in the head, but he never bothered nobody. Might be it was that fella in the raincoat.”
“What fella in the raincoat?”
“Come around here asking about Spook. Looked like a flasher in that raincoat. That’s what I thought when he come up, I thought he was gonna flash me. Old fart did that one time, he had a pecker like a pencil.” Cackle. “I swear, skinny little thing, just like a pencil. I didn’t let him do no writing on me.”