Homicide My Own Read online

  He snored, softly at first, a comforting sound to me, really. It reminded me of Connors, when we used to sleep in the same bed, and of Nelson, when he lived at home and I would check on him. But as Odd’s sleep deepened his snores became unsettled, harsh, jagged. A leg kicked out. Both of his arms shot out and folded over his head like a protective cowl, and then his breathing just stopped. I youkst the rearview mirror for a better look. Hell, he wasn’t breathing. He was thirty-two, -three, how could he just stop breathing? I was about to pull to the side of the road and administer CPR, when his lips puffed out with spent air and he started breathing again. “You never knew,” he said in his sleep, as though talking over fences to someone two backyards away. “It’s time.”

  I killed the music and drove on, keeping one eye on the road, one eye on him. He slept like that, repeating the pattern. I began to count slowly whenever he stopped breathing...one, two, three...nine, ten...fifteen, sixteen...and then a violent puff of air.

  He went on like that 'til we made Moses Lake, where they interned the Japanese-Americans during World War Two.

  “Odd? Odd? Odd?”

  I kept calling his name, softly, until he awoke.

  “Odd, do you know you do stuff in your sleep?”

  “I do?”

  “Big time. You kick out your legs and throw back your arms. Worst of all, you hold your breath. Woi Yesus, how does anybody sleep with you?”

  As good-looking as he was, the question was rhetorical.

  “I don’t sleep too well.”

  “That’s an understatement, if I just got a sample.”

  “Everybody’s got something,” he said.

  “Ain’t you tired during the day?”

  “Sometimes. But my judgment’s clear.”

  “No one said it wasn’t. Don’t get all defensive.”

  “I’m just saying I can do my job.”

  “I know that. But you could do with a medical check-up on the sleeping thing. You could pay for it yourself, so there’s no insurance record.”

  “I’m fine, don’t worry about me.”

  “Okay, deal. You don’t worry about me neither.”

  “Why would I worry about you?”

  “Just don’t.”

  We hit a hatch of boonda bugs, which smeared the windshield opaque. The window washer couldn’t keep up with it, so I pulled to the side and waited them out. To clean the windshield I had to sacrifice half a bottle of my Calistoga Springs water. I always have a bottle of water at my side because I need continual irrigation or I will spontaneously combust. I drank the other half, and we went to opposite sides of the road and watered the weeds.

  No way was I going to turn over the wheel. By now I was tired, but at least I was awake. We got back into the car and motored on.

  “You didn’t have any ‘Taking-a-piss-by-the-side-of-the-road-music’?” I said.

  “I’ll look for some.”

  We passed the long misery that lay between Moses Lake and Ellensburg in silence. I went into the right side of my brain, or is it the left? I’m never sure. Anyway, that side where whatever happens has no reason. I had some imaginary glimpses of Nelson aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, standing inspection on the flight deck in his dress blues.

  “This Houser guy, did he have a record?” Odd said, breaking the silence and my reverie.

  “No. Just a victim of love, or something.”

  “Do you think he knew he was doing something wrong? I mean, do you think it bothered him?”

  I thought he was legally sane, that was enough for me. Not for Odd.

  “Wouldn’t he know that in the end it would hurt them both, that it would end in pain and sorrowful stuff?”

  A stiff prick has no conscience, I reminded him.

  Rather than laugh, as most guys would, he only seemed to think more about it.

  “It must be easy to fall in love with an underage girl, they’re so sweet, but it must be very hard to find a safe way to express that love.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t see grown women falling in love with underage boys.”

  “There was that teacher in Seattle.”

  “Looney tunes.”

  “Why couldn’t I have had a teacher like that? Talk about learning something useful.”

  “That was strange in the extreme. And she’s in prison for it, don’t forget.”

  “Still, it happened. I think it happens a lot, but a real adult knows how to deal with it. A real adult knows how to sit and watch his impulses, watch them until they pass away, knows he don’t have to be controlled by them. Like Houser was.”

  If I thought about it at all, I might agree, but on the subject of Charles T. Houser and Stacey all I could think about was they were the reason I was on this boring road instead of home in my own bed.

  Maybe it was the night and the lonely road. I’d never heard Odd talk so much. I was already hoping it wouldn’t carry over to the long return trip during which he might try to get into the prisoner’s head, and I would have to say that we shouldn’t talk to him without a lawyer in the car.

  “What’s Houser, thirty-two, thirty-three?” asked Odd.

  Around that, as I recalled. Like Odd himself.

  “A fourteen-year-old girl is impressed by the attentions of a man that age.” He waited for me to confirm, and when I didn’t, he said, “Isn’t she?”

  “Well, it’s a new-found power. She’s either scared or euphoric, but mostly she’s embarrassed by the sheer inappropriateness of it.”

  “That’s the way it was with you?”

  “My father’s friends, teachers, dentists...in a word, icky.”

  “Still, I think a lot of young girls are longing for someone to make them feel special.”

  I asked him how he knew so much about young girls, and he said it was only logical. “But no matter what happens,” he said, “she’s innocent. You can’t blame her, no matter how enticing she was. The man is an adult, he’s my age. He has a responsibility, he can’t let anything happen, no matter how intense it gets or how natural it seems. He can’t let it go too far.”

  Houser did, though, I pointed out. That’s why we were here...but where were we? Nowhere yet. Washington prairie.

  I knew Odd Gunderson pretty well, as well as you know a guy you work with and see everyday. We buddied up a lot, I was drawn to him, in a non-sexual way. He was a good guy, and I liked him. At those times when you had to partner up, he would ask for me and I would ask for him. He was in the volley ball league, had great legs, was a ferocious spiker, a good competitor. He would have a beer with us after the game, some microbrew on tap, and sit quietly while the rest of us swapped war stories, but he’d cut out early and wind up later at The Box with that young civilian crowd, drinking cosmopolitans.

  He was devoted to lawfulness, and that made him a good cop, but I always had the feeling he was not cut out for police work, and I never knew why he got into it. By the end of this detail, I would know. He couldn’t be anything else. Before that, though, as I said, I saw an okay cop, a good volleyball spiker, one of the guys, with a life apart from the badge, a guy who maybe just examined things a bit deeper than the rest of us, those of us who were afraid to look too closely for fear of falling in, which in the end I did, holding onto Odd’s sleeve, so to speak.

  “What does he do to get this off him?” he asked.

  What? Who?

  “Houser, the grown-up. He’s going to jail...”

  Yes, and us taking him there.

  “Will that do it? Will that remove the stain? Or does he, I don’t know, have to do something? What would a person have to do to counterbalance letting his lust take him where it shouldn’t go?”

  I recalled at that moment that Odd was a Lutheran, which is not a faith known for its proselytizing but for its love of guilt. I was half-waiting for him to suggest that Charles T.’s only hope now was to accept Jesus as his personal savior and commence a meaningful relationship. But that was other guys on the force who were not a part of th
is. Every job has them, ain’t?

  For me there was nothing at all special about this case. A yonko let his cock run away with his brains. Nothing unique in the annals of criminal offense. I told him all that in a few clipped and disinterested sentences. I’m sure I was a disappointment to Odd. He’d rather share this ride with one of the sequentially pierced and extensively tattooed, dazzlingly cropped white-haired girls from The Box, who could get into the causes and consequences of statutory rape and bring a lot more to the party. Charles T. Houser, to me, was no more than a day’s work, an extra day’s work.

  Still, it was a long road and some conversation was required. I came back again to Odd’s sleeping habits. I guess he could see I was honestly interested, because he wound up telling me stuff he hadn’t told God. As a child, he told me, he could sleep through the worst nor’wester. His sleep then was like a coma. Unhappily, he would not even wake up to pee. He was, he told me, a major bed-wetter up until about thirteen. His mother accepted it with gratitude that it wasn’t anything worse, and just as she knew he would, he did eventually grow out of it. Then came the flailing of arms and legs, the talking, the walking. More recently, the night sweats and the insomnia. These last two we had in common, though I did not mention it.

  All I said was, “You must want to die. Just for the sleep.”

  “What good is sleep if you never awake from it?”

  If he expected an answer, he didn’t get it from me.

  4.

  Through the unexpected, if not happy, combination of injuries among their opponents and some equally unexpected, and certainly happy, flashes of professionalism and maturity on their own parts, the Sonics had made the playoffs and were in the semi-finals. Quite an event, deserving of a new stadium down the line. We hit some of that post-game traffic near the Space Needle and it slowed us down on I-5 all the way up to Lynnwood, where the Interstate freed up again and we cruised.

  I kept it in the second lane at seventy miles per hour, more or less on autopilot by this time. Somewhere on that island I was going to have to find a place to nap before we turned around and did this all over again.

  Fifteen miles south of Bellingham we started looking for the sign for the Shalish Ferry exit.

  “It has to be around here pretty close, ain’t?”

  “Yeah, it’s not far now,” Odd said, and looked at his watch. “We should make the 12:45 ferry.”

  And there it was: “GOMEZ LANDING, SHALISH IS. FERRY, 1 MILE.”

  I eased off the gas, got into the exit lane, and left civilization. The way was marked and in ten minutes the two-lane country road took us to a one-lightbulb landing and an eight-car ferry left over from the mosquito fleet days and of questionnable seaworthiness. I paid our fare, tucked the receipt behind the visor, and rolled aboard, the sixth car on, and nobody behind us. A few walkaboards came out of nowhere and huddled on deck, exposed to the weather, which tonight was just a little chilly. Everybody else stayed in his car.

  I put my head against the window and went right out.

  Fifteen minutes later. Odd woke me up by gently rubbing my arm. It felt nice. “Wake up, Quinn,” he whispered.

  I awoke and heard motors starting up.

  “We know where we’re going?”

  “I don’t think we can get too far lost,” he said. “It’s an island, you’ll run into water eventually.”

  We left the ferry and fell into the slow pace of a crawling caravan of six cars.

  “How did you know there was a 12:45 ferry?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Back on the Interstate...you said, we should make the 12:45. Was that written down?”

  “You got the paperwork.”

  “I didn’t see that written down.”

  “What did I say?”

  “That we could catch the 12:45 ferry.”

  “The lieutenant must have said so.”

  “I didn’t hear him say that, what time the ferry left.”

  “I don’t know, it just came into my head, I guess.”

  There was more than the one road on the island, we discovered, as the other cars from the ferry turned off and disappeared into the tall firs and cedars. We stayed on what we thought was the main road until it made a sweeping right turn and there in the still dark night where America blended into Canada sat an Indian’s vision of a bit of Las Vegas.

  A free-standing marquee, large and imposing, in front of a series of three quonset huts bolted together, promised more than the place could possibly deliver. Lavish buffets at giveaway prices, liberal card-operated slots, a rock and roll group from the sixties that I knew for a fact had long ago lost three of its four to the natural failing of internal organs. On either side of the curve in the road, both sides of the casino, was a scattering of crosses marking the demise of drivers who had been in too great a hurry either to get to or to leave the place.

  “Here’s where Charlie got busted.”

  “We should stop,” said Odd.

  “Why?”

  “See how it went down.”

  “How it went down?”

  “Yeah, Charles and Stacey.”

  “What do we care how it went down?”

  It felt silly, talking like that, how things went down.

  Odd said, “Duh? We’re cops.”

  “The cop stuff has already been done. We’re pick-up and delivery.”

  By that time we had passed the casino.

  “We could eat,” he said. “It said buffet.”

  That did it, of course. There has never been a cop who could resist a cheap smorgie. I turned around and pulled into the lot, which was near full, out there in the middle of the night, middle of nowhere.

  Sometimes you forget you’re in the uniform and you walk around like an ordinary person. We strolled in, and every head turned from the dice or the cards to see us standing at the entrance. It was a small place and shabby, and the people in it looked sad and lost.

  A boonda guy with a face like this side of the moon and wearing a powder blue blazer came up to us, walking with a limp. His name tag said KING GEORGE. It might have been last name first. He could have been George King. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t call him anything.

  “You from Spokane?”

  We said we were.

  “We don’t have ‘em here. They’re over at the Tribal Police Station.”

  “Yeah, well, we wanted to check out where it went down,” I said.

  He looked at me the way I had looked at Odd, who was looking at me that way right now. How it all went down.

  “Where they were busted. And, besides, we’re hungry. We’ve been on the road all day and missed supper.”

  So the security guy with the moon face led us to the eats and told the cashier we were compted and handed us each a large oval plate, which was a good sign because my theory is that everything tastes better on an oval plate. Short ribs and noodles, fried chicken, taco makings, squares of cake, nothing fancy but plenty of it. We took our chow to one of the small square formica tables. Low rent all the way.

  “I was the one busted ‘em,” said the boonda security guy.

  “Well...congratulations.” I could care less. He told us all about it anyway.

  He had been watching them from the minute they came in the door. Together, they didn’t look right. The legal age was eighteen and it was unlikely the girl was that old. The man was way older.

  How the fugitive lovers found their way to Shalish Island and this funky casino was never fully explained, not that I cared. This was only one of many little casinos dotting Northwest Indian Territory and far from the most inviting. Besides, it was difficult to find, considering the ferry ride. I thought they were surely not looking for a casino, but an island, which has universal appeal both to lovers and harried fugitives. Still, it was the casino they found, and in which they themselves were found, by the boonda security guy sitting with us while we chowed.

  When Houser and his little biscuit went through the buffet line, King Georg
e got a cup of coffee and sat nearby, to eavesdrop on their conversation, but for a long time there was no conversation. They joined hands across the table and, heads bowed, offered a long silent grace. King George said he wondered were they listing the items on their plates in alphabetical order or were they taking the opportunity to be grateful for other things as well. As though on cue, he said, their heads raised simultaneously and they dug in.

  “I should, you know, call,” said Stacey.