The Raft

  Chapter 29

  “I guess it will come as a surprise to no one when I say that Meerkat had her issues. A misspent youth, problems with drugs and alcohol. Life with Horus the Brontosaurus exasperated all Meerkat's demons. Horus was hardly an upstanding member of the community, even one as loosely knit and hands off as the Raft.

  “It was the birth of Firecracker to her best friend Tea Queen that cast the harsh light of reality on Meerkat's lifestyle. Tea Queen and Rocket had to clean up their acts with a baby on the way and no means to care for it other than taking responsibility for themselves. And clean up their acts they did. They dropped the drugs and the booze and focused their attention on making a living with what few skills their wasted lives had afforded them.

  “What did Meerkat have? A hangover? Horus? And Tea Queen had a perfect little baby. I suspect that the first time Meerkat laid eyes on that little man, her resolve to clean up her act became iron.

  “But for Meerkat, quitting wasn't going to be just about kicking the junk. No, she was in far too deep. Up over her head, if you know what I mean. If she was going to get clean, it would mean going ashore. Rehab, the whole nine yards. A facility. And I assume that's what she did. She told Horus some lie – or perhaps she didn't even bother. In the end, what did Horus really care?

  “Well, rehab would mean two weeks of pain and boredom. But it served its purpose and Meerkat shook at least some of her demons. But word must have gotten out about her presence onshore. Perhaps someone at the facility informed the police about a Rafter in their midst? Perhaps it was all a coincidence? Anyway, soon enough, the law came calling for Meerkat, holding a number of outstanding warrants for her arrest. Her past had finally caught up with her – the partying and the drugs, her life before the Raft. A car accident. A young couple killed. It was the reason for Meerkat's escape to the Raft: to avoid the consequences of her actions. But sober Meerkat was ready to pay the price for her past sins. Pay the price in full.

  “But the police had other ideas. Her connection to Horus made her useful. She lived with him, shared a boat. She could feed them information on his operation, his drug smuggling, shipments down from Canada. A few dates and times of deliveries and maybe the police could speak to the prosecutors, work out some sort of clemency deal. All Meerkat would have to do was go back to the Raft and keep an eye on Horus. Report back on what she saw.

  “So that's what she did. But she was nervous. After a two-week absence she knew she'd need a cover, an excuse to tell Horus. Maybe he didn't care why she left, but he'd certainly care why she came back. If Horus knew she'd been in rehab, he might grow suspicious, guess that she'd been approached by the cops, but if she'd gone ashore for some other reason, something with a financial incentive, then maybe Horus would be a little more forgiving. How she came up with the surrogate mother story, I don't know, but it doesn't take too much imagination to make a guess. Tea Queen with her perfect little baby, and Meerkat with a gut full of nothing. Maybe it just started out as wishful thinking, a hedge against the off chance that Meerkat might actually someday get pregnant. I could believe that all she really wanted from her life after getting clean was a perfect little baby of her own.

  “But not with Horus. The dream that someone rich and powerful was paying her to make a baby – might potentially swoop down and whisk her away – the idea might have appealed to Meerkat.

  “Of course, such a fantasy required Meerkat to return to Horus with something more tangible that just a tall tale. She'd need money and she'd need it quick. Waiting three months and filling out two dozen authorization forms in triplicate with the dryfoot cops wasn't going to cut it. Meerkat needed greenbacks and she needed them on demand. So she went to the richest person she knew: Gandalf.

  “She, of course, didn't tell Gandalf the whole truth. That she'd been at rehab was enough, Gandalf might panic if he knew that Meerkat was working with the police. And Gandalf was happy to extend a helping hand to a soul in need. I imagine he initially gave her the money out of the goodness of his heart – he was like that. When the idea of wrapping the Senator up into the whole affair came to him, I don't know. But knowing him, I imagine it came later.

  “And so the wheels of the plot began to turn: the police had their mole, Meerkat was back on the Raft, she had her excuse to cover for her absence, and she only owed Gandalf a small favor. A favor he would call in to have Meerkat tell just one more little lie. What caused the wheels to strip their gears, I don't know. But very quickly, things began to spiral horribly out of control. Nothing aboard the Raft ever stays as it is. Not for long. The Raft is a dynamic, shifting landscape, always moving. Everyone had a string attached to Meerkat and were pulling her this way and that. Perhaps it was inevitable that Meerkat would end up bobbing in the tide.

  “Dealing with the dryfoot authorities required Meerkat to make an excuse to return to dryland. Her surrogacy story here probably helped her a lot. Pregnancy would require her to return to shore often for treatments and tests. Horus, seeing the color of the money Meerkat was supposedly bringing back from the Senator, sent her to shore happily with his shipments. One, two dozen times this cover worked. But soon, Horus must have grown weary of the story, perhaps after Meerkat showed no signs of pregnancy? Perhaps he began to have second thoughts about his girlfriend getting knocked up by another man? Regardless, Meerkat's story need to shift to keep Horus curious – ratchet up the incentives so Horus would keep allowing her to go ashore.

  “I guarantee that it was Gandalf who suggested implicating Senator Hadian in a surrogacy scam, shifting the focus from pregnancy to sex scandal. Gandalf must have watched the deliberations of the House Ways and Means Committee with great interest. He knew that the new Income Tax Bill proposed would all but destroy the loopholes that kept the Raft afloat. Gandalf was too smart to believe that he could keep the Raft together forever on such technicalities, but his campaign to raise the legitimate profile of the Raft had only just begun. He was courting such corporations as Arrowsoft, hoping to encourage them to open campuses, tax exempt, aboard the Raft. If he could delay the new Tax Code for a few months, perhaps he could firm up a deal to pull some powerful, politically connected muscle into the Raft's corner.

  “Gandalf had only one serious target, the most hated man aboard the Raft, or anywhere else in liberal America, for his attempt to amend the Constitution a 28th time: Senator Hadian. Chairman of the Senate's Finance Committee. Should the squeaky clean Senator find himself caught up in an embarrassing scandal, however imaginary, it'd pull time and attention away from the Finance Committee's day-to-day operations. The new Tax Bill wouldn't be the first piece of legislation to get lost in the US Senate, and certainly not that last.

  “So, Gandalf coached Meerkat to feed misinformation to Horus. He converted the surrogacy story into one of blackmail. He kept feeding Meerkat greenbacks, which she'd in turn give to Horus, telling him the Senator was now trying to make a baby with Meerkat in the old-fashioned style. Any objections Horus might have had would quickly fade in the sanitizing like of cold hard cash. The idea that Horus had a powerful US Senator on the hook would keep him salivating. Curious.

  “Little did Gandalf know, he was feeding cash to Meerkat so she could feed information to the dryfoot cops...

  “Of course, the whole plan – for everyone, Gandalf, Meerkat, the cops – hinged on Horus's eventual arrest. Meerkat knew she couldn't pretend she was making a baby with a US Senator forever. Eventually, her phantom pregnancy would have to start to show some physical reality. And Gandalf's smear campaign against the Senator required some sort of public forum in which to be exposed. Such as the witness stand of a courtroom.

  “The clock was ticking away. Days and weeks passed, the Senate vote was nearing. But the dryfoot cops were sitting on their hands. Maybe they didn't have enough evidence to arrest Horus? Maybe they hadn't lucked out and caught him or one of his deliveries? Horus was always careful, using friends like Chemical to do his bag work. Or perhaps they'd just lost
interest, turned their attention to another case? Whatever the reason, the sand in Meerkat's hourglass was quickly running out.

  “Left with no baby and no bump in her belly, Meerkat must have panicked and decided it was time to cut her losses. She was going to flee to dryland, ditch Horus, ditch Gandalf, ditch the Raft. She'd dodge the dryfoot cops and go to ground somewhere onshore. How Gandalf learned of this, I'm not sure. Perhaps he never did, perhaps Meerkat came for one last chunk of cash under some pretense that the cops were closing in on Horus. Perhaps Gandalf, all on his own, also decided to cut his losses. With so much invested in Meerkat and so little to show for it, maybe Gandalf realized there was more than one way to get Horus arrested. If the dryfoot cops wouldn't pick him up for smuggling, perhaps they'd arrested him for the murder of his girlfriend?

  “With that idea in his head, it was only a matter of lying in wait for Meerkat. Catching her on her own, out in open water, late at night, wouldn't be hard. Meerkat trusted him, he was her only ally. He could get as close as he liked and Meerkat would never expect a thing. There'd be no one to see him do it, no one would ever suspect...

  “And I, for my part, did my duty. When word reached me that Meerkat was dead, I moved to arrest Horus. But Gandalf didn't foresee the seismic shock that Meerkat's death would detonate. When Horus showed up at the Senator's home with a gun, Gandalf must have realized the situation was spiraling out of control. When you, Special Agent, showed up on his boat with the IRS in tow, Gandalf came to understand that he'd totally lost control of the situation.

  “Gandalf had no idea that he'd just murdered a police informant. Perhaps that nugget of information might have stayed his hand. But the tsunami that hit the waterfront of Seattle yesterday morning – with a police informer washing up dead on the beach – bounced off the shore and washed back and hit the Raft.

  “You can, Special Agent, speak more accurately to the intricate dance of 'Cover Your Ass' you and the Seattle Police were performing. I'm sure you did exactly what any self-respecting professional bureaucrat would do in a situation like this: bury the problem. Hide it under layer upon layer of misdirection. If the Raft sank into the Puget Sound today, would anybody be the wiser to exactly what mistakes you'd made? No. After all, sinking the Raft was a task long overdue, and with the political cover that the Senator would now be more than happy to offer, in exchange for the courtesy of his name never appearing in any formal charges...

  “So, there you have it, Special Agent. You have your killer, you have your motive, and you have complicity in the whole plot, running all the way up from the Seattle PD to the Senator himself. Gandalf is lying dead on the deck above us, his debts paid in full. There is no legal system that can extract from him one more ounce of retribution. But you, Special Agent... and the Senator. You still have a lot to lose, should the events of the last few days leak out...”