I stood up and Laguire had to tilt her head up to meet my scrutiny. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t want to step back and even the distance—it might look like retreat. “I don’t have your mystery man’s location, Ms. Laguire. I don’t know a J.J. Purlis and your photo is worthless. You can—”
My suggestion was cut off by my cell phone—lucky for both of us.
“Excuse me. I need to answer my phone, but since the nature of my work is confidential, I’m sure you understand my asking you and your associates to leave now.” Then I shut up and gazed at her without blinking or hostility, just blank and expectant.
Her smoky aura flared with frustrated explosions of orange and red, but she laid her card on my desk, turned silently on her heel, and strode out of my office. Her bodyguards followed her.
It was possible she’d left a bug or had some kind of tap on my cell phone or something, but I doubted she’d set up any such thing. If she’d caught a late-night flight, she’d have been on me the night before—surprising a subject when they’re tired or disoriented from being jarred out of bed is a classic tactic for interrogators. So chances were good she’d caught a morning plane and come to me less than an hour after picking up her escort at the federal building. Even the Feds play turf wars, and she would have had to check in with the local office first.
By the time I’d finished the thought, I’d missed the call but I picked up the message. Fish had found some info on the Sistu.
“My old grandma said she’ll tell you what you want to know but she’ll only talk to you in person. She’s old. I mean old, like Kennewick Man old, so she doesn’t leave the house. Call me back and I’ll set it up, but it has to be today.”
I called his cell phone.
“I had a client in the office and couldn’t answer the phone,” I explained after exchanging greetings. “What’s the deal?”
“We have to go to the rez. I’ll take you up there and introduce you, then you’re kind of on your own. Grandma’s an old she-wolf and she’s still got teeth. Hope you’ve got a few hours, ’cause she doesn’t do anything fast.”
“I have the day, if that’s what it takes. I need to bring someone along, though. Will your grandmother have a problem with that?”
“Depends on whether she thinks she can scare him.”
“I don’t think she can.”
“Then she’ll probably be OK. She respects strength, so long as she gets respect back. Real old-school.”
“Where do I need to pick you up?”
“I live up in Montlake, near the arboretum.”
“We’ll be up at your place in forty minutes. I’ll call for directions when we’re on the way.”
“OK. See you then.”
I agreed I’d be seeing him and paged Quinton. Then I went out to find a noisy place to grab some lunch I could wolf down in twenty minutes. The drive to Montlake was usually fifteen minutes from my office, but it sounded like a long day ahead and I both needed food and wanted to minimize Laguire’s chance of picking up any of my conversations. Some things are worthy of paranoia, and she and her agency gave me the chills.
My phone rang again as I was crossing the Square. In the frosted cold, the area was mostly deserted except for the snow drifts and ghosts, and I glanced around for any sign of surveillance or monitoring. Not even the phantoms were interested in me.
Spotting nothing, I still answered the phone in a sharp bark unlike my usual tone. “Blaine.”
There was a pause. “Um, this is your alarm company,” Quinton said. “You left a message for us to return your call. . . .”
“I have three nines and I’m running late because of an official visitor.” Three nines was the pager code Quinton had programed to indicate a break-in at my office—it was also the UK version of 911. “Tell the installer I’ll meet him at Bakeman’s in a couple of minutes.” I hung up without waiting for a reply and hoped Quinton knew me well enough to guess my meaning and show up both quickly and discreetly.
Located on Cherry in a basement row of little lunch spots that mostly catered to local office workers, Bakeman’s was determinedly blue collar in service and atmosphere. The odor of roast turkey and meatloaf wafted out the sunken door along with the clang and shout of the staff passing orders and moving customers at New York speeds. The hard, slick walls and Formica tables reflected the noises of the busy kitchen and the hurried diners into a rattling cacophony. No one lingered over a cup of joe at Bakeman’s or “took meetings” at the no-nonsense tables without risking the owner’s notorious sharp tongue. If Fern Laguire or her mismatched muscles wanted to snoop, they’d have to come in, order up, and join us at our table to have any hope of eavesdropping or getting in without drawing attention.
I’d barely sat down with my food when Quinton popped in through the lunchroom’s back door from the building above.
“Hey,” he said, sliding in next to me to facilitate a lower-volume conversation.
“Hey. Two things first. We’re going to Marysville to talk to Fish’s grandmother about the Sistu, which should take a few hours so you better grab some food if you’re hungry. And I got a visit from the NSA about thirty minutes ago.”
Quinton looked thoughtful. “I’ll be right back.”
He returned in ten minutes with one of Bakeman’s famous sandwiches and a can of soda. “I always think I’ll have the pie next time and I never do,” he said.
I finished my soup and glanced at him as he wolfed his food. I was glad he hadn’t run, though I hadn’t really expected him to. “You know anything about this Fern Laguire?”
He nodded and swallowed. “I hear she was heartless at twenty and had passed ‘ballbreaker’ in her thirties. Ten years ago she’d advanced to vitrified in all human emotions except anger. The scale appears to be logarithmic.”
“She has two assistants who smell of Fed, one probably CIA, the other local Feeb.”
Quinton nodded acknowledgment.
“Do we have a problem?” I asked.
“There’s a hole in something. I don’t want to discuss it right now. In fact, considering communication is the name of the game with them, probably best to get moving and talk as little as possible.Fern may not have you bugged yet—if she just hit town she hasn’t had much time.”
“Unless she came on a private flight, I’d guess she couldn’t have arrived before eight-thirty this morning—assuming flights landed on time with the snow.”
He hummed, thinking. Then he asked, “Do you need your cell phone for this trip?”
“I need to call Fish for directions to his place.”
“Use a pay phone—it’s safer. I’ll have to disable the cell— otherwise they may use it to track or bug us.” He put out one hand for my phone and picked up his soda with the other, draining it in three big gulps.
I handed him the phone, which he looked over and put on the table.
“Remove the battery, will you?” he asked, rummaging in his coat.
As I pried the battery out, Quinton pulled a big folding knife from his pocket. I started to snatch my phone back, but he stabbed the side of the soda can near the upper crimp and cut the top off. Then he wiped the remaining soda out of the can with a napkin and dropped my phone in before squeezing the can into a flatter shape and folding the ragged edges down, making a sort of tight metallic envelope. He handed me the phone and the battery, and the tiny spark that seemed to pass between us when his fingers brushed mine had nothing to do with the phone. “Hold on to these, but keep them apart and don’t put them back together until we’re back in Seattle—unless you have to. I want to check the Rover before we go. Call Fish and I’ll meet you at the parking garage.”
Quinton folded the paper over his remaining half sandwich and stuffed it into one pocket of his coat and the knife into another pocket. Then he left through the door he’d come in by. I figured that Laguire was probably still waiting for me at the Cherry Street door, if she was watching, so I used a pay phone across the street to call Fish, buyi
ng Quinton time to get to my truck unseen—I hoped—while I got the directions.
Quinton was lurking in a dark corner of the garage and slipped into the Rover’s backseat when I unlocked it. He gave me a thin smile. “No sign of spooks or bugs.”
We picked up Fish and headed for the Tulalip reservation west of Marysville. Fish told us about his grandmother as I drove and Quinton sat in the back, scowling at his own thoughts.
“We’re going to see Ella Graham. Now, she’s not actually my grandmother,” Fish explained. “We call her Grandma as a term of respect because she’s old and wise—and kind of scary. I’m not sure how old she actually is, but my mom says she’s about a hundred and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. She’s also . . . crotchety, I guess is the word, so you have to cater to her a little. Pretty old-school. If she had her way, she’d live in a long house with her whole family and smoke salmon over the fire. But she knows all the stories and legends and she’s got a good memory for stuff she saw or heard when she was younger. She said she’d talk to you, but she wanted a gift.” He held up the large gold-wrapped box he’d had on his lap all this time. “My mom tipped me she’s a sucker for chocolate, so I got some Fran’s.”
“Give me the receipt and I’ll reimburse you,” I said.
Fish chuckled. “Heck no. I want to see how she eats them— they’re caramels. We’ll have to stop at the casino and get some cigars for her, if you want her really happy.”
“Cigars? You’re kidding.”
“Nope. She doesn’t smoke ’em. She just likes to smell ’em burning—says they smell like the old days. If we get lucky, Russell will have some Cubans he got from his cousin in Whistler and let us have one or two.”
I shook my head. “Cuban cigars and handmade chocolates. Not exactly the combo one expects to bring when visiting elderly ladies.”
“Not just any old lady—Grandma Ella. It won’t seem so strange when you meet her.”
I shrugged. “If you say so. Who’s Russell?”
“Russell Willet. He’s a buddy of mine from, hm . . . preschool, I guess. We ate mud together. He decided to work for the tribe. He’s a good manager, but he gets bored when things go well for too long, so he keeps changing jobs. At the moment, he’s working in the casino, but he’s always got contacts in everything.”
“Willet, Graham . . . I know one of the bigwigs in the tribal council is named McCoy. How come you ended up with the stereotyped name?”
“That’s my mom for you,” Fish replied, shrugging. “I think she was mad at me for giving her so much trouble in the womb. She didn’t even give me a name for three years—some Indians wait to name their kids until they do something of merit or ‘find’ a name themselves. It’s not a very common practice, but it’s still around. Mom just called me ‘dirty boy’ for a while—’cause I was really good at getting filthy and tracking it all over everything. My original birth certificate just says ‘boy, Williams.’”
“You could have changed it,” I suggested.
“Nah. It was a little rough when I was a kid, but now I kinda like being Reuben Fishkiller. ‘Reuben Williams’ would have been boring.”
I was a little confused. “But you call yourself Fish, not Fishkiller. ”
“Not all the time,” Fish said. “Most of the kids I grew up with have a totem name of some kind—an Indian name we earned— but we don’t usually use them outside the tribe. It takes some explaining and . . . well . . . it sounds kind of pretentious on most people. I mean, you’d look funny at some guy who came to hook up your cable and his name tag said ‘Swimming Bear,’ right?”
I chuckled. “I’d look pretty funny at anyone whose name was ‘swimming naked.’ ”
Fish sputtered and laughed. Quinton snickered and fell silent again as Fish and I chatted on, but Quinton’s mood didn’t have the same brooding feel after that.
When we got to Marysville, the casino was easy to spot. The Tulalip reservation started just to the west of I-5 and went all the way to the waters of Puget Sound around Tulalip Bay. The area was beautiful once you got away from the highway, and when I’d first moved up to Washington, only a few billboards advertising bingo and cigarettes had given any indication there was commerce tucked away in the tree-covered hills of the rez. That wasn’t the case anymore. The consolidated tribes of the Tulalip reservation had replaced their kitschy old casino and “trading post” with the largest casino complex in the state and a pair of massive malls—one anchored by a Wal-Mart and the other filled with designer-goods outlets—right up against the freeway where there had once been nothing but fields of creek-fed bracken and marsh grass. Now there was hardly a sign of the overgrown fields behind the new buildings and the massive lot that hosted the Boom City fireworks marketplace every year from mid-June through Independence Day.
Fish directed me to the main casino, which featured a pool with a realistic, life-size orca—the reservation’s emblem—rearing out of it and an imposing bronze statue of a native spear fisherman about to get his point across to a smaller creature a little farther up the driveway’s artificial river. I parked off to the side of the massive, triple-peaked portico with its colorful pyramid lights on top. Construction of a hotel tower had begun beside the casino, and the site had a lightning-struck look in its winter weatherproofing.
“It’s almost too bad they’re going to put up the hotel,” Fish said. “Until recently, you could see those lights on top of the casino for miles when they turned on the show. Drives the Marysville people crazy.” He chuckled and got out of the Rover, stepping carefully onto the ice-crusted asphalt of the parking lot. Quinton and I followed his example.
In spite of the development, the parking lot had a fair number of ghost images, flickering like film projected on smoke. Several of the spirits, both human and animal—and some were a bit of both—turned their night-sky eyes on us as we passed and watched us with curious expressions.
Quinton and I followed Fish into the building, through a soaring lobby of stone and murals and colored lights where the hotel’s reception desk would someday greet guests. Then down a wide corridor and into the gaming rooms with a ceiling of twinkling stars and sudden simulated thunderstorms. Circular banks of slot machines stood in treelike groves around the periphery, raising neon branches into stylized Art Deco canopies. The walls swam with murals of salmon, orca, otter, and trout, and the carpet was patterned with water currents and stones. The space felt disorientingly like a drowned forest in which the patrons floated in a watery twilight. The building itself was so new it hardly had a ghost, but a few were there, as were the silvery striations of time and the blue and yellow lines of the Grey’s power grid. A pair of sly eyes in a vague, misty shape kept a close watch on us from beside a tree of nickel slots as Fish led us over to a small gift shop against one of the river walls.
A burly man in a three-piece suit rearranged a group of expensive watches under the glass countertop. He looked up as we entered and grinned, his eyes taking in everything in quick twitches. He had the hot, gold-sparked aura of a man with boundless energy. “Hey, Fishkiller!” he cried, closing up the case and dropping the keys into his vest pocket.
“Heya, Willet.”
“So, what is it?” Russell Willet asked. “Your mom’s birthday or something?”
“Nah. Taking these white eyes out to see Grandma Ella.”
“Whoa!” Willet peered at us as if we were exotic beasts. “What do you want to see Grandma Ella for— No, wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Nope, y’don’t,” Fish said.
“But I bet I know what you want.” Willet turned and ducked down under the counter, rummaging through a cabinet. He brought out a wooden box a little larger and flatter than a shoe box. When he opened it, the smell of tobacco, cocoa, dark soil, and pepper floated up into the air. A red triangle around a little gold crown adorned the white label inside the lid, with the word “Montecristo” under it. Neat rows of cigars about as thick as my thumb and twice as lo
ng nearly filled the box. Willet carefully removed two of the cigars, which made an oily crackling sound as he touched them, and slipped them into a bag before he put the box away again.