Let Me Go

  A brisk wind rippled the surface of the river. A jogger, still thumb-sized, was heading south on the esplanade toward them.

  “We’re talking about Leo,” Archie said. “I brought him to you guys,” he added. “I’m the one who convinced him that he could do more good by staying in his goddamn family than by leaving. He came to me because he wanted my help getting away from his father. He trusted me. And I wrapped him up in a bow and delivered him to Carl.”

  Sanchez nodded and looked out, stone-faced, at the Willamette. Up river, the center of the Steel Bridge had started to raise, lifting the old wooden machinery shack affixed to the upper deck along with it. “I need to determine his status,” Sanchez said.

  “So do it,” Archie said.

  Ginger barked excitedly. The jogger was almost upon them.

  “There’s no way in,” Sanchez said. “Our resources are limited here by necessity. If we ask the wrong people to help, it could get him killed.”

  Archie lifted his finger and they waited as the jogger passed, although he couldn’t have overheard anything with the ruckus Ginger was making. He was wearing lightweight shorts and a “Life is Good” T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Every inch of his bare flesh glowed bright pink from exertion. His face looked pained. He didn’t give them a second look as he went past. Ginger, disappointed, quieted and began snuffling in the grass.

  When the jogger was thirty feet south of them, Archie asked, “How many people know Leo is the source?”

  Sanchez scratched the back of his neck. “Besides me and you and”—he looked at Archie questioningly—“I’m guessing Henry? That’s it.”

  “Henry’s my partner,” Archie said. “I don’t keep him in the dark.” That hadn’t always been true, but Archie didn’t mention that.

  “Anyone else come to mind?” Sanchez asked.

  In fact there was another person who knew Leo was DEA, a person Sanchez had not mentioned. Archie knew that Leo had told Susan his secret a few months ago. Protocol required Leo to report that to his superiors. Clearly, he hadn’t.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Archie said.

  A barge loaded with construction equipment cleared the Steel Bridge, nudged along by an old tugboat. Men with construction hats stood on board, gazing at the shore.

  “This operation is new to me,” Sanchez said. “I was the safeguard. Carl briefed me years ago, so that if anything happened to him, I could step in and Leo wouldn’t get left in the wind.”

  “You mean like if Carl got his head blown off in the john, for instance?” Archie said.

  “That would fit the criteria,” Sanchez said. “In the meantime, I’m trying to coordinate the search for a dangerous escaped serial killer.”

  “I think I read something about that,” Archie said.

  Sanchez caught himself. “Sorry,” he said with a grimace. “I’ve just got a lot on my plate. I can’t get Leo out without revealing his identity. But if I reveal his identity it could get him killed before I can get him out.”

  Archie wasn’t buying it. This had been an important operation for the feds. A lot was riding on it. It was a career-maker. “You don’t want him out until he has the names,” Archie said.

  Sanchez rubbed the side of his nose. “Okay, no bullshit,” he said. “This operation has taken ten years. If Leo can get us the names of Jack Reynolds’s partners, then yeah, I think that’s worth not rushing into anything. I have bosses whose names are on that list. So do you. That’s why we have to keep this close.”

  The Burnside Bridge yawned open to let the barge through.

  “Someone else knows,” Archie said.

  “The girlfriend,” Sanchez said with a heavy sigh.

  “He shot someone in front of her,” Archie said. “He kind of had to explain. She doesn’t know anything. Just that he’s DEA.”

  Sanchez’s jaw starting working and his lips tightened. He mulled for a few moments, and then his face lit up.

  Archie knew where he was headed.

  “You think she would go in for us?” Sanchez asked.

  “No,” Archie said quickly.

  But he hadn’t convinced Sanchez. Archie could see it in the way his jaw kept working, the way Sanchez kept clenching his teeth. Sanchez’s gaze was on the river, but Archie knew that his mind was playing out the op. Sending Susan in would be the most logical step. It made sense. She had a relationship with Leo. She would be the perfect conduit for passing information.

  “Use me,” Archie said.

  “News flash,” Sanchez said with a grunt. “Jack knows you’re a cop.”

  “Jack and I are friendly,” Archie persisted.

  “Jack Reynolds is nice to you,” Sanchez said. “That doesn’t mean he won’t kill you.”

  “I said we’re friendly. Not friends. He knows about the pills. I can make that work for me. Convince him I have something to lose.”

  Sanchez reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, extracted an envelope, and handed it to Archie.

  “What’s this?” Archie asked.

  Sanchez smiled. “It’s an invitation to a party at his house tonight.”

  Archie looked down at the envelope. His name was printed on it. “You little fucker,” Archie said. “You knew I’d do it.”

  “Go in,” Sanchez said matter-of-factly. “Determine Leo’s status, and then get the hell out.”

  Archie looked up at the cloudless sky. It had seemed like such a nice day when it had started. “Do you want me to wear a wire?” he asked.

  “If you wear a wire they’ll shoot you,” Sanchez said.

  Archie turned to Sanchez. “Maybe I’ll skip the wire, then.”

  “I have people outside,” Sanchez said. “Basic surveillance. We’ll be watching everyone who goes into that party. If you can get to the bridge, we’ll see you, and we’ll come for you. But once you’re inside, you’re on your own. So don’t do anything heroic. I know you feel responsible for this kid. But he knew what he was getting into. And he’s not exactly an innocent flower.” The barge had cleared the Burnside Bridge and now the Hawthorne Bridge had started to open. Traffic downtown was fucked.

  “What if he’s already dead?” Archie asked.

  “Then there’s no one to protect,” Sanchez said. “You scream like a girl and we send in the cavalry. But if he’s alive and he’s okay, you leave him there. If he’s alive and he’s not okay, you leave him there. No heroics. I just need to know his status. Then we make a plan.” Sanchez glanced at his watch. “I have to get back across the river,” he said.

  “Can I expense the tuxedo rental?” Archie asked.

  “No,” Sanchez said. He leveled his gaze at Archie. “We clear on this?”

  “No heroics. I determine Leo’s status.” Archie raised his eyebrows at Sanchez. “And you stay away from Susan.”

  Sanchez smiled, and Archie gave Ginger a tug and started back north along the trail. He only made it a few steps before Sanchez called his name. “Yeah?” Archie said, turning back.

  “Happy birthday, buddy,” Sanchez said.

  “I had plans tonight, you know,” Archie said.

  Sanchez chuckled. “She’ll wait.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  Archie poured himself a drink to calm his nerves.

  The morning’s blue skies had given way to cloud cover that had come in over the West Hills and hung low over the city.

  The tuxedo he was wearing had a black single-breasted two-button jacket with a peaked lapel, and flat-fronted pants. At least that’s what the woman who’d helped him at the tuxedo rental shop had said. He must have looked helpless, because she’d taken him under her wing right away, outfitting him with the appropriate jacket, pants, shirt, shoes, and bow tie. He’d taken a pass on the cummerbund.

  Archie lifted the hem of his pants and studied his socks—the only thing he was wearing, besides his underwear, that was his. They were black. He usually wore them to funerals.

  The last time he’d had a tuxedo on had been
at his own wedding.

  He heard Henry and Claire in the hallway before they knocked. Specifically, he heard Claire’s laugh. It was girlish and merry, and always sounded wrong coming from her mouth. Archie had canceled the dinner out that the three of them had planned for his birthday. The fact that they had decided to stop by anyway did not surprise him.

  Archie opened the door reluctantly. Claire was dressed to the nines in a black long-sleeved dress that hugged her growing maternity bump, and Henry was as formal as he got, in black jeans, his black leather jacket, a gray T-shirt, and cowboy boots. Their faces were beaming—apparently in the midst of a shared joke. Archie felt a surprising swell of jealousy. He missed that level of intimacy with another person. Whatever he and Rachel had, it was not a relationship in the traditional sense.

  Claire looked Archie up and down. “Did you get a catering gig?” she asked with a grin.

  Archie glanced down at his tux. “I thought I looked like James Bond,” he said.

  Claire laughed again. Archie couldn’t remember ever having seen her in a dress before. With her very short dark hair, boyish frame, and penchant for jeans and T-shirts, Claire Masland was pretty and feisty and smart, but few would describe her as ladylike. Her pregnancy had brought out her latent femininity. She was in her second trimester, and Henry had told Archie that last week he’d found her crying over a bowl of cake batter. This from a woman who had once left a witness handcuffed to a park bench next to a flooding river. Estrogen. It was a powerful thing. Claire produced a small, sweetly wrapped gift and put it in Archie’s hand. “We wanted to drop off your present,” she said. Then she bit her lip and gazed past him, into his apartment. “I have to pee,” she added.

  Archie stepped aside. “You know where to go,” he said.

  She hustled past him toward the bathroom, her black high heels tapping against the fir floorboards.

  Henry walked in and closed the door behind him. “She’s been peeing every fifteen minutes,” Henry said. “I don’t know where it’s all coming from.”

  Archie flashed back to his ex-wife’s two pregnancies. “It’ll pass,” he said.

  Henry took the drink from Archie’s hand and sipped from it.

  “Do you want one?” Archie asked.

  “I don’t want to be any trouble,” Henry said. He lifted Archie’s glass to his mouth again and grinned. “I’ll just take yours.”

  Archie examined his now-empty hand. “I find that I am suddenly thirsty,” he said. He walked to the kitchen and got another glass and then set it on the bar that separated the kitchen from the rest of the main living space, and poured another drink. Henry leaned against the bar next to him. Archie saw him glance across the living room at the closed bathroom door. “You’re getting mixed up in this whole thing with Leo, aren’t you?” Henry asked in a low voice.

  Archie recorked the whiskey. “No comment.”

  Henry ran his hand over his face and then smoothed his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Who’s running it?” he asked.

  Archie took a drink and then set the glass on the bar. He looked at Henry with a helpless shrug.

  “Jesus, Archie,” Henry said, his face reddening. “What if something happens to you? You don’t turn up, who am I supposed to call?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Archie said. “But I need you to stop by tonight and take the dog out, okay? Use your key.”

  “At what point do I start to worry?” Henry asked.

  Archie glanced outside at the darkening sky. “Twenty-four hours,” he said. He picked a pen up off the counter and wrote a telephone number on a piece of notebook paper, tore the paper out, folded it in half, and handed it to Henry. “If you don’t hear from me by this time tomorrow, open this.”

  Henry looked down at the folded piece of paper between his fingers. “Is this your will?”

  Archie heard the toilet flush and water running.

  “It’s my Visa number,” Archie said. “Run up as much as you can before they find out I’m dead.”

  Claire came out of the bathroom and started toward them.

  “That’s not funny,” Henry said, putting the folded paper in his jacket pocket.

  Claire stepped next to them. “Did you open it?” she asked, her eyes shining.

  Archie exchanged a glance with Henry, thinking she meant the paper he’d just passed him.

  “The gift,” Claire said, looking at the two of them like they were idiots. “Do it quick, before I have to pee again.”

  Archie pulled the present from his jacket pocket and unwrapped a white cardboard box. He lifted the lid. Inside was a round brass object, about the size of a Kennedy dollar but thicker, with a small knob on the side. It looked like an old-fashioned man’s pocket watch, but without a watch face. It appeared to be solid brass on both sides.

  “It’s a compass,” Claire said. She took it from Archie’s hands and flipped a latch at the bottom and the top opened to reveal a compass face underneath. The compass arrow trembled and then swung to point north.

  “Claire thought you’d like it,” Henry explained.

  Archie did like it. Though he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it exactly.

  Claire gave Archie a teasing poke in the ribs. “So what did your girlfriend get you?” she asked.

  Archie’s mind went to the promised lap dance and he felt himself blush. He pulled at the collar of his shirt. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he said.

  “Whatever,” Claire said. “It’s been two months. Have I met her? No. If Henry hadn’t seen her with his own eyes, I’d wonder if she was your imaginary friend.”

  “Susan met her this morning,” Archie said.

  “How’d that go?” Henry asked, lifting his glass to his lips.

  “Could have gone better,” Archie said.

  “Susan hated her, didn’t she?” Claire asked, beaming.

  Archie picked up his glass and took a drink from it. He wondered how long Susan would be pissed at him. Probably weeks. “Yep,” he said.

  “I want to meet her anyway,” Claire said. She didn’t wait for a response, which was good because Archie wasn’t prepared to make any promises. Claire picked up Henry’s wrist and looked at his watch. Her eyes widened. “We have reservations,” she said to Archie. Even with the high heels she had to lift herself up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. “Happy birthday,” she said. “We love you. Despite all your obvious problems and weird proclivities.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Archie said.

  She dragged Henry out the door. Henry caught Archie’s eye as Claire pulled the door shut behind them. “Call me tomorrow,” Henry said. “Twenty-four hours.”

  Archie stood in his apartment alone. The cloud cover out the window was the color of ash. The Willamette River looked like molten silver. Archie finished his drink and then called Rachel. He got her voice mail.

  “Something’s come up,” Archie said. “I have to work.” With someone else he might have had to apologize or explain more, but he and Rachel had different rules. “But,” Archie added, “I’m hoping I can get a rain check on that birthday present.”

  He ended the call and put the phone in his pocket. Then he loaded his gun and clipped the holster to the waistband of his pants. He smiled to himself. Now he looked like James Bond.

  Lastly, Archie headed into the bathroom. He opened his medicine chest and pulled out a large amber prescription bottle marked PRILOSEC and tapped out ten Vicodin into his palm. He’d been clean, more or less, for a year, and while he’d been in rehab, Henry had done a banner job rooting through Archie’s apartment and disposing of every pain pill he could find. But the one place that people never looked was right in plain sight. All Archie had done was switch out the pills. If his stomach ever started burning and he needed a Prilosec he was screwed.

  He didn’t use the pills. He just liked knowing they were there. Now he gently transferred the Vicodin into his old brass pillbox. It had been a long time since he’d carried that thing around in
his pocket, but if he was going to play the role of the self-destructive detective, he needed the right props.

  Archie gave the pillbox a shake. The familiar sound of the pills rattling against the metal confines of the box made his mouth water. But he swallowed hard and tucked the pillbox in the pocket of his tux.

  He glanced at his watch. He’d been forty-two years old for seven minutes now.

  So far, so good.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Susan’s mother didn’t allow her to smoke in the house. Marijuana was fine. Bliss kept her bong right out in the open on the coffee table like a decorative sculpture. Incense? No problem. Bliss bought it by the case, filling the whole house with a thick cherry-flavored smog. But when Susan wanted to smoke a cigarette, she had to do it on the porch.

  Susan got it. Weed was natural; cigarettes were cancer. Incense smelled nice; cigarettes didn’t. Plus, it was Bliss’s house, so she got to make the rules. Susan may have grown up in the dilapidated Victorian, but it wasn’t like her name was on the mortgage. She had moved back in with her mother while she was saving up to buy a place, then she had lost her job at the Herald. The freelancing gigs were too unpredictable to sign any kind of lease. And her credit report wasn’t exactly star renter material.

  So here she was. Getting cancer on her mother’s porch. Bliss was at work, dyeing someone’s Mohawk pink or something. Only in Portland, Oregon, did punk rockers go in for a root touch-up and a blow-out. Bliss was the go-to stylist for the rage-against-the-machine set. It made for interesting hours.

  Susan tapped her cigarette ash into the jack-o’-lantern on the top porch step. The jack-o’-lantern had squinty eyes and a round, surprised mouth. Susan’s jack-o’-lanterns never turned out as spooky as she intended. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up and checked her phone to see if Leo had texted her back yet. He hadn’t.

  She heard the car pull in front of the house and looked up. It was black and sleek and official-looking, like one of those town cars rich people hire to take them to the airport instead of just getting a cab like everyone else.