Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [6]
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