Ever.
Even as it destroyed the things he loved, he would not open up to anyone. Even when it threatened to drag Jason down with him. Like tonight, man, he had to be careful. Whenever his father was seized by his demon, he reached out to Jason to rescue him.
Jason was all he had.
The cry of a gull and lonely horn of a distant boat echoed from the bay as he approached his 1969 Ford Falcon. He’d finally gotten around to getting it painted metallic red and it reflected the city lights as he wheeled through the streets. A few blocks east, the Space Needle ascended into the night, while south, the city’s tallest buildings, Union Square, Washington Mutual, and the Columbia Center dominated the skyline. Pike Place Market was near and a little farther, Pioneer Square.
Welcome to Seattle, baby.
Jet City. The Emerald City. Gatesville. Amazonia. Java Town.
The place where Jimi Hendrix learned to play guitar.
Rolling south near the stadiums he cast a glance in the direction of First Hill and Yesler Terrace and considered a detour. To where, though? He had no specific address to check out. He wasn’t even certain anything was happening out there.
Cover yourself, man.
He called the East Precinct again. Voice mail again. He left a message. Then he alerted the editorial assistant at the paper to call him if he heard anything. He set his phone on vibrate, then slid Layla into his CD player. He was a disciple of classic rock and loved how Clapton’s genius blended with the scanner’s dispatches in an eerie mix against the night. He gathered speed as the song played and returned to his old man’s situation.
Henry Wade was a private investigator, an exbrewery worker, and an ex-Seattle cop. And for as long as Jason could remember, his father would not, or could not, ever bring himself to talk about the incident that had forced him off the Seattle PD and into a job at the brewery, where each day the thermos in his lunch bucket had been spiked with bourbon.
Whatever it was that he was trying to drown had ultimately cost him his marriage. Jason’s mother had worked beside his father on the bottling line but eventually she walked out on both of them. She just couldn’t take it any longer, she said in her note. The night before she left, she’d hugged Jason and her eyes looked as if she were dreading something on the horizon. In the days after, Jason rode his bicycle all over the neighborhood searching for her until his old man told him she was gone.
“But don’t you worry, Jay, she’ll come back, you’ll see.”
The scanner crackled with a warehouse alarm.
Nothing to it. He adjusted the channels, then looked toward the bay as he guided his Falcon south until the brewery loomed. Man, he hated that place with its dark cluster of brick buildings, its stacks capped with red strobe lights spearing the night, the stench of hops permeating his car, reminding him of the worst days of his life.
His mother never returned and his old man’s drinking never stopped.
Over time, it had pushed everything to the breaking point. It came just two years ago when his dad showed up drunk in the newsroom looking for him. The humiliation and shame of that night nearly cost Jason his job at the Mirror.
A job he’d shed blood to win.
But it also got his old man to admit that he had a problem.
He quit drinking and got counseling.
Nearly two years sober now and he was doing well, emerging from his self-imposed tomb a stronger man. Jason had reminded him that for a brief time in his life, he’d been a Seattle cop, a good one, and that he should do something about it.
He did.
First, he took early retirement from the brewery. Then enrolled in a few courses. He’d become a licensed private investigator with an agency run by an old cop buddy. He did well on his cases, even helped Jason out on a few news stories. His old man finally had it all under control. That’s right, Jason thought, looking at the brewery fading in his rearview mirror, he was convinced they’d put all this crap behind them.
But here he was driving to another bar to rescue his father.
Risking everything he’d worked so hard to achieve.
It played out before him as he came upon the bluecollar neighborhood where he grew up, in the south, between Highway 509 and the west bank of the Duwamish River, not far from the shipyards and Boeing Field. It was here, ever since his mother had read him bedtime stories, that he’d dreamed of being a writer and had decided that being a reporter would give him a front-row seat to life’s daily dramas. He studied them every morning on his first job in the business, delivering the Seattle Mirror.
Reading about other people’s problems helped Jason forget his own.
He had tried to comprehend how his mother could just leave. As years passed, his grades plunged, his writing dream slipped away, and his father got him a job driving a forklift at the Pacific Peaks Brewery. They would rise at dawn, climb into his dad’s pickup, and drive to the concentration of filthy brick buildings. For Jason it was a gate to hell and he vowed to pull himself out of it before he became a ghost, like his old man.
So, between loading trucks with beer, he read classic literature, saved his money, went to night school, improved his grades, enrolled in community college, and worked weekends at the brewery. He also got his own apartment, wrote for the campus paper, and freelanced news features to Seattle’s big dailies.
One of his stories, a feature on Seattle beat cops, had caught the eye of a Seattle Mirror editor, who gave Jason the last spot in the intern program after another candidate had bailed.
It was Jason’s shot at realizing his dream.
The Mirror ’s internship program was notorious. Jason had to compete with five other young reporters, each of them from big journalism schools. And each of them had news experience as interns at places like The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. They all went full tilt in a do-or-die competition for the one Mirror job that came at the end. After Jason had put everything on the line and broke a major exclusive, the Mirror awarded him a full-time staff reporter position.
It was all in jeopardy now because of the screwup over Brian Pillar and whatever awaited inside the bowels of the Ice House Bar.
Jason parked in the littered lot next to a burned-out Pacer, rotting there in the far corner where drug deals were closed and bladders relieved. He made another round of calls, left messages, and checked the scanner before switching it off. Nothing was popping on the air, yet he couldn’t put aside his nagging feeling that something was going on up in Yesler Terrace.
The bar smelled of stale beer, cigarettes, sweat, and regret. A mournful honky-tonk song spilled from the jukebox; the wooden floor was littered with peanut shells and pull tabs. An assortment of losers populated the place. Two broken-down old-timers were at the bar. One was missing an arm, and in the glow of the neon beer signs above the bar, Jason noticed that the other had a patch over his eye.
Farther back, under the glow of lowered white lights, there was a pool table and a game in progress between a gap-toothed woman whose T-shirt strained the words DON’T TALK TO ME across her chest, and a tall slender man, whose arms were sleeved in tattoos. Beyond the game, six high-back booths lined the walls. All were empty except the one where Jason’s father was sitting.
Alone, except for a glass filled with beer on the table before him.
It appeared untouched.
Henry Wade looked up from it to his son, who stood before him.
“You drink anything tonight, Dad?”
His old man shook his head.
Encouraged, Jason sat across from him in the booth, nodding to the white rag wrapped around his father’s right hand.
“What happened?”
“Changing the blade in my utility knife to replace a bathroom tile.”
“This is why you had the bar call me? Dad, I’m working now.”
His father rubbed his temples as if to soothe something far more disturbing than a household mishap.
“Jay, you have to help me, son, I don’t know what to do here.”
