Pacific Beat

Chapter 19

Just after midnight, Jim was poring over the department file on Phil Kearns when the phone rang.

“Jim Weir?”

“Yes.”

“This is NBPD Dispatch. Brian Dennison wants to see you immediately. He’s at Three-forty Leeward. It is urgent.”

“I’m on my way.”

Jim pulled on his boots, grabbed a windbreaker to cut the night chill, and got down the stairs as quietly as he could.

He choked the old Ford and let her idle high for a minute. Leeward, he thought, the industrial zone of Newport, home of Cheverton Sewer & Septic. Goins? Why would Dennison call if they’d gotten Goins? Maybe Dale Blodgett and Duty Free were off on another mystery cruise.

The peninsula traffic was light at this hour. The houses squatted together closely in the fog and each streetlamp wore a damp halo. Up the boulevard, over the bridge, past the hospital, then across Superior and into the poorly lit blocks of body shops and boat yards. Leeward was one block south of Cheverton. Jim turned left, steered around a gaping pothole, and followed a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire to a gate held open by an old truck tire. The numbers 340 were painted in Day-Glo silver along the top curve of the rubber. He cranked the wheel and bounced in.

While dust settled down in the beam of his headlights, Jim considered the stucco building, one of dozens of 1950s houses now converted for commercial use. The porch light was on, aswirl with moths. The sign below it read DAVIS MARINE INDUSTRIES. The front room was dark, but a steady light issued from the back and the pale yellow of a window stood out on the south wall. A late-model Jaguar sat in front — Dennison’s unreliable import, thought Weir — and beside it a white van.

He stepped out, pocketed the keys and crunched across the gravel, and went up a couple of steps and rang the buzzer by the front door.

A man’s voice issued from inside. “Weir?”

“Yeah.”

“Door’s open. Come on back.”

The living room/lobby was cool and dark. Jim walked toward the hallway and the light. He could make out the shapes of an old table and some folding chairs, a sofa, a couple of file cabinets in one corner. At the end of the hallway, a door was cracked open and the light from within sprayed out calmly against the opposite wall.

Jim pushed through the door, stepped inside, and was just about to bring up his arms in defense when the baseball bat, swung by the figure on his right, slammed into his stomach and sent him down on one knee.

Shapes around him: ski masks, gloves, dark clothing. A surge of adrenaline brought him up and he caught the man with the bat square on the jaw with a hooking left. Movement to his right, squaring to meet the onrush, driving his right fist straight into a masked nose that cracked and flattened and sent the man down. It hit him sooner than he thought it would, a heavy blow to his lower ribs, a blow that sent the breath gasping out of him and a bright red luminescence burning in his eyes. Then another to his stomach, followed by a weighted shove — two men at least, he thought — from behind, hurling him forward in a tripping run that ended abruptly when he hit the wall. He spun away and caught a chin with his elbow, but the movement left him open and he saw it coming before he could do anything about it, the short side-chopping swing of the bat again as it thwumped into his stomach. He hit the floor hard, landing on his hands and knees. For an oddly peaceful moment, Weir believed that he could simply stay here like this — immovable, safe. The kick he knew was coming lifted one side of him up and crumpled an elbow. He rolled onto his back, looking up through his own hands held before his face.

Six, he thought, wanted to count, but couldn’t concentrate. No words. No Dennison. No one built like Dennison. Heavy breathings, a sense of purpose. A burning down in the ribs, the rise of nausea, dizziness. Looking straight up now, he saw the hangman’s noose fixed to a beam exposed by a hole in the ceiling.

“Having fun, Weir?”

He grunted as they descended on him and he tried to struggle up, but his legs were too slow to move him, and one well-placed foot on his chest pressed him back to the floor. Then the strangest sensation, of being swept up feet first, his head dangling and his legs above him. Grunting, a curse, then a sudden jolt and Weir was swaying back and forth, gently as a limb in a breeze. When he looked up he saw his boots, cinched into the noose. When he looked to his side, he saw a belt buckle, a stomach, a pair of gloved hands on hips, the walls rotating dizzyingly — not just left to right but up and down, too. When he strained his neck up, he could see the masks, which was to see nothing at all. A gag was jammed into his mouth. He felt the knot being tied behind his skull.

One of them nodded. Two others stepped forward and Jim saw the lopping shears, the ones with the long, long handles and the short curved blades that can take off a limb the size of a man’s wrist without great effort.

In that moment, Jim Weir knew the greatest fear of his life. It settled over him like a box with thick walls, a cold, contained finality with which there was no argument, no negotiation.

Two more men moved in close, stripped off Weir’s belt, and yanked his trousers up. He could see their elbows, their chests, their chins covered by the masks, their gloved fists that held his pants up by his ankles now while the lopping shears moved into his field of vision, opened and shut like the mandibles of a great ant, and moved between his legs.

Jim summoned everything he had. It was a blind surge, a screaming release of fear that brought his torso up level with the floor and guided his hands for the neck of the man with the cutters. But his body swung away with the lunge and his fingers missed the neck by inches, and his stomach, bruised and aching, surrendered. His head dropped back down and he tried again, but his strength only brought him up halfway, and for a moment he swung there, arms reaching out like some infant groping for its mother while he swayed in a lazy circle and the men around him laughed.

Laughed. It was a sound, Weir knew in an instant, that he would carry with him to his grave.

“Say goodbye to someone you love, Jim.”

He felt each of his arms taken and held fast. Looking up the length of his body, Jim could see his stomach, his groin, his thighs and knees, his trousers bunched and held tight around his boots, his boots locked in the noose. The curved blades settled in his pubic hair, cold and hard. Weir tried to jerk himself up, but his arms were pinned and it was utterly useless. A strange high-pitched buzzing then came into his head, almost electric. He watched the blades lift, open, and slide into his crotch. The buzzing in his ears was louder now — it sounded like a barbershop when he was six.

Then it happened. The cold blades touched him and a sharp pain shot into his groin. Weir screamed against the gag, and his back arched and he felt his eyes getting ready to leave their sockets. Red everywhere. If you can scream loud enough, it will all go away. The buzzing so loud, so electric; the metallic shearing sound as the blades opened and closed. Something falling down now and hitting his face, something warm and light — oh my dear sweet God, you let them do it.

You let them do it.

Dear sweet God.

“Don’t fuck with us. You know who we are.”

“Ever.”

“Anymore.”

“Got it?”

“Enjoy your new look, Weir.”

He could hear them leaving, but he couldn’t open his eyes. And he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out why the pain was not excruciating — just a cool stinging patch that felt open and foreign. His head throbbed with each wild heartbeat.

Then he felt someone grab him by the shirt and lift him up, followed by a sawing sounding above. Suddenly, his feet broke free and he dropped to the floor in a backbreaking flop cushioned only by his hands.

He lay there on the cool linoleum for a long moment, listening to the footsteps departing, then the cars starting up outside, then only to the racing gallop of his heart against the floor.

Then he was strangely, insanely, profoundly happy. He could feel it there beneath him, and he knew they hadn’t taken it. He rolled over and parted his trousers, hoisting himself up on one elbow. There it was, in all its terrified, recessed glory, lying on a plain of white flesh. He lay back, turned his head to the side, and saw the clump of hair a few feet away. The barbershop sound, he thought: electric clippers — the lopping shears were strictly for show. He managed to get his zipper up. Then he rolled over to the wall and scrunched himself up against it and peered out the window to the dark sky outside. His heart wouldn’t stop racing. It sent the blood rushing into his face, into his ears and eyes, into his hands and fingers, into his legs and his feet, and he lay there a long while thanking God for the blood that still pumped inside him, every precious, eager, frantic drop.

The moon came into the window. When his heart finally began to slow, the pain came to take its place. It was mostly surface now: his back and stomach and ribs, but he knew it would sink down deeper over the hours, settling into the bone and tendons.

He stood slowly, bracing against the wall. By the time he got to the living room, he had found a tremulous balance that threatened to give out at any second. He fell once going down the steps, and once more standing beside his truck, trying to get a trembling hand into his pocket for the keys.