Past Crimes (2 page)

I
HAD THE HORRIBLE FEELING
of coming full circle. My last sight of Dono before I’d left Seattle, when I was eighteen, had been in the kitchen of this same house. He’d been lying on the floor then, too. His face dark with rage. I’d been aiming a gun at his heart.

But any blood Dono and I had spilled back then could be measured in drops. Not like this.

The running footsteps outside were gone.

Dono was still warm. I leaned down and put my ear near his cheek. One breath. Two. Light as a spiderweb.

“Dono!” I shouted in his face. “It’s Van.” No response. Not even a twitch behind the closed eyelid.

More blood was pooling on the floor under his head. My knees slipped in the wet. Then I caught the smell of singed hair and burned powder. Gunshot.

I tore off my jacket and my T-shirt, wadding up the shirt and pressing it against the oozing hole behind his left ear. His hair was sticky.

“Dono!” I shouted again. “Hang on!” With my other hand, I felt for a pulse at his carotid. It was there. Barely.

Come on, you tough old bastard. Stay with me.

I kept one hand on Dono’s head and reached out with the other to
my jacket. His blood was seeping through the wadded layers of T-shirt cotton. I was fumbling to unbutton the pocket and reach my cell phone when I heard a creak of wood on the porch outside.

Had the guy who ran out circled back to finish the job? I didn’t have a gun. Dono and I would both be easy.

I heard many quick and muffled footsteps outside, coming toward the door. Then silence.

Cops. Had to be. Coming in quiet, until they got in position.

“Here!” I yelled. “In the front room! He’s been shot!”

“Police! Who’s inside?” shouted a male voice.

“Me and my grandfather,” I said. “Somebody ran out the back door a minute ago.”

“Come out of the house, sir. Now.”

“He’s bleeding out, goddamn it. I’ve got pressure on it.”

Ten long seconds passed before silhouettes appeared at the edge of the door. Stick formation. Single file.

“Here,” I said again.

“Let me see your hands,” the cop in front ordered. He had a shotgun leveled at me.

I raised one red-stained hand up high. “I’ll step away. But somebody has to take over, fast. His skull might be fractured.”

“Do it,” the cop said. I put the other hand in the air and stood up. Blood dribbled down from my palms onto my forearms and bare shoulders. “Turn around,” he said. I did a one-eighty so he could see there was no weapon tucked in my jeans.

“Now back slowly toward the door,” he said.

I backed up. One of the cops ran around me to kneel by Dono. His partner covered me as I edged out toward the one holding the shotgun.

They let me come all the way out onto the porch, backing up to keep some distance between us. The second cop in the line was big, maybe six-three with an extra layer of padding in the face and belly. He spun me around so that my nose was three inches from the dark blue paint. Shotgun was on the other side of the doorway, watching the entry and the hall beyond.

The big cop reached for his shoulder radio. “We’re inside. Detaining one male at gunpoint. Victim down. Need rescue.”

“I’ve got combat medical training,” I said to the cop. “Let me help.” I willed Dono to keep breathing.

“The officer there is an EMT. We’ll take care of him. Is anybody else in the house?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I got here two minutes before you did. The door was open. My grandfather was on the floor. Somebody ran out the back when I came in.”

And someone must have called 911, before I’d even arrived. A neighbor? Or the same guy who’d shot Dono?

“What’s your name?” Shotgun said to me.

“Van Shaw. My ID is in the jacket on the floor by my grandfather.”

“You live here, sir?”

“No. I flew in to Sea-Tac about an hour ago. All right if I turn around?” I wanted to see if the cop working on Dono had the wound stanched.

“Go ahead.”

I edged sidewise to look through the entryway. The EMT cop had pressure on Dono’s head, and with his free hand he was checking for pupil dilation.

More cops were moving around upstairs, sweeping the place. I’d cleared my share of houses and other structures. Their team knew how to do it. They moved fast and quiet, checking every room and closet and anywhere else a human might hide.

“Gun,” said the partner of the guy kneeling by Dono. He was pointing at the floor of the front room. In the low light and with the rush to help my grandfather, I hadn’t seen what had been there. A tumbler glass had fallen and broken near Dono’s ancient leather wing-back chair. Lying behind it was a snubnose .38 revolver.

“Yours?” the big cop said to me. His name tag read
OLSSEN
.

“No.” And whatever gun had made that hole in Dono, it wasn’t as big as a .38. Maybe the revolver belonged to Dono himself. Had he been carrying it? And had he been too slow on the draw to save himself?

Two paramedics came running down the porch and past us into the house. They had a pressure bandage on Dono’s skull in under a minute and a ventilator down his throat one minute after that. I was trembling slightly. A little from the cold air, mostly from adrenaline. Tiny droplets of half-dried blood quivered off the ends of my fingers.

Fight harder, Dono. You have to wake up.

Every time the EMT squeezed the bulb and forced air into Dono’s lungs, I exhaled as if to push a little more life into him. The medics counted three and lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the door.

“Harborview?” I said. Too loud. One of them flinched.

“Yes,” he said.

“Sir, I’m gonna need you to stay here,” said Shotgun.
R. VOH.
“You said your identification is in the room there?”

We stepped inside, Voh and Olssen keeping me between them. I pointed at my jacket on the floor. Voh stepped carefully into the front room, around the spatters of blood and bloody footprints. He fished out the contents of the jacket’s pockets without moving it from where it lay.

He glanced through my papers. “You’re deployed overseas, Mr. Shaw? Or Sergeant Shaw?”

“Yes.” On the wall of the foyer was a shallow metal panel, the size of a paperback book. Dono’s house alarm. Homemade. I reached out and flipped the panel door open.

“Hey,” said Olssen. “Sir, don’t touch anything, all right?”

Dono had upgraded the system since I’d lived here. It was plain-looking, just flat stainless steel and a ten-digit keypad with a single light to show when it was armed. The light was off.

So maybe somebody knocks and Dono wakes up and turns off the alarm to open the door. Or maybe the shooter was here already and the alarm never got turned on because the old man never went to bed last night.

Either way, odds were damn good that Dono knew the person. Hard to imagine a stranger getting close enough to put a gun to his head at five-thirty in the morning.

Two men came in through the front door. Detective badges clipped to their belts.

The first was forty-something, with prematurely white hair. His blue suit was pressed and clean. The second detective was closer to my age, a thin guy in a brown sport coat and a shiny shirt with matching tie. He took in the scene in the front room and let out a low whistle. His partner frowned.

The white-haired cop took my identification and papers from Voh and looked at me for a moment. “I’m Detective Guerin,” he said. “This is Detective Kanellis.”

“Van Shaw.”

“Would you excuse us for a moment, Mr. Shaw?” He motioned to Voh, who followed the two detectives out onto the porch. Before he stepped outside, the thin cop looked me up and down.

“Keep an eye on things here, Bob,” he said to Olssen.

Olssen and I were left in the foyer. He shifted his feet.

“You in the war?” he said.

“Yeah.”

I had been on base in Germany, fourteen hours ago. Less than a day before that, I’d made the decision to come back to Seattle.

Damn it, Dono. I’d been ready. I’d been locked and loaded to actually talk to you again. I know you, old man. That letter had not been easy for you to write.

I felt a cold breeze across my chest, coming down the hallway. The shooter must have left the back door open when he ran out. Christ. If the cops had been quicker getting here, they might have caught the fucker.

And if I’d taken a cab instead of renting a car, I might have kept Dono from getting shot entirely.

The detectives and Voh came back in, and behind them I heard more footsteps tramping along the porch. A parade of four tired-looking men in blue SPD Windbreakers and carrying tackle boxes followed. Guerin pointed, and they carefully edged into the front room. Crime-scene crew.

Guerin motioned to me. “Let’s talk in the back, where it’s a little quieter.”

The two detectives followed me down the hallway. Voh and Olssen stayed with the techs.

Dono’s kitchen was small and crowded with cabinets and appliances. There was almost no counter space, so he kept a butcher’s block in the center of the tiled floor. A fat man would have trouble squeezing between it and the refrigerator. Next to the kitchen was a dining alcove with a circular pine table and three rickety wooden chairs, the same old set that had been there when I was a kid. The breeze coming through the house was stronger here, icy across my face and bare chest.

Guerin motioned to a chair. I stayed standing. Kanellis sat.

“I’m sorry about your grandfather, Mr. Shaw,” Guerin said. “Or do you prefer ‘Sergeant’?”

“‘Mr.’ is fine.”

“Okay. Tell me what happened,” he said.

I recapped what I knew. From receiving Dono’s letter all the way to finding him on the floor. It didn’t take long. The detectives listened and nodded. Kanellis fidgeted in his seat.

“Do you know of anybody who might have wanted to hurt your grandfather? Or any arguments he might have had with anyone?” Detective Guerin said.

“No.”

“The front door isn’t broken open. Did anyone else have access to the house? A girlfriend, maybe?”

“I don’t know.” Christ, Dono might even be
married
. There wasn’t any sign down here that a woman now lived in the house, but I’d only seen three rooms and the hallway.

“Do
you
have a key to the place?” Kanellis said.

“No.”

One of the crime-scene guys came into the room. He said, “Excuse me,” and began to put adhesive strips on my hands and wrists. Testing for gunshot residue. When he peeled the strips off, the dried blood came up with them, leaving rectangular tiger stripes of pink. I walked past
Kanellis to the kitchen sink and began to scrub my hands half raw with Dono’s scouring sponge.

There was a clock with a picture of a bull on it hung over the window. Another new addition. By the little hands shaped like matador’s swords, it had been forty minutes since the medics had taken Dono out.

He’d be through triage by now. The hospital would be able to tell me something.

I looked at Guerin. “I need to follow him to Harborview.”

He thought about it. I knew he was going to check out my story from stem to stern and back again before he crossed me off as his primary suspect. If he ever did.

“Do you have a cell phone?” Guerin said. I gave him the number. I saw that the phone had one of my fingerprints on it, in Dono’s blood, from when I’d started to dial 911.

“Who called for help?” I said.

Kanellis nodded. “A neighbor heard a gunshot. They called 911.” He was careful to avoid mentioning the sex of the neighbor. Which meant it was probably a woman.

“But I didn’t hear the shot,” I said. “Even though I parked and walked almost halfway up the block to get to the house. So the shooting happened at least a couple of minutes before I came through the door.”

Guerin considered it. “All right,” he said.

I glanced at the open back door. “The guy was still inside when I came in. Why stay in the house that long? What was he doing?”

“Tossing the place?” Kanellis said. “Looking for cash? Or something to sell?”

I didn’t answer. Guerin didn’t either. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was. The shooter would have to be batshit crazy if he were searching the house after shooting Dono, with the front door still wide open. Or he was one ice-veined son of a bitch.

“I’ll be at Harborview,” I said.

“We’ll meet you there,” said Guerin, “after our team is finished with the scene.”

“Don’t leave town,” Kanellis said. His partner exhaled, almost a sigh.

The lab rats had taped off the front room. One was taking photographs, and the rest were spreading fingerprint dust on everything. I grabbed an old barn jacket from a hook in the foyer and walked out.

Out on the street, clumps of people stood around the cluster of police cruisers and unmarked vehicles. Neighbors, holding their coffees. Early-morning joggers, pausing to watch the show.

“Hey!” one of them yelled as I ran back to the Charger. “What’s going on?”

I wished to hell I knew.

T
HE WORST INJURIES IN
Seattle, and usually the western half of the state, headed straight for Harborview’s trauma center. If Harborview couldn’t help you, the next option was the morgue.

The admitting-desk receptionist told me Dono was in surgery. No, there wasn’t any news of his condition. He was Patient ID 918. She said they’d let the doctors know I was there, once they came out.

The waiting room had a few dozen black-and-gray plastic chairs, arranged around low tables with stacks of donated magazines. People had pulled the chairs together to huddle in close groups, like prayer circles. Nobody was reading the magazines. There was a flat-screen monitor on the wall that told where patients were. I waited until the display cycled through to read “918—Surgery Begun.”

I claimed a chair and sat. And stared at the cream-colored wall.

I’d spent a lot of time in hospitals. Twice from my own bad spins of the wheel. The first had been at Walter Reed when I was twenty years old, after my face had been redecorated. The second bought me that desk duty during the last two months, when my forearm caught a whirring piece of shrapnel right as our platoon was being lifted out of the extraction point in Kandahar.

In between those two visits, I’d logged a few hundred hours in waiting
rooms, while buddies or my own men were under the knife. Sitting silently with the rest of our unit, none of us daring to tempt fate by saying it was going to be okay. Those hours were a hell of a lot worse than being in a hospital bed myself.

The very worst time, the reigning King of Bad, was the one I hardly remembered. I was six years old. I didn’t know how I’d come to be there, in the ER. I stood in a room a lot like this one while people I didn’t know whispered and cried around me. And then my grandfather was standing there.

I had only met him a few times. He was always a little scary. He leaned down and spoke to me, saying the same thing a few times before I got it. He was telling me that I couldn’t see my mom right now. That we’d be going home for a while. His home, not the apartment Mom and I shared.

I’d asked why. When he finally answered, there was a stone solidity to his words that I knew the truth behind it, even if I couldn’t understand.

“She’ll be here,” he had said.

And there she stayed. Even after she died and was buried and long gone, I felt she was still in the hospital, somewhere just out of sight. The six-year-old me would feel that forever.

If Dono died here, would he occupy the same corner in my mind? I didn’t want to find out.

The big automated glass doors leading from the street slid open. Guerin and Kanellis came in. Kanellis spotted me first. Something was different about their vibe, just from their walk. Kanellis stood up straighter. Guerin looked grim.

“Sergeant Shaw,” Guerin said, “you’ve been keeping things from us.”

They sat in chairs on either side of me. Guerin left a seat in between us. Kanellis sat close. Guerin was carrying a blue manila folder. It was thick, maybe thirty or more pages.

Kanellis smirked. “Your grandpa is a very bad guy.”

“I know Dono’s got a record,” I said.

Guerin opened the folder and looked at the first page.

“Your grandfather has a business license as a general contractor and electrician,” he said. “He’s held that for twenty-three years. And there’s a stack of building permits and a number of other public records that have his name on them.”

I sat, waiting for what I knew would come next. Guerin turned the pages, reading from the top of each one.

“Arrested on suspicion, armed robbery. Suspicion, breaking and entering. Conviction, armed robbery. Conviction, grand larceny.” Guerin looked up at me. “He served four and a half years on McNeil Island for those last two, since it was a federal currency depository.”

“Your granddaddy must have really pissed off the judge,” said Kanellis. “McNeil was hard shit, back in the day.”

“Before my time,” I said.

Guerin turned once more to his pages. “Arrested on suspicion, burglary. Twice on that. Suspicion, aggravated assault. Suspicion, grand larceny again. And one last count, for possession of an unregistered firearm. Fourteen months in King County.”

The detective showed me the top sheet on the stack. It must have been Dono’s first arrest record, or at least his first in the United States. His face—young, handsome, and mocking—both front view and profile, in a mug shot over a reader board with his name and booking date in 1973 spelled out in uneven white plastic letters. The reader board said
POLICE
—
ALLSTON MA.
Sometime before Dono and my grandmother and my mother, just a toddler then, had moved across the country to Seattle.

I was fascinated. Dono hadn’t kept any photos around the house. I’d never seen him as a young man before.

He looked a little like me.

Guerin raised his eyes from the page. “And speaking of guns, the pistol on the floor had your grandfather’s prints on it. We also found another .38 Special upstairs, and a shotgun hanging by a strap under the coats in the kitchen. The pistols were registered to a man who passed away at age ninety-three, eight years ago.”

Guerin closed the blue folder and put it on the chair next to him. “You didn’t say a damn thing about any of this. Which makes me wonder if you’re mixed up in his work. Maybe all the way.”

It was almost nostalgic. Cops asking me what I knew about my grandfather’s night work. I hadn’t had to play this game since I started middle school.

“How old is the last charge on that list?” I said.

He didn’t have to look. “Eighteen years.”

“Right.”

“Just because he hasn’t been busted again, that doesn’t make him clean,” Kanellis said. “Clean guys don’t keep guns hidden behind the laundry soap.”

I said, “Dono was always a little paranoid. Guns in the house don’t mean he’s robbing liquor stores either.”

“You must have known about his rap sheet, growing up,” Guerin said. “You were living with him when he was arrested the last time.”

“I was. Dono told me that bust was a case of mistaken identity.” I shrugged. “I was a kid, I believed it.”

Kanellis pointed a finger at me. “You went into the system then, right?” he said. “Foster care. That couldn’t have been a shitload of fun.”

The detectives had done some fast digging. I’d been a ward of the state for a year and a half, assigned to foster homes during Dono’s trial and while he served his stretch in County.

“If you checked my record,” I said, “then you also know I went into the army right after high-school graduation. I haven’t been back. I don’t know anything about Dono’s life nowadays.”

“You said you didn’t know if he had any enemies now. What about back then? Any old grudges? Anybody who seemed like bad types, coming to the house?”

“He never talked about anything but his construction work,” I said. “Sorry.”

Guerin stared at me. Kanellis did, too, although he kept flicking his gaze back to his partner to check for approval.

“I need you to level with us,” Guerin said finally. “You’re not doing your grandfather any good by keeping his life a closed book. I don’t think you shot him. I spoke to your company’s executive officer. You’ve served your country well.”

He leaned forward. “But it’s too damn big a coincidence. Dono getting shot the same day you come back to town.”

The detective was right. The same morning. Almost the same hour.

I hadn’t told anyone other than Dono that I was coming. Had he?

I looked at Guerin. “If I knew anything that would help you catch this guy, I’d tell you. I want him nailed more than you do.”

A slight man in fresh green hospital scrubs walked over from where he’d been talking to the receptionist at the admitting desk. He had a full beard of black hair and wore a burgundy turban that looked like an autumn leaf above the walnut color of his tired face.

“Which of you is with Mr. Shaw?” he said.

“I am,” I said. Guerin opened his jacket to show his badge.

“I’m Dr. Singh, Mr. Shaw’s surgeon. Mr. Shaw is coming out of the postoperative ward now. He should be placed in a room before very long.”

“So he’s alive?” My pulse jumped. I hadn’t allowed myself the idea.

“He is. The bullet fractured his skull. It also did considerable damage to his left temporal lobe underneath. His heartbeat is steady, but his breathing still requires assistance.”

“When can we talk to him?” said Kanellis.

Singh tilted his head. “That’s very difficult to predict. His anesthesia will wear off in two or three more hours, but—” The doctor made an almost imperceptible shrug.

“How bad is he?” I said.

“I’ll be direct. In cases of brain damage like this, consciousness is not always regained. And when it is, the patient is not often lucid.”

“Did he say anything on the table?” Guerin pressed. “Anything that might identify who shot him?”

“No. I’m sorry,” said Singh. “And I must ask that you not disturb him.
If
he wakes, we can call you immediately.”

“I’ll post someone here,” said Guerin.

Not only to hear what Dono might say, if he woke up and started talking. The shooter might learn that the old man was still alive and try again.

Singh turned to me. “If you will excuse me, did your … father …?”

“Grandfather.”

“Oh? Your grandfather, then.” Singh’s surprise wasn’t uncommon. Dono and I were only thirty-six years apart in age. “Did he have any sort of living will or advance directive? Something that might indicate his preference of care?”

“I don’t know. I’ll check with his lawyer, but I doubt it,” I said.

“I see.”

“You saying he might be like this for a long time?”

“Again, I am sorry. If you would like to see him, he should be prepared now.”

Prepared. Like a corpse for viewing. We followed Singh to the elevators and up to a ward on the third floor, where he checked a computer screen at the front desk and led us down a long hallway. The room had two beds, but only one was occupied.

Dono lay with his upper body slightly elevated by the articulated bed. A mass of gauze and tape made a small pillow across the back of his head. Electrodes to monitor his pulse were stuck to his wrist and shoulder. IV needles in his arm, hidden by tape. The bulb of a plastic ventilator tube perched obscenely on his lips like a thick soap bubble.

“Leave me alone with him,” I said. “All of you.”

Guerin and Kanellis glanced at each other.

“I’m a suspect or I’m not,” I said. “Either way, I’m not going to unplug him with you standing outside the door.”

Guerin frowned at that, but they left, with Singh following.

I took a chair from against the wall and set it by Dono’s bed. For a few minutes, I just watched him, trying to see past the medical apparatus. People at death’s door are supposed to look smaller, shrunken. But the old man was as sizable as I remembered. A shot glass over six feet, and rangy. His hair had turned from salt and pepper to iron gray in the last decade and receded a little more. There were a few extra creases around the eyes. He still had the knuckled hands of a stonemason. I rested my own hand on the bedsheet. A tanned version of his paler one.

He had asked me to come back home, without any hint as to why. And I hadn’t made it here in time. By ten minutes.

“Christ, Dono,” I said. “One of us really fucked up.”

I had lied to the cops about one thing. My grandfather hadn’t straightened out when I was a kid. He’d just gotten better at his job.

Dono Shaw was a thief. He’d been a career criminal since his teens. Robberies mostly, wild cowboy shit. After that approach had earned him the sorry record that Guerin had shared with me, Dono smartened up and changed his methods.

And he had taught me. About stealing cars and forgery and security alarms. And money. How to find it, how to take it, how to hide it. At twelve I could use a thermite mini-lance well enough to beat the relocking safety on most commercial safes. By fifteen I probably knew more about police interrogation tricks than Kanellis did now. I had been hot shit.

I doubted that Dono had changed in the ten years I’d been gone. Either my grandfather had made a score recently or he was planning one soon. He didn’t take vacations.

I’d lied to Guerin about Dono’s work. But not about his shooting. If I knew anything that might catch the motherfucker who did it, I’d happily hand it over. The detectives had the resources to follow every lead.

But I could find other sources. Better ones. Guys who would rather cut off their own toes with a penknife than help the cops.

This was assuming that any of those old bastards would still talk to me. I’d been gone a long time.

Dono had known the shooter. I felt that in my gut. Had he been a partner?

On those infrequent occasions when Dono had worked with partners, he never double-crossed them. He thought it was bad business. So I couldn’t buy that anyone had shot Dono in the back of the head because the old man had cheated him.

Which meant it had been an ambush. Were Dono and his shooter meeting to hand over somebody’s share of a score? Dono’s .38 had been
on the floor. Had he been too slow when the shooter reached for his gun?

“You asked me to come back,” I said to Dono. “I’m here. It’s your turn, goddamn it.”

The accordion pump of the ventilator eased up and down with a soft wheeze each time it pushed air into his slack lungs.

I stood and put the chair back against the wall. “I’ll be around,” I said.

Out in the hall, I saw Guerin down near the ward desk, talking on his cell phone. I turned and went the other way, a few yards to the door of the stairwell.

It was Sunday afternoon. There was only light traffic as I drove through the streets and over the hill, back toward the house. A couple of the streets had become one-way since the last time I’d seen them, and I had to backtrack once or twice. I concentrated on each step, like a student driver. Pressing the accelerator gently. Clicking the turn signals.

He might be like this for a long time?
I’d said the words to Singh, and the surgeon hadn’t given me an answer. Which had been answer enough.