J. Jance - Fire and Ice

It was useless to stand around grousing about my missing glasses. As a general rule, Mel doesn’t like grousing. Instead, muttering something about jet lag, I stomped back into the bedroom and did a thorough search. I finally found my glasses hidden away in the inside pocket of yesterday’s still slightly damp sport jacket.

Thank you, North Bend, I thought.

I returned to the living room with my glasses perched on my nose and busied myself with reading the report. The missing woman’s name was Marina Aguirre, age twenty-nine. She was reported to be five feet five inches tall and was estimated to weigh 130 pounds. She had been reported missing from the City of SeaTac by her fiance, a truck driver named Mason Waters.

Mel was still on the phone. I sat down next to her on the window seat, which happens to be Mel’s favorite perch in our penthouse condo. The view is downright spectacular. I bought into Belltown Terrace long before I met Mel. The purchase had come during a real estate downturn in Seattle in the early eighties, and I bought it with some of the money I had inherited after my second wife’s death. In recent years, condo living in downtown Seattle had come of age. Now, a space that had once been a real estate white elephant had turned into a real estate gem-at least that’s how it looks when it comes time to pay the tax bill they send out from the King County Assessor’s Office.

In the intervening years, other high-rise buildings had sprung up all over the Denny Regrade area, but none of them were tall enough to impinge on the panoramic view from our window seat. At night and to the south, we saw the myriad lights of downtown Seattle. Occasionally during the day and even farther to the south, we had a view of snow-topped Mount Rainier, but that was only on those rare but beautifully sunny Pacific Northwest days when, as we say around here, “the mountains are out.” Off to the west, rain or shine, daylight or not, we saw the wide expanse of blue or gray or black Elliott Bay and Puget Sound with their busy shipping lanes and motoring ferries. In other words, Mel isn’t the only one who likes the view from the window seat.

Toward the end of the call she turned to me. “Jot down this number,” she said, and reeled off a phone number which she simultaneously typed into her computer. Women can do that-talk on the phone, talk to someone in person, and work on a laptop all at once. But I did as she told me and wrote the number down on the only piece of paper available to me at the time-the one that happened to be in my hand. Strangely enough, that turned out to be a good choice.

“That’s the phone number for the fiance, the guy who filed the missing persons report,” Mel said. “He’s a long-haul trucker. According to his dispatcher, he’ll be back in Federal Way early this afternoon. Maybe we can go talk to him after lunch.”

“Excuse me for mentioning this,” I said, “but if you’re going to go to lunch, shouldn’t you start by getting dressed to go to work?”

“I’m working from home this morning,” she explained. “I’m due to show up at noon and bring the food with me. It’s Harry’s birthday, remember? I volunteered to handle the food for the party. And don’t mention it to Harry when you get in,” she added. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

Now, having had it pointed out, I did remember. Squad B’s fearless leader, Harry Ignatius Ball, is now and always has been a sucker for barbecue. When Mel first moved across the water from the east side of Lake Washington to the west side, I had introduced her to several of my favorite hangouts. She had really fallen for one of them, the Pecos Pit Barbecue, and was now a die-hard fan. Any excuse is good enough for her, and the fact that Harry I. Ball adores barbecue made this a perfect match.

Pecos Pit Barbecue is located down in…Wait a minute. I’m dating myself again. I started to say “Sodo,” which used to be Seattle-speak for “South of the King Dome,” but the King Dome is gone now, so forget that.

Pecos Pit is in a born-again gas station on First Avenue South. Five days a week, the people who own it cook in the mornings, serve lunches until the food is gone, and then they go home. Customers stand in lines outside, rain or shine, and then eat outside on picnic tables, rain or shine as well. Don’t expect to use your credit card. Don’t expect to get moved to the head of the line. Restaurants wanting to discourage table hogging sometimes post signs that say, “Eat, Pay, and Go.” For Pecos Pit, you walk up to the window, place your order, pay, and go eat somewhere else. In this case, the food would be coming across Lake Washington in individual paper bags, destined for Squad B’s break room.

“Maybe I could go in late, too,” I offered. To be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about work per se. “After all, I put in a very long day yesterday.”

Mel saw right through that lame excuse. “Go to work,” she said. “Keep your mind on the job and leave me alone.” Again, she smiled so brightly when she told me to shove off that it was hard to take it personally.

“But later…” I said, not exactly whining but close to it.

She nodded and smiled. “Later,” she agreed.

I knew walking away that was a promise, not a put-off.

Joanna and Butch ate a leisurely breakfast in the heated cabana out by the pool. It was easy to spot the tourists. Escapees from the Midwest’s perpetual winter were decked out in shorts or bathing suits and gave the propane heaters a wide berth. Thin-blooded locals, on the other hand, still wore long pants, sweaters, and the occasional corduroy jacket.

After checking out of the hotel, they stopped to pick up washer-saving laundry bags from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s favorite lingerie shop, Alice-Rae. After that, they spent an hour trudging through Costco. It turned out there were lots more things on Butch’s shopping list than just the steaks for Thursday night’s party.

Once the boxes of groceries were loaded into the car, it was time to head back for Bisbee. As they drove south, Joanna reflexively reached for her phone. She took it out, looked at it, and put it away.

“No phone,” she reminded herself. “It’s a vacation day.”

“Yes,” Butch said with a grin. “I know it’s a difficult concept for you to master, but at least you’re trying.”

“And you’re right,” she agreed. “If you hadn’t taken the bull by the horns, our anniversary would have gotten lost in the shuffle.”

“If you want to stop off at the department for a little while when we go by to pick up your car…” Butch offered.

Joanna shook her head. “Nope, you were right the first time. We’ll just pick up the car and go. I won’t even poke my head inside. Taking a whole day off now and then is the right thing to do.”

The guy who came up with that saying about the war’s not won until the paperwork is done was probably a cop in his other life. I believe most law enforcement officers would agree with me when I say that paperwork is the bane of our existence. The fact that it’s done mostly on computers these days as opposed to on paper may be good for saving trees, but it’s still a pain in the neck and takes inordinate amounts of time. As far as Team B is concerned, since Harry hates computers, everything has to be printed out for him, which means that the poor trees lose anyway, but at least we don’t have to make quite as many copies.

So once I got to the office…yes, even later than I expected because traffic was hell…once I got there, I spent the rest of the morning working on a report that recounted everything I had seen and heard the previous day on my trek back and forth to Ellensburg.

After Harry had had a chance to read it, he strolled into my tiny office staring down at his hard copy through his own pair of Bartell Drugs “special” reading glasses. I found it comforting to know that I wasn’t the only person around who’d had to eat crow and succumb to the indignity of needing them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Getting older is hell.