David Dun - Overfall

“Jason’s daughter-now grown. She’s half crazy herself. She’s in LA. I’ve tried so hard to talk to her, but I’m getting nowhere. She’s a stripper. She drinks. God only knows what else she does. She’s twenty and hell on wheels.”

“Tell me what you know about her.”

Anna began with Grady’s birth and recounted up through her life as a stripper.

“That’s important,” Sam said when she had finished.

“The seaplane is due in two hours. We’re going to have to part ways in Vancouver. I need to know when I’ll see you again and exactly how I hire you.”

“I’ll need time to research and plan. Let’s meet in LA at the Capital Plaza in five days-next Friday evening. You’ll hear from me in the meantime. You’re going to your place in Manhattan?”

“Yes. I’ll be there tonight.”

“I’ll send people. I’ll be talking to you.”

“Tell me,” she said, “how exactly do I get in touch with a guy who has no last name?”

“E-mail.”

“E-mail? That’s it?”

Sam took Anna into Betty’s apartment, sat her down where she could use the phone, and excused himself. When he found a public phone he paused for a moment, knowing that his life would take a major turn if he picked it up. As he considered this, he saw the would-be photographer come around the corner, a new cardboard camera in his hand.

Sam motioned with his head toward the dock, careful to keep his face in the shadow of his hat brim. The man obviously understood that Sam meant to throw him back into the bay. He snapped a picture and ran, but Sam was on him before he had gone twenty feet.

“It isn’t in my nature to fight,” Sam said, shoving a hand under the man’s rib cage and holding it like a handle. The photographer screamed and dropped the camera, grabbing at his chest, obviously in terrible pain. Sam smashed the camera under his heel while the man dangled.

“Next time take a picture of the natural wonders. It makes a much better souvenir. And don’t bother Betty about any more disposable cameras. She’s all sold out.”

A man came around the corner in response to the screams and Sam let go of the ribs.

“Don’t come back.”

As the bird-watcher looked on in amazement, the wounded cameraman ran around the corner, holding his side.

Sam returned to the telephone. It was starting to feel like old times. The first call went to Shohei because he might be in Japan. Fortunately it turned out he was in San Francisco, and more significantly, he happened to be taking a little sabbatical and therefore had no contract at the moment.

Next Sam would need Jill, one of his assistants, and his mother, a Tilok woman everyone called Spring. But if he was going to call Jill about returning to work, protocol would dictate that he first call Paul. Paul’s assistant answered the phone. He didn’t know Sam’s voice. Paul, who now ran a large hardware business, was with a commercial contractor, according to the anxious-to-please clerk.

“Tell him Robert Chase called.”

Now he could call Jill. It was an easy call-they had been friends for years and lovers briefly. Jill’s one weakness was that she liked reminding him in embarrassing little ways about what had happened between them-and about other women with whom it had happened. Jill was a bean counter by nature, and he supposed that just naturally carried over to counting more than beans.

Spring was an even quicker call than Jill. With Shohei, Jill, and Spring on board, Sam was gratified. He wanted a cigar.

He dreaded calling Typhony, but it would be gutless to have Paul talk in his place, and for what he had in mind he would need his whole crew. At the moment he had a dozen employees, mostly techies, working at feeding the Big Brain’s database and keeping it operating for government contracting work. When Sam wasn’t using his computer, it did work for the CIA, FBI, and other agencies, generating revenue. Grogg, a man whose glasses were epic in their size and magnification, was the craftsman who had implemented Sam’s architecture and created the electronic marvel that was the heart and soul of Sam’s business. Grogg remained on the job, but Sam would need to hire more investigators: the men and women who helped get the techies the kind of information Big Brain could use to solve real-world riddles.

Inside the store he found Betty.

“Hey,” he said, giving her a casual look. “Anna is an occasional closet smoker. She needs a smoke.”

“Well, I have them only by the pack.”

“Okay.” Sam bought a pack of Marlboros, removed one, and gave the remainder to Betty.

“Keep ’em behind the counter for customers.”

“No way. They smell up the place. I can’t believe she smokes.”

“Toss ’em, then. She only wants one. Doesn’t need the temptation of a whole pack.”

Sam shrugged his shoulders as if it were a mystery, then went around the corner to the men’s room. Inside he lit up, took two huge drags, snubbed it out, and tossed it.

Sam walked back to a wooden bench overlooking the bowl-shaped harbor where they would wait for the seaplane. Large conifer trees, lustrous and green, covered the upper slopes around the bay. The water was calm; the hillsides near the water were very rocky and produced gnarled trees in interesting shapes and arrangements; the ground was ornamented with salal, grasses, and fern, the rocks with lichen. Broken clouds let the sun stream through, bringing out the blue of the sky and sea. Something about the place was more than the sum of its parts, creating a mood unique in its intrigue.

“It’s beautiful here.” Anna had found him.

“Yes.”

“Why do I smell cigarettes?”

“Maybe the shirt.”

“Sam, could we talk seriously a minute?”

“I’m always serious. It’s just that I occasionally feel compelled to be irreverent.”

“Tell me about your mom and dad.”

“Just like that?”

“Come on, Sam, you’ve given me nothing else, and you know you can trust me.”

“Well, the only thing I knew about my mom when I was growing up was what my dad told me.”

“Which was?”

“Drunken slut.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all of it.”

“Did you ever see her or talk to anyone who knew her?”

“Not when I was growing up. I knew only my grandparents on my dad’s side and never my mom’s. My grandparents just refused to mention her or comment in any way. It wasn’t until a few months after my dad died that I discovered my mother. I was eighteen and in college. At first I told myself I wanted to meet her or find her grave. Listening to my dad, I guess I had it in my head that she probably died of alcohol or drugs. I traced my dad’s life back to when he was nineteen, found people who knew him then, people he’d lost all contact with. They told me about a beautiful girl, Native American, that he dated. I discovered the schools she might have gone to and started looking. Finally, I got a name, pictures, positive ID, and found her. I think I just didn’t want to doubt my dad when he was alive so I hadn’t pushed it.”

“I want to be sensitive here. But there is this sort of looming question-”

“Why didn’t my mother find me? Why did she let me go?”

“Well, yes.”

“She was going to school, he was working. They actually met because my mother was renting a room in my grandparents’ basement. They lived not far from the school campus. All of my mother’s family at that time was pretty much centered in the reservation. Neither my mother nor my father wanted me on the reservation, so his parents took care of me during the day and my mom took care of me at night. My mom and dad were never married and my mom just kept on living with my grandparents and going to school. My dad lived on a military base. Not long after I was born my parents quit talking. Then, when I was a year and a half old, my mom went on a travel class overseas for a month.