Copyright © 2021 by Emory Clark.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 09/17/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

820545

CONTENTS

Chapter 1    The Back Road

Chapter 2    Catch a Wave

Chapter 3    Hush Puppies

Chapter 4    Beer’s the Game

Chapter 5    Blue Ribbon Yeast

Chapter 6    Uncle Stu

Chapter 7    Mad Squirrel

Chapter 8    Splitting the Diamond

Chapter 9    The Traveling Case

Chapter 10    The Doubletree Hotel

Chapter 11    Melissa Marie

Chapter 12    Rio

Chapter 13    Jesus

Chapter 14    Franco

Chapter 15    Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Chapter 16    Green Hornet

Chapter 17    Jilly the Angel!

About the Author

Chapter 1

THE BACK ROAD

The Bill Clinton Freeway and Cloverleaf near Seattle lets me bypass about a million stop lights every day on the way to work. Now it becomes the key in the most exciting adventure I’ve ever had or ever will have! Two miles of freeway were lifted up onto giant concrete pillars and pass directly over our headquarters at Anchor’s Away Brewery. A half dozen of our separate buildings are nestled in a string almost directly under the highest stretch of the bridge. You’ve probably seen our big Catch a Wave beer signs if you’ve driven up the I-5. Overhead traffic is relentless, but who could ask for better exposure, once you get used to the roar?

I cut my teeth in beer production, from the barley fields to the maltsters, and from the hops farms to the brewery, and now that I’m in sales and marketing, part of every pitch I make not only includes championing our excellent ingredients and know-how but also our unusual location. Why? Well, here's the long and short of it; the legs supporting the freeway towering above us, are anchored deeply in the rock beside us, and, they provide constant vibration from freeway traffic. I and most of my colleagues agree that the constant buzz enhances our chemistry by speeding fermentation that produces a unique silkiness in our pilsners and an even more smoothness in our lagers. I tell customers it’s more important than the artesian water we use, and it may be true.

Laugh and Play Day Care and Preschool, where my kids spend their weekdays, laughing, playing, and learning, is thirty blocks up the hillside in the middle of a beautiful old meadow, where its state-of-the-art playgrounds are safely tucked away in the middle of a ten-acre Douglas fir grove more than a century old. I love those details because they spell peace, joy, and safety for Mary, five, and George, four. I’m a single parent, sort of, and depend on the highest quality of care available for my awesome kids! The street lights are usually still on as I kiss Mary Contrary, five, and Georgie Porgy, four, and watch them skip hand in hand across the lawn, past Big Bird and his friends, and usually take a quick spin on their favorite outdoor toy, the Moovin’ and Groovin’ Swring.

Sometimes I walk them to up to the door but didn’t particularly want conversation this morning with Ida Bell, the owner. She is a professional educator through and through and also a cute and a very nice one at that. Lately, she’s been taking it upon herself to grill me often on the dangers of late-night TV for my kids. Seems both of them went to sleep before lunch a couple times last week, and somehow, she knows every time, I’ve let them stay up with me too late. I keep telling her, with tongue in cheek, that I don’t enjoy Dave Letterman nearly as much unless the kids are snuggled up beside me. Lucky for me she thinks I’m kidding.

I alternate routes from there to work, sometimes whizzing down and around the cloverleaf, hitting only the one light after I turn off under the freeway and pull right up to our sales office—all on blacktop and in ten minutes. Often, though, I choose the other way, harder and more interesting although a bit slower. A narrow dirt back road, as in cow trail, takes off at the end of the daycare cul-de-sac and parallels the freeway where it splits with one road going east under the freeway and the other one, which I take, winding through an old turn-of-the-century pear orchard and then spilling over the hillside. The road becomes a pair of greasy grassy ruts and drops steeply down the hill and under the freeway where it zigzags through a blackberry patch and ends up behind the loading docks of my home away from home, Anchor’s Away. I wouldn’t take anything except my old Subaru daily driver through the scratchy thorns, but it’s a beautiful rough-and-tumble route and keeps me connected with my farm-boy roots. The pear orchard, no matter the season, is worth the thrashing I take.

I expected nothing out of the ordinary as I pulled up to the last row of trees, a few feet from where the road drops off, rolled down my window, turned up KPEG country radio, soaking in the incredible smell of pear blossoms for a minute. Say what you want about orange blossom fragrance; I vote for these beauties!

Southbound traffic was jammed going down the cloverleaf. Suspended far above the world below, on its concrete pylons, the freeway was maybe fifty feet away from where I sat and was in my direct line of sight. That’s how I clearly saw a two-tone wine and black luxury sedan coming toward me—Mercedes, I guessed—skid to a stop, tires smoking, at a widened emergency pull off. A tall fuzzy-headed blond guy jumped from the back seat of the car and bolted to the wall at the side of the road, carrying a black suitcase. I turned off KPEG quick as a wink and stared in wonder. There were no other northbound cars right then, but southbound was jammed. Tall guard rails blocked the Mercedes and the action taking place from anyone except me, and tall dense blackberry brush further shielded me. Standing with his back to the concrete wall along the top edge, the fuzzy-head held up the case to his chest, turned quickly, and set it on top. He was trying to push it all the way over when a gunshot exploded from the front passenger door. He was hit. With one more weak push, the case fell over the edge. There was a struggle in the car as the driver grabbed for the gunman’s hand, but a second crump sounded, and I saw a hole in the car’s roof. Then a third found its mark and the guy, now face down, didn’t move.

I slid out of my door and crawled on all fours like a blue lizard, phone in hand, to get the license number and call the police. As I dialed 911, I glanced behind the wall just in time to see the suitcase sliding down the steep bank then falling though the air into a guy wire that sent it cartwheeling into the Anchor’s Away compound. I heard a distant, faint bang and a dull thud.

The car, now sporting a fist-sized hole in the roof, lurched forward, running over part of the guy as it gathered speed. Two other cars, traveling side by side, rounded the corner, going in the opposite direction, and the one on the inside that had a view of the man lying out in traffic slammed on its brakes and skidded through the opening between the two lanes and into the emergency pulloff. The driver struggled to pull the injured man from the road then stood up to use his phone. The dispatcher was on my line now and asked for my name and my emergency. I shouted, I’m reporting a shooting on Bill Clinton Cloverleaf, top of Hawthorne Hill at the emergency turnout! Victim shot two times from a black and maroon sedan. The car left the scene and ran over the injured man. It is going north at top of Hawthorne Hill now! License WAN 3470B. Got to go! I’m going to be hit by traffic!

What I hadn’t reported and what the other witness had not seen was the guy throwing the big black bag over the edge. It was a no-brainer that those guys would go back to retrieve that luggage. They’d have to go north, get off the freeway at the Moss Street exit, go around under it, get back on southbound I-5, and turn off at the bottom on the Hawthorne Street exit. There’s only one right-turn lane off Hawthorn into Anchor’s Away Drive, and they would know it had to land somewhere along that road under the freeway turnout. One look overhead would narrow the location by spotting the emergency turnout.

I’d gotten a bird’s eye view of shooter, and I was glad I could see the license plate through the brush. I remember thinking how crazy those numbers, 3470B, were, because I am thirty-four, and was born in ’70. I ran like hell to my car. I knew that there was something worth dying for in that case, and while I may regret it, my first impulse was making a snap decision to be the first one to look inside it. I figured that it would take the gangsters going north three to five minutes to turn off the freeway, that they’d burn up a good two minutes in traffic in order to head south again, two minutes to the off ramp, three minutes around and back down the cloverleaf, and at least three more minutes to where I, or they if they beat me to it, would probably find it. I figured I’d better get a hustle on, with only thirteen minutes to spare.

I reached my Subaru, climbed in, and went careening down the steep grade. The only sounds were occasional squeaks from the fifteen-year-old coil springs as the car pitched and swayed down the moss-covered ruts, and swishing sounds as I dove under one large clump of blackberry vines after another, glad my paint was old because it was taking a beating. The speed felt exhilarating, and I’d never had this exact kind of mindless rush!

Almost every morning, I am the second one in the building. Squirrel Robbins, our payroll clerk, usually beats me. I hoped I was first this morning but no luck. He was parked in his usual spot, and there were two other strange cars in the gravel lot just off the street. By strange I simply mean I hadn’t seen either of them before, but we have a steady flow of job applicants daily, so I wasn’t alarmed. I casually steered into my regular stall, got out, tried to look as slow and collected as I could muster—just in case someone noticed me—walked into my office in the ad building, and dropped my overcoat over my chair. Seeing no one else, I hurried, more like blasted, out the back door and tried to get my bearings as I walked across a short section of lawn to the fermentation building, an odd structure, taller than it was wide. I figured it had to have fallen a hundred yards away along the frontage road paralleling the freeway. I looked up and noticed there were two wide spots up there, one, where the shooting had taken place, and the other directly above the dirt road at the Y, which connected with the freeway, and went under it. The catch was its midair collision with the guy wire, which I had witnessed. I did my math with some calculus thrown in plus some geometry and began looking in a very unlikely patch of ground. I checked my watch: six minutes gone, seven to go. Then I spotted it, off in the weeds next to a small horseshoe-shaped extension to the main parking lot. It was right where it shouldn’t be. No way could I go across the field that separated me and the suitcase without being seen. I recalculated and would have to cut up through the trees and bushes a hundred feet back, which would take a good two minutes, then cut around the perimeter so I could keep out of sight for another two minutes.

My heart raced with the extra excitement, but I didn’t give it a second thought. In an instant, I was sprinting like a racehorse and complimented myself on having the good sense to keep really fit at thirty-four. Just thinking about it, I picked up speed, considered cutting a corner, abandoned the notion, and was in sight of the case in one minute flat. In another thirty seconds, I stepped out of the trees, about six feet into the wet grass, and grabbed it. God, was it heavy! My plans went down the drain. Carrying this overloaded monster would take me twice as long to get back to the compound.

Then I really crapped because just as I was stepping back into the woods, I saw the Mercedes sliding off Hawthorne onto Anchor Drive. I realized they only needed about two minutes to get to the parking lot, but the good news was they would be driving slow like the turtle, not fast like the rabbit, and looking closely along the road all the way. Now I’ve been aware of adrenaline in races before, but never like this. I was able to carry that damned thing, which I estimate weighed somewhere near fifty pounds, clear up to the fermentation building without stopping. Two large dumpsters, out back of the fermentation building, which I knew by heart, beckoned to me. One of my extra duties for Anchor’s Away, when I wasn’t on the phone selling beer, was to nurture a little public relations with the City Sanitation Department. I promised them we would use these particular dumpsters only for empty sugar and yeast bags. They got dumped every week, and a spare stood by for good measure. I quickly hoisted the bag over the edge of the dumpster and, trying to not get filthy, hid it about halfway down in the empty bags. By this time, it felt like it weighed a good hundred pounds, and I was breathing so hard that the air inside the dumpster, which was laden with finely powdered sugar and dry yeast, flooded into my lungs with each breath, burning my windpipe on the way down.

I practice the technique of power breathing often in order to recover quickly from extra stress during distance runs, so I did it now again and again as I opened the back door of the building and slowly clomped—more like slogged—up the cement stairs, one leaden foot after the other. At the second floor, I was greeted by our breiwmaster. He still had his coat on and fortunately was intent on studying gauges at the moment. Otherwise, he’d have noticed my dirty, filthy sweater or at least tried to tell me one or two jokes. They were usually about German soldiers or cops and were usually about as funny as a rubber crutch.

I heard two car doors slam below as I walked to the front of the building. Like a figment right out of my worst nightmare, both the driver and the gunman stepped out of the trees that circled the back parking lot and looked up toward the murder scene. From where I stood, I could see the roofs of two police cars up there. No one bothered to look over the edge. There was no reason to look down here as far as they knew. The creeps—I guessed they’d made up with each other most likely because they chose to survive—walked nonchalantly along the hedgerow, and the triggerman traced imaginary trajectories in the air as he attempted to determine various destinations on the ground where the case might be. They both broke into a run and disappeared into the barrow pit along the roadway. I was shocked out of my head to see the driver hold up a black suitcase, about the same size, which he opened immediately and spilled clothing and what looked to be a shaving kit onto the grass before slamming it to the ground. They ran back to the visitors’ gate and began to search that area again.

The radio was always on at Anchor’s Away, and it was always loud, especially in the fermenting rooms. Another thing, it always was tuned into Rush Limbaugh’s talk show every morning where the only interruptions were news headlines about every half hour. We were on: Joel Southerly of the Seattle Triggers was rushed to Hawthorne Memorial Hospital less than an hour ago with two bullet wounds from an unknown assailant, one in his midsection and a second in his thigh. His condition is critical, and he has not regained consciousness. The shooting took place at an emergency turnoff near the top of the Bill Clinton Cloverleaf. He was first observed lying partway into the lane of traffic by a motorist headed in the opposite direction. That driver reported seeing a black and maroon car speed away from the scene and, moments later, spotted southerly and drug him to safety. That driver also waited until the state police and ambulance arrived. Police inform us another witness called in the license plate number.

I thought of Southerly’s uncanny success with jump shots and fast breaks, feeling super sad for him and thousands of his fans. The report continued: A gun labeled Magnum PI .357, was found a few feet away. The announcer paused as he reread the police report. Clearing his voice he said, According to the report, it was the Toys R Us variety. He paused again and then, like a small yapping dog, went on, "Joel’s basketball career may be in trouble if—I should say when—he recovers because his right hand, his jump shot hand, was run over and badly damaged by the car!"

A basketball star with a toy pistol? Damn, the plot thickens, or maybe it thins, I thought as I checked my appearance in the small bathroom mirror at the end of the hall. My mind felt very screwed up, but at least I was back in control of my breathing, and as I closed the bathroom door and began to straighten myself up, it was clear that my eyes needed some work, and quick! They looked back at me like wild things, and I knew that wouldn’t do. I forced my stomach muscles to push a big phony but fairly decent-sounding laugh up through my throat and out of my lips. I did it twice, then one more time and again looked at my eyes. They were starting to grin. I was going to get through this.

No sooner had I stepped out of the bathroom than I met Lois, our lab tech, and she said, Okay, you knucklehead, I heard you! What’s got you cracking up in the can already this morning?

Turning my head to the side, I gave out two more sincere-sounding guffaws while feverishly searching for an answer for Lois. Well, you’ve heard me talk about Ms. Ding Dong Bell, my kids’ daycare teacher, right? I asked. "Well, just a few minutes ago, she chewed my butt about my kids looking sleepy all the time. So I said, ‘My kids love to stay up and watch Dave Letterman with me every night!’ I swear, Lois, I thought she was going to slap me!"

I had long suspected that Lois was carrying a torch for me because she slid her fingernail along my arm when we passed in the hall sometimes, and when I told her about little innuendoes from Ms. Bell whom I joked about but absolutely loved, she asked me lots of questions like What’s her real name? Is she pretty? Is she seeing anyone? Is she sexy? Was she ever married? The reason why she asked me those things seemed simple enough to me.

This time, though, she stomped her foot and said, Now quit being a jerk! Don’t make fun of her. She sounds like she loves your kids. Why don’t you put them to bed like you should? You should get a life for yourself, Billy! Anyway, I’m glad your kids are in good hands. I worry about them, you heathen!

You’re too frigging kind, I told her. Then, leaning against her filing cabinet, I grinned like a schoolboy and said, Lois, when I grow up, you’re the kind of girl I really want.

I had a shitload of stuff to do in order to get ready to leave town next Monday for a craft beer trade show in Dallas. We had also been invited to personally pitch the president and board of directors of Roman Seas, a chain of restaurants with headquarters there. You’ve probably eaten in a Roman Seas restaurant forty times. Anchor’s Away would be the featured beer along with a handful of others, and we’d be in their brochures, their ads, and even their menus. I had way too much on my mind. I had momentarily forgotten the creeps out there looking up and down the driveway. Here I was, withholding deadly information from the police and the whole world, information I’m sure would eventually put those buzzards behind bars, but now, I, Billy the idiot, had set himself up to be arrested right along with them just because of my extreme curiosity. The way I had it figured, if I turned them in now, the cops would be all over this compound like flies on a dead gopher.

Like how would I explain the offense I’m already guilty of, that of withholding evidence? And what knucklehead gets to work first nearly every morning? Squirrel or me! Who found that suitcase? Who? Billy of course. I met all the investigators’ criteria. But if I didn’t turn the crooks in right this minute, the crooks will look and sniff around, but not as hard as the police. I had to clam up and stay clammed up! I just hoped to hell whatever was in there would be worth my time and agony and—I didn’t like thinking about it—maybe being killed. My kids flashed in front of my eyes with every burst of fear. I needed a little more time to figure out what it was I planned to do to conceal a batch of dough, if it was money inside, and still use some of it somehow.

I was grasping at straws. I was in this thing up to my butt already. One plan I feverishly recited was what I considered my copout plan because I thought of calling the police right now and explaining what I had seen take place up above, stopping just short of the suitcase matter. I practiced and recited the call. What if someone had seen me out the same window I was now using to watch them? No! Nothing settled my mind except waiting until after dark and taking it back in the woods and letting the chips fall where they might. And then, bam, the Mercedes suddenly came into view again and speeded by the building, disappearing down the frontage road. I breathed a sigh of relief as I glanced at my watch. I had been at work for less than an hour. It felt like a week!

I didn’t have a clue yet as to what was in it but agreed with myself those guys were dead serious. I also figured they would send someone to watch out for anything around here that looked suspicious. I had to figure out how to get the suitcase out of the dumpster and home unseen. It felt heavy enough to have a gun and ammo in it, maybe a break-apart rifle and some bundles of cash like on TV. I dared speculate that Joel was into drugs over his ass and the case was