Free The Deader the Better by G. M. Ford Page A

invite them along with the rest of the crowd.
    “You mind swinging by the Zoo on the way home?” I asked,
naming their favorite hangout. She said she didn’t and took a hard
left on Fairview.
    The Eastlake Zoo had occupied the corner of Lynn and Eastlake for
as long as I could recall. It hadn’t always been called the Zoo,
but it had always been a tavern. Fisher’s back in the forties. Then
Mac’s and then Hank’s. I remember my old man bringing me into
Hank’s and how I used to love to play the bowling machine. The one
where you slid the little shuffleboard disks at the pins and how they
folded up when you hit them. I could still hear the kaa-ching sound. That was back in the days when it was illegal to walk around
with your beer and ladies were allowed to sit only in the booths.
Back in my heyday, the seventies, it was called the In and Out. A
place where you could always find a cold beer and a good blues band
on Friday and Saturday nights. Rebecca pulled the car into a loading
zone across the street and I hustled inside. Terry the bartender was
polishing glasses behind the bar. I nodded on my way by. A dozen
people were spread throughout the gloom, a couple of pool games in
progress, a couple playing pinball, half a dozen smokers up in the
balcony. But nobody I knew.
    “Ain’t been here in a couple of weeks,” Terry shouted.
    “None of ’em,” he added. Terry had bad feet. Always walked
like he was barefoot in broken glass. He motioned me up to the far
end of the bar. “They found a crib.”
    “Really? Where?”
    He told me.
    “You’re shittin’ me,” I said.
    He held his hand over his heart. “Swear to God,” he said.
    “Stopped in last week to see for myself. Ya can’t miss it,
Leo. Gotta see it wid your own eyes.”
    “You go in?”
    “Hell no. No way in hell you get me in there.”
    We parked way up the street so’s not to blow their cover. Two
square condos. Identical and ultramodern. Brown. Built on a highly
questionable piece of ground between a freeway exit and the base of
Capitol Hill. Everybody remembers when these two started sliding down
the hill because they’d closed the whole northbound half of 1-5 for
three days while they figured out what to do next. What that did to
traffic will live in commuter infamy for years.
    Generally, any house that slides thirty feet downhill is firewood,
and anybody who has the misfortune to be inside becomes the dear
departed. What saved both the occupants and the structures was the
sheer enormity of the piece of ground that moved. The entire section
of hill upon which the structures stood, at least three acres square,
had separated from the surrounding earth as if sliced by a spade, and
slid the better part of thirty feet closer to the highway. Everything
went in one piece. The concrete sidewalks showed no cracks. Hell,
from what I could see from behind the police barrier, the shrubbery
was still alive down there. The original fear had been that any
further slippage might result in the condo’s sliding the rest of
the way down the hill and landing on the interstate. That’s why
they shut it down. After surveying the scene and crunching some
numbers, state and federal engineers, however, assured the city that
were further slippage to occur, the hill and the houses would surely
take the steeper line down the gully to the south and therefore posed
no danger whatsoever to the highway. I remember reading in the paper
that the reason the condos hadn’t been razed was because the
insurance companies were suing the county, claiming that building
permits should never have been issued for such an unstable piece of
property. The county was countersuing…yamma…yamma.
    Rebecca peered down at the square roofs and laughed out loud. “No
way I’m going down there,” she said. She held a hand to her
throat and chuckled some more.
    “I’ll either be here or in the car. Give the lads my love.”
    I had a feeling that this was going to be something worth