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

seeing,
but Rebecca Duvall wasn’t the type of person one talked into or out
of anything, so I didn’t bother trying. I said I’d tender her
regards to the troops and set about looking for how it was they got
down there. Two things I knew for sure. First, the path wouldn’t be
hard to find. Stealth required just a bit too much attention to
detail for this group. Second, it would not be hard to negotiate.
These guys got way too drunk for anything even remotely athletic. If
they could get there, Stephen Hawking could get there.
    It was like I figured. A hundred yards up the sidewalk, I stepped
over the cable guardrail onto a dirt path that meandered along the
top of the freeway wall. Nice and wide. Chain-link fence to hold on
to. Following the contour of the land downward until, eventually, I
took a right through a grove of scrub oak and stepped onto the lawn
of the nearest condo. Fine, unless you turned and looked back at the
hill, where a wall of mud loomed overhead like a cresting brown tidal
wave. I made a mental note not to look in that direction and started
across the patch of grass separating me from the porch.
    From the street above, the structures appeared to be sitting more
or less on the level. From here it was obvious that they sloped away
from the hill at a fairly substantial angle. I walked gingerly toward
the door. I knocked hard. Silence.
    “Shhhhhhhhhhhh,” I heard. “Shhhhhhhhhh.” Then the sound of
feet. I knocked harder and longer.
    “Open up. It’s Leo,” I said. More scuffling feet and then a
watery red eye at the peephole. A full thirty seconds of fumbling
before the door finally swung open. Ralph Batista had once mustered
the longshoreman vote for my old man. Pound for pound he was the
biggest lush of the lot and could, in any given day, put away more
booze than anyone I’d ever met. He was full-scale hammered and
having trouble with the slope, weaving and sliding back along the
incline until his grip on the doorknob jerked him to a stop. “Leo,”
he slurred. “Whatcha…Hey hey hey…”
    I checked my watch. Bad timing. Three-thirty-five. I’d caught
them at the low point in their drinking day. Especially if they had a
crib. Having a crib completely changed their drinking habits. While
the average citizen would relish being able to sleep dry and warm,
the boys saw the windfall in totally different terms. To them, having
a place meant they didn’t have to drink in bars, which, in turn,
meant that the price of booze went radically down, which likewise
meant they could drink even more than usual. Not only that, but a
crib meant a place where they could pass out whenever they wanted
without risking waking up at either the King County Jail or the Union
Gospel Mission. Yeah, three-thirty was just about nap time for this
crew.
    I kept one hand on the wall as I stepped inside. The floor listed
forward at a twenty-degree angle. I kept my butt back and my steps
short as I worked my way past Ralph and tottered into the living
room. The place was completely furnished. It hadn’t occurred to me,
but I guess if your house slides thirty feet down a hill with you in
it, you don’t call Bekins to come back for your furniture. You just
take the insurance money and thank the fates. At the far end of the
room, a striped mattress had been thrown up against the double glass
sliding doors. Kind of a safety barrier, I guessed. In case a guy
worked up a head of steam on his way across the room and couldn’t
stop. Billy Bob Fung and Big Frank sat on the floor leaning back
against the mattress, chins on chests and a bottle of gin on the
carpet between them. In the high-rent district along the left wall,
everybody had his own bottle. Gravity had pushed Norman, Harold and
George down to the low end of a black leather sofa, where they sat
pressed together hip to hip, heads loll ing. In front of the sofa, a
rosewood coffee table with a glass top. They’d nailed a two-by-four
to the floor at the far end to keep it