Dance of the Bones

After straightening my pocket square, I slipped one hand into the jacket pocket and noticed an object lurking there. As soon as I felt the contours, I recognized what it was—-my Special Homicide badge. Drawing it out of the pocket and seeing the black band still wrapped around it hit me like a ton of bricks. The last time I had worn the suit had been for Ross Connors’s funeral.

Unbidden, a whole series of images from that terrible time flashed through my waking mind just as they often do in my dreams at night. First there was the supposedly carefree December evening. There had been flurries of snow as Mel and I headed for Seattle Center intent on a much--anticipated company party that never happened. Mel and I had stood together, frozen to the ground in horrified silence, as a speeding Range Rover, driven by a pair of totally clueless bank robbers, plowed into the side of Ross Connors’s town car as his driver attempted to make a left turn off Broad into the Space Needle parking lot.

Now, alone in my bedroom, I recalled the screams of sirens as first responders converged on the awful scene. I remembered heart--stopping moments as, one by one, I realized four -people were dead. The two crooks, driving hell--bent for leather without seat belts, had both been thrown clear of their vehicle. They had died instantly.

The town car had been T--boned on the driver’s side. Racing to the vehicle, I checked on both Ross and his driver, Bill Spade, searching for pulses. There were none. The only sign of life inside the town car was in the front passenger seat where Harry Ignatius Ball, my immediate supervisor from the Special Homicide Investigation Team, sat howling in pain. His legs had been nearly severed by the sheet metal from the town car’s roof as it collapsed under the weight of a fallen utility pole.

When they hauled Harry away from the scene that night, rolling him first into the KOMO building at Fisher Plaza and then flying him by helicopter to Harborview, I was sure the man was a goner. But the docs at Harborview turned out to be miracle workers. He lost both his legs above the knee, but he lived.

In the aftermath of those events, with Ross barely cold in his grave, the newly appointed attorney general had laid waste to what had been Ross’s pet project, the Special Homicide Investigation Team. With little advance notice and less fanfare, S.H.I.T. became a thing of the past, and those of us who had worked there were out of a job.

While the rest of us were being kicked out onto the street, Harry was shut up in a hospital, first fighting for his life and later, in rehab, dealing with the grim realities of his new life as a double amputee. With nothing else to keep me occupied, I had assumed the task of fixing Harry’s Eastlake condo and turning it into a place he could use both while he was still mostly confined to a wheelchair and later—-how much later I still didn’t know—-when he would be fitted with a pair of new hi--tech legs.

The rehab job had been a complicated endeavor. While Harry bitched about his medically necessitated incarceration, I had been in charge of the Harry I. Ball Project, as we called it. Lots of -people were ready and willing to make donations, but someone had to be in charge of handling those funds and properly thanking whoever had contributed. My mother would have been proud of all my handwritten thank--you notes.