Serpents Rising. David A. Poulsen
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much trouble. Like I said, a good kid.”
“I have a feeling the story is about to turn.”
Jill nodded. “Depression. All that great stuff going on, looked like he had it all but inside he hated himself, hated his life, even talked suicide. Doesn’t remember when it started, just remembers feeling like that as far back as junior high. His parents got him into counselling, some drug therapy. It was hit and miss. He’d go along for a while feeling okay, then it was like the world, all of it, was a real bad place to be. Then when he was in eleventh grade, his parents split and the universe seemed to crash down around him. They got back together after a couple of months, but it didn’t get Jay back to what he’d been. He started skipping, hanging out with different kids at school, badass kids, he broke up with the pretty girl, started staying out later and later. At first it was alcohol, then pot, and the downhill slide was on. A few months later he was living on the streets, doing whatever it takes to get money for the next buy.”
She’d stopped filling boxes while she talked about Jay but now she started again. With attitude, like she needed to be doing something. You wish all of them could get off the shit but there’s some, like Jay, you really …
“He told me he’d tried to kick it a few times but couldn’t. I believed him … about trying to get clean. I guess I wanted to believe him. And I know he went back home a couple of times. But it never lasted.”
“Did you see him after that, after the Christmas breakfast?”
“A couple of times, but never like that. He’d say hi but he seemed to want to keep moving. It was like he didn’t want to connect with anyone. Like he’d chosen that other life. Made the same choice so many of them make.”
Her voice had grown quieter. This was someone who had seen the dark side of this world but was not a street tough woman. What was happening around her, all the misery of these streets, got to her. That’s when I remembered she wasn’t a professional — she’d said she was a volunteer.
“And you don’t know where we might find him? Or who we could talk to who might know where he is?”
She shook her head. “Last I heard he was camped out in a park area over near the Stampede grounds. But that was in the fall. Too cold for that now. So I hope … I’m guessing he’s in a building, a house or something somewhere.”
I rolled my sleeves down, pulled on my coat. “If you should happen to run into him or hear anything, maybe you could let me know. It would really help and it is important.” I wrote my cell number on a piece of paper and handed it to her. She took it, glanced at it, stuffed it in the pocket of her jeans. “And thanks for the insights. It’s tough seeing what happens to these kids.” It was weak, but it was the best I could come up with.
She nodded again, looked up at me. “I hope you find him. And I hope you can help him.”
“So do I.” I turned and headed back out onto the street.
The cold had deepened and the wind was stronger, the combination of the two making the night still more unpleasant. I looked at my watch. I’d be a couple of minutes late getting back to the bookstore.
When I got there, Cobb was inside talking to the proprietor, showing him the picture. The guy was older, with a long grey ponytail and both arms a roadmap of tattoos. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m Kissable.” I wondered if this guy and Jackie Chow shopped at the same Value Village. He was shaking his head. Judging from the look on Cobb’s face, this was the latest in a line of similar responses.
When we were outside the store, Cobb said, “I hope you had better luck than I did.”
“Nothing?”
“With a capital N.”
I gave him the Coles Notes version of my conversation with Jill Sawley. He nodded a couple of times, then pointed a thumb back in the direction of the bookstore.
“This guy mentioned an old warehouse not far from here. Some company was supposed to turn it into lofts. When the economy softened, the company folded and the place has been sitting vacant. Mostly squatters there now.”
“Worth a try,” I said.
“My thinking exactly.”
We headed for the car, walking fast. The cold was intensifying. I was hoping Jeep made good heaters.
I didn’t have time to find out. The drive to the warehouse didn’t take long enough for the heater to generate more than cold, then merely cool, air. We were on a street that whoever built it had forgotten to finish. South of 9th Avenue a couple of blocks, then left. A sign told us it was Garry Street. Looking east, we could see that it just kind of stopped. Dead-ended up against a hill that probably shouldn’t have been there. I pictured a gaggle of 1930s engineers working on their drawings and noticing the hill after the street was started. Saying screw it and moving on to another project.
We parked under a sign that said, VEHICLES TOWED TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. I wondered why the sign was there. It wasn’t like the curb in front of the warehouse was a prime parking spot. Cobb must have thought the same thing.
We walked to the front door of the building. A faded sign above the doorway told us that this had once been the home of Mainwaring Tool and Dye. Beneath it a smaller sign, even more faded, announced “De iver es At Re r.”
We tried both sides of a set of double doors — they were either locked or had simply sealed themselves shut with years of disuse. Cobb stepped back, looked up at the front of the building. Some of the windows were gone completely, others were broken, a few were intact. I followed Cobb’s eyes to one particularly dirty but intact window. Third floor.
A man in an undershirt sat smoking and staring down at us. Cobb motioned to him that the door was locked and tried to indicate to the man that we could use his help getting in. The man behind the filthy pane of glass took a drag on the cigarette and continued looking at us. Didn’t move.
“Let’s try the back. Unless that’s a robot up there, there has to be a way into this place.”
I found myself hoping that maybe the smoker was a robot and we wouldn’t get in. To no avail. The back door was not only open, it was gone.
We stepped over broken chunks of cinder block, two-by-fours and bricks, remnants of the unfinished construction, into the building. Cobb pulled out the kind of flashlight you see in cop shows and aimed it at the hole that had once been a door.
Straight ahead was a large open area where I guessed that back in the day people did whatever you do in a tool and dye plant. To the left was a set of stairs leading up to where the lofts would have been located, had they been completed. Beyond the stairs was an elevator, the door carved, scratched, and painted with graffiti. There was a hole in the wall where the buttons for the elevator should have been.
“Think I’ll take the stairs,” Cobb said.
I followed him. We moved slowly, not because we were trying to sneak around but because the stairs appeared to have been there from the building’s first life and hadn’t received much if any attention during the short-lived renovation.
We came out on a second floor that looked and smelled like it was the building’s garbage dump and communal toilet. As Cobb directed the beam of light first left, then right, I stared down at the mounds of garbage and human filth.
“How is something like this not condemned?”
Cobb didn’t answer. I was hoping he wouldn’t suggest we try to navigate our way through the refuse and he didn’t, opting instead to follow the stairs up to the next floor.
When we reached the top of the stairs we entered a narrow, dark hall that led off in both directions, like the hallway in a hotel. And like a hotel, doors stood on both sides at regular intervals leading into who knew what. My guess was that this part of the renovation had begun and what were to be lofts had at least been framed in.
A small generator hummed away about halfway down the hall