Hard Cold Winter by Glen Erik Hamilton Page A

“Kend told me you were his go-to wheels right now.”
    “Hey, you know Kend?” Selbey’s face fell. “I heard on the news. He was a cool guy.”
    “He said you were solid, too. That’s why I called.” I found myself imitating Selbey’s parrot-like head bob.
    “Yeah? That’s all right. I liked him.”
    “I’m trying to let people know. Like maybe have a gathering or something. For his tribe.”
    Selbey gave me a big grin in the rearview mirror. The Forester drifted a little out of its lane. “That’s very cool of you, man.”
    “Problem is, some of his friends, I just know their first names or nicknames from Kend. No phone numbers. It would help me out if you could tell me where he’d been going. So I can get in touch with them.”
    “Uh. Hey, I’m just allowed to drive people where they send me, you know. I can’t just go anywhere.”
    “It’s cool.” I laid two bills, a twenty and a hundred, across the shoulder of the passenger seat. Held them there with my hand. “So you take me to the Market, and Faregame gets the twenty bucks and we’re done with them. Then you can do whatever you want. Free country, man.”
    Selbey’s eyes were working triple-time, between me in the rearview and the money and the traffic down Olive. “I suppose it’s okay to drive you someplace myself.”
    “Car payments are steep. You show me the list of the places he went. I pick one, and we’ll go there.”
    He couldn’t hand me his phone fast enough. “Under the spreadsheet app. That logs all my rides.”
    It was easy enough to sort by Kend’s name. He had taken forty or fifty rides during the past month with Selbey. I scrolled through and used my phone to photograph the whole list. A lot of the destinationswere obvious—his apartment, downtown at the Columbia Center and the HDC offices, his neighborhood in Lower Queen Anne.
    One location stood out, in the southwest part of the city, almost to Burien. Kend had made at least ten visits to it. Two during the daytime, the rest in early evening.
    “What’s this one?” I said, showing it to Selbey. He was busy running the yellow light through Pine Street and waited until traffic had stopped us to look.
    “Yeah, that’s the long trip. Twenty-five bucks from his house. It’s just a building, man. I figured he worked at the place part-time. Here we are.” He stopped the car in the middle of the brick road at the Market, and took back the phone to press a couple of buttons. I signed off on the ride. A car pulled up behind us and honked.
    “Take me there,” I said.
    “You sure you know Kend, man?” Frowning wasn’t a natural expression for Selbey, but he gave it a shot. The car behind us backed him up by laying on the horn.
    “You ever meet Elana? How hot was she?” I said.
    “ So hot,” Selbey said, unable to keep from laughing.
    “Help us out,” I said.
    Selbey popped the Forester into gear and we zoomed off as the car behind us stalled, still honking.
    THE ADDRESS FROM KEND’S phone turned out to be a brown brick-and-cinder office building. It had seen better decades. The front wall showed as many FOR LEASE signs as iron-barred windows. Selbey dropped me at what he said was the same spot where Kend had gotten out of the car on every visit. We exchanged fist bumps and the two bills and he zoomed away, probably happy to be out of the neighborhood.
    I was the only person visible on the street. The eroded brickwork showed a lot of very old graffiti. The four-story building wasn’t even interesting enough to be tagged anymore. Besides a couple of homelessguys sitting across the road from the back half, the block was just as lonesome all the way around. What the hell was Kend Haymes doing here?
    Then the dreary anonymity of the office building struck a familiar note. I’d never been there before. But I had visited another location a whole lot like it, and recently.
    On my way back to the front entrance I spotted the satellite dishes. Two of them, up near the