Cold Crossover Read online

  Cold Crossover

  by

  T.R. Kelly

  An Ernie Creekmore Mystery

  Published by Crabman Publishing Rolling Bay, WA

  Copyright © 2020 by Tom Kelly

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods without prior written permission of the publisher. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any slight of people, places or organizations is unintentional. Book design by Alicia Dean and Kathy Wheeler. Cover design by Victoria Cooper. Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in the United States of America

  Cold Crossover, An Ernie Creekmore Mystery

  COPYRIGHT © 2020 by Crabman Publishing

  Dedication

  For Dickie – “Dickels”

  Ukuku!

  The Ernie Creekmore Series

  The Ernie Creekmore Series features a longtime high school basketball coach who calls upon his years of experience, resources and small-town logic to help his fishing buddy and the county’s chief criminal investigator solve murder mysteries. The books contain basketball and murder and much more. They are about boys and men, sons and parents, and the confusions of love when we are no longer young.

  In the first book, COLD CROSSOVER, initially published in 2012 and rewritten in 2020, Linnbert “Cheese” Oliver, a hard-luck hero in the Northwest town of North Fork, is reported missing from a late-night ferry. And for Ernie, his father figure, friend and former coach, the news hits hard. Ernie’s suffered too much loss and pain in his life—his wife, a state basketball championship, a serious medical malady—and he just can’t accept the idea that Cheese might have taken his own life. “The Cheese” was the best basketball player Ernie Creekmore coached in his nineteen years at Washington High School and the best shooter Ernie had ever seen. The unassuming great-grandson of the town’s founder, Linn Oliver could do no wrong. He was the talk of the town—until he missed the final shot in the 2000 state championship game. Working with the county’s Harvey Johnston, Ernie uses his new contacts in real estate and old hoops resources to trace Cheese’s movements. Meanwhile, hints at possible foul play turn up in pieces of North Fork’s rough-and-tumble history in fishing, logging and railroading and the past and present violently collide in a series of heart-stopping moments that peel back layers of secrets, gold and twisted family ties that refuse to stay buried.

  The second book, COLD BROKER, rewritten in 2020 and initially published as Hovering Above a Homicide in 2014, finds Ernie trying to solve the murder of a “helicopter” parent whose body is discovered in a vacant home for sale.

  The third book, COLD WONDERLAND, Ernie, from rainy North Fork, Washington is offered a golden opportunity in the Golden State to get back into his beloved game, guiding a team of elite young athletes to the prestigious Pacific Waves basketball tournament. But the beach trip quickly tips off into trouble. Some of the kids can’t handle the dark temptations of this sun-kissed paradise. Ernie can’t seem to handle his own love life. And soon he’s got his hands full trying to handle unfinished business from its past as it blasts back into his present.

  Purchase the other books in the series here:

  Cold Wonderland- Now Available: ORDER HERE

  Cold Broker - Pre-Order Now. Releasing January 26, 2021: ORDER HERE

  Praise for Cold Crossover:

  “Cold Crossover is a riveting mystery based on the drama of small-town high school basketball, complete with the missed shot no local will ever forget. Along the way, Tom Kelly takes the reader from the Northwest’s wild frontier days to its equally crazy present as a real-estate mecca. Kelly weaves the ferries, crabbers, and timber-men of his region into a timeless and page-turning tale.” —Jim Ragsdale, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  *~*

  “A long-time coach goes on a search for the best player he ever had in a mystery that will keep you reading deep into the roots of its Pacific Northwest setting.” —Danny O’Neil, ESPN

  *~*

  “Award-winning real estate writer Tom Kelly makes a terrific transition into fiction, offering a small-town hero as the center of a big-time story. Kelly clearly knows his territory, including the energy and emotions surrounding a state high-school basketball tournament. A successful merging of past and present, Cold Crossover catches some colorful characters along the way to its captivating climax.” —Alan J. Heavens, Philadelphia Inquirer

  Chapter One

  5:30 p.m., Wednesday, February 4, 1982

  If there were an all-star team for rotund rear ends, the guy with the Harley Davidson jacket hunched over the center of the bar would’ve been the captain. He was taking full advantage of the time of day when opinionated working men drink faster and talk louder before realizing that they should have been home sooner.

  “I’m tellin’ ya,” Harley said to a pair of work-booted buddies. “The frickin’ guy was the best high school basketball player I ever saw. And Lord knows I’ve seen a lot of ’em.” He offered a palms-up proposal to his partners. “Of course, if you can suggest somebody better, I’m all ears.”

  I dropped my fork and peeked around the partitions that divided the dining room from the bar at Tony’s Place. All I could see were the backs of heads, all with hair spilling out from under greasy hats atop bulky bodies in overalls. The man on Harley’s right nodded. “I saw that kid in a regional playoff. Good player, but not great. Had trouble on defense. Seemed to get lost trying to find his man. But, yeah, he could shoot it.”

  Harley scoffed and stirred his drink with a crooked index finger.

  “Heard you guys talking,” another man said, planting a cowboy boot on the brass rail beneath the bar. I leaned around two room dividers but saw only Fighting Crabs stitched across the back of his red windbreaker. “I know you aren’t from around here, but we had a player at the high school a few years back that every college in the country was after. He could score from the parking lot.”

  “Lot of kids got range,” Harley replied. “Most float around at the top of the key and just call for the ball.”

  The man in the windbreaker pointed the neck of his brown bottle at the bartender: Give me another. When he did, I recognized the two sagging chins. “This kid could do it all,” Mitchell Moore said. He stared high into a far corner. “Score, pass, defend, help ... Got free for his shots with this wicked crossover dribble. First time anybody’d seen a young white player with that kind of a move.”

  Labeled “Wide Load” for his ample middle and for the bright yellow sign that hung from his backhoe trailer, Moore was the bombastic treasurer of the Washington High School Fighting Crabs Booster Club and its vainest contributor. He spent many of his days in direct reflection of how the Crabs performed the previous evening and the cash he had won or lost wagering on games. For more than a decade, he found subtle ways of letting all of the school’s head coaches know about it. While he owned a ton of heavy equipment, including a cement mixer and a septic pump rig with the banner This Truck Sucks and a vanity license plate, SHTOGO, his most prized possession was an old league-championship wrestling trophy anchored on the mantel above the fireplace in his dumpy log home.

  The third man in Harley’s posse tossed back the remainder of his gin-and-tonic and nodded at the bartender for a refill. He rose to his feet, stretched his arms toward the ceiling, and gripped the side of the bar with both hands.

  “I know who you mean,” he said. “I heard a lot of people talk about him. Cheese somebody. Great kid who’d run through a wall for a win. Played for the Huskies for a couple of years, but his knee was gone by then ... Wasn’t he the kid who missed t
he final shot in the state tournament? Could have won it all. Heard the coach didn’t help him much, either.”

  I was no longer hungry. Outside, on Division Street, sidewalks were speckled with the glow of early streetlamps and windblown value coupons from the Skagit Valley World.

  “Best player ever to come out of this county,” Moore said. “Some people say the entire doggone state. His great-grandpa was one of the first pillars of this community. Kid got hurt and was never the same after that. Cost me a ton a dough, too. Bet the farm on the state title game, and he choked. Hell, bookies took me for a buttload of cash. Dumbshit coach also made him do too much.”

  I knew it all too well. Linnbert “Cheese” Oliver was the best athlete I ever coached in my nineteen years at Washington High in North Fork, Washington, home of The Fighting Crabs. Patient, easygoing, and humble to a fault, he did things on the basketball floor nobody else could do. He was the best shooter I ever saw. For years, I’d feared that the only thing he couldn’t do was to accept his limitations after a logging injury before his senior season. And the bar talk had merit. I could have called a timeout late in that title game and set up a better play. I felt the decision in the bottom of my gut every day since, five years later.

  The conversation reminded me that I hadn’t seen him in several weeks. I missed his energy and insight. After taking in a prep holiday tournament early in January, we hadn’t sat together in the stands and critiqued teams or shooters as we usually did.

  “Coach? Coach?” The waitress had been hovering close to my table. Curiously, my feet now felt buried in sand, and the tips of my fingers tingled. Maybe the bar talk aggravated my multiple-sclerosis symptoms. “When’s the last time you didn’t finish? Aren’t you even gonna look at the dessert menu? Skagit pear pie on there tonight ...”

  “Not tonight, Polly,” I said, embarrassed by my zone-out. “Got to get on down the road. I’m headed up to the lake tonight and don’t want to feel too heavy on the way.” I glanced at the food. “Mind putting this in a doggie bag? I know I’m going to want it sooner than I think.”

  Moments later, a voice, sounding barely old enough to be served alcohol, emanated from the far end of the bar. “I went to Washington High.” A young man with patchy facial hair pushed up the brim of his Mariners’ baseball cap.

  Several heads turned his way. “So what?” Harley winced, appearing upset that his closed circle had been breached. “Who are you? Beaver Cleaver?”

  “Played a little football till I broke my leg sophomore year,” the kid said.

  “And?” Harley said incredulously.

  “And I was two years behind Cheese Oliver in school.”

  I began to rise but sat back down and slid the doggie bag on to the chair next to me while I squinted to try to identify the speaker.

  Harley swayed on his stool. “Congratulations. I’m sure a bunch of kids were.” His gaze returned to his buddies.

  “Got a cousin in the Washington State Patrol,” the kid said. “I talked to him about thirty minutes ago.”

  Harley grinned and checked his audience. “Well, I know they weren’t lookin’ for me. I served my time. Believe me. Paid my debt to society and walked out free as a bird seven years ago.”

  After a few snickers from the bar gang, the kid said, “No, it was about last night.”

  Harley wiped his mouth on his sleeve, smacked his drink down, and swiveled his stool toward the youngster. “OK. What about last night?”

  “My cousin said the WSP had to tow Cheese Oliver’s rig off the Bremerton ferry. All of them in the office were saying he jumped off that boat in the middle of Puget Sound.”

  Chapter Two

  6:55 p.m., Wednesday, February 4, 1982

  The unfathomable possibility that Linn Oliver would leap off a ferry tore at my gut and elevated my guilt for not reaching out to him for several weeks. I left Tony’s Place and drove my sputtering truck—an ancient International Travelall my dad left me when he found a newer model to work our Yakima orchard—past the Shell station where Linn worked part-time. Finding it closed, I headed east past Skagit Valley College, then south toward Lake Wilhelmina where some dock work, a favor for an aging booster, awaited me in the morning at the Gustaffson place. It sat across the lake from the Dolan cabin I had listed for sale—and rented out in the meantime to Linn Oliver. Dolan’s had no phone. The entire lake valley relied on the payphone at the Mountain Market. As I drove I became more restless, stunned that any rumor about Linn, especially one of this magnitude, would reach a kid in a bar before me.

  Rambling past winterized, deserted cabins—Hogerty’s Hideout, Saul’s Never Done Inn, Me and Mrs. Jones, Stan’s Hog Heaven—I flip-flopped between radio stations wondering if the news of the star-crossed player had become public. Finally, I stopped at Mountain Market, and after a few calls from the payphone, I got the gist of it.

  One of my former players, now with the WSP at its Seattle headquarters, informed me that Linn’s car had been abandoned late last night aboard a Seattle-to-Bremerton ferry. The trooper said that the yellow Subaru was locked up tight, with a bloody towel on the shotgun seat. But Linn had not been located.

  I figured that Linn either forgot that he drove on the boat and then walked off with the rest of the crowd—commuters do it all the time—or he let a buddy borrow the car. The blood didn’t bother me. Knowing him as well today as I did when he was in high school, I guessed that it came from a wild elbow to the cheek during a rec-league game or a random cut suffered while working on a vehicle at his service station. Linn certainly caught his share of nicks and stitches over the years. I figured he’d turn up, embarrassed and apologetic over causing a fuss. That is, if he were even behind the wheel in the first place.

  I could see how people would look at the circumstantial evidence and conclude the worst, but that was crazy. People didn’t know Linn Oliver the way I did. Coaches often understand and influence kids on a different level. But with this young man, a part of me operated on an even higher plane. More like a father knows his son.

  It was dark and damp by the time I rolled down the driveway to Jim Dolan’s waterfront home on Sandspit Road at the far end of the lake. I’d known the property and the Dolans for decades. Last year after Labor Day, I listed the place for sale. The decision saddened the lake community. The family had owned the property for more than sixty years, and it had been headquarters for major summer shenanigans. Sadly, one of the parents had recently died in a tragic accident, and two of their four kids needed the money from the sale. When the house didn’t sell by the end of September, I suggested to the Dolans that Linn move in and watch after it in exchange for a bargain rent. Linn needed a place to live after his family’s home in North Fork sold shortly before, and his parents retired to Arizona.

  I had always known I would go to the mat for Linn. He was the type of kid a coach gets once in a career. Maybe once, period, if they were lucky. Polite and easygoing off the floor, he’d cut your balls off for a victory on it. On anything. Buckets, ping pong, girls. Didn’t matter. It pissed some people off because they didn’t expect that level of intensity from someone so nice. We often butted heads when my game plan didn’t solve the opponent’s strategy. Somehow, he knew what was coming better than I did, the ultimate court visionary and opportunist. He ran the floor like a four-star general in the Situation Room and locked down the opposition’s best player with DEFCON 1 efficiency. Score? From the parking lot. Each shot had impeccable form—eyes, shoulders, feet, and extended right arm always aimed at the basket. He mastered an imposing dribble-drive that forced his opponent to the baseline before quickly rising and squaring up to the basket. Defenders floated by.

  College scouts from every region in the country descended upon North Fork early in his sophomore season. My phone at school and home rang off the hook. Recruiters said no schoolboy—even in Indiana and Kentucky—drew more attention. I heard longtime fans and scouts compare him to Jerry West and Rick Mount.

  Even before I s
aw Linn on a basketball floor, I found him to be an attentive, interested listener, the likely result of his place as the last of four kids. His elementary school teachers considered him an old soul at a young age. He hated to waste time on information that appeared logical or already known and always seemed to be two pages ahead of everybody else. His intuition and instincts were uncanny and primary contributors to his athletic prowess, allowing him to excel at every sport he attempted. Basketball, though, held a special place in his world.

  He was the talk of the town, the unassuming great-grandson of the town’s founder. Linn Oliver could do no wrong. Then he missed the final shot in the state championship game.

  Chapter Three

  8:30 p.m., Wednesday, February 2, 1982

  The Dolans’ front porch light was out. I smirked and shook my head. That was part of my rental agreement with Linn Oliver; he was to keep at least one exterior light glowing when he was away, to provide a sense that somebody was looking after the place.

  I grabbed a flashlight for a closer look. The ground near the two-story wood-clapboard home had been busy with boots and vehicles. Cars carved deep ruts into the muddy parking area, including one distinctive pair of tracks left by a larger vehicle, perhaps a fire truck or emergency-aid car. Several different sets of footprints remained on the wet lakeside lawn leading to the dock. A green spike near the beach still held my Big River Realty sign, alerting late-season boaters that the place was for sale.

  I discovered that the porch light fixture with its half-moon frosted glass had no bulb. Kids often didn’t notice such things, and I had to tell myself that Linn Oliver was still a kid. The lockbox allowing real estate agents to show the home was still strapped to a front-porch post. I shooed away a lake otter that had gotten comfortable in a stinky nest of sticks and leaves, punched in my combination, and removed the house key.