Session 3: Below the Bluff
A lawyer with no money, a dead coast, and a century-old page that only counts if the right hand holds the ring.
What happened#
Three of us, and a new face. Hunter had somewhere else to be, so it was Vinnie, Lux Vale, and Trash, a raccoon shaman who opens what other people lock. Hunter still gave us the ride down to the coast before peeling off, which is more than the job paid for.
The work came through Fontaine: a two o'clock meet at the community room in Virginia Avenue Park, folding chairs and a coffee urn, and across the table Delphine Ward as Ms Johnson. She is a contingency lawyer with three hundred families and no money, and what she wanted was one piece of paper: the Hollingsworth trust instrument, the thing that establishes who actually owns a strip of the Belmar coast the courts are about to decide on. Executed back in the fifties, warded, and sitting where nobody has been able to reach it since the green water came ashore in '56.
The paper was in the old Gold Coast, below the bluff, near the pier and the Incline, in the pink half of the facing pair everybody calls the Barbenheimers. The ward on the study had died along with everything else out there, which we did not know going in and were glad of coming out.
The legwork is where we earned it. Lux Vale ran down the utility maps and the plans for the block, and found the useful detail that the whole strip stopped paying taxes in '56, so nobody official has any reason to be out there. Trash lifted three city inspector uniforms, which cost us a favor to hold as our own. And we set up somewhere to be from: a rented office at 100 Wilshire, with a gynecologist's shingle out front for a Dr. Margaret Roberts who does not exist. Pulling the paper trail also put us in the empty offices of Douglas Wray, the last partner of the firm that used to hold the house, which is a dead end shaped exactly like a man who left in '56 and never came back.
Out at the house we were not alone. Last Call's salvage crew had got there first, working the pair for copper and fixtures, and they were not the problem they looked like: we wanted a filing cabinet, they wanted the plumbing, and nobody in that house was after the same thing. That is not how Vinnie played it. One of her crew, an ork named Gil, got in the way, and Vinnie picked him up and threw him clean through both of the study's wards. The wards were dead and it cost nothing. Last Call watching one of her people handled like scrap cost quite a lot, and we will hear about it.
We got the instrument, seal intact, and got it back to Ward. Then the second half: the chair. Verna Reece, the senior living descendant, has been a year on Pueblo ground out of reach of the money buying up claims, and the hearing does not count for anything unless she is in the room. We met her off the morning rail, walked her through the border hall at Union Station (twenty minutes, a stamp, done), and then earned the fee twice over on the ten miles between the station and the board, where somebody had paid a carful of professionals to make sure she never arrived. They did not get what they were paid for.
She made the session. The claims are on the record. Nobody got a house back, which Ward never promised, but the Association owns something a corporation now has to pay to make go away, and a slice of it is filed under our own names.
And on the way out, Trent Pike, the Pacific Shoreline Trust lawyer, came to find us in person one more time. Seventeen and a half each for the piece of the settlement that has our names on it. We have not answered him.
Timeline#
- The meet. Virginia Avenue Park, two o'clock. Ward lays out the job and the money, which is bad, and does not pretend otherwise.
- Legwork. 100 Wilshire and Dr. Roberts, the utility plans, the tax records, three inspector uniforms, and Douglas Wray's abandoned office.
- The house. Last Call's crew already working it. The paper in the study behind a dead ward, and Gil going through both of them the hard way.
- The delivery. Back to Ward with the instrument intact.
- The chair. Reece off the rail, through the border hall, and the ambush on the ten that came apart on the wrong people.
- The hearing. Ring to wax, entered on the record.
- After. Pike, in person, 17,500 each for the assignment. Left open.