Seaweed in the Soup

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Book: Read Seaweed in the Soup for Free Online
Authors: Stanley Evans
Tags: Mystery
protuberant lower lip stopped me and asked if I had a cigarette she could borrow. I used to be a smoker and I know what the craving is like. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I gave her my loose pocket change and told her to buy herself a pack.
    My car is a 40-year-old MGB Coupe with wire wheels, steel bumpers and a 1798 cc engine. Ted, my personal cockney mechanic, had been trying to inveigle me into putting a 6-cylinder Buick Rover engine into it. I’d been balking at the price, and besides, the MG cornered like a Formula One Honda and it was already tuned to do a ton, easy. I got in and cranked it up, then let its 4-cylinder engine purr for a while before I engaged the clutch and drove myself across town to the Native Friendship Centre.
    The two young women that I wanted to talk to weren’t there. I then wandered over to the United Church soup kitchen on Quadra Street, where I asked more questions and had a free lunch. I chased down a couple of promising leads. One lead took me back across town to Joe McNaught’s Good Samaritan Mission, in Chinatown.
    If you have the right antennae and enough persistence, the street will tell you everything you need to know. But those girls were hard to find. By nine o’clock that night, I had visited most of Victoria’s shady venues and I was still coming up dry. I went to places where criminals and dopers prowl like wolves. Places where whores and tramps gather; where mobile canteens driven by unheralded volunteers serve hot baked potatoes and cups of coffee to people with lives in terminal decline. Hoping to glean a scrap of reliable information, I listened to gossipy old tarts and shiftless informers who would say anything to earn a dollar. I was no further ahead at the end of the day than when I’d started.
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    The Warrior Indian Reserve is a few minutes’ drive and a world apart from Victoria. Pedestrian traffic diminished after I crossed the Johnson Street Bridge and motored west along Esquimalt Road. A few minutes later, I was on home ground. With twilight gathering, I went slowly downhill past the longhouse and parked the MG beneath my carport.
    A silver moon was huge above the Olympic Mountains. Blue shadows gathered like fog in the distance. A couple of fishermen were on the boat jetty, mending nets. A lone night bird screeched as I walked through my fenced private garden. After pausing to inhale the mingled fragrances of dahlias and roses, I entered my cabin. My cabin is located on the beach and it’s fairly primitive by modern standards. Compared with most Native housing, however, it is palatial.
    Chief Alphonse had dictated the cabin’s exact location, and I built it with my own hands, largely out of rough lumber. I switched the light on and stood for a moment in the middle of the room, grounding myself by looking at the wooden tribal masks hanging on a side wall; my shelved books and LP records; an iron wood stove; an apartment-sized fridge; a kitchen sink with a single cold-water faucet. If I want hot water, I generally light my wood stove.
    It was too warm now to light the wood stove, so I put the electric kettle on and opened the window curtains. The evening tide had turned and now it was falling. Colby Island was a mere shadow out there in Warrior Bay, where a dozen anchored fishboats rocked in the darkness. Clarence Immet’s 26-foot wooden gillnetter had been dragged ashore, and it sat propped upright on beams of squared timber. The gillnetter had just been power-washed. Water still dripped from its hull. Tomorrow it would be dry. Then Clarence would face the dirty job of covering its bottom with antifouling paint.
    Bobby Bland is one of the few blues singers ever to rise to superstardom without being able to play a harmonica, a guitar or any other musical instrument. I put Bland’s Memphis Monday Morning record on and let his Jim Beam vocals wash over me as I looked out the window

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