Cement Shoes

It was when I first moved to the Seattle area, that the story was told to me.
It seems like it was lifetime ago. And it was.
It was a previous lifetime of mine... back when I was a writer... not a P.I.

Back then, we were shooting one of the marketing videos or films I wrote for a living.
The opening scene was the Seattle Waterfront, looking from the east to the west... across the busy Puget Sound. The camera followed a car ferry coming towards us, delivering its occupants from Bainbridge Island to the Seattle Pier.

The director yelled, "Cut!"

The shot obtained, it was time to break -- to add talent/actors to the scene. To set the new stage. And so we sat in that chatty limbo-land between shots.

The cameraman and I were alone and we talked of everything everyone talks of to pass the time.
A helicopter approached from a distance. Our conversation stopped as we both squinted and watched it come closer.

It could be anything, a military chopper, a traffic chopper, a rich man's chariot. Then we saw it was an medical airlift, a flying ambulance.

"You can be sure whoever's on that helicopter is hurting big-time," the camera man said to me,
"It's headed right for Harborview."

Harborview is the largest and in my opinion, best trauma center in the Pacific Northwest.
One of the best anywhere.
Yesterday, I saw a client there who'd been hurt in an accident. Multiple limbs broken, head, back injuries. And that's just the beginning. It gets worse. He was on a morphine pump when I saw him, had been in the hospital a few days and he was 100% lucid and pain free.

"Damndest thing," he said, "when you really are hurt and you're on pain meds, they take the pain away without making you high."

I said, I was of the opinion, that's the purpose of morphine and other pain meds.
When you are truly hurt and in need of them, pain meds don't make you high.
They make you stop hurting and you feel somewhat normal -- so people facing a lifetime of pain from a chronic injury can have some semblance of a real life.
For people who are really hurt, sometimes only pain meds can quiet screaming, chronic, unrelenting physical pain.

The client I spoke to yesterday had a broken body, yet was 100% coherent and pain free because of the pain meds. It's the people who aren't in real physical pain and take pain pills to get high who ruin it for those it chronic pain.

The challenge of the doctors prescribing pain meds is to make a distinction between "drug seeking behavior" and "real pain". It's become such a problem to draw that line, the distinction has led to pain management specialists popping up all over the country.

So I left Harborview yesterday... left a broken man in his bed... walked through the lobby filled with people of every human color and nationality, some in casual clothes, some in native robes.

I consider Harborview scared grounds every time I walk through there. It's filled with patients in the worst of shape and families trying to deal with it all. It's where many lives converge, heal and end. And it is staffed by the best doctors, nurses, techs, staff, I have ever seen.

"Harborview is a city of crisis," I thought, as I exited the humanity-filled lobby and stepped outside. I moved through the police-protected crosswalk where cars, cabulances and ambulances drop off and pick up patients.

A helicopter descended to my left on a landing strip right near the parking area. I stopped and watched the copter land, the med team emerged, then the patient appeared, strapped to the wood board, tubes dangling.

The blades were so loud, the only thing separating us was a metal fence I and others looked through. I looked for a while, then turned away. I still heard the chopper's blades in my head after entered the parking garage and walked to my car, which faced the Seattle waterfront.
As I got in the front seat of my car, I realized the view was the same one our film crew camera had looked at so many years ago, when I wasn't at Harborview on a case.

So I bring you back to that point on the Seattle waterfront where this story began, many moons ago.

Back before I was an investigator. When I was writer who'd come to Seattle from Lost Angeles.
If you recall... I was talking to the cameraman while a shot was being staged on the Seattle Waterfront and we were looking from east to west. We were on the Seattle side, facing West Seattle, and the waters and islands beyond it. We watched a medical helicopter overhead. The cameraman told me the chopper was heading to Harborview.

And then, he told me me something else.

"I got this buddy, he's also a camera guy," he said.
"And one day my buddy was on the waterfront, just him and his lady. He had a still camera and black and white film with him. He just bought this killer zoom lens and he wanted to play with it, try it out"

"So while he was shooting over there," the cameraman pointed, "he heard a plane, then saw it, in the distance. It was much further out over the Sound, but my friend's zoom lens could pull it right into view."

"As my friend looked at the plane through the camera lens," , the cameraman continued, "he noticed the side door of the small plane was open. Then he saw something drop from the plane. He couldn't make it out, it was vertical with a base. He shot the object steadily as it fell and then, took the film to the lab in his garage."

"When he developed the black and white film and looked really close at it," the cameraman said, with a pause for effect "it was guy! A man in a suit being dropped from the plane in cement shoes!"

It took me a few seconds to absorb the info and understand what it meant. I asked the next obvious question.
"And then what happened?"

"What happened," the cameraman replied, "is my buddy called the FBI. The FBI came out, interviewed my buddy and his missus, They looked at the pictures... didn't say a word... just took them and the film. My buddy was so pissed but was told he had no choice. You don't argue with the FBI."

I pondered the story long and hard in my head before I spoke,
"This is an urban legend right?" I asked the cameraman.
"No, it's not. He was my friend and I swear to God that's what he told me."

It's a story I never forgot and I remembered it again yesterday in my car in the Harborview parking garage as I looked through the metal screen that separated the concrete floor of the parking garage from a big drop to the ground.

I thought of the client I just left, broken, battered in his bed.
And I thought of the guy in the plane, his feet covered in cement and dropped directly into the Puget Sound. I was pretty certain he had no pain pills or tranquilizers to numb whatever he had been through and knew he faced. He knew there was no way out. How do you process that, I wondered?

We live many lives in our individual lifetimes. Yesterday in the garage my two lifetimes converged in a single story I share with you today before heading out on my rounds.

I never looked further into the case of the man in the cement shoes.
I don't know if it's a true story or not.
However, I trust the guy who told the story and I know these things happen.

I also know one other thing.
This P.I. will never wear cement shoes.