Authors: John Lescroart
“I hate to say this, Inspector,” Hardy said. “But the man’s been known to lie. Sure. Anytime. Good luck.”
The lab tests from the Terry/Wills crime scene indicated that the stuff on the shoe in Terry’s closet closely matched the gunk Thieu had collected at the Creed scene the day before—brake fluid, animal fats, peanuts and pepper flakes, no doubt from Kung Pao chicken.
Thieu was at his desk comparing the written transcription of a taped recording of one of his witness’s interviews to the tape itself. While Russell was on the phone with Holiday’s lawyer, trying to track the suspect down, Cuneo read over the lab report on the shoe and decided to thank the veteran inspector and to share the good news with him. “Pretty cool, huh?”
Thieu put the report down. “That’s enough matches for me. It’s the same stuff, all right. Nice work. And I see you found more evidence at Holiday’s place.”
“It’s been a lucky couple of days,” Cuneo said.
“If you believe in luck.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing, really. It’s just so rare when things fall together so well.”
“I said the same thing to Gerson, but what am I supposed to do, look a gift horse in the mouth? This is about as solid as it gets.”
Thieu made no comment to that. He had put down the transcript and his pencil. Now he took off his earphones and hooked them around his neck. He looked piercingly at Cuneo. “After I left the Terry/Wills scene yesterday, did you find anything that put Holiday there?”
“Not directly, no. But later in the day we did find money and jewelry from Silverman’s at his place.”
Thieu acknowledged that with a nod. “I heard about that. But no bloody clothes or shoes? Anything tying him directly to Terry and Wills? There was an awful lot of blood.”
“He hadn’t been back there, where he lived. There were three or four days’ worth of newspapers down on his stoop.”
“Ah, that would explain it then.”
“Maybe he slept in his bar, I don’t know. Or he’s shacked up with somebody.” Cuneo had pulled a chair around and was straddling it backward. He started tapping a beat with his fingers. “But that’s a good call. We’ll check the dumpsters and alleys between the Ark and Terry’s.”
“You can’t ever have too much, I don’t believe.” Thieu leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his middle. Then he smiled politely and, wishing Cuneo luck again, said he had to get back to his editing.
H
oliday’s phone call did not come one hour later as Hardy had suggested, so he had filled his increasingly wide-open morning with visits downstairs to less-than-enthusiastic associates and calls to his deposition witnesses in the Panos suit. He needed to bring them up to date on Freeman’s condition and rearrange his calendar so that they could get back on some kind of schedule by, say, the middle of next week. If David still wasn’t up to appearing, then Hardy would try to go it alone, or with minimal help, for a while.
It galled him, but he knew he might have to revisit the question of Kroll’s settlement offer—four million was starting to look pretty good to him about now. But whether that or any offer was still on the table was uncertain. Hardy himself had already billed something in the order of three hundred hours to the matter in the past four months and now stood to lose all of that time and money if he couldn’t make some magic in the relatively short term. So he talked to clients and filled time.
Three full hours after Holiday had ducked out of his office, his call-waiting signal went off. In his mind, by now he had just about come to the conclusion that Inspector Russell had staked out his office after all and that John had been arrested leaving it. And that after he was processed, Hardy would get the phone call.
He asked the client to hold a second, connected to the other line.
No hello, no identification of any kind. Just the words, “Big Dick,” repeated twice. Then a dead line.
After he finished talking to the client, Hardy hung up and stared into the empty space between his desk and his dartboard.
The voice had been Holiday’s, and he had obviously formed the impression that Hardy’s phone might be tapped. Hardy reflected that he also thought someone might kill him in jail. He might have found this paranoia amusing if he had any patience left.
Hardy thought about it for another thirty or forty seconds, then stood, threw the last two of Holiday’s morning darts into his board—two elevens—and walked out, making sure the door was locked behind him. In the lobby, some semblance of normalcy had returned. Phyllis had returned to reception and her presence was somehow reassuring. One of the associates sat with a client, visible through the glass walls of the Solarium. Norma’s door was open and he saw her at her desk, talking on the telephone. Above all, a slight but audible hum permeated the open space. People were here, trying to carry on.
Okay, he thought. Okay.
When Hardy pulled his car out of the garage, he saw that the day had become overcast again. Gray, with hovering wisps and banks of fog that he drove into and out of as he fought the noon traffic. He decided that the first thing he would do when he got to Holiday was have the billing conversation. Friends or no friends, he was going to get a retainer up front before doing any work for John Holiday. He couldn’t afford to work for free anymore. He was going to charge his top defense fee and three times that for every minute he spent in the courtroom. Holiday could sell his bar or his duplex to cover his costs for all Hardy cared. He was done with charity.
Fortunately, the phrase “Big Dick” meant something to Hardy besides the standard reading—it was Holiday’s name for Coit Tower, the phallic landmark and vista point at the apex of Telegraph Hill. Hardy had worked himself up to a fine fettle by the time he serpentined up the winding streets and reached the parking lot. This spot with its mounted binoculars all along its retaining wall, was premier sightseeing turf—Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito and the Marin headlands, seemingly a stone’s throw across the Bay.
At this time of day, normally the lot was cluttered with vacationers and tourist buses. But as Hardy pulled into one of the parking spaces and opened his car door—he’d had his windshield wipers going from halfway up the hill—he marveled at the sense of desertion. The place was wrapped in a thick, bone-chilling gauze of cloud and drizzle. He could barely make out the tower itself, looming there right behind him. He was completely alone up here today, his car the only one in the lot.
Leave it to Holiday, he thought. Why couldn’t they meet at some restaurant, or even his new girlfriend’s house? Hell, anyplace else would be more convenient and comfortable than here. But of course, Holiday hadn’t given Hardy any chance to argue, or suggest an alternative.
And now there was no sight of him here, either. Hardy looked again back toward the tower, out over the low retaining wall into the empty fog. “John!” he yelled into the nothingness. He walked halfway through the lot, into the very middle of it, toward the tower. He called out again. Turned. Waited. Cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, John! Ollie, ollie oxen free!”
“I haven’t heard that in forever.”
“Jesus Christ!” When Hardy landed, he whirled around and found himself facing Holiday, who stood a foot in front of him, grinning. “Where did you just come from?”
“Right here. Did I scare you? I did, didn’t I?”
“No. I always levitate when the fog’s in.” Hardy put his hand over his heart. “God!”
“A little jolt like that’s good for you. Clears the arteries.”
“Well, they’re clear then. Now all I’ve got to do is start breathing again.” He looked all around. “Great place you picked here. Especially today. Why don’t we get in my car before we freeze to death? You make any decision?”
They started moving. “About what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about . . . ?”
Hardy paused as out of the corner of his eye he noticed a gray sedan pulling slowly into the lot maybe fifty or sixty feet off to his right. The driver-side window, all the way down, possibly gave him some subliminal sense that something was not right, and he instinctively grabbed Holiday’s arm just above the elbow. “What?”
Before he could answer, the car suddenly accelerated and turned hard to its left, exposing them to the passenger-side window, from which an arm protruded . . .
Hardy could be wrong and look like a fool, or they could both be dead in two seconds. It wasn’t a hard choice. “Down! Get down!” he yelled.
Hardy crouched and pushed Holiday away, then hit the pavement rolling himself as two quick shots, then two more, exploded behind him.
He rolled again and came up, running and stumbling—his dress shoes slipping on the wet surface under him—toward the protection of the retaining wall. Behind him, tires screeched. Two more shots, deafening, in rapid succession.
The low wall directly in front of him pinged with a ricochet. He saw the gray mist of a shatter of concrete, felt a scratch across his cheek. Had the bullet hit him?
But he was still moving; he had to keep moving forward.
And then he was over the wall, rolling and sliding steeply downhill under the canopy of low evergreen and bramble.
The thick trunk of an ancient cypress stopped his free fall and knocked the breath out of him, a murderous blow high on his ribs under his arm. But he didn’t stop.
Were they still up there? Had he heard another peal of rubber? Did it mean the car was gone?
Whatever, he was still exposed.
Forcing himself to roll, he half collapsed into the fall line of the slope and didn’t come to rest again until he was within a first down of Lombard Street, still within the tree-line, sheltered from below and hidden from above.
He couldn’t move, never wanted to move again. His ribs. Was he shot? In shock?
The silence all around him was complete, the fog enveloping but now not cold. He was sweating heavily. His breath came in gasps. The pain from his broken left finger kicked in again. Agony.
He squeezed at the skin around his mouth, took his hand away, and saw blood. He rubbed at his cheek—a faint sting, a smear of red.
Suddenly aware of movement behind him and to his right up the slope, he turned and saw Holiday traversing, half sliding toward him. But he was moving smoothly, quickly, unhurt. He was with Hardy in seconds.
“Diz? You all right?”
Hardy tried a deep breath. His ribs hurt, but he could breathe. He definitely wasn’t shot. The scratch on his cheek—he’d done worse damage shaving.
Then they were both on their feet, dusting themselves off, checking back up the hill. A car passed below them on Lombard and they both froze until they saw it was a large white SUV, nothing like the gray sedan. For a moment, neither man could find anything to say.
The right arm of Hardy’s suit coat hung by a thread and he shrugged himself out of it and rolled it into a ball. Under it, his shirt, too, was badly ripped at the sleeve.
Holiday reached over and flicked at the tear. “I’ve got to get myself a real lawyer. Clothes make the man, Diz,” he said. “You look like absolute shit.”
From a certain point, there was only one way up or down Telegraph Hill, and deciding they didn’t like the odds of taking the only street up, where their assailants might still be lurking, they made it back to the retaining wall uphill through the trees and brush. Hardy’s car was still the only one parked in the lot, right there ten feet away. Crouching, he got to the door and opened it, got his cell phone, made it back behind the retaining wall. He and Holiday moved a few yards back down the slope where they could still see any activity within the lot. But there was none.
“Okay, you’ve got your phone. Now what?”
“Now I call the police.”
“I don’t think so. Not while I’m here.”
“So you go. But I’m reporting this.”
“Why? What are you going to say?”
“I’m going to tell them what happened.”
“And then what? They’re going to investigate? They’re going to find something you don’t already know? And thank you for it?”
“I don’t know, John. What do I already know?”
“You know somebody followed you here and tried to kill us. Your pal Freeman’s in the hospital. Put it together. It’s Panos.”
“I’m not arguing with you, John. I’m telling you the cops need to know it, too.”
“And then they’ll move right on it?”
“That’s the theory.”
Holiday shook his head. “Man. You’re hopeless.”
Twenty-five long minutes passed before the patrol car showed up.
In that time, two tour buses had pulled up into the center of the lot, the exact spot where Holiday had surprised Hardy. Additionally, several cars had arrived and parked willy-nilly all around. It had turned, Hardy was thinking, into a goddamned tourist extravaganza. A fitful breeze had blown off the worst of the fog, revealing the usual stunning panorama. A knot of Japanese tourists in overcoats had gathered at the retaining wall where the bullet had chipped it near the front of Hardy’s car. They were enthusiastically sharing the mounted pay binoculars and exclaiming over the view.
Hardy didn’t even see it. His ribs throbbed. He’d turned the car’s heater on so he was no longer cold, but he was still shaking.
As he opened his door and raised his hand to call the black-and-white car over, he was struck with a sense of the surreal nature of the whole afternoon, of what he’d gone through, of what he was doing now.
When he’d first returned from Vietnam, before he’d gone to law school, Hardy had been a cop, walking a beat with Abe Glitsky. He liked cops, empathized with them, generally understood their concerns, prejudices, methods. And now here were two more, twin tight ends named Jakes and Warren, and at a glance very much like the men from the other night with his windshield in North Beach—hardworking, sincere, dedicated—and most importantly, living every day in the line of fire, which tended to breed a certain defensiveness, even cynicism.
They pulled over and parked in the space next to him, got out of their car together, expressed their concern over Hardy’s appearance, asked him if he needed medical attention, which he declined. Finally, Officer Warren took out a pad of paper, and the interview began.