by Seth Harwood
The man in the yard raises the gun and its long silencer, and shoots three times through the right-side windows of the door. What he’s shooting at, Jack has no idea, probably his own reflection. Shards of glass fall onto Jack’s back, and he covers his head with his hands, hoping he won’t hear another shot.
After a moment, he looks up and sees the three sets of metal locks at the top, the handle, and the bottom of the door, and goes to slide the first one. To his surprise, it’s already open. He tries to remember if he locked it, but he hasn’t thought about doing that since he left for his road trip with the Czechs. Or maybe his bed-burner left it unlocked.
He gathers himself into a four-point stance, his arms straight down from his shoulders, hands on the floor, and his legs bent behind him, resting on the balls of his feet.
He focuses on the shooter’s knees, hoping the man is still looking at his own reflection. The shooter steps forward, oblivious to the crunching sound from the wood chips in the yard. And that’s when Jack goes. He jams his body forward, his legs straight then pumping, arms shielding his face as he hits the patio doors’ wooden center with both forearms. He blasts the doors open, shooting his body out onto the short wooden porch, and in the next moment he’s in the yard going headfirst for the intruder’s knees.
Like a quarterback evading the blitz at the last second, the shooter tries to shuffle to his side, but Jack grabs him around both thighs with an arm and a shoulder and drives him down hard onto his back.
The gun goes off, its silencer lisping into the night. The guy chops at Jack around the shoulder, grazing his ear with the butt of the gun, and then Jack feels the hard gunstock bounce off the back of his neck. Jack tries for a better hold on his attacker’s legs, and the guy scrambles backward, turning and crawling on all fours for a few yards before he straightens up into a run, just as Jack is standing, uncomfortable in his socks on the wood chips.
In a moment, the guy’s gone. Jack hears the sound of feet going faster than he can run in his socks, tearing out away from the yard in the dark along the side of his house.
“Fuck,” he says, shaking the dirt and chips off. He scrambles back across the deck and into the living room, vaults the couch, and rushes to the side door.
In the darkness, from his side porch, Jack can hear feet pounding down the driveway. Then he sees the shooter under the streetlight more than thirty feet away: a man with light brown hair and a medium build, running down the last five feet of the driveway into the street to a new yellow Mustang retro redo, its backside as recognizable as anything on the road—pushed into the air like a lonely whore’s.
The shooter takes a last look back and then hurries into the car. Jack wants to yell something after him. A threat? Something. But he doesn’t. As the car starts up, a puff of exhaust comes from the center of the bumper, and then, in a flash of taillights and peeling rubber, it’s gone. Jack hasn’t even made it off the porch. He momentarily considers chasing the car down on his Ducati, but shirtless and without shoes he wouldn’t get far.
Maybe he should start sleeping with his shoes on, Jack thinks. That, or start sleeping somewhere else.
2
Back inside, Jack checks the patio doors: nothing broken but the glass. He was sloppy, coming home and not checking on something as obvious as whether the doors were locked—especially when he’d come home to a note from a cop on the table—the second disturbing item—and his bed burned to the ground.
He’s lucky the guy didn’t just walk in and kill him in his sleep. Jack slinks back to the couch and sits down, lights a cigarette to try to relax.
At six-thirty, he gives up on sleeping. He’s had two cups of coffee and the only thing left is to put himself in the shower. So he does.
He dresses in a pair of dark linen pants, the ones he’d wear if he were in L.A. for a lunch meeting, and a striped button-down shirt, clothes good enough to make the rest of him—the grown-out hair and the motorcycle tan—look respectable. He runs a brush through his hair, even adds some old leave-in conditioner that he finds under the sink. The effect is a shaggy Pat Riley: his hair brushed back and barely under control, eager to blast out on its own.
By seven-thirty he’s in the Mustang Fastback, a vintage ’66 K-code, listening to it idle in the garage. He’s inspected the monster under the hood, and now he revs the engine to hear its roar, to see if the old car did okay by itself these past six weeks. It sounds just fine—as angry and aggressive as ever.
The Fastback is still in mint condition except for the three bullet holes along the left side: two in the back panel and one in the door. As Jack eases out of the driveway, he looks down at the seat next to him where he’s tossed the note from Sergeant Mills Hopkins, his old friend on the San Francisco police force.
Jack’s across the Golden Gate Bridge in time to get caught in the worst of the morning traffic. He takes his cell phone out of the glove box and turns it on. Six weeks and he hasn’t missed it. It starts beeping right away, telling him he’s got new voice messages. He turns it off, tucks it under his seat.
He weaves his way through the Presidio, goes down Lombard, and takes Van Ness toward Bryant and the Hall of Justice. He finds a place to park and feeds some quarters into the meter. They’ve got the metal detector routine going so hardcore at the entrance that Jack has to remove even his belt to get in. On the fifth floor, he walks down a familiar hall to see the same receptionist sitting at the same desk. This time she doesn’t even ask Jack who he’s here to see.
“Mr. Palms,” she says. “The sergeant will be glad to see you.” She points Jack straight back toward Hopkins’s office. “Do you think you could…” She holds out a small black notebook, open to a blank page, and extends a pen. She thanks him as he signs, tells him she “loved him” in Shake ’Em Down.
Jack angles his way through the desks in the big squad room, drawing a stare from one of the cops who’s in this early, and heads back to a small, separate room. The door reads sgt. mills hopkins. Jack knocks twice.
Hopkins barks.
Jack opens the door and there’s Sgt. Hopkins sitting behind his desk, a phone at his ear and a yellow legal pad in front of him. His desk is littered with stacks of paper and behind him is the same big wall of postings that was here the last time Jack paid a visit. Hopkins wears a checked shirt, tight around his gut, and has grown a mustache.
“Call you back.” Hopkins hangs up the phone and stands to greet Jack, a heavy movement that creaks both his desk and his chair. “Jack motherfucking Palms,” he says, extending his hand. “The big movie star. Glad you could bring your ass in.”
“Glad to see you grew out the ’stache. They give you your last merit badge for that thing?”
Jack reaches to shake Hopkins’s hand, not sure he really wants to, and at the last moment, Hopkins reaches out to slap him. He moves like a big cat—a lot faster than you’d expect—and Jack manages only a partial dodge. The slap lands square on his neck.
Hopkins breaks into a smile.
“Yeah, Jack. It’s almost good to see you.” Hopkins sits down, looks over the materials on his desk, and flips to a new page on his yellow legal pad. His face goes cold. “Hell of a day for you to make your appearance, though. Hell of a day.”
“How about we start with why you’d break into my house to leave a note on my kitchen table—”
“Try locking your doors, asshole. Your back door was unlocked, so I went in. You answer your phone, it saves me the trip.”
“I’ll try to remember that. Whatever I can do to keep you out of my life.”
Hopkins nods. He takes a freshly sharpened pencil out of the can on his desk. “Let’s get to that in a minute, okay? Truth is, this day is fucked up and it connects to you. Not even nine-thirty and it’s fucked beyond saving. Not good for the Hall.”
“Try me. I’ve been up since three when someone shot at me.”
Hopkins closes his eyes and then opens them and regards Jack. It’s the first time Jack’s ever seen him loo
k like he cares. He makes a pronounced gesture of looking around the room, finishes by raising his eyebrows and tugging an ear lobe. It’s either a sign for Jack to steal second or to be careful because others might be listening.
Jack nods.
“One of our own turned up dead this morning. They’re saying he offed himself in his car. Found him parked at the mall in Walnut Creek.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack says, “but—”
Hopkins holds up his hand to cut Jack off. “And it gets worse.” He looks down as he says the next part. “A sixteen-year-old girl was found in his backseat. Hands tied, naked, marks on her legs like she’d been tortured.”
Hopkins waves his hand over the desk as if he’s trying to get rid of a bad smell. “She was dead.” Now he looks up at Jack. “You want to tell that to the guy’s wife? The mother of his kids? Think that’s a good call? How about calling the girl’s parents?”
Jack waits for what’s next.
“Thank Christ I didn’t have to call them.”
Jack looks at the surface of the desk. The faster he gets out of here, the better. “Let’s get to why you wanted to see me.”
Hopkins’s nostrils go big as he takes a hard breath for a two-count, and then a new look comes over his face: calmer, if only by a little.
“He was what I wanted to discuss with you. Our dead cop is the guy you fingered from that mess at the Coast, the cop with Tony Vitelli and the Russians.”
“O’Malley.” Jack still remembers the name from when Vitelli introduced them. “So it’s a bad cop going out with the trash. Who cares?”
Hopkins gives a short laugh and shakes his head. “You know, Jack, it should be that easy. But a couple of things are more complicated here. There’s more we need to discuss.”
“So discuss.”
Hopkins frowns, looks around the office again. “I been looking hard at O’Malley since you dropped the dime, back before your little vacation.” He waves his index finger around in a circle, as if he’s swirling a cheap drink. “We brought in that bald Russian, did our best to pin a case on him, but he walked. Motherfucker lawyered up like a politician and skated on illegal duress. Know why?” Hopkins smiles a big fake smile.
“Maybe I had a little something to do with it.”
“Ah, yeah. But I watched O’Malley, and nothing came out right. He’s been working something—something big. A stakeout in North Beach that involves some hinky shit.”
“Hinky?”
“Like the girl in his backseat. But also a special direct line to the commissioner. I can’t even get a straight answer on what he was really working.”
A knock comes from Hopkins’s door, and Jack can see the silhouette of a big cop through the smoked glass. Hopkins makes a face. “Come in!”
A stocky Asian with a blue shirt and tie pushes his head into the office. He’s got his hair spiked on top and shaved on the sides. On the side of his neck, Jack can see a few wisps of hair flaring out. He eyes Jack as if he’s putting some pieces together, figuring things out. “Meeting in ten,” he says.
Hopkins tells him he’ll be there, and the other cop closes the door.
“Morning meeting, Jack. Today’s going to be a live one. On top of all this, we got Walnut Creek saying it’s their case.”
Jack turns to the door again, checking the glass for shadows. “Why’d he look at me like that?”
“Matsumoto?” Hopkins raises his eyebrows, then his shoulders. “That one’s on you, pal.”
“How about his hair? Can you explain that mullet?”
“Not that either.” He frowns. “People are going to be pissed at this meeting. Can you imagine trying to keep this story out of the press?”
“But they’re your old friends, aren’t they?”
Hopkins shoots Jack a hard look. “Even if I could have enjoyed the story they did on you and the mess you made of your marriage and your acting career, there was nothing I could have done to stop them if I tried. Fact is, Jack, you created that whole damn mess by yourself. You and your lovely ex-wife. At some point, you’re going to have to accept that.”
Jack bites his lip. Part of him knows the cop is right.
“What I’m saying—” Hopkins puts his finger to his legal pad. “We have to talk about this later. Where can I find you this afternoon?” Hopkins stands up and offers his hand to Jack across the table. “Don’t say it here. Call my cell later and leave a message.”
Jack stands and, confused, takes the cop’s hand and gives it a brief shake.
“We didn’t even get to the real reason I came in. I wanted to tell you about some douche bag trying to shoot me last night in my yard.”
Hopkins’s eyebrows go up. “Yeah, I’d like to discuss that.”
“Ah, yeah,” Jack says. Behind him, there’s another knock at the door.
“All right,” Hopkins calls. “I’m coming!” He’s already walking around the desk, straightening his tie, and angling Jack toward the door.
“Later. Listen, you watch your back. We’ll talk this afternoon.”
3
Jack walks up Bryant and around the corner to where he parked his car. He sees the now-familiar craters along the driver’s side, the three bullet holes, and puts his finger to the one on his door. Its smooth metal cradles his fingertip.
“Shit.”
He wants to get them fixed or work on them himself, but with the bald Russian out and around, the burned bed, and the shooter in his yard, he shouldn’t be cruising the city. He should be lying low.
Jack gets in and starts the Fastback, pulling his cell phone out from under the seat. It’s not time to go looking for answers; it’s time he found a place to disappear.
He takes a decent room at the St. Francis downtown, up on the sixteenth floor. It’s not the Regis, but that suits Jack fine. He’s coming around to the fact that the house in Sausalito might not be exactly him either.
His days of enjoying the view, of trying to live the calm life for the past three years while he built himself back up piece by piece, don’t fit anymore. He doesn’t want to go back to the hard work on his body, the same boring routine. Since he got started with Ralph a few months back, he’s been cruising, and part of him wants to keep rolling with that instead of building every step of the way.
If he’s going to keep on like this, though, he has to get his head on straight and start paying closer attention to the details. He’s glad he took the time to put a few boards over the broken glass on his back doors and pack some clothes into a gym bag.
Looking out the hotel window down onto Post Street, Jack sees the cars and the foot traffic and knows he can get used to the action of the city again.
He finds his cell phone in one of his jacket pockets and turns it back on. The familiar graphic of two friendly hands joining lights up the screen, then its song starts chiming. Jack waits for the number of messages to show and then, impatient, he calls his voicemail.
He hasn’t checked his messages or answered his phone for six weeks. The eight messages start with calls from Mills Hopkins, then an old one from Joe Buddha asking if Jack is okay and where he is. Next he’s got a call from Victoria: not a happy one, worse than her usual annoyed tone, wanting him to call her back as soon as possible because she “really needs him for something.” He figures she called back after this but wouldn’t leave another message. Typical her: needing him but not wanting to show it too much. The truth is, Jack’s glad not to hear more from her.
There’s a message from the guy at the bank, his mortgage broker, the same guy who used to call and harass him to pay up, thanking him for the payment, late and for more than he owed. Now the broker says if there’s anything else he can do for Jack that Jack should feel “perfectly welcome to call.”
The last calls are another one from Buddha and one more from Sergeant Hopkins, saying that he’s concerned about where Jack is and whether he’s all right, but that he’d know if anything happened because he’d recognize Jack’s ugly mug on any Joh
n Doe that turned up. Hopkins ends his last message with “Shit, Jack. If you don’t give a call sometime, I’m going to have to go over to your casa and let my ass in to look around.”
Jack puts the phone on the bedside table. He made the right decision to leave it behind, but now that he’s back, he’ll have to start belonging to the city again, its game.
He lies down on the bed and closes his eyes, tries to meditate away some of the stress from the morning, but when he does, he sees the open spaces of Montana and Nevada, the mountains in Wyoming—the pictures all there on the backs of his lids, almost as if he were still on his bike.
Then his phone rings, and Jack opens his eyes. He looks at the clock and sees it’s almost five. He sits up and shakes his head, realizes he’s been sleeping in his clothes for the past four or five hours. Hasn’t even moved. The phone rings again.
“Okay,” he says.
He knows who’ll be on the other end: Hopkins, the only one Jack told he’d be at the St. Francis. And Jack knows he’ll be ready to talk.
“Yeah,” Jack says, picking up the phone. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
“That’s good,” Hopkins tells him. “I’m in the bar.”
4
Jack gets downstairs in five minutes, not fast enough to see Hopkins drink his first martini. He finds the cop fishing an olive out of an empty glass with his finger.
“That good, huh?” Jack asks, pulling out the chair next to Hopkins at the bar.
“A shit day. Press was all over this.”
“And?”
“And shut up. Sit down and order a drink.”
The bartender looks at Jack as he fills a shaker with ice for Hopkins’s second martini. “Just a seltzer with lime for me.”