by Seth Harwood
He takes stock. It’s the same him: the same leather jacket against his arms, the same skin feeling the cold, the same face that he knows needs a shave, the same hair now that he’s had a cut and lost his highway craziness. He looks down and sees his feet, feels them on the ground, holding his weight. Sure he could use a few trips to the gym, and he needs to stretch, loosen up, and start caring for his body again. But it’s him. Even the stiffness feels familiar.
He pushes the image of Freeman’s bloody hand, the big man squeezing his whole face in rage, out of his thoughts. He tries to concentrate on the street in front of him.
That’s when he sees Shaw. The cop has on a dark leather jacket—shiny, tight, not like Jack’s. It has nothing to do with a motorcycle at all. He wears a tight black beanie pulled down to his eyebrows. With his hands in his pockets, he could be anyone. Here in San Francisco, twenty miles or more from Walnut Creek, he might as well be. And that’s what Jack needs, what he hopes will get them through.
When Jack sees that it’s clear, that Shaw’s alone, he drops his cigarette to the stoop and grinds it under his toe. He steps from the door frame and into the thin light of Rowland.
The cop recognizes Jack, gives the upward nod and starts coming toward him.
“This better be good, Palms.” He comes up to Jack, stands close enough that he could hit him. “I get caught in some shit, that’s not good.”
“Maybe we’re better off without the Feds right now,” Jack says. “Maybe Gannon even knows it. You see any other choices?”
“I go in myself. Or I go home and call it a night.” Shaw sticks a gloved finger into Jack’s chest. “I’m not sure you know what you’re doing.”
Jack knocks Shaw’s hand away. The two stare at each other for a long moment, then the cop nods. “Okay. But I’m not saying we go into that house just the two of us. I’m not saying I agree with that.”
“Not yet,” Jack says. “Come on.”
Jack starts walking up Broadway, toward the Bay, keeping an eye out for the Russians. He stays across the street from the Pretty Lady, doesn’t make eye contact with the bouncers outside. From there, he follows the same path he took the other night, back when they told him how to get to Tedeschi’s Café.
Shaw says, “This whole area was O’Malley’s stakeout. This is Akakievich’s hood.”
“Then we’re in the right place. Keep your eyes open. If you see any nice cars, try to pick out who’s in them. Maybe we can find out who’s buying these girls.”
Shaw nods. “Okay, Jack. It’ll be that easy.”
They walk for a few steps and reach the corner of Bartol. Jack looks up the dark, narrow block and sees the café, the same Russian sitting at one of the outside tables under a single light, reading a newspaper. “That’s the place,” Jack says. “And that’s our guy.”
“Right.”
“You want into the Top Notch, you go there, buy a dessert, and they give you the code. A password. That’s what Freeman did the other night.”
“Yeah? So what’s your idea?”
Jack walks back around the corner. Broadway’s noticeably brighter but still quiet, a few cars going up and down and not much foot traffic. Jack doesn’t see any snipers waiting in lit windows, no eyes following their moves. But that doesn’t mean no one’s watching.
He’s doing what Mike Haggerty would’ve done in Shake ’Em Down. Sometimes people don’t expect you to try the most obvious approach—the front door. That’s what he’s banking on.
That, and maybe a little of him is starting to feel like old Mike. He’s got blood on his hands now; he’s in this new world.
“Palms.”
Jack snaps back to see Shaw looking at him, waiting for an answer.
“I’ve got two thoughts: Either we go take that motherfucker and break him down in an alley, hold a gun to his head and make him tell us everything he knows. That’s the easy method.”
“Fuck.” Shaw spits on the sidewalk. “What’s the hard?”
“The hard is you go up and pretend you’re just some dude, tell him you heard about this place, try to get him to let you get the password. Then we both bust into the house when they open the door, and we try to find out what’s what.”
“Nice,” Shaw says, already shaking his head. He puts a firm hand on Jack’s shoulder to make sure he’s listening. “Let’s entertain the thought for a minute that in fact the mayor is involved. You know how cocky Akakievich would have to be to try to start that war?” Shaw shakes his head. “We assume he’s been working under some sanction, some look-the-other-way shit. Now he’s ready to drop that and take on the city. You really want to take that on?”
Jack chews his lip. He’s been hearing this shit since he teamed up with Freeman. People telling him this thing’s too big for him. The only one who hasn’t given it to him is Jane Gannon, the only one he’s not sure he can trust. And just like that, Jack sees it all turn around on him, sees maybe all his assumptions could be wrong. But if Shaw’s a dirty cop too and this whole thing extends clear to Walnut Creek, he might as well go straight to Akakievich now. Because there’s no fucking way he’ll be able to run.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Not only do I want to be here right now, but that war is what I’m counting on.”
38
Jack can feel his heart beat in his chest, his blood moving faster. Both men have their hands by their sides, like old gunfighters daring each other to draw. If Shaw takes a swing, Jack’s ready for it.
“You have a gun?” Shaw asks.
Jack shakes his head. “No. But I’ll bet you good money that guy with the newspaper does.”
“So?”
“So you get the drop on him and hold your gun to his head, we have two guns.”
Shaw meets Jack’s eyes and neither of them blinks. Then Shaw laughs, spits on the sidewalk less than six inches from Jack’s shoe. “You better hope he’s packing something special. Because it’s going to take an automatic to get our asses into that house.”
Shaw starts toward the corner of Bartol, looking around the edge. When he can see the guard, he moves out of sight. “We get the drop on that dude and just talk to him. See what we can find out.”
Jack stands in the open. If the guard turned around, away from his newspaper, he’d see Jack, and Jack doesn’t care.
Shaw pulls him back. “You follow me,” he says.
“Be my guest.” Jack gestures toward the guard.
“Fuck you, Palms.” Shaw slaps him lightly on the side of the face—maybe it feels good to get that out of the way—and takes two steps around the corner, looks at where he’s headed, and walks straight for the café.
As Shaw walks up the alley—the café is in the middle of the block—Jack watches him go. He doesn’t want to advertise that Shaw’s not alone. But he doesn’t want Shaw to be alone either.
Jack starts up the opposite side, mirroring Shaw. When the cop gets close enough to the café that the guard sees him, the guy stops reading and puts down his newspaper. Jack watches as the guard takes a cigarette out of a pack on the table and flips it in the air, catching the filter between his lips. A nice trick. He lifts his lighter as Shaw gets close, but the other hand drops down out of sight.
If this guy’s worth his vodka, he can probably peg Shaw as a cop from a block away. But maybe that’s not bad; maybe enough cops come by for the password that it doesn’t raise suspicions anymore.
The guard lights his cigarette one-handed.
Jack angles his face toward the wall to light a cigarette of his own.
As Shaw speaks, the guard blows smoke into his face. Shaw keeps talking, gesturing with his hands and, Jack guesses, going too fast. Then again, why not give Officer Shaw the benefit of the doubt?
Jack glances back up toward the top of the alley. There’s nothing there, but his mind’s starting to play that trick, making him think he saw something.
The guard says something, and Shaw nods. He puts his hands back into his pockets and heads inside
the café. This is where he’ll either get what they need or he won’t. And Jack’s not much on waiting to find out.
“Shit,” Jack says, dropping his cigarette onto the sidewalk and heading across to the café.
When the guard sees Jack, he stands, starts shaking his head. He takes a long drag then puts his cigarette into his ashtray. Jack’s about five feet away, coming across the little alley right in the middle. There’s no turning back now. The guard starts cracking every knuckle he has, wringing his hands like he wants to break every bone in Jack’s body. He waits on the sidewalk.
Behind the guard, Shaw turns away from the register. His face goes a shade lighter. Jack sees him mouth the one word he doesn’t want to see: “No.”
The Russian’s big across the chest but he has a spare tire that could fit on an Indy 500 race car. He starts to nod at Jack, says his name out loud.
“Yeah, buddy,” Jack says, unzipping his jacket for ease of movement. If it comes to it, he’s ready to go, to do whatever he can to this dude. Inside the café, a pair of coffee-sipping old men stand up to see what’s about to happen.
As Jack moves onto the curb, the guard closes on him and throws a big sweeping haymaker that Jack can see coming two seconds away. He ducks the punch and hits the Russian in the gut with a right, putting everything he has into it, getting him just under the ribs. The guard doubles over and steps away from the parked cars. Jack follows. He throws a left uppercut, a punch he’s not used to throwing, that only grazes the Russian’s chin and connects more with his cheek. That sets up the guard for a takedown, some kind of move Jack thinks about instead of acts on, and in that moment of indecision, the guard comes at him with a left that Jack barely manages to step away from, then a right that catches him in his ribs.
Jack steps into the table, the wind knocked out of him, and the Russian comes at him hard, angry, and big. He scoops Jack up with both arms, by the shoulder and between the legs, and throws Jack onto the sidewalk. Jack never would have thought the guy had a move that fast in him, but then what’s he know about this guy—any of this, really?
When the guard gets close enough to follow up, Jack hears Shaw’s voice: “Stand still or I send your brains back to the tundra.”
“Nice,” Jack says, raising himself up to sitting and then pulling himself up with the table. The guard backs away from Jack and raises his hands, but Shaw closes on him fast and hits him square in the face with the butt of his gun, right across the bridge of his nose. A sound of something breaking comes from the guy’s face, and he doubles over fast, his hands covering his nose. Shaw presses the gun’s barrel against the big thug’s temple.
Inside the café, the two old men draw handguns and move toward the door. In the second their move affords him, Jack jumps on the big Russian from the side, taking him down, and yells to Shaw the word “café,” which gets Shaw down and moving. He rolls across the ground, comes up prone, and, seeing two guys pointing guns, opens up—shooting through the glass and wood of the door. The first guy jumps back hard and fast, caught in the chest by Shaw’s first shots, and the second ducks behind the wooden door frame.
“Oh, fuck,” Jack says, aware it’s not helpful at a time like this. But what can he do? It comes out.
No going back now. It’s on.
Jack takes the guard’s head and plants his face into the asphalt. The guy makes a muffled, gurgled scream—something you wouldn’t expect to hear except from someone with a broken nose—and brings his hands up to his face. Easy to see how this works. Jack makes a mental note to break big guys’ noses more often.
Shaw rolls again and comes up onto one knee, takes a few more shots at the front of the café, close to where the guy last was. The guy comes out of the other side of the door frame, and he shoots through the window, shatters it on his first shot, and Jack puts his head down. He’s still on top of the Russian, and he hopes that doesn’t make him the first hit.
Shaw fires again, and this time a scream comes from inside the café. Jack can’t see anyone. The girl must be crouched behind the counter, and the man’s out of sight.
“You hit him?”
Shaw shakes his head. “Can’t tell. I made contact, but I think I just clipped him.”
The big guard starts to push himself up, and Jack wrenches both of his arms behind his back in a tight lock. He puts all his weight down in the middle of the guy’s back.
“You got that one under control?”
“Yeah.” Jack twists an arm and the Russian grunts. “He’s not going anywhere.”
39
“Hold that fucker, Jack.”
Shaw starts a low crawl toward the café. That’s when Jack notices headlights turning into the alley at its bottom end, filling the narrow opening between the buildings. He strains to look up—more from instinct than thought—and in that moment, the Russian thrusts his head back hard and high enough to catch Jack in the jaw and knock him off. With his arms free, the Russian rolls Jack to the side and, getting up, pushes him away. As Jack scrambles onto all fours, the Russian reaches inside his jacket with one hand.
Jack pounces on him, knocking him back onto the sidewalk, and head-butts him in the face, He follows it up with a right to the stomach, and the Russian squeezes his eyes. Jack knows this guy’s developed a major-league pain button right in the center of his face.
A shot comes out of the café—Jack can see the older man shooting from around the side, through the window—and Shaw stands up and rushes the building. He times his leap and flies through the air in front of the window, emptying his clip into the old man. When Shaw hits the ground, he rolls and comes up next to the guard’s head. Faster than Jack can move, Shaw reaches inside the guy’s jacket and comes out with the gun: a small automatic that looks like a Glock but probably isn’t. Shaw trains the second gun on the old man, who slumps to his knees, then falls quietly into what’s left of the glass in the windows, the shards cutting his face open from his temple to the other side of his nose.
Jack looks away in time to see the passing car: a silver PT Cruiser, moving slowly. Not Gannon, not any Russian thugs, some poor dumb fuck who turned onto the wrong little excuse for a street. Shaw turns the guard’s gun around and hands it to Jack.
“This a Beretta. Try that for feel.”
Jack grips the gun and it feels good in his hand, better than a Glock. It’s bigger, and the handle doesn’t cut off partway down his palm. It just feels good. He drops the barrel into the middle of the big guard’s face.
“You got something else on you, right?” Jack asks. “Tell me you didn’t come all the way to San Francisco with just a couple of clips.”
Shaw drops the clip out of his own weapon and inserts a fresh one from inside his jacket. “I got a few more clips, and if I need another piece, I’ve got two dead assholes inside who won’t be using theirs.”
Jack taps the big guard lightly on the nose with the Beretta. “You want to talk with us?”
“Fuck you,” he says through the blood in his mouth.
“Nice. That’s real nice.” Jack pushes harder on the guy’s nose, causing him to grit his teeth and make a soft whine in the back of his throat. “How’s that help your participation?”
At the bottom of the alley, a black sedan’s brakes screech as it makes a hard turn, narrowly avoids hitting either curb, and tears down the block. Jack can see it bearing down, and then Shaw’s on his feet, firing.
“Jesus,” Jack says. The sedan stops. A Ford. He can’t see through its tinted windows, but he hears a door open on the other side, and then a second.
Shaw fires twice and jumps forward, hunches against a Mercedes E-Class parked on the curb. Two shots come from the street and disappear into the café. A third breaks the back window of the Mercedes, and Shaw drops down lower as bullets shatter the side windows of the car. Jack slides around so he’s facing the street, his body shielded by the bulk of the Russian. He still holds the gun to the guy’s temple, and the Russian doesn’t move. Shaw rolls, comes o
ut of it shooting from behind the trunk of the Mercedes. Someone in the street yells, and there’s another gunshot. Shaw stays where he is, his head up, both arms across the trunk.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jack says under his breath. He doesn’t like the situation, the shooting, the holding a gun to a guy’s head. This is all getting out of control. “Do not move,” he tells the guard.
Then Shaw fires two shots into the street, someone else calls out in Russian, and Jack sees a guy from the sedan, medium height, brown haired with a snap-front cap pulled low, duck around the front of the Ford. The guy has on a tan jacket and brown pants. His cap blocks his peripheral vision, and he’s focused on Shaw’s position as he eases around the front of the car.
Holding the guard’s head on the ground with one hand, Jack raises the Beretta.
Still firing at the back end of the Ford, Shaw doesn’t see Cap. He crouches behind the Mercedes to reload. It’s then that Cap comes around to see Shaw and raises his weapon. But he sees Jack too, and Jack’s Beretta. With the gun in his hand and his pick between Shaw and Jack, he freezes for an instant, and Jack fires.
Jack has no other choice, but before this thought has even cleared his processors, he’s pulled the trigger, knocked the guy back by his left shoulder onto the hood of the car. Then, as the guy starts to raise his gun, Jack follows the first shot with a second to the center of the chest.
The guy flips back onto the hood and slides down its front, drops into a sitting position on the ground, his legs tangled under him and both hands by his sides. He closes his eyes, swallows hard. When he opens them, he takes a breath and coughs, blood rolling out of his mouth and onto his chin. He’s looking at Jack, and a wave of understanding passes across the guy’s face. It’s the understanding that Jack will be the last person he sees.