Wolf's Revenge

by Lachlan Smith

  “Yes, come in,” Tamara said. But only after a pause.

  On a normal day I’d have taken my cue from her tone and departed. Today had been anything but normal, however. The three of us needed to talk.

  Carly was overtired, resisting her bath. Teddy, who’d begun to help her, was forced to turn her over to her mother, the only one who could reason with her at such moments. After reviewing the available options in the kitchen, I shuffled through a pile of delivery menus and settled on Chinese.

  There’d been a time when I might have said what I needed to say to Teddy in the privacy of the kitchen, leaving it up to him how much to share with Tamara. But, in my mind, Teddy was a main part of the reason we were in this situation. And so I waited until after we’d eaten, enjoying Carly holding forth as usual, the goofy center of attention.

  She wanted me to read her a bedtime story, so I did, then yielded my place to her mother, who spent a quiet fifteen minutes lying down with her. Then, when she came out, the three of us sat in the kitchen, Tam working on a glass of wine, Teddy and I nursing after-dinner beers.

  They each seemed to anticipate that I had something to say, Tamara looking at me with open defiance, as if expecting me to blame her for losing Carly this afternoon—an event she’d no doubt memorialized in the notebook she carried everywhere with her for this purpose—and readying her response. Teddy looked sheepish and ashamed, unable to meet either his wife’s eyes or mine.

  I showed them the picture on my phone, the dude calling himself Jack standing with his hand on Carly’s shoulder, Carly holding the mascot doll he’d bought. Even now, in bed, she still had the doll clutched against her chest. Jack’s eyes were fixed on the camera with their secret message just for me.

  “This man kidnapped Carly this afternoon,” I said.

  Tamara gazed at the phone as if she were seeing the picture for the first time, then looked up at me in apparent confusion. “He brought her back. That’s what I wrote down. She got lost and a man bought her a doll and brought her back.”

  “Why?” Teddy, having already accepted the truth, looked braced for the worst.

  “Because last week I pleaded one of Wilder’s guys to a deal that involved him giving testimony in a murder he happened to have been a witness to. Today’s scare was Wilder’s way of reminding me who’s in charge.”

  Tamara had risen from her chair like someone obeying an inaudible command. Without a word she walked past me, through the dining room, and into Carly’s room, leaving the door ajar. I heard the creak of bedsprings, then a pair of gasplike sobs. Carly’s incredibly deep, slow breathing continued without pause.

  Teddy and I spoke in lower tones. “Did he tell you this when you left us?” he wanted to know.

  Instead of answering his question, I brought up a topic I’d waited far too long to mention, a failing I was resolved to remedy now. “You and I, we never talked about why I left the Public Defender’s Office.”

  “You always spoke about going back to private practice. I figured you were ready, that it was just a matter of time.”

  “It must be obvious to you that I’ve been repping Wilder’s crew. You think I’m doing that by choice?”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “I’m saying I left because Bo threatened Carly. About six months ago, he sent a guy from jail to take the place of one of my clients. The one who showed up did a number for me on Carly. Where she goes, what she does, her weekly routine. They even knew what books she had on her shelf beside her bed, as if they’d been in her room. The message was clear—go back to private practice and work for Bo, otherwise she gets hurt.”

  Teddy looked at me sadly. “You never told me this.”

  “I didn’t want you to feel responsible for my choices.”

  But I did hold him responsible, as he must have known. Until four years ago, our father, Lawrence Maxwell, had been serving a life sentence in San Quentin for murdering our mother when I was just a kid. I was the one who’d found her body when I came home from school one day, and I’d spent most of my life believing him guilty of this crime that had irreparably tainted my life.

  It turned out, however, that he was, instead, the victim of misconduct by a prosecutor who’d sent more than one innocent man to jail. Although Lawrence’s conviction had been vacated, he was required to stand trial again for her murder, twenty-one years after the fact. At that point, a jailhouse snitch had come forward claiming our dad had confessed to him on the inside that he actually had killed his wife, making a return to prison look likely. Next, however, this snitch, an ex-con named Russell Bell, turned up dead. Without his testimony, the present-day jury voted for acquittal.

  The party responsible for the witness’s murder, as it turned out, was an inmate named Bo Wilder. He’d protected Lawrence on the inside while the two of them were serving their life sentences. Now, because of this “favor,” Wilder expected our father to dedicate his freedom to working for him on the outside, serving as a check on greedy associates Wilder couldn’t afford to trust.

  Lawrence proved an able and willing consigliere. But Wilder also needed legal representation, ostensibly to handle the legitimate side of his business, which he hoped to expand. Over the years, he’d invested the money he made off drugs, guns, and prostitution in real estate, with the result that he now owned half a dozen apartment complexes badly in need of a steady managing hand. Lawrence, in turn, had recruited Teddy, who, deskbound by his impairments—a far distance from the courtroom force he’d once been—was struggling to make ends meet. Seduced by the promise of making easy money while keeping his hands clean, my brother allowed himself to be recruited. Probably Bo had intended to rely on Teddy in the same way Teddy’s former client Ricky Santorez once had done. But he’d soon discovered that, since the shooting, Teddy’s legal abilities were limited to serving wrongful detainer suits. Given the situation, Bo had turned his sights on me.

  “We need to call Dad,” Teddy said. “I think he’s meeting with some people in the city tonight.”

  I heard the bedsprings creak again, then Tamara appeared in the doorway. She wiped tears from her eyes.

  “No,” she said forcefully. “We need to call the police.”

  “I don’t disagree with you, in principle,” I told her. “I’ve been wondering all day if the time has come for that. Here’s the problem: Bo had Russell Bell killed. Lawrence is the one who benefited from that murder, and the police suspect he was involved. Going to the cops now means coming clean about the role the three of us have been playing in Bo’s organization. They’ll naturally assume this relationship was in place before Bell’s murder, that we were in on the conspiracy to murder Russell Bell to prevent him from testifying, but that since then, we’ve had a falling-out—not an uncommon event in a syndicate like Bo’s—and that’s why he grabbed Carly. We’ll be charged with murder. Bo’s already in prison for life. He’s got nothing to lose.”

  Tamara took out her little book and jotted a quick note. When she closed it and looked up again, it was with the shocked expression of someone waking from a bad dream into a reality that was somehow even worse.

  “I’d better call Dad,” Teddy said, repeating what he’d said a moment ago, as if he thought our father could make everything better with the wave of a hand.

  “No.” I agreed with Tamara. “Not until we’ve talked this through. We can’t ever have a repeat of today, and threats are the only kind of power Bo knows. We first need to agree on our next step. Then we’ll tell Dad what we’ve decided.”

  Teddy now turned his anger on me. “When something comes up, Dad’s the one you always look to blame. Even after you’ve been proved wrong about him time and again, you still don’t trust that he’s got our best interests at heart.”

  “If I blame him, it’s because he deserves some of the blame,” I replied. “You would never have gotten this deep in bed with Wilder if Lawrence hadn’t been leading the way. I’ll always blame him for that.”

  Teddy’s face
showed his outrage at my defection. Tamara had never been eager to accept Lawrence into their life.

  “You’re talking as though you’re the ones who get to decide,” she said from the doorway.

  She was right, of course. Out of all of us, she and Carly were the only ones who hadn’t done anything to deserve the mess we were in. They were the innocent victims. At all costs, we needed to protect them.

  Of course, that was precisely the thinking Bo had used to lure me this far.

  Tamara went on. “When things turned bad last time, after your office burned, Lawrence left the country. He stayed away until he thought it was safe to come back.” She held up her little notebook. “I’ve got boxes and boxes of these, filled with the most horrible memories of waking up in a panic every time the neighbor’s cat jumped off the fence. All through the worst of that time, your dad was on vacation.”

  After our father’s acquittal, Bo Wilder had sent me a message I’d refused to accept. I’d had no intention of becoming an enabler of organized crime, a role in which my brother had seemingly thrived before paying a near-ultimate price when he took a bullet in the head. As a consequence of my turning down Wilder’s “proposal,” he’d ordered my office burned. No one had been hurt, but the message was clear: I could choose to make my living through him or not at all.

  Caught between the two dangers of the police, who wanted to arrest him for Russell Bell’s murder, and Wilder’s rougher sense of justice, my father, just as Tamara had said, had fled to Europe with his wife, Dot. There they’d quickly run through the proceeds from his wrongful conviction settlement. Meanwhile, I’d gone for a time to work in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office.

  Slow learners, Wilder’s crew eventually had seized on a more effective means of intimidating me than arson: threatening Carly in the manner just described.

  Teddy rose from the table and took his wife in his arms. They held each other for a moment, and then she pushed him gently away.

  “Tell me what you’re going to do to end this,” she said.

  When her husband couldn’t answer, she turned and walked across the dining area into the master bedroom. I heard a closet door bang open and the thump of a suitcase hitting the floor.

  “Tam!” Teddy called, and went after her, tugging the bedroom door closed behind him. Still, I heard their murmured voices, Teddy’s pleading, Tam’s alternately accusing and agitated. Not knowing whether to stay or leave, I went into Carly’s room, leaving the door open, and lay on the rug beside her bed.

  There, in the dark, I marveled at the great drinks of air she sucked in, as if the motive force came not from within herself but from something outside. I could make out the sound of her parents’ discussion, two rooms away, but not what they said. Presumably Tam wanted to leave, and Teddy was talking her out of it. Because where would she go? To her mother in East Oakland, where Wilder’s thugs could get at her even more easily than they could here?

  I must have fallen asleep, because I awakened with a start, momentarily fearful and disoriented, to find the house still and cold, darkness showing beneath Carly’s closed door, the night sounds beyond the window telling me no one was awake. Someone had thrown a light blanket over me and shut the door. In the bed, Carly slept on.

  I kept telling myself that I’d rise in a moment and let myself out of the house, then drive back to the city. But before I could carry out this intention I slipped again into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  When I woke the second time the window had just started to brighten. On the bed a few inches above me, Carly lay on her stomach, staring into my face. She smiled as I opened my eyes. Then she gathered her knees underneath her and launched herself off the bed onto me, like a wrestler leaping from the ropes. I threw my arms up to protect my vital parts. Then, with a laugh, she was up again, running through the door to the washroom.

  I closed the door to Teddy and Tamara’s room to let them sleep. She wanted oatmeal, so I made it for her. After an exhaustive search I found the brown sugar in the fridge. I figured this was another of Teddy’s mix-ups, but Carly set me straight, informing me that they kept the sugar there because of the ants.

  Just yesterday, it seemed, she’d been eating her meals strapped into a high chair, scooping mush with both hands. Now she ate daintily, using her spoon to perfect effect. Despite what ought to have been a restless night sleeping on the floor, I hadn’t dreamed of pursuit and blood. Watching her now, I was grateful.

  After she finished her breakfast we took the dog for a walk. We didn’t go far, just around the block—that was all the asthmatic yellow Lab could manage. All its life this duplicitous animal had seized on the couple’s memory lapses to beg for extra feedings, resulting in an immovable bulk that he used to maximize his opportunities for contact with his humans, typically positioning himself across doorways or on top of discarded clothes.

  We returned just as the sun was breaking through the fog. When we came in, we found Tam in the kitchen with her coffee cup at her lips, staring at the front door with a spaced-out look that suggested she’d been steadily gazing at it for minutes, willing us to appear. Teddy emerged from the washroom a moment later. It was obvious neither of them had slept well. My brother, in his mid-forties, suddenly seemed aged by the restless night he must have passed.

  I’d overstayed my welcome already, I knew, especially after the news I’d delivered yesterday evening. Seven hours later, none of us had the answers Tam had demanded; none of us knew how we were going to free ourselves from Bo Wilder’s grip. I kissed Carly, hugged my sister-in-law, looked with concern at Teddy, and hit the road.

  CHAPTER 3

  After a shower and a change of clothes I headed to my office, on the fifth floor of a building between the Civic Center and the Hall of Justice. Working for Bo hadn’t changed my routine of spending Sunday afternoons at my desk.

  My clientele was standard for any solo criminal defense practitioner—DUIs, gun charges, car thefts, assaults, child porn and molestation. My clients mostly paid with credit. Charging a retainer onto a client’s already overloaded card was far more palatable to me than playing bill collector. I wanted my clients to answer my calls. Let MasterCard worry about its pound of flesh.

  Sundays, I’d learned, were good for reaching clients by phone. Five had court dates next week, a small fraction of the number I’d have had if I still worked for the Public Defender’s Office. I went down my list, covering with each one I talked to what would happen in court, with reminders to dress professionally, preparing one for the possibility that he’d be taken away in handcuffs for no-showing at a drug test. Through all of it, not surprisingly, Bo Wilder and what had happened with Carly were never far from my mind.

  After I’d finished with these, I tried to focus on the files in front of me, but my thoughts swirled around the brief kidnapping. Finally I went to the window, took out my cell phone, and called my father. Not wanting to speak on the phone about the Wilder business, I arranged to meet him for a beer at a nearby watering hole.

  Lawrence had returned from his self-imposed European exile last year after I’d informed him that Bo had begun placing late-night recruitment calls to Teddy from prison. At the time, Lawrence had come in the guise of our would-be rescuer. He and Dot lived in San Rafael, but he was often in the city on Wilder’s business.

  “Teddy told me what happened,” he said when we were seated. “I intend to take it up with Bo personally the next time we talk.”

  Of the three of us, Lawrence was the only one in direct contact with Wilder. Because he was a former prisoner, Lawrence was prohibited from visiting anyone at San Quentin—and he’d never have set foot back in that hated place even if he’d been allowed. However, the two of them spoke regularly, with Bo utilizing an ever-changing series of contraband cell phones and SIM cards.

  “You shouldn’t be having contact with him,” I said. But we’d been through this so many times before that I knew my advice was falling on deaf ears.

  “Teddy c
ouldn’t give me a very good description. What’d the guy at the game look like?”

  I told him that I could do better than a description, that I had a picture. I took out my phone and showed it to him.

  He studied the picture. His face tightened. “Jack Sims.”

  “Evidently he’s one of Bo’s main guys now, or so he says.”

  “This asshole? No way. He’s on the periphery, a hanger-on. I’m sure he’d like to be in on the main action.” He stopped and thought a few moments. “But Bo’ll never trust him.”

  “Why not?”

  “No skills. Only muscle, and second-rate muscle at that. Punks like him, they lack the ability to thrive in today’s more complex environment. You’ve seen it. They’re hammers, and to them, the world’s full of nails. The trouble is, these days the business side of the enterprise requires a bit more finesse.”

  Briefly, I explained to Lawrence the message Sims had delivered. And I offered my theory that he’d been acting on his own initiative. “Or maybe Bo was behind it,” I told him, acknowledging the alternative possibility. “They’ve threatened Carly before.”

  My father reacted with shock and anger. “You never told me that.”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  I explained about the incident that had precipitated my sudden departure from the Public Defender’s Office, when Bo’s stooge had turned up instead of my client during a meeting at the county jail, forced me to listen to private details about Carly’s life, and urged me to return to private practice.

  “You didn’t flinch when they burned your office.”

  “Yeah. But that wasn’t the same as threatening Carly,” I said. “I had no choice.”

  Lawrence nodded. He seemed to expect me to say something more—maybe even ask him for help in extricating us from this increasingly dangerous situation. I understood I’d need his help eventually, since he’d done everything in his power to make himself indispensable to Bo.

  “How’s Bo do it, anyway?” I asked.