Red Right Hand

by Chris Holm

  “So,” Frank said once they’d reached the kitchen and he’d deposited her on a stool beside the island, “what can I get you?”

  “That’s very kind of you, Max, but I can’t have you cook me breakfast in my own home.”

  “Of course you can. In fact, I insist. So what’ll it be? I make a mean omelet. You want one?”

  He watched her expression cycle from disgust to curiosity to outright hunger as she tried the idea on for size. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “How about coffee? I made some earlier—I hope you don’t mind—but I finished it hours ago. I’d be happy to put on some more.”

  This time, she ran through the same cycle of expressions in reverse and wound up little green. “I think I’ll stick to water for now, thanks,” she said.

  Frank got Lois some more water. Then he opened her fridge and dug around. Even after their feast last night, it was well stocked—eggs, milk, several kinds of meats and cheeses, and scads of local produce. He selected an herbed goat cheese, thin-sliced prosciutto, and some leftover asparagus, as well as a few sprigs of chive to chop for garnish. Then butter for the pan—an expensive, restaurant-grade nonstick made of anodized aluminum—and three eggs.

  He set the pan on the Viking cooktop, put two pats of butter inside. The burner clicked three times when he cranked the dial and then lit with a whoosh, blue flames licking the underside of the pan. He cracked the eggs into a bowl. Seasoned them with salt and pepper. Beat them while the butter melted. Poured the mixture into the pan. Fed Ella a small scrap of prosciutto while the eggs set. All the while, Lois watched in bemused silence.

  “What?” he asked when he noticed her expression.

  “It’s just…” She hesitated—maybe wondering if she was about to offend him—and then continued. “You must be the most thoughtful home invader on the planet, to make me breakfast.”

  The briefest frown touched his features, an expression he replaced immediately with a genial smile. “I didn’t invade nothing—you let me in!”

  “Did I?” she asked as he added filling to the omelet and folded it. “I confess, it’s all a bit fuzzy. I remember I was in the tub and heard you knocking.”

  It was the Park Police she’d heard, not Frank. “You came downstairs,” he said, rooting through the cupboards, “saw me outside”—he found a plate and set it on the island in front of her—“and let me in.” He grabbed the pan and expertly slid the omelet onto the plate with a nudge from the spatula he’d taken from a ceramic crock beside the stove.

  “To the left of the sink,” she said, when he looked flummoxed trying to find the silverware drawer. “No, your other left.”

  Frank found the drawer, opened it, and handed her a fork. She cut a bite from the center of the omelet and put it in her mouth. At first, she chewed tentatively, as though worried it would be terrible or—more likely—that her body would rebel. But when she swallowed, she immediately took another. By her third bite, she was practically shoveling it in.

  “This is delicious,” she said around a mouthful of omelet. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Frank replied. “It’s been a long time since I got to cook in a kitchen this nice. You have a lovely home.”

  “Thanks. I think so too. Of course, it’s not actually ours—we pay the Presidio Trust twelve grand a month for the privilege of staying here. Cal always tells me that it makes more sense to buy than rent, that our money would go farther elsewhere. But I like it here, and in the end, we’re all just renting anyway, aren’t we?”

  On that point, Frank agreed.

  He watched with a chef’s satisfaction as she demolished the omelet. When she was finished, he took the plate and cleaned it, Lois objecting all the while.

  “How’re you feeling?” he asked finally as he dried the plate.

  “Better,” she replied. “More myself.”

  She looked better. Her eyes clearer. Her color returning. Her movements more assured. “Good, because we need to talk. About Calvin. About you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Cal’s stuck in Reno.”

  “No, Lois, he’s not.”

  Her face was a mask of innocent surprise, brittle and unconvincing as a porcelain doll’s. “Oh, are the flights back on schedule? If so, there’s every chance he’s in the air by now. In fact, he’ll probably be here any minute—and he’ll doubtless think me a fool for letting a stranger spend the night.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Lois, I was in your master bath last night. I saw the pills, the knife. I heard Cal’s message.”

  “I…I don’t…”

  Lois didn’t finish her sentence. She couldn’t. Because when her mask slipped, it shattered. What began as a slight tremor in her hands as she raised them to her face in shock and horror became a series of violent, choking sobs that racked her body. It was as if she’d just heard Calvin’s final message for the first time, not simply replayed it in her mind.

  Her breath came in ragged gasps, and she released it in keening wails, her mouth wide open, her eyes clenched shut, the cords of her neck straining from the effort. Tears and snot streaked her face. These were not dignified widow’s tears; this was the ugly cry of a woman who’d had her heart ripped out. Frank recognized the difference because he’d put his share of husbands and fathers in the ground.

  Unconsciously, Lois drew her knees upward, primal instinct reducing her to a wounded animal, curling into a fetal position for protection. Frank reacted without thinking and was glad of it. She would have fallen off her stool if he hadn’t rushed around the island to catch her.

  He wrapped his arms around her and held her close while she shuddered from grief. He said nothing, just squeezed with all he had and let her cry. There was no point in saying anything—she was beyond the comfort of words.

  Eventually, her cries subsided. Her breathing slowed. Her body stilled. Frank released her and was pleased to see she stayed upright. She dabbed her eyes with her pajama sleeve and wiped it across her nose like a child. Her eyes were bloodshot and glistened with tears.

  A hysterical laugh escaped her lips. It startled Frank, and worried him too. He hoped he hadn’t pushed her to some kind of psychotic break. “What’s so funny?”

  “I just remembered an old joke my mama used to tell, is all.”

  “A joke.” Not questioning, exactly, but skeptical.

  “That’s right. It was about a righteous man and a terrible storm. Town officials warned him the river that ran beside his house was going to overrun its banks and ordered him to evacuate, but he refused. ‘I put my faith in God,’ he said. ‘If I’m in danger, He will protect me.’

  “As the storm raged and the waters rose, his neighbors loaded up their car and said, ‘We’re headed to higher ground, and we’ve got room for you—come with us!’ But the man declined. ‘I’m in no danger. God will save me,’ he said.

  “The river breached its banks and lapped against his porch. A man in a canoe paddled by. ‘Hurry into my canoe! I’ll take you to safety!’ But the man said, ‘No, thanks. God will save me.’

  “As the floodwaters rose higher, the man retreated inside and was eventually forced onto his roof. A helicopter spotted him and lowered down a rescuer who shouted, ‘Grab my hand so I can pull you up!’ But still, the man refused. ‘God will save me!’ he said. Shortly after, he was swept away and drowned.

  “When he reached heaven, the man said angrily to God, ‘I put my faith in You—how could You just let me die?’ And God said, ‘My son, I sent you a car, a canoe, and a helicopter. What more were you looking for?’”

  She laughed again, the sort of raw, guffawing laughter that strikes at funerals and is only encouraged by attempts to suppress it. Frank tried his best to smile politely, although he thought that as jokes went, this one was pretty weak. When Lois saw his pained half-smile, it only made her laugh harder.

  “I know,” she said, tears streami
ng down her cheeks. “Mama must’ve told that joke a thousand times, and I never found it funny either!”

  “Then why are you laughing?”

  “Because it occurred to me that you’re my goddamn helicopter. And now I can’t get my Mama’s smug-ass voice saying ‘What more were you looking for?’ out of my head.”

  “You saying you believe all that ‘God works in mysterious ways’ bullshi—er, stuff?”

  That elicited a fresh peal of laughter from Lois. “No!” she said. “That’s the point! Mama dragged my ass to Sunday service every week until I went away to college, and it never meant a thing to me. But here you are, and thanks to you, here I am. Now, maybe I’m just grasping because”—and here her smile faltered, a deep reservoir of sadness peeking through—“because of Cal, but to me, it feels like fate. And if that’s the case, when I finally do pass through the Pearly Gates, that old biddy’s never going to let me hear the end of it.”

  “I hope you’re right about all that,” Frank said, and he meant it. Not because he much believed—he’d seen so many senseless acts of violence in his life, he figured the universe was either random or outright cruel—but because he liked the notion that in his useless, fucked-up life, he might’ve done one good thing, if only by accident.

  “I do too. But either way, thank you.”

  “Anytime,” he said.

  The moment was interrupted by an unexpected sound: the melodic tinkle of glass breaking. It happened so quickly and with no evident cause that at first Frank thought he had imagined it. But then Ella growled, her hackles rising, and a matte-black cylinder skittered down the hallway from the living room into the kitchen.

  “Get down!” Frank yelled. He threw himself at Lois, knocking her off her stool. She shrieked as they fell and was silenced when the landing knocked the wind from her lungs.

  A half a second later, the room was filled with blinding light, followed by a firework pop so loud that Frank’s ears ran warm with blood. He collapsed, disoriented, atop Lois, who struggled to get free.

  Then, as one, the front and back doors imploded with a brittle snap of wood—not that Frank or Lois could hear or see—and armed men in riot gear stormed the house.

  25.

  AS HENDRICKS SCALED the Lincoln Boulevard on-ramp toward the Golden Gate Bridge tollbooths, the Homeland Security agent stationed at its top looked him up and down. The man’s expression was inscrutable, thanks to a pair of sport sunglasses, and his gloved palms rested on the butt of his MP5 assault rifle, which hung from a tactical sling across his chest.

  Hendricks was flushed and short of breath. Because of the hike across the Presidio, he told himself, although he worried it was more than that. Sweat beaded on his brow. His skin crawled. His wound itched like crazy. He worried he’d look like he was going for a weapon if he scratched at it. He worried he’d look shifty if he didn’t.

  The stolen .45 rested heavily in the pocket of his cargo pants. After a brief internal debate, he’d elected not to move it to his waistband once he made it onto Presidio grounds. Now he regretted that decision. He had no intention of using it against law enforcement, but damn if having it within easy reach wouldn’t offer him some comfort now.

  The route to the bridge had taken him down Pilots’ Row, a neighborhood of Colonial Revivals originally built for army aviators. He caught glimpses of the bridge through the trees to his left as he walked, but he couldn’t see it in any detail. When he climbed the on-ramp, the trees dropped away. The view that greeted him was heartbreaking and confounding. Even as tense as he was, marching into the densest concentration of law enforcement agents this side of the Hoover Building, he couldn’t help but stare.

  The bridge’s roadway was chunked and gapped as it drew near the southern tower. Cars were piled atop one another on either side. Charred bodies lay just outside open doors and protruded from shattered windshields. There were survivors up there too, some trapped inside their ruined cars, others wandering nervously while they waited for rescue. There’d been reports that a few of them had plunged to their deaths during the night. Whether they’d jumped or fell, no one was sure, but the result was the same either way. Two hundred and seventy feet is a long way to fall—four full seconds from bridge to bay. When they hit the water, they were moving so fast that they might as well have landed on a city street.

  The tower itself was blackened but stood true, although a few of the steel support ropes that ran parallel to the tower dangled freely, frayed at the ends and curled like broken guitar strings. Smoke still drifted on occasion from below as leftover accelerant caught fire, only to be quickly doused. The undamaged northern tower seemed impossibly small from where Hendricks stood, which made sense, given that it was almost two miles distant.

  The bay was littered with government boats: police, Coast Guard, fire-and-rescue. Most were small, ugly, and utilitarian—scuffed hulls and faded paint, pilothouses crowded with antennas and equipment—but a few were quite large. Several hundred yards to the west of the bridge was a fog bank as pale and solid as the cliffs of Dover, and a Coast Guard cutter hovered like a ghost ship at its edge. A massive crane barge with a ruined pickup truck in its grasp sat to the bridge’s immediate right, the twisted wreck swinging like a pendulum as the crane pivoted to deposit it on a flattop barge beside it.

  As Hendricks approached the top of the on-ramp, he forced himself to give the Homeland Security agent guarding it a friendly nod. It felt awkward, insincere, and in that instant, Hendricks was painfully aware that this plan hinged on a disguise made out of duct tape.

  The man eyed him a long moment. Shifted his weight and adjusted his hand on his gunstock. Hendricks tensed. He was too far away to engage hand to hand but not nearly far enough for the man to miss him if he opened fire.

  Then the man said, “Fucking awful, isn’t it?”

  “You ain’t kidding,” Hendricks replied. “It makes me hope there’s such a thing as hell—death’s too easy for anybody who could do a thing like this.”

  “I hear you,” the man said, and then a quadcopter camera drone zipping toward the bridge from the command tent drew his gaze. Hendricks slipped past him without another word, into the teeming nerve center of the rescue effort.

  From Hendricks’s perspective, the place was an operational nightmare. There were cop cars, fire trucks, and military vehicles everywhere. At least half of them were occupied, their doors open, radios crackling. People seemed to dart around at random. SFPD and Park Police uniforms abounded, but FBI and ATF agents were sprinkled here and there as well, their nylon raid jackets fluttering in the breeze. Men and women in military fatigues trotted back and forth between the command tent to the south of the tollbooths and the sawhorses that marked the point at which the roadway was deemed structurally unsound. Homeland Security agents in riot gear stood guard at all the access points.

  It looked to Hendricks like it had been a while since a survivor was extracted from the wreckage. Ambulances lined the FasTrak lane that bypassed the tollbooths, their drivers antsy and wide-eyed. Two Life Flight helicopters sat in the bridge pavilion’s parking lot, their crews milling just outside. Some paced. Others smoked. All of them looked tired, strung out, on edge.

  Hendricks took in most of this through the screen of his smartphone. He walked with it in front of him, scowling and occasionally tapping at it with his thumbs as if he were texting. Smartphones made for excellent camouflage. People were less likely to question your presence if you seemed like you belonged, and these days, belonging meant wandering obliviously around with your eyes glued to your phone’s screen.

  But the phone was no mere prop for Hendricks; it was also a useful piece of tech. He kept the camera app open as he walked, and, pretending that he was looking for a decent signal or trying to see the screen in full sunlight, he alternated between live shots of whatever was in front of him and glimpses over his shoulder, via the forward-facing camera, to see if he was being followed.

  The cell on wheels was set apart a
ways from all the chaos, which made approaching it tricky. It was a good fifty yards south of the command tent, to which it was connected by a cord the width of Hendricks’s wrist, and twenty yards from the nearest cluster of vehicles. No one was guarding it, which was good, but no one passed near it either, which would make any attempt to do so painfully obvious.

  He snapped a pic. Sent it off to Cameron via text. “You still with me?” he asked.

  “Sure am,” she replied in his Bluetooth earpiece. Hendricks could hear the clink of dishes and quiet conversation all around her. A coffee shop, she’d said. Then she’d hit him with some mumbo-jumbo about how she planned to use its unencrypted Wi-Fi network to gain access to the other computers on it, which would decrease the processing time for all the data they were about to steal. He’d barely understood a word.

  “Good. I sent you something. Any updates on our bomb scare?”

  “CNN and local news are on the scene. The bomb squad’s cordoned off the area. They’re waiting for a robot to arrive as we speak so they can safely detonate it.”

  Her tone was sharp. Brittle. “You sound annoyed,” he said.

  “More like disgusted. Two more witnesses came forward claiming they saw, and I quote, ‘an Arab-looking guy’ drop the bag and flee the scene. One of ’em swore up and down this nonexistent perp was wearing some kind of explosive vest.”

  “People are scared. Nervous. Bracing for the next attack. They see what they expect to see. That’s why eyewitnesses are so untrustworthy. You’d be surprised how easy it is to plant the seeds of false memory. They probably don’t even realize they’re lying.”

  “Somehow,” she said, “that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Did the pic come through yet?”