The Dangerous Hour (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  “Stay on the line, ma’am.”

  “Jules? Hang on.” With my free hand I felt for the source of the blood. Her chest—her sweater was soaked.

  “Help’s on the way, ma’am. May I get your name, please?”

  I gave it, fury at what had been done to Julia welling up inside me.

  “Help’s on the way. You stay on the line, ma’am.”

  “Will do. Jules, they’re coming. You’ll be okay.”

  Sophia Cruz, Julia’s sister, clung to me, crying. We stood under the bright lights of the emergency waiting room at S.F. General Hospital. Julia was in surgery; she’d taken a bullet in the left side of her chest, which had narrowly missed her heart.

  I stroked Sophia’s thick, gray-streaked hair, stared helplessly over the top of her head at Mick, whom I’d summoned from the pier to the scene of the shooting. He frowned in sympathy, came over, and we guided her to a chair in a corner. Thank God tonight was a relatively quiet one at the city’s trauma center.

  I sat next to Sophia, took her work-roughened hand. “Jules will pull through,” I said, wondering if the words sounded as baselessly optimistic to her as they did to me. “She’s strong; she’s a fighter.”

  “But if she doesn’t, Tonio . . .” A fresh spate of sobs.

  “She will.”

  “I feel so bad. This, after what I did to her.”

  I watched a doctor in greens emerge through the wide automatic doorway. He crossed to an anxious-looking Chinese couple on the other side of the room.

  “It was so cruel, what I said,” Sophia went on. “All this trouble she was in, but me, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. No, I had to go off on her about the drinking and the yelling at Tonio—”

  “She’s been drinking?”

  “Yeah, real heavy, since this thing happened. And Tonio, he’s just a little boy; he doesn’t understand when she gets mad. This morning? I lost it. Told her to leave the apartment and not come back till she got her shit together. Said if she didn’t, I’d claim abuse and sue for custody. That was why she was out there, walking alone in the dark. It’s all my fault, and if she dies—”

  “Sophia, she’s not going to die. And she often walks along there at night. It was just her bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  But I don’t really believe that. She was a target, not a random victim.

  Bad enough Dominguez framed her—and me. Now he’s gone way over the line.

  Sophia shook her head. “But if I hadn’t thrown her out, she’d’ve been home with us.”

  “No, she wouldn’t have. She was working late because there’d been a break in the case. When she was shot, she was on her way to Miranda’s, where we were going to have dinner.”

  Sophia lifted her red, damp eyes to mine. Her mascara had run down her cheeks and into the creases around her mouth. “But she must have been careless because she was upset. I threw her out. Where would she sleep?”

  “I knew she was upset, and we were going to talk about it at dinner. I’d’ve invited her to sleep at my house.”

  Sophia shook her head and looked down at her lap. At that moment she reminded me of Julia. It was a submissive, defeated response conditioned by a life filled with too much deprivation and too little hope. Sophia was determined to take the blame for Julia’s being shot, and I knew I couldn’t talk her out of it.

  The door to the parking lot slid open, and Adah Joslyn strode inside. She glanced around the waiting room, then motioned for me to join her. Sophia had lapsed into a depressed, waiting silence, so I left her with Mick.

  “You here officially?” I asked Adah.

  “Yeah, I requested the assignment.”

  “It’s not a homicide. Yet.”

  “No, but one of the guys on the crime scene unit knows Craig works for you and called me. I told my lieutenant I wanted in at the beginning, in case it becomes a homicide. What the hell happened, Shar?”

  “She left the pier maybe fifteen minutes before I did, to get us a table at Miranda’s. I was walking down there when I heard her moaning, found her crumpled on the ground.”

  “You hear the shot?”

  “No. It must’ve happened while I was still at the office. I think she’d been there a while; she was soaked with blood. Are the uniforms canvassing the people in the nearby piers?”

  “Sure, but I doubt they’ll find anybody who heard anything. It was late for folks to be in their offices, and the traffic on the bridge and the Embarcadero overpowers most other sounds. The shooter picked an ideal spot; it’s dark and deserted along that stretch.” Adah’s eyes rested on Mick and Sophia. “That the sister?”

  “Yes. Sophia Cruz.”

  “How’s she holding up?”

  “She was pretty upset earlier; they had a bad argument this morning, and she feels guilty. Now she’s gone into a holding pattern.”

  “Better that way. You think this has to do with what we discussed on Saturday?”

  “I’m almost certain it does.” I told her about my identification of Reynaldo Dominguez.

  “Well, that makes my job easier. We’ll put out a be-on-lookout order on him, ask some tough questions.”

  “I already contacted the department, as well as the Department of Corrections. Neither sounded particularly interested.”

  “That was before he came under suspicion of attempted homicide. You may not have concrete proof of his involvement, but I sure as hell want to talk to him.”

  “Well, good luck, but I don’t think a BOLO will bring results. He’s clever and probably has a number of places to hide.”

  “You know where any of those places might be?”

  “If I did, I’d be hauling him out kicking and screaming right now.”

  Adah’s eyes narrowed. “That the truth, McCone? You’re not just saying that so you can go this alone?”

  “I don’t lie to you; you know that.”

  “Yeah, I do.” She sighed. “And I know what’s coming now: do I mind if you assist on this?”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not. You’ve got a vested interest—first your career was on the line, now your employee’s life. Just play it cautious and easy. Control those hotheaded impulses.”

  “Hotheaded impulses?”

  “Let’s face it, McCone: you can be damned angry and relentless when you’re involved in something personal.”

  “I feel angry and relentless, but I’m not going to let my emotions rule me. There’s too much at stake here.”

  Adah left to check with the other officers on the investigation, and I joined Mick and Sophia to wait for news of Julia. We sat mostly silent for over an hour, watching the room slowly empty, before a doctor came through the doors, spoke with the clerk on the desk, and approached us. Julia, he said, had survived surgery and would soon be moved from the recovery room to the intensive care unit. Her condition was critical, and they would know more in a few hours.

  Sophia rose and grabbed his hands. “Critical—what does this really mean?”

  The doctor’s face was etched with weary lines, but he forced a kindly smile and said, “Why don’t we talk about that on the way to the ICU? You’ll want to see your sister. And even though she’s not conscious, your presence may help her.”

  I watched them go, the doctor putting his arm around her shoulders to guide her. “Jesus,” I said to Mick, “people like him are the real heroes.”

  “People like Jules, too. She made it through.”

  “So far.”

  “So far.”

  “Listen, Mick, I’ve got to get out of here. Will you wait for Sophia, take her home?”

  “Sure.”

  “Find out what the doctor said, and leave a message on my machine at home.”

  “Will do. But where’re you going?”

  “I’ve got a few places to check out.”

  “Shar, not alone. Not at this time of night.”

  “I’m not alone.” I patted my bag, where my .357 Magnum rested. I’d
never gotten around to returning it to the office safe after I’d taken it along on my aborted appointment with Johnny Duarte.

  Wednesday

  JULY 23

  One twenty-five in the morning. Smack in the middle of the dangerous hour. Smack in the middle of a dangerous place.

  A dark, half-block-long Mission-district alley that, so far as I knew, didn’t have a name. Near the projects, where men loitered on the sidewalks doing drugs and drinking from bottles in paper bags. Sirens wailing in the background—police cars and ambulances speeding toward S.F. General. Busy night in the Mission, and by now the emergency room I’d left earlier would be filling up with its victims. But here in the narrow space between two old warehouses silence prevailed.

  I walked along, hand on the .357 Magnum in the outside compartment of my bag. Listened to the crunch of my shoes on gravel and broken glass. The cold wind whipped down the alley and blew the hood of my sweater off my head, bringing with it the smell of garbage, urine, and feces. On the street behind me tires screeched, there was a thin crash, and then the vehicle sped away.

  Halfway down the block on my right a row of rundown clapboard cottages abutted the warehouse, and in the street-level window of one glowed the name “Sam’s.” I went down three steps to the door and pushed through. Inside was a bar fronted by old chrome-and-vinyl stools and backed by a smeared and cracked mirror. The only light in the small room was cast by a half-dozen beer signs and a bulb above the cash register. A few tables and chairs of the same vintage as the stools, a jukebox with an Out of Order sign taped to its glass, worn and curling linoleum floor—your extremely basic watering hole, designed for serious drinking and drug-taking in the restrooms.

  At one of the tables I spotted the individual I was looking for: a short man wearing jeans and a denim jacket, pointy-toed boots, and a Stetson hat much too large for his small head—Claude Cardenas, street name Cowboy, although the closest he’d ever been to a ranch was a state work farm. Claude was a petty thief, sometime drug dealer, sometime pimp, and all-around loser. He was also one of my best informers.

  He glanced at me, registered surprise, then looked away. I turned and went back outside. After a few minutes he came through the door and started down the alley; I followed him into the shelter of a Dumpster behind the warehouse. Claude lighted a cigarette, cupping his hands around his Bic, then pulled up his collar against the wind.

  “Long time, McCone.” His voice was rough from decades of chain smoking.

  “It’s been a while.”

  “But now you need the Cowboy.”

  “Yes, Claude, I do.” From my bag I took a copy of the composite of Reynaldo Dominguez. “You seen this guy?”

  He held up his lighter and squinted at it through the smoke. “Looks familiar. I might’ve seen him in one of the joints the other side of Army. The Viper? Sharl’s? Nah, haven’t been over there in more’n a month, and this was recent. Where’ve I been this past week? Dude’s. La Cucaracha.”

  “What, you were disloyal to Sam’s?”

  “That dump’s my office. For pleasure I hang at the better joints. Your guy, I don’t think he was in a bar. So where else’ve I been? The bank. Mike’s Burgers. The BART station. Ngoc’s Grocery. Wait a minute, I got it. The Cash Cow.”

  “That pawnshop near the Mission Street Safeway?”

  “Yeah. I was there talking with Darrin Boydston last week, and your guy came in, asked to look at guns.”

  I knew Darrin Boydston. The pawnbroker had been an All Souls client, and I’d once assigned Rae to conduct an investigation for him. In many ways he was a decent man, but he wasn’t above breaking the law, provided the price was right. The Cowboy had probably been talking to him about fencing stolen goods.

  I said, “Will you ask around, see what you can find out about the guy?”

  “Sure. Can I have this picture?”

  “I’d rather you just described him. He’s not to know I’m looking for him.”

  Cardenas nodded and scanned it once more. Drug-and-alcohol-saturated though his mind must be, he had good recall.

  I took the composite back and handed him forty dollars—our usual upfront arrangement. He nodded his thanks and stuffed the bills in his pocket.

  “McCone,” he said, “this have to do with the hit that was supposed to come down tonight?”

  “What hit?”

  He dropped his cigarette to the ground, crushed it out with the toe of his boot, looking uneasy. “I don’t know the details, but word was out on the street some woman was gonna die. Surprised me to see you come into the bar, because what I heard sounded a lot like you.”

  The little bastard! All these years I’ve put money in his pocket, treated him like a human being. He hears there’s a contract out, suspects it’s on me, and doesn’t give warning.

  Well, what do you expect from a scumbag paid informer? Loyalty?

  “So what did you hear? And where?” I asked him.

  “Where, I can’t tell you. Just on the street. They said she was young, a private detective, and had been mixed up with a drug dealer.”

  “And you thought that sounded like me?”

  He shrugged. “I’m sixty-six years old, McCone. You look young to me. As to who you get mixed up with, I don’t know. I’ll be in touch.” He turned and started back toward Sam’s.

  So Dominguez had been in the Cash Cow looking at guns—probably because he’d heard that Darrin Boydston occasionally sold untraceable weapons without complying with the state licensing procedures. And the word was out on the street that a young female detective who had been involved with a drug dealer was going to die.

  But why kill Julia? She’d never laid eyes on Dominguez, couldn’t connect him with either Aguilar or Johnny Duarte.

  The answer was obvious: Dominguez wanted me to pay big time for what I’d done to him years ago in San Diego. Killing one of my employees was part of that payback.

  Another obvious realization shook me. What about the rest of my employees? The other people I cared about?

  For a moment I pushed the panicky thought aside, because there was something wrong with the picture: why had he talked about the shooting beforehand? While a great many women now worked in my profession, Julia was a Mission-district resident and had been in the news recently; surely Dominguez must have realized someone would have recognized her as his target and warned her.

  The answer to that was obvious, too: he didn’t care.

  I thought back to the man I’d glimpsed in the National City barroom, holding court to a circle of admirers, openly bragging about killing Troy Winslip. And then there was his voice on the answering-machine tape that had cinched the case against him: “Knives at midnight,” interspersed with crazy laughter. This was more of the same: catch me if you can.

  He brought himself down then. I’ll bring him down now.

  I was stopped at the light at Mission and Army Street—the latter now called Cesar Chavez Boulevard, but we longtime residents had yet to make the mental transition—when, on impulse, I turned right. The first few blocks of Mission were reasonably quiet at this hour, the stores dark, iron gates locked across their doors and windows, but soon the street exploded into a kaleidoscope of light and motion. People entered and exited all-night groceries; the bridge-and-tunnel crowd filtered out of the clubs on the first leg of their journey home to the suburbs; muggers eyed them, assessing targets; working girls and junkies prowled, looking to score; the sound of police radio calls and music filled the air. Near the Sixteenth Street BART station a ragged man kept up a persistent, spine-chilling howl; a black-and-white turned on its flashers and pulled to the curb beside him.

  I drove a couple more blocks, turned right, and right again into Minna Street, between Mission and South Van Ness. Drove half a block more and stopped behind the building that housed Trabajo por Todos. Darkness there, except for an occasional fog-hazed streetlamp and lighted window. I edged the MG next to the fence around the building’s parking lot and got out. S
ilence, until I stood still and strained to hear. Then there were faint rustling noises as rats or stray cats moved through the night.

  Or as a stealthy human moved.

  The gate in the fence was closed and padlocked, but it was old, its frame bent, the chain that wound around its supports loose. I bent it some more and squeezed through, catching it so it wouldn’t clang.

  Criminal trespass, McCone. You get caught, you’ll be in even more trouble.

  Then I won’t get caught.

  Only one vehicle was parked there, close to the wall, a shabby white Datsun. Dim light shone through the glass door leading into the building. I moved toward the steps, then stopped in the shadows, feeling a chill.

  Someone watching.

  But from where?

  I closed my eyes, focused on the sensation.

  Not behind me. Not to either side. Not ahead—that hallway’s well lighted. Above? Maybe, but there aren’t many windows.

  All right. Chalk it up to nerves, too much imagination.

  I climbed the steps, tried the door, expecting it would be locked, but it was open. Why . . . ?

  Then I heard the whirr of the sewing machines from the downstairs clothing manufacturer’s space. Of course—companies like that maintained around-the-clock shifts. Fortunately for me, the door must’ve been left open to comply with fire regulations.

  I slipped inside, moved along the hall, and peered into the sewing room. A dozen or so women, heads bent over their machines, expertly guiding fabric. I darted past the door and headed for the staircase next to the elevator.

  The second floor lay in darkness, except for dim lights in the hallway. I followed its jogs and turns to the job-training center, found one side of the double doors ajar. My hand on my gun, I slipped inside and waited, listening. No sound, and the place had a vacant feel. Even so, I remained there a few minutes more before proceeding.

  I moved through room after room: physical fitness, day care center, language lab, classrooms, lunchroom. All were dark and silent. But in the cubicle next to Gene Santamaria’s a light glowed. I stopped, drew back around the corner, and listened.