Wildcase - [Rail Black 02]

by Neil Russell

  The streetcar near Lombard Street was traveling away from us, and the kid hit it with such force that windows rattled in Oakland. The car’s rear third came off the tracks, and the mixer slid along its right side, where his extended mirror took out every window. When I passed, the conductor was doing his best to get the trolley stopped, and the passengers were clumped together on the opposite side.

  The Golden Gate Bridge isn’t that easy to get to. The shark managed to do it without dropping under sixty. I’d been expecting a fleet of squad cars and helicopters since we’d begun, but when I finally heard the first siren, it was by itself. A single black and white was sitting about thirty yards behind me and making no move to come any closer. I couldn’t blame him. There’s less paperwork for shooting somebody than wrecking a department vehicle. And the outcome for tangling with a couple of concrete behemoths at freeway speed seemed obvious. I figured they’d probably be waiting for us at the toll plaza.

  They were—about twenty of them. Plus a couple of cone trucks they’d commandeered from the Bridge Authority. But Shark-Boy didn’t come off the gas an inch, and that much tonnage behind the leering grin of a man-eating fish sent the Marin sheriffs into a jailbreak trying to clear what had been a limp-wristed attempt at a roadblock. The kid took out half a tollbooth, and I finished the job. I didn’t see anybody inside, but they’d forgotten the cash drawer, and as I looked in my mirror, I saw dozens of motorists bolt from their cars and wade into a cyclone of currency. It was nice to know somebody was having a good day.

  I was trying to anticipate where the kid might go when he took the guesswork out of it, got off the highway and headed east—which was also straight up. It made sense in that guys on the run seem to try to stay close to home, but a cement mixer wasn’t what that narrow road was designed for.

  * * * *

  29

  High Ground and Long Magazines

  Ninety-nine percent of the visitors to San Francisco have no idea the Marin Headlands are anything other than picturesque hills. Part of the reason is that nobody’s turning a buck up there, so the tour books funnel you to the normal fleecing stations. The other part is the city’s anathema to calling attention to the military—except to ask if there’s any more free land they can have.

  The headlands, however, are where America’s Guns of Navarone were.

  Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the army began constructing cannon emplacements across the bay to protect the country’s most important West Coast port. In the run-up to WWII, antiaircraft batteries were added along with massive sixteen-inch guns that could fire a one-ton shell thirty miles out to sea. To man and secure these weapons, hundreds of soldiers lived and worked in remote installations hidden among the ridges. The locals knew they were there, of course, but details were classified, and to ask questions was to invite a cold cell and several long evenings with the FBI.

  During those years, the movement of every vessel that passed through the Golden Gate—from carrier to minesweeper, cargo ship to tug—and every aircraft that ventured overhead was carefully orchestrated by the military: The secrecy of the operation, along with the tightly controlled identities of the personnel and the state-of-the-art equipment were components of the Japanese internment decision.

  Though very few outsiders know about the headlands’ former use, almost everyone has seen photographs taken from high above the Golden Gate Bridge looking across to San Francisco. Most are not the aerial shots they appear to be. You get them by standing on a narrow spit of dirt on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff with your heart in your throat.

  During my high school years at the Army and Navy Academy, we traveled to the headlands for two weeks each summer to bivouac with other military schools and play war games. The food was lousy, it always rained, and trying to stay awake standing watch was impossible. But they could have doubled our discomfort for the one Saturday night each year that we were turned loose in San Francisco.

  What had begun as a postcard-perfect day had been gradually darkening since the shark and I hit the bridge. Now, ascending the hill at an angle steeper than any street in the city, fog rolled over the hood of the mixer, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Twain never said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco,” but he should have.

  I raised my window to keep out the wet gauze and turned on my wipers against the increasing mist. Ahead, the shark disappeared, and when I gave my truck more gas, I almost missed a bend and barely recovered to avoid plunging over the side. When I could no longer see the road, I hit my lights, then quickly switched them off when they reflected back in my face.

  The procession of law enforcement kept falling farther back until it was completely swallowed by the gloom. Even the sirens disappeared. Since we were now on federal land, somebody higher than a patrol officer would be making decisions. Hopefully, that would give me time to figure out how to avoid having them reopen Alcatraz for me.

  As I approached the top, my memory said that as soon as the terrain leveled, the ruins of one of the artillery batteries would be thirty yards off to my right. I turned in what I hoped was the correct spot, and in a few seconds, I could make out what looked like a two-story concrete motel with its outer wall removed. Welcome to 1942.

  I angled in so that I was parallel to it and almost ran into the shark. The kid’s engine was still running, but the door was open and the cab empty. It made sense that he would know the place. He’d probably graffitied it along with countless other drunks, druggies and gangbangers. I drove past the idling truck until I was enveloped in fog again, stopped and got out as quietly as possible, leaving my engine on to cover any extraneous noise.

  The gravel had been paved over since the last time I’d been here, and the brown cement was wet from the mist, causing the soles of my deck shoes to squeak slightly. I thought about taking them off, but a sea of broken glass changed my mind. With visibility only inches, I kept to the wall, unable to see the overhang of the second floor above my head. I entered the first doorway I came to, and though it was dark inside, there was much less fog.

  It was a square room with rusting artillery shell racks built into the walls. At the rear was a stairway leading up. As I moved toward it, I noticed something under one of the racks. When it didn’t move, I got closer. The guy was wearing dark blue sweatpants, matching hooded CAL sweatshirt and Adidas cross-trainers. He’d taken two shots to the face and several more in his chest. He hadn’t felt much pain.

  Keeping against the wall, I took the stairs one slow step at a time. Halfway up, I found a St. Francis Hospital clip-on ID in the name of Joanne Trufant. From the picture, Joanne was a black girl in her twenties with an engaging smile. Just under the small gold crucifix around her neck was the bold lettering:

  TRAUMA TEAM FOUR

  SUPERVISING R.N.

  Two steps beyond, a pink-and-white running shoe lay on its side. There was broken glass here too, and fresh blood on the cement. Suddenly, a volley of shots ricocheted off the concrete above my head. Not a good time to be tall. I retreated down a couple of steps.

  “Hey, Jaws, you don’t need the girl.”

  His answer was two more bullets. I knew he couldn’t see through the fog, but I also couldn’t avoid the glass underfoot, so I might as well have been wearing a cowbell. I needed him thinking about, something else.

  “You okay, Joanne?” I shouted back.

  “I’m fine, but this motherfucker’s crazy.”

  She didn’t sound like she was about to fall apart.

  “How’s Carmine?” she asked.

  She’d obviously seen him shot, so I told her the truth. “Dead.”

  “Shit, he seemed like a nice guy.”

  The kid spit a stream of angry Chinese, and Joanne let out a muffled yell. “Goddamn it, stop pulling my hair!”

  I heard scuffling, and it was just what I needed. I bolted the rest of the way up the stairs into the open air of the roofless second floor. I ran in the direction w
here I thought the shots had originated and came upon the kid trying to hold on to Joanne with one hand and level his MAC with the other. He didn’t get either right.

  Joanne sank her teeth into his free wrist, and I got to the MAC just as he pulled the trigger. I jerked it up, and it fired wildly for a few seconds before the clip ran dry. If I had hit him with the left I threw, it would have knocked him cold, maybe worse. As it was, it just grazed his temple and sent the gun flying but didn’t put him all the way down. He spun, caught himself with one hand on the floor, regained his balance and headed for the stairs.

  Other than a bloody foot and some mussed hair, Joanne coked okay. I left her and went after the kid. I heard the shark’s engine rev and the gears engage. I got close enough to see the soup close around its taillights. I listened as it gained speed, but instead of turning onto the road, it went straight. Maybe the kid didn’t know his geography after all. I ran after him.

  You couldn’t miss the noise of the truck going through the fence, but it was a low barrier, and as high as the kid was sitting, he might not have seen it. Then the engine surged and underbrush began breaking. I slowed because I knew the edge was close. Still, I almost misjudged it.

  Standing between the tire tracks, I listened to the mixer sliding down the side of the cliff. It continued for a couple of seconds, then hit something hard and stopped. The engine was still roaring, so the kid might have been unconscious with his foot on the gas.

  I moved carefully parallel to the abyss, hoping to get an angle that would let me see. Like the eye of a hurricane, a round tunnel of sunlight suddenly opened, extending all the way to the water. Two-thirds of a mile below, a flock of white seagulls skimmed the whitecaps. And then there was the crack of a tree trunk splintering, and the shark suddenly fell out of the clouds into the light. It bounced once against the cliff face, flipped and plunged upside down into the bay. I waited for somebody to bob to the surface, but it didn’t happen, and the hole closed.

  I was on my way back to the battery when I heard a helicopter. He passed over me then swung around and came back and hovered directly overhead. We couldn’t see each other, but he must have been equipped with thermal imaging, because there was no question he knew I was there.

  Joanne had both shoes on and was bending over Carmine. She looked up. “Did you get him?”

  “He got himself.”

  “Fucker.”

  I nodded at the dead guy. “You two weren’t together?”

  She shook her head. “Just jogging the same route when the weasel almost took us out with that goddamn truck. You a cop?”

  I ignored her and went back upstairs. I found the kid’s MAC. It was well used and devoid of markings. I ejected the long, nonstandard magazine. Half-inch dashes were etched along its edge at irregular intervals. I recognized the clip’s design. It had been manufactured for the Ministry of State Security, and its capacity would be a multiple of eight. Fifty-six for this one, I estimated. There would also be an identifier engraved inside its base that corresponded to an agent.

  Being able to link a specific piece of equipment to a specific operator might seem counterintuitive, but the Chinese are almost as long on personal accountability as they are on brutality. In other words, carelessness with state property can get you executed. The kid wouldn’t be an officially recognized asset, but considering the brazenness of the attack and immediate response to our arrival at Happy Asia, he was being run by a professional.

  I pocketed the magazine, took the MAC and headed back downstairs. Joanne was standing in the doorway looking up at the opaque sky. The helicopter was still there, and the fog was getting thinner.

  “Sounds like somebody’s going to be here pretty soon,” she said.

  “I know, and I’m sorry to leave you with this mess.”

  She looked at the gun in my hand. “How are you going to get past anybody on that little tiny road?”

  “A little cadet magic. But it would be helpful if you never saw me.”

  She nodded. “Way too much fog to have seen anybody.”

  “You going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Where I work, this wouldn’t even make the day’s top ten. How bad is the heat going to be?”

  “I think they’re all going to go into a room, and when they come out, none of this will have happened.”

  “‘Then one day, you can buy me dinner and fill me in.”

  I shook her hand and felt its warmth. “It’s a date,” I said.

  * * * *

  I wiped the American Flag mixer free of prints and made a mental note of the owner’s name painted on the door. j. g. tarantello. J. G. would get something nice for the trouble I’d caused him. Maybe a new Escalade to ease his commute.

  As I jogged west down the ridgeline, I threw the MAC as far as I could, knowing there was water out there somewhere. About a mile farther along, I found the old trail. It was in a lot worse condition than I remembered.

  During my military school excursions, we’d discovered a shallow cavern in the hill about two hundred feet down. Since it provided a clear sweep of the bay, rumor had it that it had been a sentry post against a possible Japanese commando landing. To me, that sounded like army-speak for: Here’s another place to bore some dogfaces to death.

  Wanting to honor those who had come before us, our group turned it into a drinking club and cut crude steps down to the tiny beach to get the beer up once it arrived via the tug captain we’d paid. I suppose the steps put us at risk of a frontal assault, but we kept a church key handy just in case. Never underestimate the industriousness of young men with too many rules and too much money.

  I wasn’t as nimble as I’d once been, but half an hour later, I was hoofing it along the Golden Gate Bridge approach. An empty cab heading back to the city stopped where he wasn’t supposed to when he saw the hundred-dollar bill I was waving.

  It was still a mess at the toll plaza, but the cops were doing their best to squeeze the four northbound lanes down to two. I made a silent apology to those I’d inconvenienced. Southbound was clear but moving at a curiosity crawl that was somewhat mitigated by the Bridge Authority having suspended toll collection. My cabbie, an aging hippie named Walt Wingo, caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “I still gotta charge you for the toll, buddy.”

  “That the law or because you saw the C-note?”

  Walt got a little ouchy. “You want, motherfucker, I can stop right here and call one a them pigs over to ‘splain it to you.”

  “Lighten up, Walt, the sixties are over. If the extra few bucks will make a difference in your life, fine. Just don’t jerk my chain.”

  He brooded for a moment. “Two fuckin’ airport runs with a earful of Gandhis. Counted out the fare to the fuckin’ penny ... to the fuckin’ PENNY. Then I get sent out to Sausalito, where I drive around for a fuckin’ hour lookin’ for an address that don’t exist. I got me a roommate that don’t pay his share of the rent and picks up stray cats that eat my fuckin’ food. So, you’ll fuckin’ EXCUSE me if I got a little attitude.”

  I had Walt drive past Happy Asia. There was crime scene tape blocking the sidewalk, and some cops standing around smoking. An old Asian woman, pulling a grocery cart, broke through the tape and started across the restricted area. One of the cops said something to her, and she spit a stream of brown liquid on his shoe and kept walking. The cop’s buddy almost fell down laughing.

  Down the block, next to Starbucks, were more tape and more cops. No old ladies. I saw no sign of Eddie or Fat Cat, but I’d been gone two hours. I had Walt stop at the next intersection, where I got out and handed him the entire hundred. He might have grunted, but he didn’t smile.

  You can only checkmate a Fed for so long, and my time was running out. With my plane now in operation, it wouldn’t be difficult for my dear friend, Francesca Huston, to find me. I didn’t need more aggravation. It was time to play a customer’s game. As I hoofed it back to the Huntington, I bought a throwaway phone from a street vendor.

&nb
sp; “You and I need a face-to-face,” I said when she answered.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” growled SAC Huston. “Where are you? I’ll send a car.”

  “If that’s your sweet voice, you don’t date much. A friend of mine has a soft spot in his heart for law enforcement. Benny Joe Willis. You should be able to come up with an address. I’ll give you a hint. LA.”

  “Fuck off, Black. The only reason I haven’t put out an arrest-on-sight is ...”

  I interrupted her. “Are we going to have to go through the hang up/call back routine again? You’re not going to arrest anybody because you’ve got a sick feeling that you’re way over the horizon from something very big and very ugly. Well, you are, and it’s a good bet you’re going to get a whole lot sicker before you get better.” I gave her a moment. “So, do I have your attention?”