The Vig

by John Lescroart

Most, maybe.

  Baker? Hardy wasn’t so sure.

  “So he’s out?”

  Ingraham pulled his cuff back and checked his watch. Hardy wasn’t positive, but it looked to be a hell of a Rolex. “If they’re on time, in about two hours.”

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  “I got a friend in Paroles. He called me. And I checked with the warden at the House. Nobody’s meeting him at the gate. Who would? Supposedly taking the bus back to town.”

  Hardy whistled. “You have checked.”

  “The guy got my attention.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  His old office mate sipped at his drink. “What can you do? Something’s gonna get us all. Maybe lock up more carefully.”

  “Did you ever pack?”

  Ingraham shook his head. “That’s for you cops. We gentlemen who believe in the rule of law are supposed to have no need for that hardware.”

  Hardy had come up to the D.A.’s office after a tour in Vietnam and several years on the police force. Ingraham had come up through Stanford, then Hastings Law School.

  “You planning to debate with Louis Baker?”

  “I’m not planning on seeing the man.”

  “What if he comes to see you?”

  “I called the warden after I got the word. He says Louis has been a model inmate, has found the Lord, gets max time off for good behavior. I’ve got nothing to worry about. Neither of us do. Evidently.”

  Hardy leaned across the bar. “Then why are you here?”

  Ingraham’s smile finally caught. “Because it sounds like a heap of bullshit to me.” He leaned back on the barstool. “I thought it might not be a bad idea to stay in touch for a couple of weeks, you and me.”

  Hardy waited, not getting it.

  “I mean, call each other every day at the same time, something like that.”

  “What would that do?”

  “Well, hell, Diz, we’re not going to get police protection. Nobody’s gonna put a tail on Louis to see if he heads for our neighborhoods. This way, if one of us doesn’t call, at least we have some clue. One of us bites it, maybe, but the other one is warned.”

  Hardy picked up his Guinness and downed the last two inches. “You think he really might do it, don’t you.”

  “Yep. I’m afraid I do.”

  “Jesus …”

  “One other thing …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I thought you might recommend what kind of gun.”

  Jane was in Hong Kong buying clothes for I. Magnin. She would be back this weekend.

  They hadn’t quite formalized living together again, although some of Jane’s clothes hung in the closet in Hardy’s bedroom. She still had her house—their old house—on Jackson, and would stay there once in a while, on nights she worked late downtown. But three or four nights a week for the past three months she’d slept here, out in the Avenues, with her ex-husband.

  Padding now from room to room, he realized how much he had come to need her again. Well, not need. You didn’t really need anybody to survive. But once you got beyond survival, you needed somebody if you wanted to feel whole, or alive, or whatever it was that made getting up something to look forward to rather than dread.

  After he’d finished his shift and Moses McGuire had come in to spell him at the Shamrock, he shot five or six games of 301 to keep his hand-eye sharp. The newly formed flights worked well, and he held his place at the line until he was ready to quit, leaving unbeaten.

  He drove home in darkness, parking his Suzuki Samurai, which he called his Seppuku, on the street in front of the only white picket fence on the block. Inside, he cooked a steak in a black cast-iron pan and ate it with a can of peas. He fed the tropical fish in the tank in the bedroom, read a hundred pages of Barbara Tuchman and realized anew that the world had probably always been very much like the wonderful place it was today; he went into his office to open his safe and look at his guns.

  He’d recommended to Rusty that he consider buying a regulation .38 police Special. It was a no-frills firearm that, using hollow-point slugs, you nicked a guy on the pinkie and he’d spin around like a ballerina and hit the ground.

  Hardy lifted his own Special from the safe. The Colt .44 was more of a show gun, and heavy, and the .22 target pistol might stop a charging tree rat, but that was about it. The Special was the one.

  He pulled a box of bullets from the back of the safe and carefully loaded the weapon. Immediately he was nervous and walked into his bedroom, opened a drawer in his night table and deposited the Special there.

  It was 9:48. He figured he would sit at his desk and wait for Rusty’s call at 10:00, then watch some L.A. Law and turn in—a quiet night.

  He picked the three darts out of the board across from his desk and starting throwing, easy and loose, trying not to think about Louis Baker, or Jane, or Rusty Ingraham.

  Someone had once told him that the way to turn water into gold is to go to the middle of a jungle and light a fire and put a pot of water on to boil. Now, you ready? Here’s the trick. For a half hour, don’t think of a lion. Pick up your pot of gold and go home.

  Hardy checked the clock on his desk. It was 10:12. Maybe he’d gotten it mixed up and they weren’t starting until tomorrow morning at 10:00. Still.

  He took the piece of paper that Rusty had given him and dialed the number. The phone rang eight times and Hardy hung up. Anyway, Rusty was supposed to call him at night, and Hardy call Rusty in the morning, unless one of them was not going to be home. Then they’d change the schedule on those days. It was only going to be for two weeks.

  At 10:35 he tried again. They must have said they’d start the next morning.

  Hardy wasn’t tired. None of this seemed very real, but he did lie down on his bed and take the Special out of the drawer next to him. He flipped off the light and pulled a comforter over him, his clothes still on, the gun in his hand. He looked at the clock by his bed. It was 11:01.

  No call.

  2

  It was dark when the telephone rang in the kitchen. Hardy, gun in hand, woke up from another of his fitful dozes, flicked on the kitchen light and got to it before the second ring.

  “Rusty?”

  “Who’s Rusty?”

  A woman’s voice, far away, crackled on the wire after a short delay.

  Hardy’s head was clearing. “God, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  The clock on the stove read 3:10. “It’s three o’clock in the morning here,” he said. “I was just jogging around the neighborhood and happened to hear the phone.”

  “In the morning? I can’t get this straight at all.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t even know what day it is. There, I mean.”

  “That’s all right. I’m right here and I don’t know what day it is.”

  “And who’s Rusty?”

  Jane was halfway around the world and there was no heed to worry her. “My old office mate. I was just having a dream, I guess.”

  He held the telephone’s mouthpiece in one hand and became aware of the gun in the other. He almost thought of telling her then. Look, sweetie, I’m standing in my kitchen holding a loaded .38 Special and I am considering the possibility that someone, who’s probably good at it, is trying to kill me. But don’t worry. Have a good time in Hong Kong. Don’t think about lions.

  What he did was ask her how her trip was going.

  “Good, except it looks like I’ve got to stay another week, maybe ten days.”

  “Peachy.”

  Silence.

  “Dismas?”

  “I’m here. I was just doing a few cartwheels.”

  “This happens, you know.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’d just like to see you.”

  “Me, too.” She went on to explain about the vagaries of supply in the East. Ships carrying thousands of bolts of material from the labor-cheap factories in the Philippines, T
hailand and Korea coming in to Hong Kong to be made into designer clothes by the—relatively—labor-cheap tailors there.

  “But we can’t commit, really, I mean buy, unless we see the colors, feel the quality of the material.”

  “I know,” Hardy said. “Feel the quality …”

  “And two of the ships are running late. They could come in earlier but even so, it’ll take a few days to go through the bolts.”

  “I got it, really.” Hardy put the gun on the counter. “It doesn’t thrill me, but I’ll live.” Poor Dismas. “Otherwise, how’s the trip going?”

  “Well, people are starting to get nervous about ninety-seven. You can feel it already. Nobody wants to talk long-range, like by next year some plans may evolve and the Brits will be gone. It’s weird.”

  “It’s better,” Hardy said. “People ought to remember they might be gone by next year.”

  Jane paused. “My cheerful ex-husband.”

  “Hey, not so ex-.”

  “Not so cheerful either. Gone by next year! You can’t live thinking like that.”

  Hardy wanted to tell her you’d better, that even a year was pretty optimistic. He was tempted to remind her that their son hadn’t even made it that year, but he let it pass. She didn’t need to be reminded of that. “You’re right,” he said. “You can’t live like that.”

  “Dismas, are you all right?” she asked. “Are you doing anything for fun?”

  “I am tearing up the town. I’d just rather be doing it with you.” He realized he was being a pain in the ass. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s three A.M. and you tell me you’ll be gone another week. I’m a little disoriented, is all. A little ease of vu zjahday.”

  “Vu zjahday?”

  “Yeah. It’s the opposite of déjà vu. The sense that you’ve never been somewhere before.”

  Jane laughed. “Okay, you’re all right.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Maybe when you get home we talk some long-range, huh?”

  A beat, or it might have been the delay on the line. “It could happen,” she said.

  Frank Batiste wasn’t sure anymore that he was happy to have made lieutenant. It was more money and that was all right, but sitting here in the office all day, the conduit for gripes going up and edicts coming down, was wearing him down.

  In ancient times they killed the bearer of bad news, and he was starting to understand why. Maybe, somehow, the news would go away, or wouldn’t have to be thought about.

  He couldn’t just hide in here all day. He forced himself up from his chair, feeling the beginning of back pain, and opened the door.

  The homicide department was commencing to take on the feel of a country-club locker room. Several golf bags leaned against desks.

  He walked back through the room, nodding at the guys and getting ice for his troubles. Hell, it wasn’t his doing. He even sided with the men. Maybe he should step down as looie, let someone else deal with this crap. But what would that do? Just put someone else in, someone who wouldn’t be as sympathetic to the team.

  If only the City That Once Knew How had a goddamn clue, he thought. Now it didn’t know how to wipe its own ass. And nowhere was it more clear than here in Homicide. These fourteen guys—it sounded funny, but was true anyway—were the shock troops against the worst elements in the city. No one got to Homicide without nearly a decade of solid police work, without a lot of pride, and without some special mix of killer instinct, stubbornness and brains. These guys were the elite, and if you cut their morale you had a problem.

  But last week, for the first time in seven years, the department had brought charges against two men on the squad. A month before, the two officers—Clarence Raines and Mario Valenti—had gone to arrest a telephone-company executive named Fred Treadwell for murdering his lover and his lover’s new boyfriend. Treadwell had resisted arrest—kicking out a window of his second-story apartment, cutting his head upon his exit, falling to the alley below, breaking an ankle, smashing his head again as he pitched into some garbage cans and escaping on foot to his attorney’s office.

  Treadwell and all the other principals in this triangle being gay, his attorney immediately called a press conference and trotted poor Fred out with his cuts, breaks and bruises, charging police brutality.

  Valenti and Raines, two of the elite with perfect records, had, it seemed, suddenly not been able to contain their prejudice against gays (probably as a result of their own latent homosexuality), and had beaten Fred to within an inch of his life, leaving him for dead in the alley behind his apartment.

  Somebody took Fred’s lame story—or the righteous outrage of the gay community—seriously enough to bust Raines and Valenti and begin a formal investigation.

  As if that weren’t enough, at about the same time as the charges came down, the latest budget cuts were announced. Effective immediately, no overtime was to be approved for “routine procedural work,” which meant writing reports and serving subpoenas.

  A significant number of murder cases now were what they called NHI cases. It stood for “No Humans Involved,” and a kind interpretation meant that the victim, the suspect and all the witnesses were at best petty criminals.

  These people were not fond of policemen and tended to be hard to find during normal business hours. So the service of subpoenas would most often take place in the early morning or late at night, and the cops going out after their witnesses would put in the overtime knowing this was their best chance of doing their job. Now the city had decided it wasn’t going to pay for that.

  Which led to the golf clubs. The guys went out at eight or nine o’clock, knocked at doors, found no one home, played a round of golf, went back to the same doors and tried again, still found no one home, came back to the office, and wrote reports on their day in the field.

  It sucked and everybody knew it.

  Jess Mendez nodded at the lieutenant and called over his shoulder. “Hey, Lanier! What time you tee off?”

  Batiste didn’t turn around. He heard Lanier behind him. “I got three subpoenas first. Say nine-thirty.”

  Abe Glitsky’s desk was near the back window with a view of the freeway and, beyond it, downtown. Today, however, at 7:50, there was no view but gray.

  Glitsky did not have a bag of clubs leaning against his desk. He was also one of only two men in the squad who worked without a partner. He and Batiste had come up to Homicide the same year, and neither of them had given a shit about their minority status—Glitsky was half Jewish and half black, Batiste a “Spanish-surname”—so there was a bond of sorts between them.

  Batiste pulled up a chair. “Forget your clubs, Abe?”

  Glitsky looked up from something he was writing. “I was just going to come see you.”

  “Complete a foursome?”

  Abe moved his face into what he might have thought was a smile. He had a hawk nose and a scar through his lips, top to bottom. His smile had induced confessions from some bad people. He might be a nice person somewhere in there, but he didn’t look like one. “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s funny.”

  Abe put his pen down. “Flo and I, we’re thinking we might make a move.”

  “What are you talking about?” This was worse than golf clubs.

  “L.A.’s recruiting. I’d have to go back to Burglary maybe for a while, but that’d be all right.”

  Batiste leaned forward. “What are you talking about? You’ve got, what, nineteen years?”

  “Close, but they’ll transfer most of ‘em.” He motioned down at his desk. “I was just working on the wording here on this application. See where it says ‘Reason for leaving last job?’ Should I say ‘incredible horseshit’ or keep it clean with ‘bureaucratic nonsense’?”

  Batiste pulled up to the desk. “Abe, wait a minute.” He wasn’t about to say Abe couldn’t quit—of course he could quit—but he had to say something. He put his hand o
n the paper. “Can you just wait a goddamn minute.”

  Abe’s stare was flat. “Sure,” he said. “I can wait all day.”

  “You know it’ll turn around.”

  Abe shook his head. “No, I don’t, Frank. Not anymore. It’s the whole city. It doesn’t need us, and I don’t need it.”

  “But it does need us—”

  “No argument there. Give me a call when it finds out.” Abe took the paper back and glanced at it again. “‘Incredible horseshit,”’ he said. “It’s a stronger statement, don’t you think?”

  Hardy parked at the end of the alley and turned up the heater. His Samurai was not airtight and the wind hissed at the canvas roof. On both sides, buildings rose to four stories, and in front of him fog obscured the canal and the shipyards beyond.

  It was not yet 8:30. The gun—still loaded—was in his glove compartment. It was a registered weapon. It was probably one of the few legally concealable firearms in San Francisco. Hardy’s ex-father-in-law was Judge Andy Fowler, and when Hardy left the force, he’d applied for a CCW (Carry a Concealed Weapon) license, which was never, in the normal course of San Francisco events, approved.

  But Judge Fowler was not without influence, and he did not fancy his daughter becoming a widow. Not that being allowed to pack a weapon would necessarily make any difference. But he had talked Hardy into it, and this was the first time Hardy had had occasion to carry the thing around.

  Okay, he would legally carry it then, even concealed if he wanted to.

  He turned off the ignition. He slowly spun the cylinder on the .38, making sure again that it was loaded. Stepping out into the swirling fog, he lifted the collar of the Windbreaker with his left hand. In his right hand, the gun felt like it weighed fifty pounds.

  He hesitated. “Stupid,” he said out loud.

  But he moved forward.

  The alley ended in a walkway that bounded the China Basin canal. To Hardy’s left an industrial warehouse hugged the walkway, seeming—from Hardy’s perspective—to lean over the canal further and further before it disappeared into the fog. The canal, at full tide, lapped at the piling somewhere under Hardy. There was no visible current. The water was greenish brown, mercury-tinged by the oil on its surface.