16
I figured I could get in just before closing and rode the bus all the way to the gun range. “Am I too late?” I asked Charlie.
She checked the clock. “Naw, you’re fine. What are you into? Hey, I got this sweet Walther PPK 7.65—it’s the James Bond gun.”
“Just give me a .45, will you?”
“You didn’t bring yours?”
“I haven’t been home. But it’s all I’m in the mood for.”
“Got a Remington Rand right here. It’ll feel just like yours.”
I stepped onto the range and fired clip after clip. I kept sending the target out farther and farther, blasting at the silhouette with focused precision, feeling the power of the gun, the secure, heavy weight of it in my hand, the comfortable kick as the rounds left the barrel. I was at ease, in the perfect peace of vengeful meditation, imagining Susan’s killer with every squeeze. Take aim, breathe, shoot him right through the heart. Aim, breathe, right between the eyes. Conrad, dead. Sharkskin, dead. Conrad’s words were swirling: You’re pegged, buddy. Prints on the gun. Why would he tell me? Aim. Breathe. Shoot. Prints on the gun. Aim. Breathe. Shoot. No gun at the crime scene. Gun with prints.
The gun in my hand clicked, the bolt slammed back. The clip was empty. I pulled the trigger again, enjoying the relative silence. Click. I watched my hand on the gun, pulling the trigger. Prints on the gun. You’re pegged, buddy. Everything clicked. It was a crazy hunch but worth it. I adjusted my ear protection and moved toward the door, peeking through the window and into the storefront of the range. Charlie was alone, no customers. I reloaded.
Movies never tell the truth about how loud handguns are. A .45 automatic is ear-splittingly loud in a small room without ear protection. I left the ears on, held my gun lightly, and stepped through the door. Charlie looked up at me and smiled. I saw her mouth move but I could barely make out the words.
I brought the .45 above my head and squeezed off a shot into the ceiling. Charlie’s hands went instinctively to her ears as the entire store rattled in repercussion. The ceiling tile shattered and we were both showered with brilliant bits of gypsum, white powder everywhere, like a concentrated snowstorm. I aimed the gun at her and stepped forward. Her eyes were darting, her body lurching for the reach.
“Don’t!” I screamed, and got even closer. Her hand was inches from her belt and the .38 she always wore on her waist. “Don’t even fucking move, Charlie.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Dave?” she shouted. “You know I can take you out before you can squeeze off a shot.”
“So why didn’t you? You had the chance.”
She paused a second. “What do you want. The register? I know where you live, man—”
“Speak up, Charlie. Who is it?”
“Who’s what?”
I shot the ceiling again. Charlie cringed, hands on her ears.
“Who is it, Charlie?” I was yelling to be heard over her ringing ears. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know!” she screamed. “Don’t fucking kill me, Dave, just don’t fucking kill me!”
I slipped off my ears but held the gun on her. “I’m not gonna kill you, Charlie, I just have to know what you know.”
“I don’t know shit, man, I’m just trying to get by. They threatened my little girl, my daughter. Can you understand that?”
“Who, Charlie? I need to know who.”
“I don’t fucking know who they are. They jumped me over a year ago.”
“What do they want from you?”
“Your guns, man, that’s all. Just your guns. They offered me money. I said, Fuck you, this is my business. Then they jumped me, said they’d hurt my little girl.” She looked at me with genuine fear in her eyes, this tough, frighteningly lethal woman, scared shitless. “She spends the weekends with my ex-husband. I can’t protect her all the time. My ex is dirt—you know that. All I got is my daughter and my store. I didn’t have a choice, Dave, you gotta believe me.”
“Charlie, how does it work?”
“They give me a gun. You know, sometimes you want to try a new gun, you ask me for a suggestion?”
“Yeah.”
“They ask me what kind of guns you’ve been shooting. This guy comes in, he gives me a gun—something you’d like—he leaves. And I keep it here and don’t let no one touch it but you. I say, Try this. You shoot it, I put it in a bag, when the guy comes back I give it to him. That’s all I know.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“I don’t know his name, I swear it.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Tall, dark hair, a real snake.”
Conrad. “How many times, Charlie? How many guns have they given you?”
“Four. Four guns, four pickups.”
“You sitting on anything now? That PPK you tried to sell me on?”
“No, Dave, I just thought you’d like it. I swear.”
“When. When were the guns?”
She leaned on the counter, head shaking. “The first one was last year, very beginning of the year, right after New Year’s. Then another last winter, maybe November or December. Then another maybe a month ago, not even. Then last week.”
“When last week?”
“When you wanted to shoot the Mini Cougar and I suggested you try the 9mm Baby Glock.”
“I made your life easy.”
“Well, yeah.” She wasn’t proud. “But the guy came to get it, David. Just the other day. He was like, Nice doing business. I thought that was it, man—I thought it was over. When you came back and asked to shoot it again I gave you a Glock 19, hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
I hadn’t. I lowered the gun. “All right, Charlie. Sorry about your ceiling.”
“I’m sorry, Dave. I hope I didn’t get you into trouble, but my little girl—”
“I would’ve done the same thing in your place.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. And Charlie, keep a low profile.”
“You think I’m in some shit?”
“You’re definitely in some shit. I don’t know how it will pan out. You could get charged as an accessory in some murders.”
“Damnit, Dave, I can’t—I have to get out of town—”
“Charlie, calm the fuck down. You can’t go anywhere. If the law comes looking for you, you tell them the same story you told me. Because I promise you—if anyone comes for you, you’ll be lucky if it’s the cops. If you get heat from the other side, you’re cooked.”
“What are you into?”
“I have no idea. But I keep meeting people who wind up dead. Keep your head down, business as usual. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I was never here today. This didn’t happen.”
“All right, Dave. Be careful.”
“Watch your back, Charlie.” I was already gone.
* * *
I went home and tried to forget that there were cameras in my house. If I was still being watched—and I had to assume that I was—the best thing was to go on about my business until I could figure it all out. I would have to play it cool, keep up appearances. And tonight I was definitely in for the evening.
I tried to replicate my usual routine—or what had been my usual routine before all the madness began. I cooked a meal, spent a little time with the paper, had a couple slim fingers of whiskey, and went to bed early. I left the light in the living room on, as usual, got into bed, reading for a few minutes longer, and then turned off my bedside lamp. I hoped the cameras didn’t have night vision.
I got up, stuffed my pillows and an extra blanket under my sheets, slipped into my clothes, into the dark hallway, and downstairs to the garage. I let myself out the back door and walked down to Grand to get a cab.
17
There are only three long blocks between Hollywood Billiards and the 711 Club on the south side of Market. I let the cabbie hold a hundred-dollar bill and asked him to wait. It had been years since I’d been back to the 711, a genuine dingy hole of a bar, a
narrow shotgun leading into the depths of one’s own bile-filled liver. I bellied up to the all-too-familiar dismay and nodded to the old-timer who had served me an infinite number of bracers back in the day.
“Hey there,” he grunted. “Long time.”
“That it has,” I replied. No post-AA judgment from this gentleman. He didn’t ask, he didn’t tell. The kind of discretion that comes from a lifetime of serving newspapermen. “Frank, I’m expecting a call here.”
“I’ll keep an ear out.”
I nursed a whiskey and waited. At about twenty after ten the phone rang. Frank answered it and put the phone on the bar, nodding at me.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Crane?” Big Al, no mistaking it.
“Talk to me.”
“He’s on his way over. We’ll be leaving in a couple minutes. Soon as he gets here.”
“Good. I’ll call you at home tomorrow and tell you how it went.” I hung up, knocked it back, tipped Frank, and walked out. I got back into my cab and had the driver pull me up close—but not too close—to Al’s jalopy, which hadn’t moved since the afternoon. Within a few minutes, Al and Conrad came around the corner and got in.
It was cliché, but there was nothing else to say. “Follow that car.”
We got on the 101 and headed south, past South City, finally getting off at Poplar and cruising surface streets into the upscale section of San Mateo that might as well have been Burlingame. All the houses were big, ugly, Northern Californian takes on McMansions. Stucco and pink ruled the day.
Al turned onto a dead-end street. Before following them down, I had the driver stop. I saw Al pull up in front of a big house in the center of the cul-de-sac at the end of the road. Conrad got out and went around the side of the house—there must have been an in-law unit in the back. I had the driver roll down the next block before I paid the fare and sent him away.
I got close to the house and found a nice little hedge and settled in for a long wait. In less than half an hour Conrad came back out, whistling, jumped into Al’s car, and took off.
I waited a bit longer, until a few dogs in the neighborhood started barking it up. I didn’t want it to be too quiet. I carefully worked my way around the side of the house and saw the in-law unit, a tiny, one-story miniature house. The lights were on inside, and the large French doors in front of the place were well illuminated. I could see a figure moving around inside and ducked out of sight.
The front door opened and the figure emerged: midtwenties, dark complexion, thin but wiry. He was lighting a cigarette and talking on a cell phone.
“Sí. Una hora y media, más or menos. Voy a tener un pizza, quieres? Okay, okay. Entonces no te espero. Ciao.”
He hung up and dialed another number. He spoke in a slow, hesitant English with a Latino accent.
“Yes, I want one pizza. With pepperoni, and also I want extra cheese. Okay. Can you bring—do you know the Shell station?” He described the location—I’d seen it on the way in. He didn’t even want a pizza delivered to this place. That worked for me—if he wasn’t meeting anyone for an hour and a half, and if his pizza came in thirty minutes or so, I might have a chance to take a look while he was out grabbing his dinner.
I went back to the hedge and dug in.
About twenty minutes went by and I heard his shuffling footsteps on the sidewalk. He was wearing a crappy pair of sandals, the kind that are common in Mexico and usually made with recycled tire rubber. As soon as he was out of sight I ducked around to the back house.
The door was locked, but not seriously. There was only a simple lockset keeping the French doors closed, and no dead bolt. A quick movement of a credit card and I was in.
The front room was your basic living room, cluttered with empty Pepsi bottles and discarded pizza boxes. This guy liked his pizza. I moved into the back bedroom and almost fell over with shock.
The “deer blind” was a technological behemoth. The simple little back house in a nondescript suburban neighborhood had been tricked out with every imaginable high-tech gadgetry, and the cumulative effect was an enormous electrical shrine with only one object of adulation: me.
A series of monitors displayed my house in South San Francisco in Technicolor: my kitchen, my living room, my bedroom, and my office. With the exceptions of my garage, my bathroom, and the very front vestibule of my house—the tiny foyer that leads off the front door—my entire home was on display. Another monitor showed a map of the Bay Area, with an inset that was a close-up on South San Francisco and a blinking green dot at the center. It was a GPS tracking system, and the blinking dot was right on top of my garage. My car, of course. As near as I could tell, the videos were all being recorded, hard drives ticking and whirring, and one machine was set up to record voices, its monitor displaying a virtual mixing deck and a digital bandwidth. They had my shit wired for sound too.
I still had no earthly idea what these people wanted from me, but they didn’t want me dead. Whoever I was dealing with had spent a great deal of time and money keeping track of me, and clearly wanted me left alive. As tempted as I was to stay the hell away from South San Francisco and my televised life, my gut was telling me to get the hell out of there, go home, and keep up appearances. At least now I knew just exactly how low I had to duck to stay below the radar.
I found my way home in a daze.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to sleep. I haunted my house, walking around my bedroom in the dark, revolving it all. I took the whiskey down to the garage and flipped the light on—no one could see me down there. It had already been the longest, strangest day of my life. Everything had taken a turn for the surreal.
I grabbed a creeper and a shop light and slid under my car. It didn’t take long to find it—a small metal box, spot-welded to the chassis, far enough back that I wouldn’t have noticed it during a routine oil change. A tracker. Sobczyk was right: they had my car bugged too. I got a grinder and worked quickly through the welds. The box came off and I set it on the floor of the garage, right under where it had been attached to the car.
There was some good news: I’d taken Ashley’s painting straight to my garage before opening it, so it was possible that no one knew I had it. They’d been watching my car’s movements, but not mine. I’d been making most of my phone calls on the run, and hadn’t been driving that much. I had parked several blocks away from Masello’s house; I had left my car at Twin Peaks and walked to Katie’s shop in West Portal; I had taken public transportation to Chinatown, back to West Portal, and to Rider and Sobczyk’s place. There was no reason to believe that any of them were in imminent danger, and no real reason to believe that anyone knew where I’d been or what I’d been up to when I was out of my house and out of my car. Conrad no longer believed I was off the case, but he didn’t seem concerned. Sharkskin must have killed the Daltons, but he wasn’t after me. For once, I felt like I might have the upper hand. I knew about the deer blind, I had the tracker from my car and could decide whether or not I wanted them to know where I was. I knew about Charlie, I knew I was being set up, and I knew that, somehow, Conrad was connected to everything. And I knew how to get to him.
I opened the garage door and hopped into Delores. I was going for a drive.
18
I met Reuben in the Tenderloin years ago. I had been heading up Leavenworth toward my apartment in Nob Hill, on my way back from working out at the YMCA. He had a shopping cart full of crap stopped in the middle of the street, and was trying to get a crack pipe lit with a wet book of matches. Black, ragged, and ageless—could have been a hard thirty or a blessed sixty. He asked me if I had a light, and I waited for him to give me back my lighter while he smoked. What was surprising, and what got me talking to him, was that he offered me a hit.
He was the highest-functioning crackhead I’d ever met. He was in and out of shelters, but occasionally held down busboy jobs and was incredibly personable. He considered himself a “good” crackhead, and said he “never ripped
off anyone who didn’t rip me off first.” He knew the street, could tell a hard-liner from a tourist and a good cop from a crooked one. He wasn’t a rat, but he had a conscience, and when bad things happened he didn’t keep his mouth shut. He became a great rock-bottom contact when I was still on the Metro desk.
Reuben once told me that he knew every stripper and prostitute in San Francisco. As he put it, “Ain’t one of them don’t hit the pipe now and then.” Reuben would need a little encouragement, and bribing crackheads with money just gets them to run from you that much quicker. They get money, they want to score.
I parked on Valencia and walked around to 16th and Mission. The block was oddly quiet, and I questioned my luck. As I neared the southwest corner I saw a couple of black guys lurking by the bench. I had to pee, so I went into the public restroom, the curved door sliding open on a disgusting scene, a private space set in a public place that had been used for one too many indiscretions. I did my thing, pulled a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet and palmed it, walked out, and almost ran right into a steeplejack of a man.
“What,” he barked at me.
“Just lookin’ for a ten-dollar rock.”
He grunted and cocked his head at the skinny guy on the bench. He had cornrows, and his chin jutted out slightly, continuously moving back and forth. He was cracked out of his mind, and he was the Man. The steeplejack was his muscle.
“Lookin’ for a ten-dollar rock.”
What came out of his mouth was completely unintelligible. His lips barely opened.
“What?”
“Are. You. The po-lice.”
White guy, well-dressed, trying to score. I get it. “No, man, I ain’t a cop.”
“Show me your ID.”
There was no chance I was pulling out my wallet on this corner. “I’m not showing you my fucking ID.”
The Painted Gun Page 10