by Lee Killough
The retail stores had been closed for almost an hour and the boy looked too young to drive…maybe fifteen. Automatically, Cole noted the rest of his descriptors…about five-six, ninety-five to a hundred pounds; Caucasian, or possibly Hispanic since dark hair hung around his face; a Giant’s baseball cap worn backward; carrying a plastic shopping bag.
After a furtive look around, the boy turned in on the passenger side of an SUV several spaces down. Cole automatically headed that way to see what the kid was up to.
Suddenly the kid jumped back into the drive. Cole froze. He wore a plastic Elvis Presley mask and had the shopping bag pulled up over his left forearm…pointed straight ahead and held in place by the kid’s elbow pressed against his side. The plastic conformed to the shape of a gun muzzle inside. Now the bobbing of the kid’s head and shoulders looked like the twitches of a junkie.
After a glance around, the kid slid the bag down his arm far enough to display the butt of a compact semiautomatic…with the hammer cocked and his fingers gripping the weapon so tightly they were white. “Trick or treat.” He pulled the bag up again.
Cole spread his arms away from his body, and made his voice casual. “Are you sure you want to be doing this, partner?”
“Oh, shit!” The reedy voice cracked. “You’re a cop!”
A quick glance down showed Cole that his suit coat hung open far enough to reveal the star still clipped on his belt. Two thoughts raced through his head simultaneously: that he had to prevent the kid from wigging out, and get rid of him before Benay showed up.
Keeping his tone soothing, Cole said, “This doesn’t have to be a problem. Nothing’s happened yet. You can just put down the gun and walk away.”
“Oh, sure.” The hand in the bag twitched.
Cole forced himself not to wince.
“Then you’ll tackle me.”
“No. But if you’re worried, don’t turn away. Back off until you feel it’s a safe distance.” Just go, you little bastard; get the hell out of here.
The tweaker shifted from foot to foot. “As soon as I run, you’ll be on your radio, I bet. I gotta have a better edge than that.” His free right arm reached up across the top of his head, then dropped to rub at his left shoulder and fiddle with edge of the Elvis mask.
Cole waited for a glimpse of the face beneath, but the mask stayed in place.
As though driven by a will of its own, the arm flopped back across the top of the tweaker’s head. “I know. Go get in your car, the passenger side, and toss your gun in the back seat. And move easy.”
Cole moved as though carrying nitroglycerine. “You don’t have to do this.”
The tweaker followed, halting to the rear of the open door, where he stood shifting from foot to foot. His voice slid up a register, cracking. “I been in juvie once. I ain’t goin’ back.” Granite determination rang in the words. “Handcuff yourself behind your ankles.”
Cole breathed slowly. Their positions hid his hands from view, giving him the chance to use a technique he and Razor had practiced for just such situations. As he closed the first cuff around his left wrist, he deflected the rachet section so the blade slid along the outside of the cuff and the pieces overlapped instead of engaging. At the same time he squeezed the other cuff with his left hand, creating sound of a closing cuff. So far, so good.
As Cole started to run the chain behind his ankles, the tweaker said, “No, no…wait…wait. I got a better idea. Lock the other one around the adjustment bar down there in front of the seat.”
Cole complied. As soon as the tweaker left, he would pop the rigged cuff open and be home free.
The tweaker giggled. “I like that. It’s like the bar on the bench in Booking.” In Cole’s peripheral vision his whole body twitched. “It’s gonna be real embarrassing when you’re found and have to tell the other cops what happened. Oh…wait…wait.” He giggled again. “I got an even better idea.”
Peripheral vision caught the tweaker reaching into the car. The next second Cole felt the gun muzzle behind his ear. Surprise, anger, and terror collided in his head in screaming pandemonium. He wrenched desperately at the rigged cuff. No, wait! But before the cry left his throat, explosive pain hurled him into blackness.
Cole’s head snapped forward, staggering him. A spin and lurch against the Neon kept him on his feet. He clung to the spoiler while chaos echoed in his head and sent shivers through the rest of him. Shit. He never expected to relive the damned memory! Had it given him anything except a bad trip?
When the shivers subsided and all but the terror in the air around him faded, Cole realized it did give him more. The Elvis mask did not hide the shooter’s ears. They had no lobes, a distinctive enough feature to help identify him. And while the shooter might well be a kid — there were plenty these days capable of cold-blooded murder — he was no tweaker. Now Cole saw it had all been an act…designed to maneuver him into position for an easy kill. The proof was finding the Taurus. A real junkie would have sold it to a chop shop for drug money, not driven to San Jose and dumped it. Cole also doubted a junkie would bother hauling the body away.
So it was a hit. He had been set up.
The location and timing pointed toward Donald Flaxx arranging it. While the tweaker act seemed a complicated way to make a hit when a drive-by would do the job, it did keep things tidy. The car caught all the blood.
Cole knelt down to peer under the Neon and neighboring vehicles, searching the garage floor. Sure enough, the area looked clean. No stains that might be blood. No spent casing, either. With his body removed, nothing indicated a murder had taken place here. An important point considering the garage’s proximity to the Flaxx offices.
The trouble was, as much as he liked Flaxx for the hit, Flaxx had no motive. Flaxx could sneer at anything Benay found in the files. Criminally greedy pond scum he might be, but not stupid. Part of his arrogance included showing off how familiar he was with the search and seizure rules. So when Benay admitted she and Inspector Dunavan discussed searching the company books, Flaxx would realize it was an illegal search. Which made all her discoveries fruit of the poisoned tree…evidence inadmissible in court.
Cole climbed to his feet and started dusting off his knees before realizing what he was doing. Catching himself, he shook his head — reflexes! — and considered one other problem with Flaxx ordering the hit on him. How could it have been set up in the time between the call to Benay and when the shooter appeared?
Benay, on the other hand, had two days if she wanted him dead. His gut said no…something threatened her and he was still here I order to stop it. Yet the old saw about the fury of a woman scorned ran through Cole’s head. He leaned against the Neon, drumming his fingers on the spoiler, and considered the possibility Benay set him up. Killing him because of Monday seemed extreme, and even two days was not very long to find a hired gun. A psycho might lurk behind those butterflies, though, and, being someone who spelled “weekend” P-A-R-T-Y, she might have connections.
Still…he would swear the fear in her calls was real. Even in memory it felt palpable, as intense as his terror swirling around here.
Or was this his? He had been assuming so because he died here. Now something about it gave him doubts. Cole closed his eyes to concentrate…and found disbelief mixed in the terror, rather than his anger and surprise. This terror was someone else’s. Whose?
“Miss Benay? Sara? Was it you?”
What were the odds of an unrelated incident generating terror in this same spot. What created her terror, though?
Possibilities ran through his head. She came looking for him and arrived in time to witness him being forced into the car and killed. Paralyzed by shock, she stood there instead of running…and the shooter caught and shot her, too. Or she came looking for him and the shooter lay in wait to eliminate her. Her disbelief maybe came from being shot by a kid.
Guilt dragged at Cole’s gut, cold and leaden. In either scenario, his obsession with nailing Flaxx killed her. Her death was
his fault even if she set up the hit, and discovered, on arriving to gloat over the body and pay the shooter, he decided to leave no witnesses. That would account for the disbelief. It did not account for removing the bodies, however. Cole saw no reason for that shooter to care if they were found.
All the scenarios gave him one problem. Where Sara was killed. Not standing somewhere here or there would be blood. Not in the car. Razor said nothing about blood anywhere other than the front passenger area. Both the rear seat and trunk must have been checked.
Had Sara had managed to escape, her extreme emotion leaving this psychic residue?
The urgency in him cranked higher. He had to see if she made it home.
6
Racing for the garage exit, Cole tried to decide the fastest route to her apartment. Instant travel would be nice. If not to her apartment, at least somewhere close. He knew the Marina…well enough to walk mentally down every street, even the one outside Sara’s apartment building. It had been part of his old Patrol territory and Razor lived there with his first wife Jessica. Razor and Denise moored the Chimera in the Small Craft Harbor.
Suddenly the garage blurred…and became a Marina street. Sara’s street. Her building lay just ahead of him, wrapped in fog.
Cole blinked. Son of a bitch. Nothing happened when he willed it, yet here he had made no real effort and…
He shook away his frustration. Puzzle over that later. Right now, think about Sara. He hurried into her building
Up on the third floor, her livingroom and little kitchen looked no different than they had Monday night. They still had all the butterflies he remembered. A file sorter sat at the back of a small desk. He frowned at the envelopes and papers visible in its slots. What a drag not being able to look through them, or open and operate the laptop lying in the middle of the desk. Talk about being restricted to an in-plain-sight search!
He grimaced in frustration. Nothing in plain sight indicated whether Sara made it home.
Until he walked into the bedroom. There he stopped cold. The closet door stood ajar and two dresser drawers hung partially open. Plastic hangers lay scattered on the butterfly pattern comforter. Peering into the closet, he noted empty slots in the double-decker shoe rack running the length of the floor. The bathroom had an empty toothbrush holder. A plastic caddy like one Sherrie used for cosmetics, brush, and comb sat empty and askew in the middle of the counter.
Cole returned to the bedroom and eyed the hangers. So she did make it home…in a panic. The state of the room screamed flight.
Where might she run to? Kenisha Hayes and Joy Quon probably had ideas. Except he had no way to ask them. He had to find a way to communicate!
His fingers itched for the tools in his basement workshop at home. The endless repairs the house needed not only gave him the satisfaction of finite tasks with visible results, the physical activity helped him think. Lacking the workshop, Cole walked back out to the livingroom and paced around it.
On his second circuit, the lamp on one of the couch’s end tables brought back a memory. Coming in Monday night, Sara turned it on by tapping the base. The girl who walked through him at the mall remarked she felt zapped. That implied the presence of some energy charge in him.
He touched for the lamp. And grinned when it came on. “Call me Electric Man.”
Two more touches brightened the light. A third turned the lamp off.
He ran it through its cycle three more times for the pleasure of being able to affect something. The question was how to use this ability. While turning lights on and off made a nice ghost trick he saw no way to use it for communication. SOS being as much Morse Code as he knew.
The laptop on Sara’s desk caught his attention. Might affecting current let him operate a computer? That would be great. Then he could worry less about being seen, just talk to Razor with something like instant messaging.
Cole left the apartment and headed east toward Russian Hill. He probably had a while before Razor came home…time enough to play with Razor’s computer. If that worked, he would write up a message and have it waiting.
Fog in the street had thickened, turning car lights into fuzzy glows and pedestrians into figures as ghostly as himself. A couple down the block moved to the outside of the sidewalk as they approached.
He blinked. Did they see him?
As they came closer, the male gave a surprised frown, then returned to the middle of the sidewalk. Cole stepped to the curb to let them pass.
“What was that about?” the woman asked.
The man shrugged. “For a minute I thought I saw someone coming toward us.”
Cole wheeled after the couple. If the man glimpsed him, maybe he could hear, too. “Excuse me, sir,” he called.
“I didn’t see anyone,” the woman said.
“It was probably just a spot where the fog was thinner.”
Mulling over the encounter, Cole continued on toward Razor’s apartment. The fog let him appear as a negative density? Since the guy almost saw him, might he have heard if spoken to while still thinking someone was there?
Cole tried that approach with other pedestrians he met, calling, “Excuse me, what bus goes to North Beach?”
Like the male half of the first couple, one woman seemed to notice him at a distance, then as they neared each other, her gaze shifted from looking at him to through him.
A man answered, “What did you say?”…tilting his head to hear better. Only to grimace as he came closer and give a furtive glance around that said: Did anyone see me making a fool of myself?
While no one else reacted, two responses out of maybe a dozen tries gave Cole hope that a rational individual might see and hear him. An encouraging thought to take to Razor’s place with him.
Which would be a faster trip if he could figure out that instant travel thing. Why had he jumped home and to Sara’s apartment building, but not the Flaxx offices? As far as he could remember, he did the same thing each time…picturing somewhere he wanted to go and wanting to go there right now. If it took familiarity with the destination, Razor’s apartment qualified.
Cole stopped by a light pole and, shutting off all his vision, pulled up a mental image of Razor’s front room. When he opened his eyes, however, he had not moved.
Crap. The successful trips had to be more than a fluke. So, where else to try? Burglary came to mind. He certainly knew it thoroughly enough.
He carefully pictured the office…crowded with desks, half of them unoccupied…the big poster for the Kurt Russell movie Tombstone tacked above Stan Fontaine’s desk on the wall separating them from Fencing…his own desk with one end against the outside wall and a map of his Mission District taped beside his window. He tried to feel himself standing at the door.
The street blurred and…he was in the office.
Cole shot his hands toward the ceiling in triumph. Score! So…what did this tell him? Since he felt no urgent need to be here, yet arrived, a clear picture of his destination seemed more important than the strength of desire to be there. So now maybe he could make it to Razor’s place. And find a snappier name than the instant travel thing. Ziptrip?
He pulled up an image of Razor’s front room again, this time concentrating on details…the kitchen nook at one end; the bookcase at the other — one he built for Razor and Lauren’s wedding, to replace the boards-on-cinder blocks Razor had been using until then — the big futon that folded down for Razor’s bed when Holly stayed overnight. He pictured himself at the front door.
Instead he remained standing inside Burglary’s door. Zip…no ziptrip. Setting his jaw, Cole started to try again…then noticed that across the room, Phil Braff’s laptop sat open and running. Braff himself was nowhere in sight. Why not try communicating with him? Braff could pass information on to Homicide, too…such as where the shooting took place, a description of the shooter, and the likelihood of Sara being a witness.
Cole made his way to the desk. There, taking a mental breath, he ran a finger across the noteboo
k’s touchpad.
The screen saver cleared! Cole grinned. Feeling like a kid with a new toy, he zig-zagged his finger around the touchpad and watched the cursor trace the same pattern across the screen. When he dragged his finger down the scroll side of the touchpad, the page obediently rolled up or down. Presently he noted the image on the screen, a hand-drawn room diagram with accompanying scrawled notes, and remembered how proud Braff was that his laptop could also be used as a PC tablet, letting him draw or write directly on the screen. Cole felt a prickle of excitement. Could he work the screen, too?
He scrolled clear of Braff’s notes and drew his finger across the screen. A corresponding line appeared. All right! Below the line he wrote: Please pass the following information to Homicide. Writing with his finger was clumsy. That sentence took two lines. Still, it worked!
On Braff’s computer. For Razor’s he would have to use the keys. Could he?
He ran the arrow up to File and left tapped to pull down the menu. Nothing happened. He tapped the button harder. Still no menu. His heart sinking, he leaned on the button as hard as he could…without results. Frustration sparked in him. No! This had to work.
Keys rattled outside the door. Cole glanced toward the sound. Braff?
Yes…Braff. He came in and re-locked the door.
A faint tickle running up Cole’s finger pulled his attention back to the computer. He found the end of the finger sunk in the key. And on the screen the File menu had opened.
He stared at it. How did that happen? The finger part he understood. Like everything else material, the keys felt solid only as long as he looked at them. But what did going through do? Cole pulled back the hand and rubbed the finger with his thumb, thinking of the tickle. Did he make contact with the relay or whatever under the key?