The First Law

by John T Lescroart

  "The question is why? Why right then?"

  Glitsky had clearly given this a great deal of thought.

  "Because Thieu put Sephia and Rez at Holiday's when they denied they'd ever been there."

  "And, John"—Hardy turned—"have they ever, to your knowledge, been to your place?"

  "Are you kidding?"

  "I'll take that as a 'no.' That's what I thought. So." He came back to the others. "Doesn't this mean that Gerson must have thought Thieu was the only person with this information? Otherwise, why kill him if somebody else is going to show up tomorrow and confront him with the same problem?"

  "Except by now Gerson has probably destroyed the tape," Glitsky said.

  "Maybe not," Roake said. "Especially if he figures nobody else knew about it."

  Hardy nodded at Glitsky. "Assume, Abe, that Gerson doesn't know that you know."

  "I'm sure he doesn't. I specifically asked Paul to keep you and me out of it, and if anybody in the world was capable of that, it was him."

  "Well, there you go." He held up his hands as though he'd proven something.

  "Where, though?" Glitsky asked. "Call me slow, but I don't see where you're going."

  "Okay, Slow. What exactly did Paul tell you?"

  Glitsky wasn't sure where this was going, but Hardy seemed to have an idea, and at this point, anything was worth pursuing. "Just that he'd lifted Sephia's and Rez's prints from Holiday's house. He had this tape. He was going down to play it for Gerson." He lifted and dropped his shoulders. "That's about it."

  Hardy looked across the room. "Gina, you see it?"

  She nodded.

  Back at Glitsky. "Abe, now you can go to a judge and do an affidavit, which ought to be probable cause to search Gerson's office, maybe even his home, for the tape. Odds are they'll even have a copy of Thieu's original fingerprint request and the results with the tape, showing Gerson knew its significance."

  Roake had come forward to the edge of the couch. "So you're saying Abe should get a warrant for Gerson's house and office without telling anyone else in the PD?"

  "That's the general idea, yeah. We've finally got some probable cause and here's our chance to use it."

  Glitsky didn't buy it. "Impossible," he said. "Even if Gerson hasn't already gotten rid of the tape and every one of those reports—which I know, if I were him, I would have—if we do find them we have no real proof of anything. And my career would be completely over."

  "It seems to me like our only chance. You've got to get something on Gerson and squeeze him."

  Glitsky was all concentration. "Don't get me wrong. I love the idea, but it doesn't go anywhere." He looked up at Hardy. "And at best it still leaves Panos, who'll then know we—that's you and me, Diz—we haven't backed off."

  He shook his head. "I'm not sure I want to dare him to see how far he'll go."

  Holiday, who'd been listening all this while, suddenly butted in. Quietly. "How about this, instead? You call this Gerson and tell him you've got me."

  "What do you mean, got you?" Glitsky asked.

  "In custody. You want to turn me over to him, but Diz here, my whizzo lawyer, doesn't trust the normal procedure. He won't give me up to anybody but you, Lieutenant.

  Gerson would believe that."

  "And how does that help us, John? Or help you?"

  Hardy asked.

  "I'm not exactly sure about the nuts and bolts. But if Gerson knows that you, Lieutenant, are going to be some place at some time with me ..."

  "You'd get ambushed," Hardy said. "No way is that happening."

  But Glitsky liked it. "If we could in fact get them all together on some pretext ..."

  Roake went with it. "The fact that they're all there together is probable cause right there, Abe. And you arrest the lot of 'em."

  Glitsky, Holiday and Hardy just looked at her.

  After a moment, she turned pale, then crimson, then added in a flat tone. "There would have to be backup. I'm talking police, of course."

  Glitsky went on as if she hadn't spoken. "So I call Gerson and tell him where and when, and that it's just me and you, Diz, and your client turning himself in to me. And that after I have John in custody, I will personally take him downtown for booking. I also tell him it's imperative that no one else, including him, is there to blow the deal. Especially not him. But he's going to think the three of us are out wherever it is, all alone."

  "Okay," Hardy said. "Then what?"

  "Then we field-test our theory, which all along has been that this ends when Holiday is dead."

  "Don't sugarcoat it," Holiday said.

  Glitsky ignored him. "The point is, if Gerson does show up, I know there could only be one reason."

  Roake was shaking her head. "It's no good, Abe. You'd be absolutely exposed. No way would Gerson come alone."

  Glitsky nodded. "That's probably right. And that would remove any doubt about his guilt and conspiracy, wouldn't it? Not that I have any. But that would be rock-solid proof."

  "No question, proof is good," Hardy agreed. "Except when it leaves you outnumbered four or five to one."

  "Any trace of the rest of them," Glitsky said, "and I call for backup."

  Sure you will, Hardy thought to himself.

  Glitsky went on. "Then I go to Batiste and let him know what happened. And then they have to listen."

  Hardy got up and walked over the window. He turned back around. "No way, Abe. This can't happen. You're talking suicide."

  "Well, if they succeed in killing me, which I strongly doubt, there's three witnesses in this room can swear to what happened."

  "Be that as it may, Abe, I won't allow it."

  Glitsky's mouth turned up a fraction of an inch. "I know it runs counter to your worldview, Diz, but you've got nothing to say about it. This is my job."

  "So get your backup there and in place first."

  "On what pretext? I'm the payroll lieutenant. Remember? Besides, then it would just leak and scare everybody off." Now Glitsky stood up, full of resolve. "This is a good plan, people. It might be the only one before they can hit us again, and that I can't let them do." He was over behind Hardy's desk, reaching for the phone, punching the numbers.

  The three others watched in a kind of helpless, mute panic as Glitsky's few words put things into irrevocable motion.

  "Lieutenant Gerson, please. Lieutenant, Abe Glitsky here. Yeah, I heard. I know, it's awful about Paul, but that's not what I'm calling about. John Holiday. And I told them they should go to you, but as you may know his lawyer's a friend of mine, and..."

  In under five minutes, they had it all arranged. Holiday and Hardy, Glitsky said, would be showing up to surrender at four o'clock at Pier 70, a mostly abandoned and completely deserted dock of dilapidated boathouses and razed ancient warehouses. Glitsky didn't know why they'd picked such a godforsaken place, but...

  "Because then there's no way Gerson can argue that he just happened to be in the neighborhood."

  "So how about if John and I really do show up with you?"

  Glitsky looked straight-faced from one of them to the other, over to Roake. "I hope I haven't given you the impression that's an option, because it's not."

  "Now wait a minute—" Holiday stood up.

  Glitsky raised his voice against any interruption. "So I'm just running down the hall to the bathroom for a minute, maybe less. Diz, your client is your responsibility. I expect you as an officer of the court to keep my prisoner here under your watch until I get back. I need your word on it."

  Hardy solemnly raised his right hand. "You've got it."

  "All right, then." And Glitsky was gone.

  Roake, Glitsky and Hardy were standing downstairs in the lobby. Upstairs in Hardy's office, Glitsky had put on a perfectly convincing display of anger and disappointment when he returned from the bathroom to find that Holiday had "escaped." Both Roake and Hardy swore he'd pulled his weapon on them again. They'd been helpless to stop him.

  Now Hardy noticed Phyllis
as she stood up behind her switchboard. She caught his eye as she came around her partition and motioned with her head toward Norma's office, where she stopped and stood expectantly in the doorway. Hardy reached out for Gina's arm and turned her, guiding her that way as well. Glitsky followed.

  They all were there, crowding behind Phyllis, in time to see Norma put down the receiver and hang her head, her shoulders collapsing around her. When she finally looked up, tears streaked her cheeks.

  Wordless, she nodded at the assemblage in her doorway.

  It seemed the limit of all the acknowledgment she was capable of. Phyllis, next to Hardy, put her hand over her mouth and began to sob.

  30

  After leaving Hardy's office, Glitsky returned to his empty home. He was tempted to stop by Nat's to see his father and his daughter, but in the end decided that this would serve no purpose. He kept trying to convince himself that today was in a fundamental way no different than any other. The situation was personal and extreme, true, but basically it wasn't too far removed from the work done by most cops every day—sometimes you had to put yourself in the line of fire. It came with the territory.

  He still wasn't clear in his mind about how the logistics would play out, but this uncertainty again was, if not exactly comforting, at least familiar enough. He remembered earlier in his career, making busts in places where he had little or no knowledge of what he'd be facing after he hit the doorway, most often at or before the very first light of dawn. Would there be three small terrified children and their mother huddled in a corner? A wired junkie who might decide on the spur of the moment to take a nearby and convenient hostage? A pit bull with a bad attitude? A dark room with a desperate gunman in each corner? Or maybe just a sleepy and strung-out loser who'd just as soon wake up tomorrow in jail anyway, where it was cleaner, warmer and they had better food.

  So he'd done this kind of thing before, many times. You knew the basic rules. You tried to keep your options open, stay flexible and be prepared. You wore your vest for sure, you had enough ammunition and at least a couple of loaded guns so you didn't have to reload at an inopportune moment. His experience had taught him that ejecting a spent clip and slamming in a new one wasn't as easy in the heat of the moment as it might appear on television. Even when he'd been younger, his hands tended to shake in moments of stress and danger. They still did. He could more easily imagine himself fumbling and dropping his reload to the ground at the worst possible moment than otherwise.

  So he took out two guns from the safe in his bedroom.

  His everyday weapon was a Glock 9mm automatic, and it was a fine gun, easy to carry and to handle. But in this case, he reached for his matching Colt .357 revolvers with custom rubber grips. The damn things bucked like horses with the kind of heavy load he'd be using—.357 ammunition, special hand-loaded hot rounds, hollow-point bullets—but if things developed the way he thought they might, he wanted a bullet that could spin a man around twice and bring him down if it nicked him on the pinky. A hit in any large muscle and the slug would flatten and pretty much take the fight out of its target, guaranteed. A body hit was a death sentence.

  Sitting on his bed, Glitsky slid the bullets into the cylinder on the first gun, snapped it closed, did the same with the second. Twelve shots, less than he'd get with two automatics, but less chance of a jam or a misfire. Speed loaders for quick reloads. People disagreed with him, but he'd take a revolver every time.

  Taking off his shirt, he went to his closet and pulled his vest off the nail where it had hung undisturbed for probably ten years. He realized suddenly with a pang of regret that if he'd continued wearing the darned thing to work as a matter of course, his last eighteen months of medical madness and recovery might have been avoided. He might have only had a bruised rib for a couple of days, a black-and-blue stomach instead of IVs and antibiotics, tubes and monitors, to say nothing of the pain, the guilt, the self-doubt.

  He shook himself to clear those thoughts. No point in whipping himself further on that score. It was what he had done—gone into a potentially violent situation unprepared.

  He would not do the same thing again.

  With his regular shirt back on and buttoned over the vest, he checked himself in the closet door mirror. With a jacket on, no one would be able to tell. Since he wore a shoulder holster every day, it felt natural under his left arm, even with the slightly unwieldy bulge of the rig he used for the revolver. He hadn't worn a belt holster, though, since he'd been on a beat, and he was slightly surprised at how comfortable it felt, high on his right hip.

  It had been unusually cold, even for November in the city, and it would probably be worse on the pier jutting out into the Bay, so he forsook his standard leather flight jacket in favor of his old dark blue goose-down ski parka. Snapping the lower buttons, he pulled the hem down and checked the mirror again to make sure that it covered his hip weapon.

  Glitsky almost never looked at himself. When he'd come to college, as a kind of private joke to himself, he started telling people that he got the scar through his lips in a knife fight with some gang kids in high school. In reality, it had been a prosaic accident on parallel bars when he was in junior high. But whatever had caused it, the scar itself didn't heal perfectly and came to be something he tended to avoid looking at. The same thing with the blue eyes in his dark face. They made him uncomfortable. Was he in fact black like his mom, or a nice Jewish boy like his dad?

  As a young man, all the superficial stuff was too confusing to him and, in the end, he realized, meaningless. He was who he was inside. And so was everybody else.

  Now, though, he stood an extra moment before the mirror, trying to glean in the image there some hint of his essence as he was today. Why was he doing this? He had an incredible wife and a new daughter and everything to live for. Had it really gotten to the point where he had no other choice? Weren't there other cops he knew, friends and allies over the years, to whom he could turn? Or at least from whom he could request backup? What was he hoping to accomplish?

  But then he ran down the numbers—Chief Rigby, no.

  Deputy Chief Batiste, no. Jackman, no. Lanier, impossible.

  The FBI, no time. Paul Thieu, dead. What was he going to do next, go to the mayor? Any man on the force who joined with him now risked his career at the very least.

  Beyond that, Glitsky had always been a loner on the job, a solo inspector for his entire career, and then as lieutenant, mostly a by-the-book justice freak. He'd always believed that although people might not like him, he was at least respected. Recent events called even that minimal standard into question.

  Now he couldn't afford to care about that public opinion.

  He only had to answer to his family. These threats to them could not be allowed to stand. If he could not enlist help among those whose job it was to provide it, then it was up to him. And him alone, if need be.

  He glanced one last time at the middle-aged man in the mirror. Knocking three times on the Kevlar over his heart, he drew a deep breath, then let it out heavily. "Okay," he said.

  He'd chosen Pier 70 quickly and intuitively out of several possibilities that had occurred to him as he'd spoken to Gerson. The more obvious spot might have been the outer edges of the parking lots at Candlestick Point, where there would be no opportunity for his enemies to ambush him and where, frankly, if it came to a gunfight, there would be less chance of bystanders becoming victims. But to his mind, more than equally balancing out the ambush question, was the parking area's total lack of cover for himself.

  If Gerson came out with enough friends to surround him, Glitsky didn't want to be standing alone in the middle of a concrete field, where Gerson could see Holiday was in fact not with him, where even a mediocre shot with a rifle could take him down from outside the county.

  By chance, Glitsky, along with most of the workers at the Hall of Justice, had come to know Pier 70 very well about three years ago, when it had been the major crime and finale scene in a movie one of the b
ig-shot Hollywood directors was always shooting somewhere in town. For about three months, the tinseltown crew had worked out of the Hall of Justice, and everybody had become starstruck to some degree. One of Abe's inspectors, Billy Marcusik, even got tapped for a credited speaking role in the eventually awful film, playing essentially himself. After shooting wrapped, Billy quit the force and moved to L.A., but so far he hadn't been in any more movies that Abe had seen.

  In any event, in the glory days, just about every cop and clerk and even a few judges in the Hall thought they might turn out to be the next big thing if they hung around the director enough. If nothing else, they might get five seconds with one of the stars. For a week or more near the end of shooting, hordes of city workers would descend upon Pier 70, either in hopes of working as an extra, or to watch the fools who entertained those hopes.

  Now, not much after one o'clock, Glitsky pulled over and parked. He'd told Gerson he'd be there at 4:00, but it would be bad luck to be late. He wanted to be absolutely sure he was the first man here. He wanted to walk over every inch of the area. He stopped on an unnamed industrial street of low-rise warehouses and garages a few blocks west of a dent in the Bay's shoreline called the Central Basin. An abandoned railroad line ran down the middle of the road. When they'd been shooting the movie out on Pier 70, this street had been the glamorous, albeit slightly funky, production base—trailers for the stars, incredible catered spreads of food for everyone with a pass, lights and gurneys and hundreds of people. Now Glitsky sat behind the wheel for a short while, letting his senses take it in, warn him of anything that resembled trouble.

  There was nothing but the empty street. A gust off the bay skipped some heavy dust off the car's hood; some newspapers and candy wrappers fluttered in the recessed doorway of an empty storefront across from him. Another car was parked at the end of the block, but Glitsky had already driven by it once, and it appeared empty.