The First Law

by John T Lescroart

  He got out and walked to the corner, looked out toward the Bay on his right. Pier 70 was the last of a series of six or seven piers jutting north into the water. In front of them was a relatively large open expanse of cement—reminiscent in some ways of Candlestick Point—although in this case there were few if any individual parking spaces. The area had once been used for loading and unloading and container storage, but for the past ten years or so, the piers on this stretch of the bay had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

  Hands in his pockets, head down against the dusty wind, Glitsky crossed the shortest distance to the squat, yellowish building that marked the entrance to the first pier. The next three piers were similarly constructed—a large warehouse-style building out of which protruded the actual pier and boat loading area behind it. Everything was deserted.

  Pier 70 itself was nearly a quarter of a mile long, a little over sixty feet wide. It was the farthest east of the half-dozen sister piers. Although there were a few open areas leading down to docks at the water level, most of the pier's entire eastern exposure, along the Bay, had been built up into various one-story structures, many of them open to the elements, some of them railroad cars, to service its trade.

  This left a relatively broad asphalt roadway on Glitsky's left as he walked out along the pier, his shoulder weapon drawn now and held in his hand, mostly concealed in his jacket pocket. He looked into the various doorways and openings. There was no mystery in why the famous director had chosen this spot for his finale—with its ramshackle, low-or open-roofed, wooden buildings facing a wide thoroughfare posing as Main Street, the pier resembled nothing so much as an Old West movie set, false fronts and all.

  But Glitsky wasn't in much of an aesthetic frame of mind to appreciate the art of it all. When he reached the end of the pier, water on three sides and no escape, he realized where he had to set himself—back where he'd begun, maybe a few structures in. Let whoever was coming next get in behind him and cut themselves off. With no escape.

  Except past him.

  He made it back in half the time he'd taken going out, but it still seemed to be one of the longest walks of his entire life. Doorway to doorway, one at a time, his gun in hand, eyes always on the head of the pier, the open expanse in front of it. Nothing and no one.

  He was a hunter now, not a cop. Cops didn't draw weapons without suspects or specific situations at hand. They didn't conceal the weapon if drawn. They called for backup if even the remote chance of gunplay loomed.

  A gull landed on a post across the way, studied him for a moment, then flew off with a series of derisive squawks.

  Somehow rattled by this natural display, Glitsky turned quickly, now impatient to find a suitable place to wait.

  He found it in a low, barnlike structure maybe sixty feet from the front of the pier. It had no front door and was also open in the back, but half-height partitions within created several eight-by-four-foot spaces that might have served as horse or cattle stalls. He had looked cursorily into the place on his way out and had concluded that, because there was light from the front and back openings, and they were only four feet high, the partitions would be inadequate for hiding. He hadn't even looked behind them when he passed.

  Now, for the same reasons, suddenly they looked good to him.

  He put his gun back in his holster. At the back opening, he scanned along the waterline, then turned and came back to the front. Another gull, or maybe the same one, had landed on the nearest post, and now was squawking continually. Glitsky looked around in the barn and found a large rusty hinge of some kind, which he chucked at the bird. It missed and splashed into the water below with a noise that sounded to Glitsky's ears loud as a depth charge. The bird didn't so much as shift its feet, and kept on squawking.

  He pushed back the sleeve of his jacket and checked his watch. It was ten minutes until two. The wind whistled through the cracks in the structures around him. Not a streak of blue showed in the dun-gray sky overhead. Somewhere in the white noise of the background, he thought he heard a chunk, like a car door closing. He looked at his watch again. It was the same time as before. His hands, he realized, were damp with sweat.

  On the cement no-man's-land, a body appeared. A man alone, walking.

  Once Glitsky was sure, he came back into view and stood in the barn's doorway where he could be seen. Surprises among armed men could turn unlucky very quickly and he had no intention to be part of one. He found that he was unprepared for the wave of relief he felt at John Holiday's appearance here. He hadn't let himself consciously acknowledge that some part of him had half expected reinforcements of some kind to show up. In any case, he was glad of it.

  Glitsky motioned him to move it forward, Holiday broke into a trot, and in a moment they were together, back in the shadows of the barn, but able to look out.

  "Where's Hardy?" Glitsky asked.

  "I don't know. I thought he might be with you."

  "No." Then, "You came down here by yourself? What for?"

  "I've asked myself the same question." He shrugged.

  "You told Gerson you were going to turn me in. I thought it would play better if you actually had me here. Maybe give you fellows something to talk about for the first minute or so."

  "He might not come at all," Glitsky said.

  "And if he doesn't, you'll have to take me in. I know.

  We've already done that once today." Holiday pulled at his mustache, maybe to keep from breaking a smile. "Well, Lieutenant, whatever way it works out, if it comes to a fight, I figure it's mine as much as anybody's. I belong in it. These boys don't play fair."

  Glitsky looked him up and down, the heavy sheepskin jacket to mid-thigh. "Are you still packing, John?"

  This time Holiday did break a smile. "I don't know why you want to go and ruin a perfectly fine afternoon asking a question like that. No I am not. My lawyer advised me that it was against the law and my appearance here today points to my good faith. I'd be offended if you asked to search me."

  Glitsky allowed an amused grunt. "Sounds like you've been talking to Diz, all right. Did you see anybody when you were coming in here? If not, I thought we'd wait behind these partitions and let people get by us, if anybody comes. How does that sound?"

  "That's your call. I'm just here to help with the fuckin'."

  Glitsky frowned at the profanity, gazed out again at the no-man's-land. "If it's Gerson alone, I want to let him walk past, come out behind him alone. You wait back in here, and listen up. If we both come back to pick you up and take you downtown, I'll pat you down and it would be smart if you didn't get yourself armed between now and then." A cold smile. "Do you understand me? If you try to escape, say out the back opening there, you've got an excellent chance of getting shot. Is that clear enough?"

  "It's clearer than why Hardy thinks you're a sweet guy."

  Glitsky nodded. "He's notorious for being a bad judge of character." Suddenly, he narrowed his eyes, twisted his head slightly. "Did you hear that?"

  Gerson eyed the length of the pier.

  He squinted out along the asphalt roadway through the midday overcast. The last structures, way out there, were blurry and indistinct; the actual end of the pier seemed to fade into the gray-green water of the bay.

  He hadn't slept at all last night. The business with pushing Thieu off the roof, so suddenly conceived and hurriedly executed, might have been a mistake. Not so much that he would ever be suspected of the actual murder; that had been clean enough. But the real problem was that now and forever, any thought of getting out from under Panos was completely impossible. Because naturally Wade knew about Thieu. Wade always knew. He'd called as soon as he'd heard, said he'd figured it out and appreciated the consideration, would not forget who his friends were. The death of the woman in jail had locked him in with Wade, too, of course, but that hadn't been Gerson, personally. It had been someone in the sheriff's department and all Gerson had to do was ignore it.

  But Thieu was different. Not that G
erson had ever liked the self-righteous, brilliant little shit, but when he saw the nooses tightening around Nick's and Julio's necks, he should have tried some other tack first—offered Thieu money, maybe a raise or a job at the Diamond Center.

  Big money for mostly doing nothing. Gradually get Thieu involved in the racket.

  At least Gerson might have talked to Wade and gotten a sense of things. But instead, he'd panicked.

  And now here he was at Pier 70.

  "Lieutenant!"

  Gerson turned around. He'd only come up the pier about seventy feet and somehow Glitsky was already here, had already gotten in behind him.

  "Lieutenant," Gerson echoed. He stepped toward him.

  "I thought I asked you not to come out here. That I was bringing Holiday in."

  The smile faded. "I don't see him, though, do I?"

  "And you might not now, if he sees you first."

  "He's going to see me anyway, downtown."

  Half turning to look around behind him, Glitsky intended the movement as cover while he reached in to get at the weapon in his shoulder holster. He was going to place this son of a bitch under arrest and let the chips fall.

  But a movement out in the no-man's-land completely got his attention first. Two men were double-timing toward the foot of the pier while a third was already down on one knee, arm extended. A glint of metal. Someone was aiming a gun at him.

  Glitsky jerked his gun from the holster and dove hard to his left just before he heard the noise of the two shots.

  Formal firearms training stresses the advisability of two-shot volleys, and Glitsky was still rolling as another two shots, much closer—Gerson!—exploded behind him. Still exposed on all sides, he lay flat on his stomach, his gun extended in a two-handed grip.

  Gerson, still perhaps thirty feet away—the outer limit of accuracy for a pistol shot—had turned sideways and was now advancing, presenting very little target, but Glitsky took aim at his torso and squeezed off two quick rounds, then rolled again as the return fire pinged around him. He found himself wedged into a corner where a building jutted a foot farther out than its neighbor. This sheltered him slightly from Gerson, but left him wide open from the foot of the pier, where he now clearly saw Sephia, Rez and Roy Panos drawing down on him. They'd come onto the pier itself.

  He couldn't forget Gerson, approaching now under the same cover Glitsky was using from his right, but he had to get off a shot at the trio on his left or he was surely dead.

  He got on his feet just as other shots—a volley really—exploded and a bullet smacked the stucco six inches from his head.

  Reaching around the corner of the building, he took another wild shot at Gerson then whirled in time to see that part of the volley he'd heard must have come from John Holiday in the barn. The thugs had been coming at Glitsky three abreast, almost casually now that they had him cornered, but now suddenly Roy Panos was down on the ground, rolling back and forth, screaming that he'd been hit. Sephia and Rez had scattered, pressed up against the covering building facades, at the unexpected fire.

  They'd just got their vests on when they heard the first shots from back on the street and now McGuire's pickup flew in a spray of gravel across the no-man's-land and skidded to a stop at the mouth of Pier 70.

  Hardy was out before they'd stopped moving, the situation clear to him at a glance. This was already a heated firefight, the smell of cordite acrid in the breeze. One man was already down, with Glitsky pinned out in the goddamned middle of nowhere. Sephia and Rez were in a couple of adjacent recessed doorways, and somebody else—Hardy didn't recognize him by sight—was beyond Glitsky, along the wall of a warehouse.

  Sephia and Rez looked his way and without hesitation opened fire.

  A shot richocheted off the hood of the pickup.

  McGuire, exposed on the driver's side, got down and slid across the seat, coming out with his shotgun beside Hardy, squatting behind the front tire, peering out. On the pier, another shot rang and he saw Sephia and Rez pull back.

  "Who's that?" McGuire asked.

  "I don't know," Hardy said. "But if he's shooting at those guys, I've got to believe he's with us."

  "Yeah, but he's still shooting in our direction. What kind of shit is that?"

  "That's what happens when you're all in a line."

  And this, clearly, was the problem. From this angle, McGuire couldn't use his shotgun to fire at anyone this side of Glitsky, since the buckshot pattern risked hitting Glitsky beyond. By the same token, any shot of Glitsky's—or Holiday's, for that matter (though Hardy and Moses didn't know it was him)—was essentially in their direction. Somehow they needed an angle, and there was no way to get to one that wasn't immediately life-threatening.

  Another couple of shots slammed into the pickup, rocking it on its wheels.

  "Forty-fives," Hardy said.

  "We've got to rush 'em," McGuire said. "It's the only way."

  At that moment, John Holiday, perhaps coming to a similar conclusion about needing an angle, broke running from the shelter of his barn. Ten or twelve feet out into the road, he stopped abruptly, whirled, and with an almost agonizing slowness, took careful, two-handed aim at Gerson, who snapped off a shot of his own, then hit the ground himself in a continuous roll back away from Glitsky's position.

  Holiday squeezed off a first shot.

  "Now! Now! Now!" McGuire yelled.

  More shots from the pier, but there was no time to analyze or even look at what was happening farther down there. Now it was all movement with a focus on Sephia and Rez, as McGuire, using Holiday's break as a distraction, cleared the back end of the truck. "Comin' in, Abe!"

  Hardy yelled and sprinted out of the truck's protection, two steps behind McGuire, both of them running full out, low to the ground.

  "Go right right right!" McGuire screamed as he brought the shotgun up.

  Moving out onto the pier itself now, still running, Hardy got a glimpse of Sephia hunkered down against a kind of covered doorway on the left. Moses was going to take him.

  Rez was his target. He stood six feet closer toward the mouth of the pier, to Hardy's right. He raised his gun with his left hand, tried to draw a quick bead, and fired, but he hadn't reckoned on the broken bone in his hand, the immense kick of his weapon. His grip didn't have the strength it needed. The recoil knocked the gun from his grasp, sent it clattering onto the asphalt.

  A deafening explosion to his left as first Sephia opened fire with everything he had, emptying his gun, while McGuire straightened up and fired first one load, then almost immediately the second. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardy saw Sephia thrown backward, glass breaking down over him as he fell slumped to the ground.

  But Rez had an automatic in each hand now, both of his arms pointing straight out in front of him. He seemed to be laughing, taking aim at Hardy from no more than fifteen feet. Starting a desperate dive for his gun, Hardy was in the air when something hit him in the chest and he went down at first sideways, then over flat on his back.

  John Holiday was down. He lay in a hump out in the fair-way of the pier.

  McGuire and Hardy were charging up from the truck.

  It was Glitsky's only chance to move and he took it, pushing off from the building, turning to get a gauge of where Gerson had gotten to. Glitsky's own position, caught between Gerson and the Panos crowd, had been completely untenable, but Holiday's intervention and then the truck's arrival had given him a few seconds.

  Off to his right, by the mouth of the pier, Glitsky heard the blast of a shotgun, then another, intermingled with several explosions of pistol shot in rapid succession—someone was firing an automatic with both hands. A quick glance caught Hardy going down.

  Zigzagging, Glitsky broke for the cover of the barn.

  McGuire, the lone man standing now out on the pier, had fired his two loads at Nick Sephia. If the man wasn't dead, McGuire figured his dancing career was over at least.

  McGuire had ejected his shells, had two more in h
is knuckles ready to insert. But it all took time. Not a lot of time, but enough for Rez, who jumped out of his doorway now and ran toward McGuire, one of his gun hands extended with the automatic in it, screaming a long wild note. He closed to three or four feet, pointed the gun at McGuire's head and pulled the trigger.

  But there was no report. The automatic had misfired.

  Staring at it in fury for the briefest of seconds, Rez swore and threw it down onto the asphalt. Glitsky, less than twenty feet away in the door of the barn, could almost see the moment when Rez realized he still had his other gun in his other hand. McGuire was finished with his reload, though, snapping the barrel back up into place as Rez extended his other arm.

  Glitsky, braced against the barn door, aimed carefully and, holding his gun with both hands, fired twice, the first bullet taking Rez under the right arm, passing through both his lungs and his heart, the second missing entirely. But the second shot wasn't needed. Firing squads had killed people more slowly—Rez was dead before he hit the ground.

  But the reverberation from that shot hadn't died when another two rang simultaneously, one to Glitsky's left from the front of the pier, and the other behind him. Spinning around, his own gun in his two-handed grip, Glitsky saw Gerson not ten feet behind him slide slowly down the front of the stucco of the warehouse next door, leaving a trail of blood on the faded wall. He turned back to see that Hardy was now slowly getting up, his gun in his hand, and Moses crossing over to him.

  Glitsky suddenly wasn't sure that he could move at all.

  In the sudden and deafening silence, he let his hands go to his sides and leaned heavily against the barn door. But there was Holiday, whose early volley had certainly saved Glitsky's life, lying without any movement on the asphalt.

  If he was alive, if any of them were alive, they would need to call an ambulance. And seconds could matter. Glitsky had to check.