This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  CRIMEWAV Books

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  Table of Contents

  Part I: Beside the Law 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Part II: The Guy Who Came in from the Cold 18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  Part III: Into the night 37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

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  REVIEWS

  ALSO BY SETH HARWOOD

  About the Author

  “It’s a cold world and this is life.”

  Part I

  Beside the Law

  1

  As Jack sits up to steal a look over the back of the couch, he wonders if the person in his backyard is the one who set his bed on fire, burned it down to the frame. A welcome-home message from an unknown friend.

  He can still see the remains in his mind’s eye: the wood frame scorched black and the mattress crispy where the sheets and blankets used to be. Even Victoria’s Tempur-Pedic pillows—the plastic foam you wouldn’t think would be flammable—burned. A black line of charred rug outlined where the bed had stood, but nothing else in the room had been touched by fire. A professional pyro.

  That was one of two disturbing items Jack found when he got home from the open road.

  Another creak in the night, a stick breaking outside the patio doors. The VCR clock flashes 12:00; the wall clock reads two forty-five.

  When Jack looks over the back of the couch, he sees darkness all the way to the rock wall of the garden. Then he hears another sound like the last but louder: a crunch from something heavier than a deer—someone walking outside, just past the little evergreen trees Victoria planted along the back wall of the house.

  Jack hits the floor on all fours, crawls between the couch and the coffee table, then around the end table toward the double patio doors. Whatever’s out there, he wants to know it before it knows him.

  At first, all he sees is his own reflection in the glass. Then, just inside the edge of the garden, a glint of something metal pointing out of a bush—the shiny round barrel of a gun. Jack drops to his chest as the gun goes off. He hears the whistle of a silencer, and a bullet pierces the glass above him, right where he’d be if he had been standing.

  He looks out through the bottom row of windows in the door, and sees a man come out of the bushes—a man right outside his living room, not five feet away. His face is hard to make out in the shadows, but he’s white, serious-looking. Jack’s seen him before, but that’s just a hunch—maybe not even right.

  The man in the yard raises the gun and its long silencer, and shoots three times through the right-side windows of the door. What he’s shooting at, Jack has no idea, probably his own reflection. Shards of glass fall onto Jack’s back, and he covers his head with his hands, hoping he won’t hear another shot.

  After a moment, he looks up and sees the three sets of metal locks at the top, the handle, and the bottom of the door, and goes to slide the first one. To his surprise, it’s already open. He tries to remember if he locked it, but he hasn’t thought about doing that since he left for his road trip with the Czechs. Or maybe his bed-burner left it unlocked.

  He gathers himself into a four-point stance, his arms straight down from his shoulders, hands on the floor, and his legs bent behind him, resting on the balls of his feet.

  He focuses on the shooter’s knees, hoping the man is still looking at his own reflection. The shooter steps forward, oblivious to the crunching sound from the wood chips in the yard. And that’s when Jack goes. He jams his body forward, his legs straight then pumping, arms shielding his face as he hits the patio doors’ wooden center with both forearms. He blasts the doors open, shooting his body out onto the short wooden porch, and in the next moment he’s in the yard going headfirst for the intruder’s knees.

  Like a quarterback evading the blitz at the last second, the shooter tries to shuffle to his side, but Jack grabs him around both thighs with an arm and a shoulder and drives him down hard onto his back.

  The gun goes off, its silencer lisping into the night. The guy chops at Jack around the shoulder, grazing his ear with the butt of the gun, and then Jack feels the hard gunstock bounce off the back of his neck. Jack tries for a better hold on his attacker’s legs, and the guy scrambles backward, turning and crawling on all fours for a few yards before he straightens up into a run, just as Jack is standing, uncomfortable in his socks on the wood chips.

  In a moment, the guy’s gone. Jack hears the sound of feet going faster than he can run in his socks, tearing out away from the yard in the dark along the side of his house.

  “Fuck,” he says, shaking the dirt and chips off. He scrambles back across the deck and into the living room, vaults the couch, and rushes to the side door.

  In the darkness, from his side porch, Jack can hear feet pounding down the driveway. Then he sees the shooter under the streetlight more than thirty feet away: a man with light brown hair and a medium build, running down the last five feet of the driveway into the street to a new yellow Mustang retro redo, its backside as recognizable as anything on the road—pushed into the air like a lonely whore’s.

  The shooter takes a last look back and then hurries into the car. Jack wants to yell something after him. A threat? Something. But he doesn’t. As the car starts up, a puff of exhaust comes from the center of the bumper, and then, in a flash of taillights and peeling rubber, it’s gone. Jack hasn’t even made it off the porch. He momentarily considers chasing the car down on his Ducati, but shirtless and without shoes he wouldn’t get far.

  Maybe he should start sleeping with his shoes on, Jack thinks. That, or start sleeping somewhere else.

  2

  Back inside, Jack checks the patio doors: nothing broken but the glass. He was sloppy, coming home and not checking on something as obvious as whether the doors were locked—especially when he’d come home to a note from a cop on the table—the second disturbing item—and his bed burned to the ground.

  He’s lucky the guy didn’t just walk in and kill him in his sleep. Jack slinks back to the couch and sits down, lights a cigarette to try to relax.

  At six-thirty, he gives up on sleeping. He’s had two cups of coffee and the only thing left is to put himself in the shower. So he does.

  He dresses in a pair of dark linen pants, the ones he’d wear if he were in L.A. for a lunch meeting, and a stri
ped button-down shirt, clothes good enough to make the rest of him—the grown-out hair and the motorcycle tan—look respectable. He runs a brush through his hair, even adds some old leave-in conditioner that he finds under the sink. The effect is a shaggy Pat Riley: his hair brushed back and barely under control, eager to blast out on its own.

  By seven-thirty he’s in the Mustang Fastback, a vintage ’66 K-code, listening to it idle in the garage. He’s inspected the monster under the hood, and now he revs the engine to hear its roar, to see if the old car did okay by itself these past six weeks. It sounds just fine—as angry and aggressive as ever.

  The Fastback is still in mint condition except for the three bullet holes along the left side: two in the back panel and one in the door. As Jack eases out of the driveway, he looks down at the seat next to him where he’s tossed the note from Sergeant Mills Hopkins, his old friend on the San Francisco police force.

  Jack’s across the Golden Gate Bridge in time to get caught in the worst of the morning traffic. He takes his cell phone out of the glove box and turns it on. Six weeks and he hasn’t missed it. It starts beeping right away, telling him he’s got new voice messages. He turns it off, tucks it under his seat.

  He weaves his way through the Presidio, goes down Lombard, and takes Van Ness toward Bryant and the Hall of Justice. He finds a place to park and feeds some quarters into the meter. They’ve got the metal detector routine going so hardcore at the entrance that Jack has to remove even his belt to get in. On the fifth floor, he walks down a familiar hall to see the same receptionist sitting at the same desk. This time she doesn’t even ask Jack who he’s here to see.

  “Mr. Palms,” she says. “The sergeant will be glad to see you.” She points Jack straight back toward Hopkins’s office. “Do you think you could…” She holds out a small black notebook, open to a blank page, and extends a pen. She thanks him as he signs, tells him she “loved him” in Shake ’Em Down.

  Jack angles his way through the desks in the big squad room, drawing a stare from one of the cops who’s in this early, and heads back to a small, separate room. The door reads sgt. mills hopkins. Jack knocks twice.

  Hopkins barks.

  Jack opens the door and there’s Sgt. Hopkins sitting behind his desk, a phone at his ear and a yellow legal pad in front of him. His desk is littered with stacks of paper and behind him is the same big wall of postings that was here the last time Jack paid a visit. Hopkins wears a checked shirt, tight around his gut, and has grown a mustache.

  “Call you back.” Hopkins hangs up the phone and stands to greet Jack, a heavy movement that creaks both his desk and his chair. “Jack motherfucking Palms,” he says, extending his hand. “The big movie star. Glad you could bring your ass in.”

  “Glad to see you grew out the ’stache. They give you your last merit badge for that thing?”

  Jack reaches to shake Hopkins’s hand, not sure he really wants to, and at the last moment, Hopkins reaches out to slap him. He moves like a big cat—a lot faster than you’d expect—and Jack manages only a partial dodge. The slap lands square on his neck.

  Hopkins breaks into a smile.

  “Yeah, Jack. It’s almost good to see you.” Hopkins sits down, looks over the materials on his desk, and flips to a new page on his yellow legal pad. His face goes cold. “Hell of a day for you to make your appearance, though. Hell of a day.”

  “How about we start with why you’d break into my house to leave a note on my kitchen table—”

  “Try locking your doors, asshole. Your back door was unlocked, so I went in. You answer your phone, it saves me the trip.”

  “I’ll try to remember that. Whatever I can do to keep you out of my life.”

  Hopkins nods. He takes a freshly sharpened pencil out of the can on his desk. “Let’s get to that in a minute, okay? Truth is, this day is fucked up and it connects to you. Not even nine-thirty and it’s fucked beyond saving. Not good for the Hall.”

  “Try me. I’ve been up since three when someone shot at me.”

  Hopkins closes his eyes and then opens them and regards Jack. It’s the first time Jack’s ever seen him look like he cares. He makes a pronounced gesture of looking around the room, finishes by raising his eyebrows and tugging an ear lobe. It’s either a sign for Jack to steal second or to be careful because others might be listening.

  Jack nods.

  “One of our own turned up dead this morning. They’re saying he offed himself in his car. Found him parked at the mall in Walnut Creek.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack says, “but—”

  Hopkins holds up his hand to cut Jack off. “And it gets worse.” He looks down as he says the next part. “A sixteen-year-old girl was found in his backseat. Hands tied, naked, marks on her legs like she’d been tortured.”

  Hopkins waves his hand over the desk as if he’s trying to get rid of a bad smell. “She was dead.” Now he looks up at Jack. “You want to tell that to the guy’s wife? The mother of his kids? Think that’s a good call? How about calling the girl’s parents?”

  Jack waits for what’s next.

  “Thank Christ I didn’t have to call them.”

  Jack looks at the surface of the desk. The faster he gets out of here, the better. “Let’s get to why you wanted to see me.”

  Hopkins’s nostrils go big as he takes a hard breath for a two-count, and then a new look comes over his face: calmer, if only by a little.

  “He was what I wanted to discuss with you. Our dead cop is the guy you fingered from that mess at the Coast, the cop with Tony Vitelli and the Russians.”

  “O’Malley.” Jack still remembers the name from when Vitelli introduced them. “So it’s a bad cop going out with the trash. Who cares?”

  Hopkins gives a short laugh and shakes his head. “You know, Jack, it should be that easy. But a couple of things are more complicated here. There’s more we need to discuss.”

  “So discuss.”

  Hopkins frowns, looks around the office again. “I been looking hard at O’Malley since you dropped the dime, back before your little vacation.” He waves his index finger around in a circle, as if he’s swirling a cheap drink. “We brought in that bald Russian, did our best to pin a case on him, but he walked. Motherfucker lawyered up like a politician and skated on illegal duress. Know why?” Hopkins smiles a big fake smile.

  “Maybe I had a little something to do with it.”

  “Ah, yeah. But I watched O’Malley, and nothing came out right. He’s been working something—something big. A stakeout in North Beach that involves some hinky shit.”

  “Hinky?”

  “Like the girl in his backseat. But also a special direct line to the commissioner. I can’t even get a straight answer on what he was really working.”

  A knock comes from Hopkins’s door, and Jack can see the silhouette of a big cop through the smoked glass. Hopkins makes a face. “Come in!”

  A stocky Asian with a blue shirt and tie pushes his head into the office. He’s got his hair spiked on top and shaved on the sides. On the side of his neck, Jack can see a few wisps of hair flaring out. He eyes Jack as if he’s putting some pieces together, figuring things out. “Meeting in ten,” he says.

  Hopkins tells him he’ll be there, and the other cop closes the door.

  “Morning meeting, Jack. Today’s going to be a live one. On top of all this, we got Walnut Creek saying it’s their case.”

  Jack turns to the door again, checking the glass for shadows. “Why’d he look at me like that?”

  “Matsumoto?” Hopkins raises his eyebrows, then his shoulders. “That one’s on you, pal.”

  “How about his hair? Can you explain that mullet?”

  “Not that either.” He frowns. “People are going to be pissed at this meeting. Can you imagine trying to keep this story out of the press?”

  “But they’re your old friends, aren’t they?”

  Hopkins shoots Jack a hard look. “Even if I could have enjoyed the story they did on
you and the mess you made of your marriage and your acting career, there was nothing I could have done to stop them if I tried. Fact is, Jack, you created that whole damn mess by yourself. You and your lovely ex-wife. At some point, you’re going to have to accept that.”

  Jack bites his lip. Part of him knows the cop is right.

  “What I’m saying—” Hopkins puts his finger to his legal pad. “We have to talk about this later. Where can I find you this afternoon?” Hopkins stands up and offers his hand to Jack across the table. “Don’t say it here. Call my cell later and leave a message.”

  Jack stands and, confused, takes the cop’s hand and gives it a brief shake.

  “We didn’t even get to the real reason I came in. I wanted to tell you about some douche bag trying to shoot me last night in my yard.”

  Hopkins’s eyebrows go up. “Yeah, I’d like to discuss that.”

  “Ah, yeah,” Jack says. Behind him, there’s another knock at the door.

  “All right,” Hopkins calls. “I’m coming!” He’s already walking around the desk, straightening his tie, and angling Jack toward the door.

  “Later. Listen, you watch your back. We’ll talk this afternoon.”

  3

  Jack walks up Bryant and around the corner to where he parked his car. He sees the now-familiar craters along the driver’s side, the three bullet holes, and puts his finger to the one on his door. Its smooth metal cradles his fingertip.

  “Shit.”

  He wants to get them fixed or work on them himself, but with the bald Russian out and around, the burned bed, and the shooter in his yard, he shouldn’t be cruising the city. He should be lying low.

  Jack gets in and starts the Fastback, pulling his cell phone out from under the seat. It’s not time to go looking for answers; it’s time he found a place to disappear.

  He takes a decent room at the St. Francis downtown, up on the sixteenth floor. It’s not the Regis, but that suits Jack fine. He’s coming around to the fact that the house in Sausalito might not be exactly him either.