This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  Jack glances sideways at Shaw, sees the officer hasn’t made a move for his phone.

  Finally Shaw grunts. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll call her.”

  Even with the M6 engine revving into the red as they pick up speed on the Embarcadero, Jack can hear Gannon through the phone. “Yeah, but—” Shaw tries to get a few words in and then hands the phone to Jack. “You deal with this, Palms. It was your idea.”

  “Jane,” he says. “This is Jack.”

  “So now you probably want me to come help you somewhere? You want me to protect you?”

  “No, we have three girls that we’re bringing over to get some protection. We took them out of the house.”

  “Three girls? Bring them here.”

  It’s clear to Jack that Gannon didn’t go home and get some rest. He hears a voice in the background on her end.

  “Where are you now?” she asks.

  “On the Embarcadero. I want you to get someone over to the house on Prescott. The police are there now, and I don’t think any of us know what they’ll do.”

  “Shit,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s Akakievich?”

  “We haven’t seen him. But I have it on good authority that he’s going to be pissed. That’s why we have to bring these girls in tonight and shut him down.”

  Jack knows that she’s not sure whom to trust, that anyone she calls might be closer with Clarence than with her. But he doesn’t want to hear about the red tape she’ll have to sift through to get the scene under her jurisdiction. He just wants to bring the girls in, get tonight under control, and hear that someone’s found Akakievich. For all Jack knows, Akakievich is out dumping the other girls now. Jack’s hoping Gannon can get something done for them, wherever they are.

  “How many of Akakievich’s guys are at Prescott right now?”

  “None. They had nothing left. Shaw and I walked in and out of Prescott and our biggest problem was the police.”

  “Shit,” Gannon says.

  “That’s right. But you can handle it, Jane. You’re a federal agent.”

  In the passenger’s seat, Shaw shakes his head. “She’s going to be pissed about that one.”

  Jack can see the Ferry Building ahead of them, knows he’s about to pass the turnoff for the Gannons’ condo, but he’s still enjoying how fast he can take the M6 on the wide street.

  On the phone, Gannon’s quiet. Then she says, “All right. I’ll make some calls. You two come in. No matter what my orders are.”

  “Call some of your people and get them set up to deal with the situation at Prescott,” he says. “But don’t tell them where we’re heading.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gannon says. “And, Jack?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I just want to say fuck you.”

  Jack looks at Shaw. “She’s happy about this,” he says.

  “Sure, Jack. Sure she is.”

  49

  Jack eases off the M6’s muscle, getting ready to turn around and head back toward Market.

  “Shit.” Shaw laughs. “I can take my ass home to Walnut Creek right now and get into bed with my wife, fuck her in the morning, do something with my kids. We can even take these ladies back to my house—no one will find them there.”

  Jack looks into the rearview mirror, sees the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old Russians. “You sure that’ll be okay with your wife?”

  Shaw takes a look back at the girls. “Hello, ladies,” he says. He turns to Jack. “Yeah, fuck that. Let’s go to Gannon’s.”

  Jack hits the brakes and makes a hard U-turn across the whole Embarcadero at an empty intersection. At this hour, he practically has the road to himself. “I thought you’d see it that way.”

  They both laugh as the M6 picks up speed, heading back toward the financial district and Gannon’s condo. Her husband will probably still be up with her, though it’s likely he’s not going to be happy about five late-night visitors. But he’s an agent; he knows how it goes.

  “What I don’t understand,” Jack says, “is why Akakievich goes all out after the squeeze. He’s already got himself connected, protection, the club drugs, the girls. Why’s he want more?”

  “Motherfucker knows that shit won’t last. Whoever told him the Feds came in, he knows it’s all going to get too big to contain pretty soon.”

  Jack can see Market up ahead, and he starts to slow down. Here there’ll be more traffic and perhaps a few cops. The last thing he wants is to get pulled over.

  “Let me tell you a story, Jack. You ready?”

  Does he want to hear a story from Shaw? Jack’s not so sure. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. You got this cage of mice, right? The cage is their home. They’re all the same kind of mice. White ones, gray ones. All the same.

  “Then there’s this piece of cheese in the cage for the mice to feed on. Enough to go around. All the mice can eat whenever they want. And they’re happy as shit. No worries in mouse land.”

  “Okay.”

  “But then one mouse decides he’s getting a little bored with happy. He wants something else. So he bites the mouse next to him on the ass. Then he goes back to eating cheese. You know what? Now that mouse is even happier. He’s smiling and laughing his ass off all the way to the cheese wedge. All the other mice want to know how he got so happy. They’re jealous.

  “And you know what else? That mouse that got bit on the ass, he’s pissed off. He’s like, ‘What the fuck!’ So he goes and bites another mouse on the ass. Now that guy’s pissed, but mouse two is happy again. He’s laughing because now he knows how good it feels to bite one of the other mice in the ass.”

  Shaw pauses for a few moments, looks back at the girls in the backseat. They’re looking at him, but they probably can’t understand what he’s saying.

  “So?”

  “Now you got happy mice, angry mice, and jealous mice. Next thing you know, you got all the mice in the cage eating cheese and biting each other on the ass. They’re not necessarily happier in the long run, but once this ass-biting gets started, there’s no going back. It’s just a part of their lives. And they all start eating less cheese. You see what I mean?”

  “You’re saying you want to bite my ass?”

  “This world, San Francisco, wherever you go, we are those mice. That’s us. This our cage.”

  Jack turns off the Embarcadero, brakes at a light in the first block and says, “I say we make it to Gannon’s, get these girls to some kind of safety, then go back to Prescott.”

  “That’s fucking crazy. Think no one will identify us as the dudes who just shot up the whole street?”

  “Because it’s crazy is why I like it. Who cares if they can identify us? If we go in with a carload of Feds, what can they say? Then we go after Akakievich.”

  “Yeah. That there, you definitely don’t know what you’re talking about. This dude’s up against the city, ready to take on that kind of heat, and you just want to hit him?”

  “Only way to take out a bully. You have to hit him first.”

  Jack jumps the M6 around a turn, revving the engine between gears. “We fucking hit his ass, pound that Russian fucker.”

  Shaw starts to laugh. “You’re nuts, Palms. Fucked in the head. You sure you’re not still shooting H?”

  Shaw’s still shaking his head as Jack pulls up to the entrance of Gannon’s garage. He parks next to the call box, but the doors have already started to open. “Jane must’ve been waiting for us,” Shaw says.

  Inside the garage, signs everywhere say the first level is reserved for residents and visitor spots are downstairs. Jack thinks about taking an empty resident space but doesn’t see any. Besides, someone calling security to have a stolen M6 taken out of his or her spot is about the last thing he and Shaw need. And why wouldn’t they want to hang on to this car? He heads down below, to the second level.

  “So we go with the Feds,” Shaw says. “But the way I see it—”

  Before Shaw c
an finish his thought, the window beside Jack crashes inward, spewing glass all over the front seats, covering him. At the same time, the dashboard in front of Shaw explodes; paper bits from the glove compartment and an airbag blast out at him.

  And the girls in the back start screaming.

  50

  “Fuck!” Jack slams the gas and tears across the lower level of the garage, heading for the back.

  “The fuck!” Shaw paws at the limp airbag, pushing it off his lap, trying to free his arms. It has a hole in it, and the smell of stale aerosol fills the car. “Everybody all right?”

  The girls haven’t stopped screaming. They sound like a three-part chorus. Each of them screams until she has to draw a breath, but in this way they overlap and it never stops.

  Jack hits the brakes and then the gas. He checks the rearview mirror for an instant and doesn’t see the girls. He doesn’t see any blood either. Jack’s driver’s-side window is shattered, gone. The BMW’s tires screech as he brakes around a turn at the end of a row, then it skids and crashes into a concrete wall.

  “Seat belts!” Sparks fly off the door as he accelerates into the open aisle that runs along the back of the garage. He scrapes the M6 along the wall and then veers away, the side mirror completely gone.

  Another loud shot echoes out: the same boom he heard when Hopkins was gunned down. The car fishtails, and its back hits the wall again with another flurry of sparks before Jack can steer it right. The car bucks as Jack floors the gas pedal.

  “The girls there,” Shaw says, “no blood I can see.”

  As they drive the short distance to the other end of the garage, Jack hears two more shots—a shattering of glass in a parked car marks the first, followed by that car’s alarm starting up, and a loud chunk marks the second as something hits the concrete wall right in front of the BMW. Jack slams the brakes and skids the car to a stop in the corner of the garage, just tapping the far wall with the front end.

  Shaw’s out his door and on the pavement before Jack can move.

  Jack unfastens his seat belt and opens his door. “Anybody want to thank me? How about, ‘Nice driving, Jack. Way to get us out of this shit storm.’ No?”

  He drops out on his side, staying crouched behind the car. The Barrett must be at the other end of the garage, the far corner, judging by the placement of the shots. Here’s where Jack’s glad to have a gun, not worried about whom he’ll have to shoot or what that’ll do to him.

  “How about nice job stopping like this?”

  He can see the girls lying along the backseat of the BMW, crowded against the back of the front seats. They’ve stopped screaming, but car alarms echo everywhere, electronic screams all around. Jack pushes the front seat forward, and the first girl slides out of the car onto the cement.

  Shaw yells, “How about get your fucking head down and let’s get to this fuck shooting a heavy artillery cannon?”

  Jack drops into a sitting position, his back supported by the car’s rear panel. “Yeah,” Jack says. “I guess that’ll work.” He checks the bullets in the cylinder of his gun, the little revolver he’s had since the café. Shaw’s got the rest of the bullets, so Jack’s glad to see it’s still full.

  Shaw says, “Girls, stay the fuck down.”

  The other two girls are out of the car; all three of them in a low crouch along the car’s side panel, too much bare leg against the hard, scratchy concrete. Jack wishes he’d found them a blanket or something.

  “Stay here,” he says. And then to Shaw, “So what’s the plan? You want to rush him or flank him?” Jack waits but doesn’t hear any response.

  “Shaw?” He ducks to the pavement and looks under the car, but the cop’s already gone.

  51

  “Okay.”

  Jack looks around the garage. From where he is behind the BMW, he can see two walls and the dark concrete ceiling, the pipes and sprinkler system that run along it. Beneath the car he can see the tires of another car parked in a nearby row, but no Shaw, nobody.

  Chunk: a shot blasts into the wall above the BMW, raining down pieces of concrete and dust onto Jack and the girls. The report of the gun echoes across the garage. “Yeah,” Jack says. “I hear you.”

  The girls huddle together, crying quietly now. Jack reaches out to touch the blond’s leg, her knee. She’s shaking, her skin cold with goose bumps.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack says. “But I’ll be back. We’ll get help for you.”

  He drops to the floor and starts a low crawl around the back end of the BMW toward the closest row of cars, just as another shot pummels the concrete wall and a new series of car alarms starts ringing.

  “Shit.” He ducks his head for a moment and hears another shot crash through the air above him. Chunks of white wall spray across the trunk.

  He starts the crawl again and gets to the first car in the row, a Land Cruiser SUV, one of the newer ones, a car some SF guy will probably make sure never sees dirt. Jack sits up on his haunches, wondering about the best plan of attack and where Shaw’s gone. The thing to do is probably run the length of the rows, try to get to the opposite corner of the garage without being spotted. Making it that far at a crawl or a crouch will hurt, and if he gets there, it’ll mean the sniper has a shot at him, but that’s also what it’ll take to get a shot at the sniper.

  Jack considers Shaw’s two-finger motion outside the house on Prescott Court. Commando time.

  “Jack.” Shaw’s voice comes from the other side of the row of cars in a magnified whisper.

  “Yo.”

  “Come around this way. I want to show you something.”

  Jack looks around the end of the SUV and sees Shaw crouched behind the car it faces. He makes the low crawl with his tail in the air and gets to Shaw as another blast from the gun cuts into the wall near the BMW. The girls scream.

  Shaw hits Jack on the shoulder when he’s close enough, and Jack sits down, his back against the car’s rear bumper. “What’s the plan?”

  “Look,” Shaw says. Jack follows his finger to see an extra piece of metal along the pipes and sprinklers on the far roof of the garage. “That’s the gun.”

  Jack tries to look closer. What he sees is a small piece of pipe, what looks like a regular ceiling pipe but thinner, with a short horizontal piece stuck onto its end.

  “That’s the gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Gannon shooting at us?”

  Shaw shakes his head. “I tried calling her to see if I could hear the phone. I didn’t.”

  “She answer?”

  Shaw nods.

  “So who’s—”

  “I’m just hoping he’s alone, but don’t count on it. If he stays there, we’re okay. He starts to move, whole new game.”

  “Let’s go get that fucker.”

  “Right.” Shaw points toward one wall, then the other. “I go this way.” He points down the row toward the elevators. “And you go there.” He points down along the ends of the rows, along the wall parallel to the elevators.

  “We shoot when we see someone?”

  Shaw nods. “Yeah. That works.”

  The two exchange a fist pound.

  “You sure you ready to shoot that thing?” Shaw nods at the gun. “I don’t want either of us getting hurt from hesitation.”

  Jack nods. “I’m ready.”

  52

  Shaw takes off toward the elevators, crawling along the cars’ bumpers. He’s better at crawling than Jack—probably had some experience in the military, where they teach crawling as a basic survival skill—and Jack watches him go for a moment before realizing he’ll never be able to copy what Shaw does. Wherever Shaw’s used this shit before, Jack doesn’t even want to know. It’s more like Jack to run in, go flat out, and hope the sniper can’t keep up with him or hit a moving target.

  He thinks back to the morning with Hopkins, though, and to what O’Malley looked like in the photos he saw, and he knows he doesn’t want to end up like that.

  Jack
stays down the best he can. How many people they’re going after, who they are, these are questions that rush through Jack’s head, things he wants—but isn’t dying—to know. Then he hears footsteps, an echo in the garage, and sees movement at the end of the aisle. Someone who isn’t Shaw is moving across the garage, and Jack dives into one of the rows. He’s lucky he was at a point between cars, had a space to duck into.

  Staying low, Jack moves forward across the open driving space between the rows to a space between two cars on the other side. Now, instead of moving along the wall, he moves between parked cars, listening for movement.

  He hears a single footstep ahead and something dropping to the floor. On all fours, Jack edges forward like he saw Shaw do.

  From down in this position, he’s able to lower himself enough to take a look under the cars; he checks for feet or legs in the direction of the wall. Nothing. And then, about two cars away from Jack, a pair of legs and men’s black shoes. Jack ducks and waits, hoping not to be heard. The shoes turn toward the elevators. Jack can see their sides, and then they get narrower as they turn to face him again.

  Slowly he slides himself underneath a parked car. It’s a Volvo—why this car can’t be a big Land Cruiser with higher ground clearance, he doesn’t know—but he gets under by moving sideways on his hands and his toes. He hears the footsteps coming closer, heading toward the near wall. Just as he hears them pass his row and start away, Jack puts his head close to the car’s side and sneaks a look out into the row. He can’t see the man at first, but then he passes along the end of the row, his head turned the other way, obscured by a black ski mask. Wonderful. Jack pulls his head back fast because of what else he saw in that moment: The guy was standing straight up, scanning the aisles, and holding a big machine gun like the AK-74 from Prescott.

  Jack thinks it over. He knows that a gun that big isn’t effective in close quarters, between two tight rows of cars, and that he’s best off just going at the guy, getting as close as he can. He’s been charging right at his targets so far, not showing any fear, even doing a passable impersonation of Sergeant Mike Haggerty’s driving when he pulled into the garage. This is real fucking life, Jack knows, and not a movie, but he’s not about to stay tucked under a parked car. That’s not acting or action.