message.
“What’s that?” Gage asked.
“They asked me for his next of kin.”
Gage froze at the top of the stairs, then caught his breath, steeling himself for the answer before he asked the question. “Did he…”
“No. Sorry, man. It’s not that. They just wanted contact info.”
Gage exhaled. “Put me down until his wife gets there.”
“Where is she?”
“With Faith up at the cabin. I’ll call her on the way.”
In his bedroom, Gage slipped on a pair of Levi’s, then reached for a gray hooded sweatshirt, and slid it over his body like armor.
CHAPTER 2
The city began to emerge as Gage drove down the pine-and oak-treed canyon toward the Bay Bridge. The clouds had lifted enough to expose a pattern of lights hinting at the shapes of buildings spread around the San Francisco financial district. His mind’s eye perceived what he still couldn’t quite make out: the top three floors of a steel and glass Montgomery Street office tower, home to Jack Burch’s international law firm. His thoughts then drifted up toward Pacific Heights, still masked in gray, now and forever stained in his sight. He then imagined a faceless driver in an anonymous car disappearing into the mazelike city spreading out before him.
Gage glanced at his dashboard clock as he crested the cantilever section of the bridge, beginning the decline toward the waterfront: 5:59. He punched on the radio, already tuned to the local CBS News affiliate. He didn’t know how long it would be until some nurse or clerk or paramedic leaked Burch’s shooting to the press-but he knew how long it would remain there: weeks, maybe months. It wasn’t imaginable that the man who charted the courses by which half of the Fortune Global 500 navigated the world’s turbulent markets had been randomly shot down in the street. The cable news channels would demand a Greater Meaning, perhaps even a Conspiracy. Day after day. Night after night.
The 6 A. M. national feed began with the collapse of Silicon Valley’s Surveillance and Targeting Technologies and the outbursts of betrayal from its devastated shareholders. Networks had hovered over the SatTek story for days like news helicopters at a crime scene, the downdraft creating a turbulence of uninformed speculation that seemed to feed less on new facts than on itself. The disintegration of a key manufacturer of components for anti- terror and missile guidance systems had left the cottage industry of analysts at a loss for explanations, though not for words, and a new surge had been triggered by the arrival of U.S. Marshals to secure the chaotic SatTek facility.
Through a breach in the veil of drizzling fog, Gage caught a glimpse of Mount Sutro rising two thousand feet above sea level. The radio and television tower stood poised like a monstrous, three-pronged gigging spear, clouds masking its barbs. Anger surged when he realized that the news channels would soon abandon SatTek to obsess over Burch’s shooting, and through that obsession lay waste to Burch and his wife’s intimate lives. He took in a breath, then gripped the steering wheel as his body warmed from within. He exhaled when he recognized the source: how much easier it was to rage at the media than at a faceless and anonymous-what? Thug? Lunatic? Assassin?
Gage jabbed the off button, then stared at the pavement ahead and at the lane lines bracketing him: a familiar path now leading him into the unknown. He drove the rest of the way listening only to his racing thoughts against the background of the gusting wind, the raindrops tapping his windshield, and the rhythmic sweep of his wipers.
Gage spotted Lieutenant Humberto “Spike” Pacheco at the end of a wide hallway, leaning against the wall outside the packed emergency waiting room. Thick arms crossed above his belly flared out the front panels of his navy sports jacket. It revealed a middle-aged paunch that belied the childhood nickname he carried with him when he had joined Gage at SFPD thirty years earlier.
“Any word from the doctors?” Gage asked softly, a step away.
Spike shook his head as he looked up. His dark face and bloodhound eyes revealed nothing. He wasn’t about to give passersby fodder for speculation, later to be whispered to tabloid reporters as fact: Then this private eye came up. Tall. Solid-looking. About fifty. Not a snap-your-neck-tough-guy type, but you could tell he works out. First I thought he was like a college professor or something. Now I’m thinking that he looked a helluva lot more like a cop than the short, fat detective-that guy couldn’t run nobody down. Somebody told me the PI said he was going to…
“What about the shooter?”
“Not a damn thing.” Spike’s tone was low, grim.
Murmuring flowed from the waiting room. Gage glanced inside at the families of the night’s wounded huddled together in plastic chairs under brutal fluorescent lights. The air was heavy, almost sweating, reeking of unwashed bodies ripped from sleep by sickness or violence.
Gage and Spike turned as one as Dr. Ajita Kishore approached. She acknowledged Spike with a quick nod. They didn’t need an introduction. The trauma surgeon had sought him out a hundred times before on that same square of speckled tan linoleum, more often than not to report that a shooting or stabbing or beating had become a homicide.
Kishore looked up at Gage, her deep-set South Asian eyes expressing a compassionate familiarity, even an affection, that he hadn’t expected.
“You must be Graham,” she said. Her accent was Indianized British. Formal, but not distant.
Gage nodded, his jaw set tight for the worst, his eyes riveted on her.
She held his gaze. “Mr. Burch raised his hand and mumbled, ‘Graham, tell Graham’ just before we put him under. Something in his voice told me you’d be here when I finished. He must trust you very much.”
“How is he?” Gage asked.
“Alive.” Kishore pressed her fingertips against the green surgical scrubs covering her breastbone. “It’s not just damage from the slugs, the CAT scan shows his brain absorbed a tremendous shock when he fell. Unfortunately, he’s now slipped into a coma.”
Gage smothered the urge to ask the questions to which he knew Kishore couldn’t have answers: How long would it last, and how would it end.
Kishore looked at him apologetically. “We put him on a ventilator. We couldn’t count on his brain functioning well enough to maintain his breathing.”
A timer started counting down in Gage’s mind. The science hadn’t changed that much in the quarter century since he’d left SFPD Homicide. Given his age and the severity of his injuries, three weeks was all Burch had to fight his way out of the coma and avert a descent into a lethal vegetative state-if he survived the next few hours.
Kishore cast an expectant look toward the emergency entrance. “Has his wife been called?”
Gage nodded, finishing her sentence in his head: In case he doesn’t make it.
“She’ll be here by ten o’clock. She and my wife-”
A glimmer of a question caught him short. He fought his way back from an uncertain future to the image of Burch raising his hand-and to his own past as a young detective: riding in ambulances, then following gurneys to operating room thresholds, pursuing facts binding a victim to a shooter, or a dying declaration linking a wounded killer to his crime.
“Do you know what he was trying to say?” he asked Kishore.
The doctor shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s all there was.”
They stood silently for a moment, then Kishore furrowed her brows as if she’d taken a wrong turn in a familiar city. “I assumed you’d be Australian, too.” She inspected Gage’s graying brown hair. “Maybe his older brother.”
Gage’s mind leaped back a half a life. Looking down from a dusty one-lane bridge, spotting a ruddy fisherman waist-deep in the Smith River, wading boots losing traction on the descending tail of a submerged sandbar with boulder-strewn rapids gapping and foaming below. Then Gage racing downstream, sliding down the hillside,
