cheap cloth. Long gone now in that pickup of his. But he wouldn’t get far, probably wouldn’t even try. Just go on home and wait the way his buddy was waiting, riddled with self-pity and banked hatred and not understanding for a minute why he deserved to be punished for what he’d done.
The hell with him. The hell with Tommy Douglass. Runyon opened his cell phone and called 911.
The SFPD’s response time was nineteen minutes, not bad for a week night in a city with a fairly high crime rate and a department in a state of flux. The paramedics took a little longer to get there-more emergency medical calls than felony crime reports tonight. Runyon showed his state ID to the two uniformed officers; that didn’t impress them, but they showed some respect when he mentioned his time on the Seattle PD. He gave them a full accounting of the situation, and when Jerry Butterfield added his version and said damn right he wanted to press home invasion and assault charges, the uniforms Mirandized Tommy Douglass, handcuffed him, and stuffed him into the back of their patrol car. The kid didn’t have much to say and offered no resistance; he was all through making trouble for anybody tonight. While the paramedics were ministering to Butterfield, one of the cops radioed in a request for a pickup order on Bix Sullivan.
Butterfield insisted he wasn’t badly hurt, but the paramedics kept talking to him about the unpredictability of head wounds and convinced him to take a ride to SF General for a doctor’s exam. He closed up the garage and went with them in the ambulance. One of the uniforms told Runyon to stop by the Hall of Justice within the next twenty- four hours and talk to a Robbery and Assault inspector and sign a statement; he said he would, and they took Douglass away and left him with the usual crowd of neighbors and rubberneckers. The crowd was still milling around, reluctant to let go of their little thrill, when Runyon climbed into his car and drove off.
The whole thing hadn’t taken much more than an hour. Violence erupts, blood gets spilled, the cleanup crews move in, the crowds finally disperse, and it’s as if none of it ever happened. Life in the city. Confirmed all over again just how pointless human behavior, human action, human existence was. People live, people die; life goes on and then it doesn’t. Everything matters for a while, and then nothing matters.
Colleen had lived, Colleen had died; his life had gone on, and then someday it wouldn’t. Everything had mattered for twenty years. And now it didn’t.
The apartment Joshua shared with Kenneth Hitchcock was only a few blocks from here. He was on his way there, to tell Joshua the news, see if it would make a difference in their relationship, make something matter again for a little while, when the call from Bill came through.
Bill’s car was parked in tree shadow just down the block from Robert Lemoyne’s house-the same place Tamara had been parked during her two-night surveillance, he’d said on the phone. Nearly ten-thirty now. Two- thirds of the houses along here were dark or just showing night-lights; Lemoyne’s was one of the dark ones. Runyon made a U-turn, pulled up behind Bill’s car, and went to slide in on the passenger side.
“You made good time, Jake.”
“Not much traffic. Still no sign of him?”
“No.” Bill’s voice had a thick tension in it. Finding Tamara’s car had wired him up tight. “I took a turn around the property a while ago. Doors, windows… everything locked up tight.”
“Gone since last night?”
“Or early this morning.”
As much as twenty-four hours. And the first twenty-four hours in a case like this were critical. If a snatch victim survived them, the odds jumped in favor of continued survival. Problem was, the percentage of victims who didn’t survive them was a hell of a lot larger.
“So how do you want to handle it?” Runyon asked.
“Keep on waiting. For now.”
“Brace him if he shows?”
“Push him hard if we have to. You carrying?”
The. 357 Magnum was in his belt now. He said, “Yeah. But I hope it doesn’t come down to that.”
“So do I.”
They sat in silence. Bill kept shifting position, finding things to do with his hands. Runyon sat without moving, tuned down inside, on hold.
After a time Bill asked abruptly, making talk, “How goes the gay-bashing investigation?”
“It’s finished now. Right before you called.”
“Finished how?”
Runyon told him.
“Right place, right time. Good job. Why didn’t you say something before?”
“This is more important.”
Bill thumped the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, kept on doing it.
Runyon said, “We’ll find her. She’ll be all right.”
“Sure. Sure she will.”
Trading standard reassurances, keeping it upbeat. Believing out loud what they were both doubting inside.
More silence. A couple of cars appeared and then disappeared, another car turned into a driveway at the far end of the block. More houses went dark. The tension in Bill thickened until you could almost smell it, heavy and sour, like rancid butter.
He smacked the steering wheel again, hard enough this time to make it vibrate. “The hell with this. He’s not coming.”
“Still early yet. Not even eleven-thirty.”
“Patience isn’t one of my long suits. I can’t keep sitting here like this, Jake. What if she’s in his house right now, been there all along?”
Runyon didn’t say anything.
“She could be. We both know it.”
“So what do you want to do?”
Bill said, “How do you feel about B and E?”
“Same as you do. Last resort.”
“Yeah, well, that’s where I’m at. I’m going over there.”
Again Runyon said nothing.
“You don’t have to go along. Stay here, keep watch.”
“If you go, I go.”
“I don’t want to risk your license, Jake-”
“The hell with that. What kind of locks on his doors?”
“Dead bolts, front and back. We’ll have to break a window.”
“That can be done without too much noise, but we’ll need duct tape.”
“There’s a roll in the trunk.”
“You have a window picked out?”
“There’s one on the left side-areaway between the garage and the house hides it from the neighbors.”
They got out. Runyon checked the street while Bill took the duct tape and a flashlight out of the trunk; then they moved as one to the Lemoyne property, up the drive, into the shadowed areaway. The window there was small, high up, the glass pebbled and opaque. Bathroom. The sill extended outward just above Runyon’s head; he reached up with both hands, pushed upward on the frame. Wouldn’t budge. Locked. He ran fingertips over the glass. It didn’t feel too thick.
He said against Bill’s ear, “Need something to stand on.”
“Me. My back. You’re lighter than I am.”
“Okay.”
Bill gave him the duct tape, got down on all fours, and braced his body against the house wall. Runyon stepped up on his back, balanced himself by leaning his shoulder against the sill, then began tearing off strips of tape and pasting them to the cold glass just above the bottom of the frame. Took him five minutes to cover an area about a foot square. Bill bore his weight the entire time without moving or making an audible sound.
Runyon paused. The street out front remained empty. A chilly breeze had kicked up; it made rustling noises in a nearby tree. A dog barked somewhere a long way off. Otherwise the night hush was unbroken.
Ready. He leaned out from the wall, raised his left arm with the elbow extended, waited until the wind
