It’s a reminder of the rebellious streak that made Grandma Lane a slightly ill fit for the confines of the Greatest Generation. One time, she saved money for a sports car without telling my grandfather; in her late forties, she took up karate and became a blue belt.
I’ve hated witnessing her precipitous decline and her fragility. I’m helpless to do anything about it, or the acute and bizarre danger we find ourselves in at this moment.
I dial 911. This time, before I can hit send, I hear the piercing sound of a police siren. It’s coming from Lincoln Boulevard, the thoroughfare that runs along the park and is only a few hundred yards away. The siren seems to be heading our direction, suggesting a good Samaritan heard the shots and called 911, or maybe the cops themselves heard the telltale blasts.
They should be here in mere minutes.
I peer past Grandma and through an opening between two eucalyptuses and into the open field. Squinting in the poor light, I make out the grove of trees that I believe hides One Bad Person with Gun.
I see movement. Leaves rustling. Is the shooter on the move? Then, more rustling — a shape making its way from the grove.
“I’ll be right back,” I mutter to Grandma.
I might be nuts, but maybe I can get a look at the shooter, and play hero with a police department that doesn’t much like me these days. We can’t stay here, a pair of sitting ducks.
“A train can’t breathe,” Grandma mumbles.
“Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”
“It’s the man in blue.”
“What?”
“You look tired, Harry,” she says.
Harry. Her friend from the retirement home.
“Promise me you won’t move.”
“I promise.”
I trudge into the darkness. Hoping to get an eyewitness view from a safe distance, wondering exactly how I’ll do that and about the mysterious phone call, wondering about Grandma.
Danger.
How did she know?
Chapter 2
Dense foliage envelops my feet. I take two dozen loping steps away from Grandma. I trip.
I rise to my knees and say a silent agnostic’s prayer of thanks for cortisol. It’s the fight-or-flight hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that heightens the senses.
It explains why I can make sense of my surroundings despite the quick onset of twilight. To my right, I make out Grandma’s shape propped against the tree, motionless.
I wade a few more steps, moving parallel to the line of eucalyptuses, protected by it. I crouch where I can look through another gap between the big trees at the grove containing the assailant. More movement, I think.
Then I’m sure.
A shadowy figure exits the left side of the distant tree enclave.
I crouch, suddenly fearful he might not be escaping but still on the attack. Is he circling around the other way?
Squinting. C’mon cortisol!
Based on our past experiences, our brains try to make sense of situations with imperfect information. Through the darkness, I piece together that a figure is carrying an elongated bag. I can see he’s trotting to a car parked at the edge of the grove; he opens the trunk, tosses in the duffel bag, climbs into the driver’s seat. Shooter seems lumpy, amorphous; brain concludes he is muscular and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Car has distinctive wide back; brain sends message: Prius.
Police sirens blare. They can’t be half a minute away. Brake lights from the Prius pierce the dusk. The car lurches forward and starts to pull away. I stumble through the tree line, knowing I couldn’t possibly create enough cortisol to allow me to make out a license plate, let alone fly through the air, bring the car to a screeching halt and make the driver apologize to Grandma.
I stop and watch the Prius drive away. And I almost laugh at the idea of our nearly quintessential San Francisco death: gunned down by the driver of an environmentally friendly car — and who has the courtesy to call my mobile to make sure I’m dead.
“The Idles live to see another day,” I tell Grandma.
“I know you. I taught you to drown,” she says.
I laugh, a release of adrenaline, my hands shaking.
Thirty years ago, Grandma takes me for a weekend to the ocean in Santa Cruz. Babysitting while my parents shepherd my older brother through his appendectomy. Just the two of us. Grandpa Irving, the devoted accountant, stays at home to work.
My parents, Grandma tells me later, overload her with rules. No cotton candy, no late-night television, and no filthy ocean, especially since I’m not familiar with water.
For two days, adventure, sugary snacks and wading in the tide. Grandma makes friends with a retired lifeguard who teaches me how to wade and hold my breath under water. At the time, she later recalls, I told her that I learned how to drown.
She says: “Let’s not tell your parents about the swimming.” It’s our first secret.
A light breeze kicks up, chilling my bare arms — and my exposed toe. I take the sweatshirt I’ve had tied around my waist and lay it gently on my ward.
“Lane, who is the man in blue?”
“I’m tired.”
“Earlier you said ‘A train can’t breathe.’ What did you mean by that?”
No response at first.
“I’d like soup,” she finally says.
It is like talking to a child who knows words but not their meanings.
My phone vibrates. I whip it from my pocket. It’s a text message. Is it the maniac again? I open the message. It reads: “emergency in blogosphere. call asap.”
The message is not from a mystery sender, not from a hybrid-driving outpatient. It’s from Pauline Sanchez, the woman who pays my bills. She’s the editor at Medblog, a medical news and information Internet site that pays me $120 a day for three postings.
The nature of her message, despite its drama, isn’t particularly compelling. Pauline is a news junkie, an information monger, a data speed-freak. She speaks in headlines. From her message, I infer only that she’s trying to get my attention. Maybe she’s upset I haven’t posted in the last eighteen seconds.
Maybe she wants to talk about a searing physical chemistry between us that she wants to experiment with — but that I’m holding at arm’s length.
I am about to put the phone back in my pocket when I realize that the best thing I can do is freeze.
“Drop it,” a voice says.
Chapter 3
Two police officers stand at the tree line, bathed in headlights.
They have guns drawn, pointing in my direction.
It takes a moment to disabuse the two cops of the idea that I should be targeted. But I can see why they’d
