But now, truly pissed off, he turned around. 'Okay, asshole, you want to have some fun?' The beam from his flashlight preceding him, he raked the dumpster side to side and front to back. 'Come on out! Don't be stupid.' Ten feet back, he stopped again, gave the flashlight another pass.
Finally, movement at the back of the dumpster. He brought the beam over, took a step in that direction, then heard a noise-a second movement, to his left, at the front of the dumpster, maybe six feet from him.
He was turning in that direction…
And then he was dead.
John Lescroart
Hardy 08 – First Law, The
Part Two
^
Sometime earlier today-time was routinely meaningless now-Gina Roake had been with them in Dismas Hardy's office, in David's building. These men, these unlikely avengers. She knew where they would be going when the meeting broke up, and why.
Now she was back where David had asked her to marry him. The most stunning, shocking and unexpected moment of all her life. She sat straight, unmoving, at the little rickety table, now reduced to its usual state, without the linen or china or crystal. Could that lovely service have been here? When was it now, that eternity ago?
She looked at her hands. The ring caught her short again and she held her left hand within her right and stared at it while more immeasurable time went by.
The kitchen was in a round turret that jutted from the corner of the apartment. The glass in the curved, original windows was probably sixty-five years old. Looking through them was a wavy vision through perfect water, and now she stared downhill at the impossible world going by as though nothing had changed. Cars passed at the intersection a block down; a couple embraced and kissed against a building; a woman pushed a baby stroller up toward her.
She hadn't dressed for work in several days, so she wore blue jeans and tennis shoes, a UOP sweatshirt, a blue band to hold her hair back. No makeup of any kind. She was rubbing her hands and looked at them again, surprised that now suddenly they struck her as the hands of an old woman. She'd been biting her nails, and the week-old red polish was chipped and pathetic. She made a fist of her right hand, let it go, made it again, and held it until it hurt. Old or not, she recognized that there was still strength in these hands.
Perhaps the biggest shock was what it had taken her this long to process-that her old friends in Hardy's office had truly scared her. She'd been playing with the big boys in her real life for a long time now, consoling or lecturing her clients, being a goddamned equal to her male friends and lovers, kicking ass in the courtroom, taking no shit and giving no quarter. That's why she was successful. That's why David loved her.
She thought it was who she was, but now even that wasn't clear. Nothing was clear. She didn't know who she was, who she wanted to be, what she wanted to do. But beyond everything else was raw rage. She'd never known anger like this before, nor even understood that such a thing could exist. The desire to hurt someone was almost a physical pain in her stomach. That scared her more than anything.
Her mind returned to the men in Hardy's office. She'd known them forever, it seemed. They'd been colleagues in her life with the law. She'd clerked for Dismas at the DA's when she'd been in law school and he'd just been starting out. Glitsky always a presence, even long before the homicide years, with his passion for justice, for fairness, a stickler for procedure.
But then this morning, these people of the law suddenly making common cause with a man like John Holiday? But Holiday, Dismas and Abe were in this all the way together now, there could be no doubt of that.
And good lawyer that she was, where did that leave her? With them? If she didn't believe in the rule of law under all circumstances, then what kind of fraud had she been for all these years? If it seemed to these men that the law wasn't working as it should to protect them, did that give them the right to take it into their own hands? When the police didn't exactly move mountains to identify shooters in the various ghettos and barrios, did that condone or mitigate even slightly the violent retribution of a victim's relatives or friends?
She didn't think it did. No, she knew it didn't. She knew Glitsky and Hardy and they felt the same way. Or always had, until today.
Today everything was different.
And Gina now found herself with them. These men had become her true allies in this. The import of the collective decision as Abe had left Diz's office had been clear. He was going down to make the arrests himself if he couldn't move his own police department to do it for him. That was the pretext.
The subtext was that Panos and his gang would not go gently into the night. They'd proven themselves not only capable of violence, but committed to it as the way they dealt with obstruction. And the clock was running.
So Glitsky, left without an option, had come to his decision. He gave lip service to the arrest, but she knew without doubt that he'd get down to Pier 70 early, maybe a couple of hours early to avoid an ambush-in any event long before the four o'clock appointment he'd made with Gerson. And when they showed up, he'd be prepared to fight, quite possibly to kill. He had never asked Hardy or Holiday, and certainly not Gina, to back him up in any way. In actual fact, he'd been adamant on the point, expressly reminding them that he was a police officer acting in the line of duty. Diz, Holiday, anyone else who showed up to help him would, in the eyes of the law, be vigilantes. They must not be part of it.
To be part of it at all, if they lived, would ruin them.
But of course, he told them exactly where he was going, and when; what he planned to do, what he believed was going to happen.
A gust shook the ancient windows, then howled away down the street like the passage of the Angel of Death, the howl modulating down to a moan and finally fading to a dirge, then silence.
Gina had kept a Beretta. 40 caliber automatic locked in her desk drawer ever since one of her early cop boyfriends had convinced her that one day she'd need it. She had often thought to get rid of it-lawyers needed to believe that they didn't have to carry guns-but could never quite make the decision. And because it really would have been the height of absurdity to keep a gun she couldn't load or shoot properly, she went to the range every few months and fired off a couple of hundred rounds of ammunition to keep herself sharp. Over the years, she'd not only become comfortable with her gun and, in the process, turned into a capable marksman, she'd come to enjoy the experience-the smell of powder, the deafening noise, the awesome kick and power so far removed from the cops-and-robbers fantasy she'd entertained when she'd started.
She knew now. To shoot a high-caliber handgun was to taste death, in some ways to embrace the idea of it. The thing ruined flesh, obliterated bone. It snuffed out life instantly. As fast, she thought, no-faster than God could take it. The feeling was intoxicating.
Still at David's kitchen table, she looked at her hands a last time. Her ring, again, caught her eye, and suddenly the reality of all she'd borne coursed through her body like a current.
She nearly ran to the front door and outside to the street. She had to get to her desk, then to her car. Enough reflection. She was who she was-equal in her heart and soul and body to any man, and to her allies in particular. She'd suffered along with them, and now belonged with them. They were all in this and they would need her.
She checked her watch and broke into a jog.
10
The smartest inspector in the San Francisco homicide detail if not on the planet worked solo. Paul Thieu, a six-year veteran, was on when the call came in at a little after one in the morning. A security guard named Matthew Creed had not reported back to his liaison at the Tenderloin Station at the end of his shift, and the ensuing search of his route by both city and private patrolmen had turned up his body. He'd been gunned down-two shots at very close range-and lay sprawled by a dumpster not two blocks from Union Square.
Although the pickin's were very slim, Thieu spent most of the rest of the night at the scene with the Crime Scene Investigation unit. He did notice a few potential anomalies that might possibly shed light on elements of the crime. There were two concentrations of broken glass, where bottles had obviously been broken-one out on
