Juhle hated this.
He imagined himself in front of the Police Commission, explaining how he had gotten involved in this half- assed operation. And without his partner or any other backup. This was not how it was done, fraught with risk and uncertainty for everyone involved. He wondered and sincerely doubted if any other cop he knew would have made the kind of promise he’d made to Hunt; if any other homicide inspector, with an imminent arrest of his prime suspect in his pocket, would have postponed the moment and agreed to this amateur-hour charade. His only consolation was that when Hunt’s scenario failed-as it surely would-he would then pick up the Thorpe woman. Of course, the fact that Hunt had invited Roake along would complicate that arrest, but not impossibly so. Still, it galled Juhle that Hunt had never even mentioned Roake’s presence here as Thorpe’s attorney during their phone call. In fact, everything about this felt wrong to him. But, he told himself, that’s what happened when you believed your friends.
And people wondered why cops grew so jaded over time. It was because you were either in the brotherhood or you were not. You played by the rules or you didn’t.
Somehow Hunt had persuaded him he had no choice. And that, more than anything else, added to his fury and frustration.
Almost as soon as Juhle had arrived, Hunt suggested that they all come out now to the basketball court. Now Roake, Thorpe, and Dade sat together in consecutive chairs while Juhle stood behind them, arms crossed and his shoulder holster unbuttoned, where he could keep his eye on them as well as on whoever entered through the Brannan Street door. The lights were up; the temperature fairly cool, in the mid-sixties, the way Hunt liked to keep it.
They weren’t in there and settled for more than three or four minutes when the doorbell for this side of the warehouse rang and Al Carter, who for some reason Hunt had designated to greet the guests, crossed to the door by the garage entrance, opened it up, and said hello to Len Turner and a tall, thin, well-dressed young black man that Juhle guessed must be Keydrion Mugisa.
Inside his jacket, Juhle’s hand went to the butt of his duty weapon.
The doorbell rang again. As instructed, Carter opened the door again.
Quite clearly, Juhle heard him say, “Hello, Lorraine.”
And then he heard the voice of Lorraine Hess as she said, “Hi, Al, you dumb shit.”
And then the enormous boom of the shot.
Hunt was over by the residence side of the warehouse and broke for the door, jumping over Carter’s prone form. He got outside just as Lorraine Hess was running to get to her car, sitting and idling there at the curb fifty feet up the street, a couple of seconds after the unmistakable report.
“Hold it,” he yelled. “Stop!”
Stopping and turning in her tracks, but without any hesitation, she raised her arm and fired another shot. Hunt, seeing her arm coming up, dove sideways away from the building and heard the bullet ricochet off something back at the corner.
Hunt by this time was lying on the pavement, leveling his gun out in front of him, but he found that he could not fire. She was not then firing at him and it was bad luck to shoot in the back even an escaping murderer. To say nothing of the fact that under those conditions, it was nearly impossible to claim self-defense.
Even if it was. Even if she’d just shot at you.
Lorraine Hess got to the door of her car and again he saw her extend her arm, and again he rolled as the shot pinged off the pavement behind him.
Still on the ground, he squeezed off a round in the general direction of her tires. Off to his left, coming out his door, Juhle had his own weapon out, extended in both hands. He got off two quick shots that cracked the windshield before Hess got the car moving, and then Juhle had to jump backward inside the warehouse as she slammed it into gear and tried to run him down, smashing her front bumper into the side of the building, then bouncing off and coming on, faster now and off the curb.
Hunt, in her path now as well, rolled out into the street and the car passed him, missing him by no more than a few inches. He turned to see her disappear around the corner with a squeal of her tires, heard the diminishing roar of the engine as she sped away, and, lying there on the street, then heard Juhle’s professional voice talking urgently into his cell phone. “I’m calling to report a shooting victim at around Sixth and Brannan. Ambulance required immediately. Urgent, repeat, urgent.” And then, as he closed up the phone, “Son of a bitch.”
It was one week to the day after the arrest of Lorraine Hess.
Wyatt Hunt put down the pages and looked across Gina’s small living room to where she sat with her Oban, her legs tucked up under her. “A twenty-two doesn’t make an enormous boom,” he said. “More like a ‘pop.’”
“Everybody’s a critic.”
“And besides,” Hunt went on, “that’s not what happened.”
“I realize that. But it’s damn sure what very easily could have happened, and forcing you to take a good hard look at the other possibilities was kind of my point in doing the exercise. Because actually, it could have been much worse even than this. In my first draft of this, she runs you over and you die too. But then you’d be out of your misery, and I didn’t want that.”
“You wanted me to suffer?”
“Just a little more. I wanted you to see where this so easily could have gone.” Her smile was fleeting, laced with portent. “But just for fun, let me count the ways.” She held up a finger. “First, Lorraine doesn’t confess and goes home and realizes that she’s finished and she shoots her son while he sleeps and then takes her own life. And meanwhile, of course, Devin arrests Alicia.”
“Don’t be such a softie,” Hunt said. “Have something bad happen.”
“Something bad is coming right up,” she said. “Because maybe you’ve forgotten about it, but that first shot, Lorraine’s first shot as soon as Al Carter opened the door? In my little version of the story, it killed him and he’s lying dead on the floor of your place. And guess who the mildly angry Inspector Juhle is going to blame for that homicide-hint, it’s not just Lorraine, but the person who set up the encounter in the first place. So the good news is that nobody cares what he thinks because he’s going to lose his job for getting involved in this at all. But the bad news is you can’t give him a job because you lose your license at least, your shop gets closed up, and you maybe even go to jail. Next, in her ongoing rage and plain old embarrassment at having somebody shot to death in her partner’s presence when he was right there to stop it and she would have been there if you hadn’t sandbagged him, Sarah Russo comes after me for conspiracy or obstructing justice or some trumped-up charge and I lose my license too.”
“And,” Hunt added, “we become another of San Francisco’s prominent homeless couples, living out of a Dumpster.”
“Laugh if you want, Wyatt, but all of this was this close to happening, and I don’t see you realizing that.”
“That’s because it didn’t…”
“Oh, and the last thing… because Lorraine killed herself when she got home, see above, she never could have told us where she had dumped Jim Parr at Lake Merced after she shot him, and he would have undoubtedly died too.”
“And still may.”
“True. But maybe dead, or as Billy Crystal would put it, mostly dead, is far preferable to completely and officially dead. They’ve done studies.”
“All right.” Hunt crossed a leg and sat back in his chair. “Yep, those all would have been bad things, I agree. But what else would you have had me do, in some future case where I’ll be able to apply all these important lessons you’re trying to teach me from this one?”
“How about you just call Juhle-or whoever the relevant police figure may be in the future-and tell him what you’d figured out?”
“And then what? In the first place, he doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m blowing smoke at him to protect Alicia. Then, even if he buys what I’m telling him, he’s still got no evidence. So he’s going to play it by the book. He shows up with twenty- five cops, the SWAT team, a tank, and a helicopter and scares Lorraine away. Or worse, he
