Once upon a time, before he was seeing Cindy and at a point when Joe and I had split up, the spark between us kindled and almost burned up a hotel bed in Los Angeles.
I’d called a breathless halt to what would have been a hot fling with a short duration and no future. I’d reconsidered that decision many times, but as Conklin was telling me that he loved me, I was thinking about how much I loved Joe. How much I missed Joe.
Joe and I got together again.
Conklin hooked up with Cindy and they were so perfect as a couple, you had to wonder why it had taken them so long. I put on the big diamond ring Joe had given me and we got married in a magical ceremony by the ocean. And now I was running it all through my head again.
Conklin passed me the thermos of coffee. I took a couple of sips and passed it back to him. He stowed the thermos in the door pocket and called Cindy.
“You going to bed?” he asked her.
Pause as she said either yes or no.
“I don’t know when. I can nuke something. Don’t worry.”
Pause as Cindy said okay.
“I don’t care how late it gets, I’m going to wake you when I come in.”
He laughed at something she said.
“You too.”
He closed the phone. Put it in his pocket.
“She’s okay?” I asked. “She’s writing. Don’t bother her when she’s writing. Look,” he said.
I looked past the sofa that had been put out at the curb for garbage pickup, and saw a man, probably Randall, moving around on the main floor of the house.
Then the lights went out.
I had been hoping that Randall would leave his house, fire up his SUV, and take off so that Conklin and I could follow him and find out where a cop-and drug-dealer-shooting executioner went at night.
But that didn’t happen.
Soon the inside of the house was dark except for the attic rooms. I saw a TV jump to life in one of those rooms, and a few minutes later, I saw Randall walk between the lamp and the window shades in the second room. Then that light went out too.
“He’s packing it in for the night,” I said.
“Lucky guy,” said Conklin.
We had three more hours before the next team took over.
Chapter 85
Will Randall had been watching the two-year-old blue Ford sedan from his rear window, had seen it pull into the empty space on Elm with its headlights off.
And the car was still there.
Will had expected to be tailed and surveilled, but his brothers in blue hadn’t seen him do anything and had nothing on him; if they had, they wouldn’t have been sitting outside in their car.
Will went down the hallway, stopped in each of the bedrooms, and checked on the younger kids, all of whom were sleeping. He filled the hamster’s water bottle in the boys’ room, then went to the den, where his father-in-law, Charlie, was sitting in an easy chair, asleep in front of the television.
The TV was on really loud, so Will lowered the sound and then the thermostat, opened the sofa bed, and helped Charlie get under the covers. From there, Will went into the hall bathroom and jiggled the handle on the toilet until the water stopped running; after that, he turned off the overhead lights on the second floor.
Then he went upstairs.
His oldest son’s room was right off the staircase and next door to the room Will shared with Becky. He pulled a chair up to the hospital-type bed where his son was lying and said, “You want to watch a little TV, Link?”
“Dah,” Link said.
“David Letterman it is.”
Will pointed the clicker, turned on the TV, raised the angle of the bed with the other clicker, and when Link was sitting up, he put a straw into a water bottle and held it to his son’s lips.
Father and son watched Letterman for a few minutes, Will’s mind drifting to the unmarked car downstairs, to what would happen to his family if he was caught. He’d had these thoughts before, and now he ran through the same questions and came up with the same answers.
He was in free fall, but he wasn’t done yet.
He brought his attention back to Letterman, who had finished his monologue and gone to a break. Will put the clickers down and said, “I’ll be back in a little while, okay, son?”
Will went next door to his bedroom and saw Becky sacked out, completely zonked from a day of running this asylum.
He loved her, worried for her health, admired her selflessness, couldn’t imagine life without her.
He sat down on the side of the bed, put his hand on her cheek. She opened her eyes.
“Coming to bed, honey?” she asked. “In a little while.”
“Okay,” she said.
Will pulled down the shades, first standing for a moment in front of the window, knowing that a couple of cops down on the street were seeing his silhouette. Then he turned off the light.
He paused in the doorway and listened to Becky’s breathing. Then he went downstairs to the garage, where he took his leather jacket off a hook and put it on. He took his gun out of a toolbox and tucked it inside his waistband. Then he exited through the rear door and went down the short flight of steps to the backyard.
There was enough moonlight to see by but not enough to be seen. He crossed the grass and cut around the swing set, disappeared through the gap between the two houses that backed up against his yard and faced onto Golden Gate Avenue.
He turned onto the deserted road with the grandiose name, kept his head down, walked a block past shabby Victorian homes, and found Becky’s Camaro where he’d parked it. He opened the car and got in, put his gun under the front seat, then started up the engine.
A moment later, he was heading east on Golden Gate. He wanted to get this job done before Craig Ferguson started his e-mail segment on The Late Late Show, which would be in about an hour.
If everything went as planned, he was pretty sure he could make it.
Chapter 86
Will Randall drove through the light-industrial area in the northern part of the Potrero Hill District as if he had an open barrel of beer in the backseat. He kept an eye on the speedometer, came to full stops at traffic lights, was careful not to attract any attention; he wanted to get this over with and go back home.
He stopped for a yellow light at the intersection of Alameda and Potrero. Then he continued on for another block, turned right onto Utah, a quiet road adjacent to the Jewelry Center and during the day used mostly for local traffic.
At night the area was nearly deserted. The lots were empty, and metered parking was open as far as he could see. Will pulled into a spot half a block from Zeus, a club and restaurant that filled a three-story brick warehouse and had the best sound system in San Francisco.
From where he sat, he could see the 101 Freeway to the north, the newly planted trees up the street, a gang of laughing-out-loud kids stumbling off the wide sidewalk, crossing the street behind him, and heading for the black iron delivery doors that were the unmarked entrance to Zeus.
Will forced himself to watch and wait as he sat in his wife’s car, a loaded gun under the seat. He thought
