A hand rocked his shoulder and he struggled to pry his eyes open. Standing beside his bed was a man in a white coat.
“I’m Dr. Martin Tumaco. I operated on you. You were in pretty bad shape. Do you remember anything?”
MacNally opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue felt thick and parched.
Tumaco held a cup to his lips and he sipped water from a straw.
“That’s enough,” Tumaco said, then withdrew the drink.
MacNally turned his head toward the doctor. His neck was stiff. “Am I going to be okay?”
Tumaco turned around, grabbed a chair, and moved it to the bedside. “We had to do emergency surgery, but you’ve made an extraordinary recovery. A month ago, you were brought in with significant head trauma. You’d apparently had an accident, and you sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex and frontal lobe areas of your brain. I don’t want to get too technical on you, but-”
“I’d rather you say it. Be honest with me.”
“Right. Honest. Okay.” Tumaco paused, nodded silently, and then said, “In a normal brain, those areas provide self-control. If it’s damaged, you have less control and increased desire. It feels better for you to act than to stop yourself from acting, even if it’s a bad idea or if it’s likely to get you into trouble. And if you succeed-meaning you don’t get caught-you want to do it again. The longer the reward is delayed, the more the brain produces the hormone testosterone, which-” The doctor stopped and frowned. “That’s probably more than enough for now.”
MacNally glanced around his hospital room: two large adjacent- barred-windows on the wall to his right, a radiator squatting below it. Gray light streamed in and fell across a table fan that sat atop a glass cabinet to his right. “Go on. What does all this mean?”
“There will be certain deficits, that much I’m certain of. But I’m afraid I don’t know yet what they’ll be.”
“But you have a pretty good idea. My brain will want me to do things without me being able to stop it. Right?”
Tumaco hesitated. “You’re in the right ballpark. Bottom line is that aggression and violence may be a problem. But-we’ll see how things go. I wouldn’t worry about it now. Just get your strength back so you can-”
“So I can go back downstairs to my cell. And live with violent men who do violent things. Like me. Sounds like a recipe for success.” MacNally closed his eyes, then turned away from the doctor.
A moment later, Tumaco rose from his chair and left the room.
The Coast Guard cutter delivered them to Pier 33 fourteen minutes later. They ran to their car, Burden driving with Vail riding shotgun and Dixon in the back thumbing her iPhone.
Vail stuck the light atop the Taurus to ensure the ride did not take any longer than necessary.
“I’ve got it,” Dixon said. “It’s called the Washington/Mason Cable Car Barn and Powerhouse. It’s on Mason-”
“I know where it is,” Burden said. “We’re real close-we’ll be there in four or five minutes.”
“It’s the only transportation system listed on the National Register of Historic Places,” Dixon read from her screen. “Been around since 1873.”
“Almost as old as Robert,” Burden said with a laugh. But his grin immediately faded as he-no doubt-realized that his friend and colleague wasn’t in the car to offer a retort.
As Burden pulled down Jackson Street, Dixon pointed at an open rollup doorway on the side of the brick building. “There.”
A painted sign on the gray steel framework above the tall maw read, San Francisco Municipal Railway.
Burden stopped in front of the entrance and they poured out of the car; the wall to the right was dominated by floor-to-ceiling corrugated metal with a freeway guardrail in front of it and two horizontal windows featuring closed cream venetian blinds. Above the windows was an old Market Street and Fisherman’s Wharf Cable Car sign, advertising Rice-A-Roni. Notices and papers were posted across the glass: Authorized Personnel Only, Keep Out, and Cable Car Storeroom, Parts, Receiving.
Vail stepped up to the steel door-it, too, was covered with signs and employee-themed paperwork. She rapped on it. Seconds passed. She banged again, and it finally swung open. She held up her creds, as did Burden and Dixon. “We need to talk with someone in charge.”
The woman’s eyes flitted over their IDs. “You got her. Elise Cooper. I’m a supervisor. What do you need?”
“We’re looking for cables in dark places.”
“Excuse me?”
“Go with me on this,” Vail said. “Don’t think too hard. Just-whatever comes to mind first.”
Cooper shrugged and said, “Well, there are the tunnels…that’d be the most obvious.”
Vail swung and looked around. Large form machinery, humongous spools of thick, stranded cable and spare brakes and gears filled the space as far as she could see.
“Tunnels,” Vail said. “Where?”
Burden scrunched his face. “Tunnels?”
“Yes,” Vail said. “Cables in small dark places. From the note.”
Cooper looked from Vail to Burden and back to Vail. “And then there are the blind channels.”
“What are they like?” Dixon asked.
“Long tunnels. The sheaves run through them, carry the cables under the street.”
Burden’s chin jutted forward. “The what? Shivs?”
“Spelled s-h-e-a-v-e-s, pronounced shivs. Large spool-type pulleys that keep tension on the cables. They enable the cars to change direction, like around curves. C’mon, I’ll show you.”
“Shiv,” Burden said to Vail. “Prison weapons are called-”
“I know. Something tells me we’re on the right track.”
Dixon looked at Vail. “Is that a joke?”
Cooper led them through, and past, what appeared to be a
