He needed a phone.
Urgently.
He started for the slope.
His ankle twinged and gave out.
He wasn’t sure if anything was broken but it sure felt that way. He sat down unceremoniously in a heap on the roadside, struggling not to shout a curse.
Then he heard a noise, building from nothingness to a crescendoing roar in the space of maybe five seconds.
Two vehicles racing toward the scene, coming from the tip of Hunters Point. Out the way of Frankie’s gym.
Headlights flaring, engines screaming.
Slater lurched backwards on his rear end and rolled off the side of the road into a shallow ditch, pressing his face into the weeds.
Hoping he hadn’t been spotted.
60
Time stopped.
King had a direct line of sight on Frankie for maybe a half-second, perhaps even less. Milliseconds, most likely. He could’ve fired but Danny’s limp body was rushing toward him and his instincts took over and he lowered his gun to reach out and catch the young man, stopping him from continuing to fall and slamming his head against the pavement, even though it was futile since he was already dead.
Except he wasn’t dead.
As King took a knee to absorb Danny’s weight and lower him into his arms, he saw the kid’s eyes were wide open, but not frozen over. Danny was in shock, not a corpse. And the source of the droplets of blood that had coated King came from a missing earlobe, loose skin that had been torn away by Frankie’s bullet.
King registered all this and it radically shifted his priorities.
He dropped Danny the few remaining inches to the concrete and jerked upright, gun coming back up, anticipating return fire—
No return fire.
Frankie had fled.
Frankie’s car door slammed, only several feet away from where he’d been standing, and an engine spluttered to life. King fired three times through the driver’s window, throwing caution to the wind and sprinting at the stationary vehicle to get a better shot.
He was maybe a second away from barrelling right up to the shattered pane and firing in through the window frame, pumping Frankie full of lead in his seat.
But Frankie got his foot on the accelerator and tore away, tyres squealing on the asphalt.
King kept firing until the clip was empty.
Shot most of the windows out.
Evidently none of them served as the kill shot, because the car kept accelerating, and it turned onto the street and gunned it northwest toward Bayview and, beyond, the city. There was no telling whether Frankie was hit. He was nothing but a dark silhouette pressed into the seat, hands wrenching the wheel left and right.
When King turned around to check on Danny, the kid was sitting up, blood dripping steadily from his missing earlobe. ‘Did you hit him?’
King shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Hurry up and put pressure on that.’
Danny lifted a palm to his ear and pressed hard and moaned in pain. When he pulled himself together he mumbled, ‘Guess I’ll stay here.’
King thought of Bobby and Kit taking Slater away at gunpoint. He couldn’t picture Slater letting anyone get the better of him, but it’s better to plan than to hope. If there was even the slightest chance Slater was dead in a ditch and Bobby and Kit were on the way back…
They sure wouldn’t like what they found.
King said, ‘You’re not leaving my sight until this is through. Get up. Come with me.’
Danny seemed disbelieving as he clambered to his feet, a wince now etched into his face. He was in serious pain. ‘You really ain’t gonna shoot me?’
‘I was telling the truth.’
The tiniest smile of relief. ‘Man, fuck that guy.’
‘His real name’s Frankie Booth,’ King said, hustling for the ride he and Slater had driven to the gym.
‘I know,’ Danny said, jogging to catch up. ‘He told me a while back.’
‘He tell you what he did to need to change his name?’
‘No. But it can’t be worse than what he does now, can it?’
They threw themselves inside and King started the engine and took off after Frankie. ‘Fair point.’
King let the car climb from twenty to forty to sixty miles an hour. His heart was in his throat, but not for the reasons one might assume. Blazing after a murderous gangster in a speeding vehicle wasn’t as important as the question he needed to ask.
‘Danny,’ he said. ‘Have you done this before?’
‘What?’
‘Have you taken jobs for Frankie before?’
‘Nah, man. Earlier tonight was supposed to be my first. Then you sent me away. Then I got called back. I didn’t know what to think.’
Relief flooded King.
It was salvageable, and for now that was enough.
He didn’t ask the follow-up question.
Not yet.
Namely: Would you have done it?
They tore through the desolate industrial zone toward residential Bayview, and by chance King glanced to the right at precisely the correct moment. He looked past Danny, out the window into the gloom, and he swore he saw the Ford sedan that Slater had been taken away in. It was overturned, its frame twisted out of shape, resting at the bottom of an excavated lot set low into the ground for an underground garage.
He blinked once, and then they’d sped past it.
Danny noticed the look on his face. ‘What?’
King couldn’t slow down. He could barely see Frankie’s taillights in the distance, and if he so much as touched the brakes they’d lose him, probably forever. Frankie had disappeared and changed his name before. He could do it again.
King surged faster.
Danny said, ‘What was that? You look like you saw a ghost.’ The side of his head was stained crimson, dark red in shadow.
King said, ‘Maybe I did.’
Danny went quiet.
King’s phone rang.
He hoped for Slater. Fished it out of his pocket.
Alexis.
So she was alive, which meant she’d probably decimated the Russians. All of them, over the course of two days. He couldn’t think straight in the moment, but he knew later he would start to wonder what she had become.
He answered. ‘Where are you? Are you hurt?’
‘I need you in Hayward. Along the
