THE FIRST LAW Chapter One Ten o'clock, a Wednesday morning in the beginning of July. John Holiday extended one arm over the back of the couch at his lawyer's Sutter Street office. Today he was comfortably dressed in stonewashed blue jeans, hiking boots, and a white, high-collared shirt so heavily starched that it had creaked when he lowered himself into his slouch. His other hand had come to rest on an oversize silver-and-turquoise belt buckle. His long legs stretched out all the way to the floor, his ankles crossed. Nothing about his posture much suggested his possession of a backbone. Women had liked him since he'd outgrown his acne. His deep-set eyes seemed the window to a poet's soul, with the stained glass of that window the odd whitish blue of glacier water. Now, close up, those eyes revealed subtle traces of dissolution and loss. There was complexity here, even mystery. With an easy style and pale features—his jaw had the clean definition of a blade—he'd been making female hearts go pitter-patter for so long now that he took it for granted. He didn't much understand it. To him, the prettiness of his face had finally put him off enough that he'd grown a mustache. Full, drooping, and yellow as corn silk, it was two or three shades lighter than the hair on his head and had only made him more handsome. When his face was at rest, Holiday still didn't look thirty, but when he laughed, the lines added a decade, got him up to where he belonged. He still enjoyed a good laugh, though he smiled less than he used to. He was smiling now, though, at his lawyer, Dismas Hardy, over by the sink throwing water on his face for the third time in ten minutes. "As though that's gonna help." Holiday's voice carried traces of his father's Tennessee accent and the edges of it caressed like a soft Southern breeze. "It would help if I could dry off." "Didn't the first two times." Hardy had used up the last of the paper towels and now stood facing his cupboards in his business suit, his face dripping over the sink. Holiday shrugged himself up from the couch, dug in the wastebasket by the desk, and came up with a handful of used paper, which he handed over. "Never let it be said I can't be helpful." "It would never cross my mind." Hardy dried his face. "So where were we?" "You're due in court in forty-five minutes and you're so hungover you don't remember where we were? If you'd behaved this way when you were my lawyer, I'd have fired you." Hardy fell into one of his chairs. "I couldn't have behaved this way when I was your lawyer because I didn't know you well enough yet to go out drinking with you. Thank God." "You're just out of practice. It's like riding a horse. You've got to get right back on when it tosses you." "I did that last night. Twice." "Don't look at me. If memory serves, nobody held a gun to your head. Why don't you call and tell them you're sick? Get a what-do-you-call-it . . ." "Continuance." Hardy shook his head. "Can't. This is a big case." "All the more reason if you can't think. But you said it was just dope and some hooker." "But with elements," Hardy said. In fact, he hadn't done a hooker case for nearly a decade. In his days as an assistant DA, the occasional prostitution case would cross his desk. Hardy mostly found these morally questionable, politically suspect, and in any case a waste of taxpayer money. Prostitutes, he thought, while rarely saintlike, were mostly victims themselves, so as a prosecutor, he would often try to use the girls' arrests as some kind of leverage to go after their dope connections or pimps, the true predators. Occasionally, it worked. Since he'd been in private practice, because there was little money in defending working girls, he never saw these cases anymore. As a matter of course, the court appointed the public defender's office or private counsel if that office had a conflict. In this way, Aretha LaBonte's case had been assigned to Gina Roake, a mid-forties career defense attorney. But Gina's caseload had suddenly grown so large it was compromising her ability to handle it effectively. If she wanted to do well by the rest, she had to dump some clients, including Aretha. By chance she mentioned the case to her boyfriend, Hardy's landlord, David Freeman, who'd had a good listen and smelled money. With his ear always to the ground, Freeman had run across some similar cases. Aretha's arrest had been months ago now. Her case was interesting and from Freeman's perspective potentially lucrative because her arresting officer wasn't a regular San Francisco policeman. Instead, he had been working for a company called WGP, Inc., which provided security services to businesses under a jurisdictional anomaly in San Francisco. In its vigilante heyday a century ago, the city found that its police department couldn't adequately protect the people who did business within its limits. Those folks asked the PD for more patrols, but there was neither budget nor personnel to accommodate them. So the city came up with a unique solution—it created and sold patrol "beats" to individuals who became private security guards for those beats. These beat holders, or Patrol Specials, then and now, were appointed by the police commissioner, trained and licensed by the city. The beat holders could, and did, hire assistants to help them patrol, and in time most Patrol Specials came to control their own autonomous armed force in the middle of the city. On his beat, a Patrol Special tended to be a law unto himself, subject only to the haphazard and indifferent supervision of the San Francisco Police Department. They and their assistants wore uniforms and badges almost exactly like those of the city police; they carried weapons and, like any other citizen, could make arrests. Aretha LaBonte's arrest had occurred within the twelve-square-block area just south of Union Square known as Beat Thirty-two, or simply Thirty-two. It was one of six beats in the city owned by WGP, the corporate identity of a philanthropic businessman named Wade Panos. He had a total of perhaps ninety assistants on his payroll, and this, along with the amount of physical territory he patrolled, made him a powerful presence in the city. Aretha's case was not the first misconduct that Freeman had run across in Panos's beats. In fact, Freeman's preliminary and cursory legwork, his "sniff test," revealed widespread allegations of assistant patrol specials' use of excessive force, planting of incriminating evidence, general bullying. If Hardy could get Aretha off on this one assistant patrol special's misconduct, and several of the other "sniff test" cases could be developed and drafted into legal causes of action, he and Freeman could put together a zillion dollar lawsuit against Panos. They could also include the regular police department as a named defendant for allowing these abuses to continue. But at the moment, Hardy didn't exactly feel primed for the good fight. He brought his hand up and squeezed his temples, then exhaled slowly and completely. "It's not just a hooker case. It's going to get bigger, and delay doesn't help us. There's potentially huge money down the line, but first I've got to rip this witness a new one. If he goes down, we move forward. That's the plan." "Which gang aft agley, especially if your brain's mush." "It'll firm up. Pain concentrates the mind wonderfully. And I really want this guy." "What guy?" "The prosecution's chief witness. The arresting cop. Nick Sephia." Suddenly Holiday sat upright. "Nick the Prick?" "Sounds right." "What'd he do wrong this time?" "Planted dope on my girl." "Let me guess. She wasn't putting out for him or paying for protection, so he set her up." "You've heard the song before?" "It's an oldie but goodie, Diz. Everybody knows it." "Who's everybody?" A shrug. "The neighborhood. Everybody." Suddenly Hardy was all business. He knew that Holiday owned a bar, the Ark, smack in the middle of Thirty-two. Knew it, hell, he'd closed the place the night before. But somehow he'd never considered Holiday as any kind of real source for potential complainants in the Panos matter. Now, suddenly, he did. "You got names, John? People who might talk to me? I've talked to a lot of folks in the neighborhood in the last couple of months. People might be unhappy, but nobody's saying anything too specific." A little snort. "Pussies. They're scared." "Scared of Wade Panos?" Holiday pulled at the side of his mustache, and nodded slowly. "Yeah, sure, who else?" "That's what I'm asking you." Hardy hesitated. "Look, John, this is what Freeman and I have been looking for. We need witnesses who'll say that things like this Sephia bust I'm doing today are part of a pattern that the city's known about and been tolerating for years. If you know some names, I'd love to hear them." Holiday nodded thoughtfully. "I could get some, maybe a lot," he said. "They're out there, I'll tell you that." His eyes narrowed. "You know Nick's his nephew, don't you? Wade's." "Panos's? So his own uncle fired him?" "Moved him out of harm's way is more like it. Now he's working for the Diamond Center." "And you're keeping tabs on him?" "We've been known to sit at a table together. Poker." "Which as your lawyer I must remind you is illegal. You beat him?" A shrug. "I don't play to lose." The Wednesday night game had been going on for years now in the back room of Sam Silverman's pawnshop on O'Farrell, a block from Union Square. There were maybe twenty regulars. You reserved your chair by noon Tuesday and Silverman held it to six players on any one night. Nobody pretended that it was casual entertainment among friends. Table stakes makes easy enemies, especially when the buy-in is a thousand dollars. Twenty white chips at ten bucks each, fifteen reds at twenty, and ten blues at fifty made four or five small piles that could go away in a hurry. Sometimes in one hand. With his neat bourbon in a heavy bar glass, John Holiday sat in the first chair, to Silverman's left, and two chairs beyond him Nick Sephia now smoldered. He'd come in late an hour ago and had taken a seat between his regular companions, Wade's little brother, Roy Panos, and another Diamond Center employee named Julio Rez. The other two players at the table tonight were Fred Waring, a mid-forties black stockbroker, and Mel Fischer, who used to own four Nosh Shop locations around downtown, but was now retired. At thirty or so, Sephia was the youngest player there. He was also, by far, the biggest—six-three, maybe 220, all of it muscle. While Silverman took the young Greek's money and counted out his chips, he carefully hung the coat of his exquisitely tailored light green suit over the back of his chair. The blood was up in his face, the color in his cheeks raw beef, the scowl a fixture. He'd shaved that morning but his jawline was already blue with shadow. After he sat, he snugged his gold silk tie up under his Adam's apple, rage flowing off him in an aura. The usual banter dried up. After a few hands during which no one said a word, Roy Panos pushed a cigar over in front of the late arrival. Holiday sipped his bourbon. Eventually Silverman, maybe hoping to ease the tension, called a bathroom break for himself, and Sephia lit up, blowing the smoke out through his nose. Waring and Fischer stood to stretch and pour themselves drinks. Holiday, quietly enjoying Sephia's pain, had a good idea of what was bothering him. Maybe the whiskey was affecting his judgment—it often did—but he couldn't resist. "Bad day, Nick?" Sephia took a minute deciding whether he was going to talk about it. Finally, he shook his head in disgust. "Fucking lawyers. I spent half the day in court." "Why? What'd you do?" "What'd I do?" He blew smoke angrily. "I didn't do dick." Roy Panos helped him with the explanation. "They suppressed his evidence on some hooker he brought in for dope a couple of months ago. Said he planted it on her." "So?" Holiday was all sweet reason. "If you didn't, what's the problem?" Sephia's dark eyes went to slits, his temper ready to flare at any indication that Holiday was having fun at his expense, but he saw no sign of it. "Guy made me look like a fucking liar, is the problem. Like I'm supposed to remember exactly what I did with this one whore? She's got junk in her purse, another one's got it in her handbag. Who gives a shit where it was? Or how it got there? It's there, she's guilty, end of story. Am I right?" "Fuckin' A." Julio Rez, a medium-built Latino, spoke without any accent. All wires and nerves, he'd probably been a good base stealer in his youth. He'd lost the lower half of his left ear somewhere, but it didn't bother him enough to try to cover it with his hair, which was cropped short. "She goes down." "But not today. Today they let her go." Panos spoke to Holiday. "They suppress the dope, there's no case." "Were you down at court, too?" Panos shook his head. "No, but Wade was. My brother? He is pissed off." "Not at me, I hope," Sephia said. Panos patted him on the arm. "No, no. The lawyers. Bastards." "Why would your brother be mad at Nick?" Holiday sipped again at his tumbler of bourbon. "He was working for him at the time, that's why. It makes Wade look bad. I mean, Nick's doing patrol for Christ sake. He busts a hooker, she ought to stay busted at least. Now maybe they start looking at the rest of the shop." "Judge reamed my ass," Sephia said. "This prick lawyer—he had the judge talking perjury, being snotty on the record. OI find the arresting officer's testimony not credible as to the circumstances surrounding the arrest.' Yeah, well, Mr. Hardy, you can bite me." Holiday feigned surprise. "Hardy's my lawyer's name. Dismas Hardy?" Now Sephia's glare was full on. "The fuck I know? But whatever it is, I see him again, he's going to wish I didn't." "So he must have convinced them you did plant her?" Rez shot a quick glance at Sephia. But Sephia held Holiday's eyes for a long beat, as though he was figuring something out. "She wasn't paying," he finally said, his voice filled with a calm menace. "Wade wanted her out of the beat. Most of the time that's intensive care. I figured I was doing the bitch a favor." Dismas Hardy's wife, Frannie, cocked her head in surprise. They'd just sat down at a small Spanish place on Clement, not far from their house on Thirty-fourth Avenue. "You're not having wine?" she asked. "Not tonight." "Nothing to drink at all?" "Just water. Water's good." "You feel all right?" "Fine. Sometimes I don't feel like drinking, that's all." "Oh, that's right. I remember there was that time right after Vincent was born." Their son, Vincent, was now thirteen. She reached her hand across the table and put it over one of his. "Did you hurt yourself last night?" Half a grin flickered then died out. "I didn't think so at the time. I'm out of shape pounding myself with alcohol." Frannie squeezed his hand. "Out of shape could be a good thing, you know." But she softened her tone. "How was John?" "Entertaining, charming, drunk. The usual. Though he came by the office this morning fresh as a daisy. He must have been pouring his drinks in the flowerpots." "So what time did you finally get in?" "One-ish? That's a guess. You were asleep, though. I think." "Aren't you glad you decided to take a cab when you went out?" "Thrilled. I guess I must have taken a cab back home then, huh?" "If John didn't drive you." Hardy pressed two fingers into his temple. "No. I think we can rule that out." A look of concern. "You really don't remember?" "No. I remember. I didn't even think I'd hurt myself until this morning when that moose in my mouth wouldn't stop kicking at my brains." He shrugged. "But you know, with John . . ." "Maybe you don't have to keep up with him." "That's what they all say. But then you do." The waiter came by with a basket of freshly baked bread, some olives, a hard pungent cheese. Frannie ordered her usual Chardonnay. As advertised, Hardy stayed with water. They kept holding hands over the table. The waiter vanished and Hardy picked up where they'd been. "He's more fun than a lot of people," he said, "and more interesting than almost everybody except you." "What a sweet thing to say. And so sincere." She squeezed his hand. "I don't have a problem with him. Really. Or with you. I don't know if I understand the attraction—if you were a woman, okay—but I don't like to see you hurting." "I'm not so wild about it either. But you hang out with John Holiday, there's a chance you'll drink too much sometimes. And in spite of all this, by the way, today wasn't a total loss. Maybe I should have a drink, after all. Celebrate." "What?" "You know that motion to suppress . . ." He told her about his afternoon in the courtoom, getting Nick Sephia's evidence kicked out, which led to Aretha LaBonte's case being dismissed. "Not that it's going to change her life in any meaningful way. She's probably back on the street even as we speak, although if she's smart she's not working one of Wade Panos's beats. But it was nice to serve notice that this stuff isn't flying anymore. When it was over, David even had a little moment of actual drama right there in the Hall of Justice." The curmudgeonly and unkempt seventy-four-year-old legal powerhouse that was David Freeman wouldn't give Wade Panos or his hired thug Nick Sephia the satisfaction. Further, he did not believe in revealing pain or weakness under any conditions, but most especially in a professional settting. So even Dismas Hardy, who'd been there, wasn't aware of how badly he'd been hurt. How badly he still hurt. At first, he even tried to fake it with Roake. On her sixth full day of automatic redial, she had finally succeeded in getting dinner reservations for them both at the legendarily swank restaurant, Gary Danko. Freeman wasn't going to whine and ruin the special night she'd so painstakingly orchestrated. So after the successful hearing and the little problem he'd had with Sephia and Panos, he'd forgone any celebration with Hardy and instead had beelined home from the Hall of Justice, hailing a cab as soon as he was out of sight around the corner. In his apartment, he popped a handful of aspirin with a hefty shot of Calvados. Then he ran a hot bath and soaked in it before dragging himself into bed, where he slept for three and a half hours until his alarm jarred his aching body into a disoriented awareness. It cost him a half hour, laboring mightily through the pain, to get himself dressed. Freeman held fast to a lifelong core belief that juries didn't trust nice clothes, and so of the seven business suits he owned, six were brown and straight off the rack. But the last one was a khaki Canali that Roake had bought him last Christmas. He was wearing that one tonight, with a red silk tie over a rich, ivory, custom-made shirt. His scuffed cordovan wingtips were the only sign of the usual Freeman. By the time Roake had come by to pick him up at seven o'clock, he had steeled himself and thought he was ready. But then she surprised him, or perhaps his flashy clothes surprised her. In any event, she hung back in the doorway and whistled appreciatively, frankly admiring him for a moment, then took a little skip forward and threw her arms around him, squeezing hard. A cry escaped before he could stop it. "What is it? David? Are you all right? What's the matter?" He was fighting for control, his jaw set, brow contracted, blowing quick, short little breaths from his mouth. Now, two hours later, he awoke again from his third brief doze. He was back in bed, in his pajamas, and Roake was sitting at his side, holding his hand. "You really ought to see a doctor," she said. But he shook his head. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And nothing's broke." "But you're hurt." He started to shrug, then grimaced. "Tomorrow I'll be dancing. You wait." He put a hand to his neck and turned his head slowly from side to side a couple of times, then stopped and fixed her with a sheepish gaze. "I feel like such a fool." "What for? You didn't ask for this." "No. But I knew who I was dealing with. I should have been prepared. In the old days, I would have been." "Prepared for Nick Sephia to knock you over?" The old man, looking every year of his age, nodded wearily. "They set me up." "How did they do that?" "Child's play with a trusting soul like myself." He sighed in disgust. "I'd already had a few words with the elder Mr. Panos after Dismas beat the hell out of Sephia on the stand." "What in the world prompted you to do that?" "Hubris, plain and simple." Another sigh. "I couldn't resist the opportunity to crow a little, though I thought I'd done it subtly enough in the guise of giving him a friendly warning of what was coming." Roake allowed a small smile. "Hence your nickname, Mr. Subtle." "In any event, it didn't fool him much. So afterwards a bunch of their guys—Dick Kroll's there, too. You know Dick? Sephia's lawyer? And Panos and his little brother and one of Nick's pals I'd seen in court with him before, some greaser. Anyway, all these guys are having some kind of powwow out in the hall. So Wade sees me come out with Hardy and motions to me over Nick's shoulder. Come on over." "And you went?" "What was I gonna do? I tell Diz to wait and give me a minute. I'm thinking no doubt I put the fear of God in Wade and he's talked to Kroll and decided to cave and try to cut some kind of deal right there." "That hubris thing again." Freeman raised his shoulders an inch, acknowledging the truth. "Occupational hazard if you happen to be cursed with genius. Anyway, it's here to stay." Another shrug. "So I'm like two steps away when Nick the Prick suddenly whirls around—whoops, late for a bus—and next thing I know I'm flat on my keister, stretched out on the goddamn floor, and there's Nick leaning over me, all OSorry, old man, didn't see you.' " Finally, his eyes got some real fire back into them. "Sorry my ass. Wade gave him some kind of sign and he turned on cue. That was his warning back at me—fuck with me and you'll get hurt." He went to straighten up in the bed, but his bones fought him and won. He gave it up, falling back into his pillow. Roake put her hand on his chest, brought it up to stroke his cheek. "You guys," she said gently. Then, in a minute, "It could have been an accident, after all, couldn't it?" "No. No chance." "So now you need to get back at them, is that it?" He nodded. "In the words of Ol' Blue Eyes, I'll do it my way, but bet your ass I will." Reading her reaction, he added, "That's the only message they hear." "And how about you? Which one do you hear?" "What do you mean by that?" "I mean, you warn them, they attack you, now it's your turn again, and it all escalates, until somebody really gets hurt. Maybe it doesn't always have to be that way." "With some people, maybe it does. What else do you do when they're pulling shit like today? You fight back, is what." Roake had her hands back in her lap. "Then you're both still fighting. And what's that prove?" "When somebody wins, it ends. And I intend to win." "And that's what it's all about, is it? Who wins?" "Yep." Defiantly. "What else?" he asked. "What else is there?" Roake sat with it for a beat. She blew out in frustration. Finally, she looked down at him and stood up. "How very male of you." "There's worse ways to be, Gina. What else do you want?" She looked down at him. "I want you to be smart. Don't get drawn into playing their games. This doesn't have to continue being personal, especially if they believe in doing things like today, in actually hurting people. That's all I'm saying. File your papers, keep out of it, and let the law do its work." "That's exactly my intention. What else would I do?" Freeman patted the bed. "Come, sit back down. I'm not self-destructive, you know. I'm not going to fight anybody physically." Roake lowered herself down next to him again. "That's what I thought you were saying." She took his gnarled hand in both of hers. "No, no, no. I'm talking what I do. The law. That'll beat up on `em good enough. But I will tell you one other thing." "What's that?" "Whatever else it might look like, it's going to be personal." Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, once the powerful head of San Francisco's homicide detail, was half-black and half-Jewish, and in his job he'd groomed himself to exude a threatening mixture of efficient competence and quiet menace. His infrequent smiles would even more rarely get all the way to his piercing blue eyes. A semetic hatchet of a nose protruded over a generous mouth, rendered unforgettable by the thick scar that bisected both lips. Now this fearsome figure stood framed in the doorway to his duplex. He wore neither shoes nor socks and his bare legs showed at the bottom of a dirty kitchen apron. He'd draped a diaper over his right shoulder. It was streaked—recently—with the oranges and greens and off-browns of strained baby food. He held his ten-month-old daughter Rachel in the crook of his left arm. She had somehow wriggled out of one of her pink baby booties, and just as Glitsky opened the door, she'd hooked it over his ear. "Where's a camera when you really need one?" Hardy asked. Frannie stepped forward. "Here, Abe. Let me hold her." In what had become a largely unacknowledged weekly ritual, the Hardys' Wednesday Date Night was ending here again. Since Rachel's birth, Frannie couldn't seem to get enough of holding her. She was turning forty soon and their children were both teenagers. Maybe she and Dismas should have another baby. There was still time. Just. If Dismas wanted one, too. Which he did like he wanted cancer. He couldn't decide if the visits to hold Rachel were a good thing because it satisfied Frannie's need to hold a baby, or a bad thing because it made her want one of her own even more, but either way, they'd been coming by now regularly enough that there was usually some kind of dessert waiting for them when they got there. Glitsky shrugged the baby over to Frannie, immediately grabbed at the bootie. "You ought to leave it," Hardy begged. "It's so you. And that pink goes just perfect with the puke on the diaper." Glitsky glanced down at his shoulder. "That's not puke. Puke is eaten, regurgitated, expelled matter. This"—he touched the diaper—"is simply food that didn't quite get to the mouth." "Guys! Guys!" Frannie whisked the diaper over to her own shoulder. She slipped the booty over Rachel's foot, then fixed each of the guys with a look. "Fascinating though these distinctions are, maybe we could leave them just for a minute." She turned into the living room. Hardy, behind her, didn't want to let the topic go. He could score some valuable points here. "You know, Fran, if you really want another baby, you've got to be ready to deal with puke." "I can deal with it fine," she said over her shoulder. "I just don't want to talk about it, much less decline it." Hardy took the cue. "I puke, you puke, he she or it pukes . . ." Suddenly Treya came around the corner from the kitchen. "Who wants another baby?" Ten minutes later, they were arranged—coffee for the Hardys, tea for the Glitskys—around the large square table that took up nearly all the space in the tiny kitchen. Rachel was dozing, ready to be laid down in her crib, although neither Frannie nor Treya seemed inclined to move in that direction. The treat tonight was a plate of homemade macaroon cookies, still hot from the oven, all coconut and stick-to-the-teeth sweetness. "These," Hardy said to Treya after his first bite, "are incredible. I didn't know normal people could make macaroons." "Abe can. Not that he's a normal person exactly." "Or even approximately," Hardy said. "But if he can make these things, maybe there's still some use for him." "You're both too kind." Glitsky turned to Hardy. "So where did you think they came from? Macaroons." "I thought they dropped straight out of heaven, like manna in the desert. In fact, I always imagined that manna had kind of a macaroon flavor. Didn't any of you guys? I'm serious." His face lit up with an idea. "Hey, Manna Macaroons. That wouldn't be a bad brand name. We could market them like Mrs. Fields. Abe's Manna Macaroons. We could all get rich. . . ." Frannie spoke. "Somebody please stop him." Glitsky jumped in. "It's a good idea, Diz, but I couldn't do it anyway. I'm going back to work next week. Monday." Treya gave him a wary look. "You hope." "All right," he conceded, "I hope." "Why wouldn't you be?" Hardy asked. "How long's it been, anyway?" "On Monday, it'll have been thirteen months, two weeks and three days." "Roughly," Treya added pointedly. "Not that he's been counting." Glitsky was coming off a bad year, one that had begun with a point-blank gunshot wound to his abdomen. For the first month or so after the initial cleanup, he'd been recovering according to schedule—getting around in a wheelchair, taking things easy—when the first of several medical complications had developed. A secondary infection that finally got diagnosed as peritonitis put him back in the hospital, where he then developed pneumonia. The double whammy had nearly killed him for a second time, and left him weakened and depleted through Rachel's birth last August until late in the fall. Then, suddenly the initial wound itself wouldn't completely heal. It wasn't until February of this year that he'd even been walking regularly at all, and a couple of months after that before he began trying to get back into shape. At the end of May, his doctors finally declared him fit to return to work, but Glitsky's bosses had told him that homicide's interim head—the lieutenant who'd taken Glitsky's place—would need to be reassigned and there wasn't an immediately suitable job befitting his rank and experience. So Glitsky had waited some more. Now they were in July and evidently something had finally materialized, but obviously with a wrinkle. "So what's to hope about getting back on Monday?" Hardy asked. "How could it not happen? You walk in, say hi to your troops, go back to your desk and break out the peanuts." The lieutenant's desk in homicide was famous for its unending stash of goobers in the shell. Glitsky made a face. "Apparently," Treya said, "it's not that simple." Hardy finished a macaroon, sipped some coffee. "What?" he asked. "Somebody from the office saw you in the apron? I bet that's it. We can sue them for discrimination. You should be allowed to wear an apron if you want." "Dismas, shut up," Frannie said. "What, Abe?" "Well, the PD will of course welcome me back, but maybe at a different job." "What job?" Hardy asked. "Maybe they're promoting you." "I didn't get that impression. They're talking payroll." "Head of payroll's a sergeant," Hardy said. "Isn't he?" "Used to be anyway." Glitsky hesitated. "Seems there's been some concern that I was excessively close to my work in homicide." "Evidently this is a bad thing," Treya added. "As opposed to what?" Frannie asked. "Bored with it?" "You haven't even gone to work for a year," Hardy said. "How does that put you excessively close to it?" Glitsky nodded. "I raised some of the same points myself." "And?" Hardy asked. "And in the past few years, as we all know, my daughter was killed, I had a heart attack, and I got shot in the line of duty." "One of which actually happened because of the job." Treya was frowning deeply. "He also got married and had a baby, as if there's some connection there, too." Glitsky shrugged. "It's just an excuse. It's really because my extended disability made them put a new guy in homicide for the duration. . . ." "Gerson, right?" Hardy said. "That's him. They probably told him it was his permanent gig when they moved him up. And now that I've had the bad grace to get better, they're embarrassed." "So transfer him," Hardy said. "What does the union say?" "They say Gerson's been doing okay so far, and it wouldn't be fair to transfer him before he's even really gotten his feet wet. It might look bad for him later. Whereas I've already proved myself." "And so as a reward, they're moving you out?" Frannie asked. "And down?" "Not down," Treya said. "He's going to be lieutenant of payroll." "I don't even know where payroll is," Glitsky said, "much less what they do." "That's perfect," Hardy said. "You wouldn't want too many people working at jobs they know about." "God forbid," Glitsky said. "And the great thing, as they so graciously explained to me, is that this is not a punishment. It's an opportunity to improve my résumé. I spend maybe a year in payroll; then they promote me to captain at one of the stations. Couple of years there, next thing you know I'm a deputy chief." "His lifelong dream," Treya added with heavy sarcasm. Hardy knew what Treya meant. Glitsky had worked fourteen years in the department before he got to inspector sergeant at homicide, and then another eight before they promoted him to lieutenant of the detail. Abe didn't crave varied administrative experience. He wanted to catch murderers. "Have you talked to Batiste?" Hardy asked. This was Frank Batiste, recently promoted to deputy chief. For many years, as Captain of Inspectors, he had been Glitsky's mentor within the department. "Maybe he could throw some juice." But Glitsky shook his head. "Who do you think I talked to?" Hardy frowned. "I thought he was your guy." "Well . . ." Glitsky made a face. Treya knew that her husband wasn't comfortable complaining about a colleague, so she helped him with it. "It seems like Frank's going through some changes himself." "Like what?" Frannie asked. "It's not Frank," Glitsky said. He wasn't going to let people bad-mouth another cop, even if there might be something behind it. "He's stuck, too. His wife hasn't sold a house in a year. They got kids in college. Times are not sweet." "So he makes them bad for you, too? What's that about?" Again, Glitsky wouldn't rise. "I can't really blame him, Diz. He can't afford to lose his own job to make me happy." "That wouldn't happen," Treya argued. "He's too connected." "People might have said the same thing about me last year," Glitsky said. "It's a different world down there lately." He shrugged. "Frank got the word from above; then he got to be the messenger. If he didn't want to deliver it, they'd find somebody else, and then he's not a team player anymore. He had no choice." But Treya shook her head. "He didn't have to tell you good cops don't go where they choose, they go where they're ordered. That doesn't sound like a friend." "I could hear me telling one of my troops the same thing." Clearly uncomfortable with the discussion, Glitsky looked around the table. "As for being friends, Frank's my superior officer. He's doing his job." "So you're really going to payroll?" Frannie asked. "I can't really see you crunching numbers all day long." The edge of Glitsky's mouth turned up. "I'm sure there'll be lots of hidden satisfactions. In any event, I'll find out on Monday." "You got a backup plan?" Hardy asked. Glitsky looked at Treya, tried a smile that didn't quite work. "We've got a new baby," he said. "What else am I going to do?" Chapter Two It was a Thursday evening in early November. Daylight saving time had ended on the previous weekend, and consequently it was full night by six o'clock. It was darker even than it might have been because the streetlights on O'Farrell Street between Stockton and Powell had not come on—perhaps they hadn't been set back for the time change. A fifteen-knot wind was biting and blowing up from off the Bay, pushing before it the occasional large drop of what was to be the first real rainstorm of the season. Although Sam Silverman's pawnshop was located only one block south of the always-congested Union Square neighborhood, tonight—with the awful weather and deep blackness—the street out front was all but deserted. Silverman had already locked the front door and pulled both sides of the antitheft bars on their tracks. Now all he had to do when he was ready to leave was to unlock the door again for a moment, step outside, and pull the bars so that he could padlock them together. He stood at the door inside an extra second and frowned—that hour of lost daylight always depressed him for the first week or so. Sighing, he turned and walked back through the center aisle of his shop, reaching out and touching the treasures of other people's lives against which he'd loaned them money—guitars and saxophones and drum kits, silverware, cutlery, fine porcelain china sets, doll collections, televisions, radios, microwave ovens. Much of it bought new in a spirit of hope for the future, now most of it abandoned forever, secondhand junk without a trace of dream left in it. At the back counter, he stopped again, struck by the display. Jewelry was by far his biggest stock item, and the watches and rings, the necklaces and earrings, though lovely, tonight seemed to hold even more pathos than the other goods. These were mostly gifts—at one time they'd been the carefully chosen expressions of love, of vows taken and lives shared. Now they were locked under the glass in a pawnshop, to be sold for a fraction of their cost, with all the human value in them lost to time and need. He shook his head to rid himself of these somber thoughts. The start of winter always did this to him, and he'd be damned if he'd give in to it. Maybe he was getting that sickness where you got sad all the time when the weather sucked. But no. He'd lived in San Francisco his whole life, and God knew there had been enough opportunity that he would have caught it before now. It was just the early darkness. He glanced back at the front door and saw himself reflected in the glass—a small, somewhat stooped, decently dressed old Jewish man. It was black out there. Time passed during which he didn't move a muscle. When he heard the wind gust, then fade, and drops of rain just beginning to sound slowly onto the skylight overhead, he started, coming suddenly back to where he was. He looked up at the source of the noise—the skylight, covered with bars, was just a dark hole in the ceiling. The thought crossed his mind that he wished he'd kept up his contract with Wade Panos. It would be nice on a miserable night like tonight to have one of his big and armed assistant patrol specials walk with him the two blocks around the corner to the night deposit box at Bank of America. But he and Sadie had gone over it and decided they couldn't justify the prices anymore, especially since Wade was raising them again. While it was somewhat comforting to have the private patrol watching out for you—especially on your walks to the bank—it wasn't as though this part of the city was a magnet for violent crime anymore. Nothing like it used to be. The shop hadn't even had a window broken in over twenty years. No, the Patrol Special was a luxury he really didn't need and couldn't afford anymore And it wasn't as though the city police didn't patrol here, too. Maybe just not as often. Still, though, he considered calling the station and requesting an officer to walk over to the bank with him. But even if they could spare anyone, he'd have to wait here another hour or so. Maybe he just shouldn't do the errand tonight. But Thursday, after the poker game, was always his deposit night. And last night he'd made one of his biggest hauls. He flicked on the small night-light in the jewelry cabinet. Enough with maudlin. He'd better get finished here or he'd get soaked on the way to the bank. Working the combination to his safe, he considered that maybe this should be the year he and Sadie pack up and buy a condo like the ones they'd looked at last summer in Palm Springs. Maybe even Scottsdale. Although when they'd gone there in the summer a few years back, it had been way too hot. And leaving his friends here, and his synagogue—did they really want to do that? What did he think he was going to do in Palm Springs without the company of Nat Glitsky, a brother to him all these years? And Nat, with a new baby grandchild, wasn't going anywhere. Sam loved Sadie, but she was a reader—a very solitary and passionate reader—not a games person. Nat, on the other hand, loved all kinds of games—backgammon, dominoes, Scrabble, anything to do with cards. They had tournaments, for God's sake, with trophies. No, Sam didn't really want to move. He just wanted the days to be longer again. "Fart-knocker," he said aloud to himself, shaking his head. In the back room, he went to a knee, worked the combination, swung open the door to the safe. Lifting out the old maroon leather pouch, he was struck again by the thickness of it. He unzipped the top and ran his thumb over the top edges of the bills, nearly fifteen thousand dollars in all, more than two months' worth of the shop's earnings, even if he included what he made on his poker fees. It would be the largest deposit he'd made in years. He zipped it back up and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket. A last check of the shop, then he grabbed his fedora off the hat rack, pushing it down hard over his crown against the wind he'd encounter when he got outside. He turned out the lights and retraced his steps down the center aisle. Stopping a last time, he looked both ways up the street and saw nothing suspicious. He reached for the door and pulled it open. * * * The plan was a simple one. Speed and efficiency. They wore heavy coats, latex gloves, and ski masks to thwart identification. None of them was to say one word before they knocked Silverman out. The old man was holding his hat down securely on his head with one hand, pulling the door to behind him when the three men came out of hiding in the doorways on either side of his shop windows and, pulling their masks down over their faces, fell upon him. The biggest guy got the door while the other two grabbed him by the arms, covered his mouth, and manhandled him inside and back up the aisle. In the back room, they turned the light on. But the old man had gotten his mouth free and was starting to make noise now, yelling at them, maybe getting up the nerve to give them some kind of fight, as though he had any kind of chance. But delay would mean a hassle. And since hassle wasn't part of the plan, the big man pulled a revolver from his pocket. The old geezer was actually making a decent show of resistance, struggling, using his shoulders from side to side, grunting and swearing with the exertion. Because of all the lateral movement, the first swing with the gun glanced off the side of the man's head, but it was enough to stop him, stunned by the blow. The instant was long enough. The next swing connected with Silverman's skull and dropped him cold. He slumped into dead weight and they lowered him to the ground, where he lay unmoving. The big man knew just what he was looking for and where it would be. In two seconds, he'd unplugged the surveillance video mounted over the office door. Five seconds later, he had the maroon leather pouch in his hands and was back on his feet. He pulled his ski mask off and threw it to the floor. His accomplices removed theirs and put them in their coat pockets. "Okay," the big man said. "Vamanos." Leading the way, he doused the shop lights again. He was at the front door, halfway out. Somebody called out. "Guys, wait up." The gunman stopped and turned. Waiting up wasn't in the plan. The idea was to get the money and then get out, closing the dark shop behind them. When Silverman came to, if he ever did, they'd be long gone. "The fuck are you doing?" Their third partner remained in the back of the shop, over the jewelry case, still glowing under its soft night-light. "He's got great stuff here. We can't just leave it." "Yeah we can. Let's go." The big man had the door open and was checking the street. He turned back and whispered urgently. "We don't need it. We gotta move move move." The man in the back moved all right, but in the wrong direction. Now he was behind the counter, pulling at the glass, trying to lift it up. "He's gotta have a key somewhere. Maybe it's on him." At the door. "Fuck it! Come on, come on." His partner pulled again at the countertop. A noise in the street. "Shit. People." The two men up front ducked to the side below the windows as two couples walked past the shop. Directly in front of the door, they stopped. Their voices filled the shop. Would they never move on? Sweat broke on the big man's forehead and he wiped it with the back of his hand. He pulled the revolver from his pocket. Other people joined up with the first group and they all started walking again, laughing. The big man looked out. The street seemed clear. But at the back counter, his partner was holding something up now—a key?—and fitting it to a lock. "Jesus Christ! There's no time for—" When suddenly he was proven right. Whatever it might have been, there wasn't going to be time for it. Silverman must have come to and had a button he could push in the back room. The whole world lit up with light and the awful, continuous screaming ring of the shop's alarm. Wide-eyed in the sudden daylike brightness, the big man threw the door all the way open, yelling, "Go, go, go!" This time—the jewelry forgotten in the mad rush out—both his partners went. He was turning himself, breaking for the street, when he caught a movement off to his left. One hand to his head, blood running down his face, Silverman was on his feet, holding the side of the doorway for support. The big man saw the shock of unmistakable recognition in the pawnbroker's face. "I, I can't believe . . ." Silverman stammered, then ran out of words. Shaking his head in frustration and disgust—their good plan was all in tatters now—he stood up slowly and took three steps toward the old man, as though he planned to have a conversation with him. He did speak, but only to say, "Ah, shit, Sam." Then he raised the gun and shot him twice. The second bullet went through his heart. The streetlights on O'Farrell came on as assistant patrol special Matt Creed, working Thirty-two, came around the corner a long block down on Market. Though Creed had been on the beat less than a year, when he heard the squeal of the burglar alarm and saw the two men breaking out of a storefront ahead of him on a dead run, he knew what he was seeing. "Hey! Hold on!" he yelled into a gust, over the alarm and the wind. To his surprise, the men actually stopped long enough to look back at him. Creed yelled again and, moving forward now, reached down to clear his jacket and unholster his weapon. But he hadn't gone five steps when— Crack! Unmistakably, a gunshot. Brickwork shattered by his head, rained down over him. Creed ducked against the front of the nearest building. Another man broke from the door of Silverman's shop. Less than a half block separated them now, and Creed stood, stepped away from the building into the lamplight, and called again. "Hold it! Stay where you are!" The figure stopped, whirled toward him and without any hesitation extended his arm. Creed caught a quick glint of shining steel and heard the massive report and another simultaneous ricochet. It was the first time he'd been fired at and for that moment, during which his assailant broke into a run, he half ducked again and froze. By the time he'd recovered, raised his own weapon, and tried to level it with both shaking hands, the third man had disappeared with the other two, and there was no real opportunity to shoot. Creed broke into a full run and reached the corner in time to get a last glimpse of what seemed to be a lone fleeing shadow turning right at the next corner. Vaguely aware of pedestrians hugging the buildings on both sides of the street, he sprinted the length of the block along the cable car tracks, past the trees that incongruously sprang from the pavement near the end of the Powell Street line. By the time he got down to the cable car turnaround at Market, it was over. There was no sign of any of them. They'd probably split up and gone in separate directions. But even if they had stayed together, which Creed would have no way of knowing, they could go in any one of six or seven directions from this intersection—streets and alleys within a half block in every direction, each a potential avenue of escape. The turnaround also marked the entrance to the subterranean BART station. And since Creed hadn't gotten close enough to get a good look at any of them, as soon as his three men stopped running, they would look like anyone else. He had a sense that the man who'd fired at him was bigger than the other two, but that was about it. A fresh gust of wind brought on its front edge a wall of water as the drizzle became a downpour. Creed heard the insistent keening, still, of Silverman's alarm. He took a last look down Market, but saw nothing worth pursuing. He looked down at his gun, still clenched tight in his right hand. Unexpectedly, all at once, his legs went rubbery under him. He got to the nearest building and leaned against it. He got his gun back into its holster, buttoned the slicker over his jacket against the rain, began to jog back to Silverman's. It didn't take him a minute. Still, the alarm pealed; the door yawned open. The shop's interior lights illuminated the street out front. Creed drew his gun again and stood to the side of the door. Raising his voice over the alarm, he called into the shop. "Is anybody in there?" He waited. Then, even louder, "Mr. Silverman?" Remembering at last, he pulled his radio off his belt and told the dispatcher to get the regular police out here. With his gun drawn, he stepped into the light and noise of the shop. But he saw or heard nothing after catching sight of the body. The victim might have been napping on the floor, except that the arms were splayed unnaturally out on either side of him. And a stream of brownish-red liquid flowed from under his back and pooled in a depression in the hardwood floor.