by Seth Harwood
Jack holds the phone in front of him, stares at it, trying to get his brain started. He’s got some big questions for Sergeant Hopkins and a potential problem with his huge wingman. It doesn’t take him more than a second to remember that.
But for Hopkins to call him early like this has to mean there’s something new he’s going to have to handle. He calls his voicemail and cradles the phone between his ear and shoulder, takes a cigarette off the nightstand—a nasty habit, especially at this hour of the morning—and thinks about breaking the rules again.
Hopkins’s message is brief. He’s got information to discuss, something that can’t wait, and he wants Jack to meet him by the Embarcadero Center.
“Get your ass down here, Palms” is the last line of the message, “and we’ll talk when you do.”
A half hour later, showered and with an egg-and-cheese sandwich in his gut, Jack stands on a sidewalk along Davis Street. Even this early on a Saturday, the tourists and shoppers are out in full force.
Jack calls Hopkins from a phone booth using his cell phone, not wanting to sit out in the open, and the old cop answers while walking the beat on his day off, looking around the area where they found the second girl to see if he can turn up anything else. Good cop Hopkins can’t even take a morning off to settle in and calm himself down, Jack thinks. The fuck will probably keep walking beats even after he’s retired, trying to solve crimes for free.
They agree to meet near where Jack is, at a small patch of grass and a piece of hill with some trees. Not something you’d even call a park.
Jack walks up the block and around a corner, gets there before Hopkins, so he sits on a bench and lights up. He takes a look around, trying to get his bearings.
It’s a sunny morning in late fall, probably the sunniest time of year in the city, with less fog than the summer months and even some truly warm days. Today’s not warm, though, and Jack’s got on the motorcycle jacket he still means to get rid of. He can see the wide thoroughfare of the Embarcadero and off to his right a broad, open courtyard with a huge modern sculpture and a barricaded area where they’ll set up an ice rink soon.
Tall, thin trees whistle in the breeze. About twenty feet up, branches and leaves sprout from the white trunks, and Jack can see birds: colorful green birds that can’t possibly be pigeons. He turns and looks up to see better. Not only are the birds too colorful to be pigeons—Jack sees a lot of bright green and even some yellow—but there are far too many of them. Like a friendlier version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
“Those are the parrots,” Hopkins says. He’s behind Jack suddenly, coming up from a path Jack hadn’t noticed.
Jack pops up. “Fuck, Mills. You’re killing me.”
“Those cigarettes, those are killing you.” Hopkins takes his hands out of his pockets and sits down on the bench. “Those aren’t the parrots from the movie, mind you, but they’re our parrots, the pride of the city or something like that.”
“Nice,” Jack says. The birds have large beaks, more colors on their bodies than Jack can make out. “They’re chirping like it’s Christmas.”
“Yeah. People think they just talk about crackers or pirate bullshit. But that’s not true. Obviously.”
Jack doesn’t sit back down. He asks Hopkins what’s up and takes a long drag off his cigarette.
Hopkins shakes his head. His eyes have focused on something far away.
“Got nothing on the big gun from Walnut Creek,” he says, shrugs. “They’re keeping mum about it. As for who would own a gun like that, it’s anybody’s guess. As illegal as they’re supposed to be, I’ve heard of local drug runners in the East Bay having them. I mean small-time punks.”
“I’m worried about Freeman.” Now Jack sits down. “I think he’s gone over. Switched sides on me.”
“Shit.” Hopkins turns to Jack and asks why, so Jack explains about seeing him on Bartol and following him back to Prescott Court. When he gets to that detail, Hopkins nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Prescott Court is where O’Malley was spending his time. I still can’t get much info, but that name has come up. There’s shit going down.”
Jack looks away. He drops his cigarette butt onto the ground and crushes it with his shoe. “In any case, it looks like I’m on my own now. It has me more than a little worried.”
“Stick with Freeman then. Watch him, let him watch you. But don’t let him know you saw him cross. Could be he leads you to something we can use.”
“Could be he leads me to getting my ass killed!” Jack stands, and a number of parrots shift from one tree to another in a flutter and beating of wings. “Tell me something good. What you got?”
Hopkins slips his wallet out of his jacket’s inside pocket and takes out a card. He hands it to Jack. “This is the guy you can trust. He’s my connection at Walnut Creek, and he’s ready to help.”
The card features the crest of the Walnut Creek PD and the name Alvin Shaw.
“His cell’s on the back. Anything you need, bring him in. Guy’s a whole different breed of cop.”
“Is that good?”
“It is good. For you.”
“What’s he doing in Walnut Creek?”
“What can he do? His wife made him move to the suburbs. But he’s the goods. Former military, the kind people don’t talk about: some heavy black ops shit those Walnut Creek cops don’t understand. They’ll never understand most things about this guy.”
“Yeah?”
“Trust me,” Hopkins says. “Trust him. He knows how you’ve been working for me.”
Above them, the parrots’ wings beat loud and fast all of a sudden, and then the whole pack of them, what looks like fifty birds, flies out of the trees and away. A mass of dark green bodies moves east toward the Bay and then turns toward downtown.
Hopkins stands up, holding onto his hat. For a moment, the sound of the wings flapping is all Jack can hear. But then a new sound wipes that clean away: A boom fills the morning air, reverberates off the tall buildings, loud, more like a cannon than anything Jack’s ever heard. It leaves everything quiet in its wake.
19
Jack starts and falls back. He sees Hopkins fly through the air as if a giant arm had punched him into the trees more than five feet from where he’d been standing a moment before. Jack steps toward him and stops: There’s more blood on the ground already than he can imagine. Hopkins grabs at his shoulder with a blood-wet hand, clutching at himself with fingers that seem to move of their own accord as his eyes blink open and shut.
“Oh, fuck me,” Hopkins wheezes. He tries to roll over onto his side, and when he does, a new sound comes out of him, a gurgle, and a stream of blood coughs its way out of his mouth.
Hopkins shakes his head, looks at Jack with wide eyes over what’s left of his shoulder, pieces of collar bone and torn muscle hanging open for all the world to see.
“You’re going to be all right,” Jack says, knowing it isn’t true.
“Fuck.” Hopkins spits out a gob of phlegm and blood. “Go. Run.”
Jack looks around, crouches as he turns and gets behind the bench, then looks in the direction where the shot must have come from. He sees nothing. Slowly he backs toward Hopkins, watching the buildings for any movement, and suddenly he sees a flash, hears the sound of an explosion.
Jack drops onto his chest and looks up to see a big chunk blown out of a tree not three feet away. Something hit the tree about chest height, in its thickest part, and it still took away almost half its width. With a creaking, cracking sound, the tree starts to lean, then fall. It gets caught in the branches of another tree and stops. Jack looks at Hopkins and sees there’s now a trickle of white foam coming from his mouth. But he’s still breathing, shaking his head in small jerky movements as if he might be going into shock.
Jack stands and, as fast as he can, jukes and twists away from the bench, a motion he hopes a sniper wouldn’t predict. Another shot tears the air around him, then a scream from somewhere close, and
Jack realizes he’s not in a world by himself. There are other people around him: other potential victims, other witnesses.
He runs, head tucked and changing directions, goes for the tall wooden boards that will soon house the ice rink. If he can get to the other side—
Another shot. Jack sees a hole punched into the boards a few feet in front of him and cuts to his left, but his foot slips on the wet tiles of the courtyard. He goes down hard, hitting his chin on the cement, rolls, keeps his momentum, and scrambles up into a running crawl, his hands still hitting the ground as he pushes forward the last few feet toward protection. He stops. Prone, with his head down, he waits, breathing hard against the ground, his lungs burning.
He runs his tongue along his teeth, making sure none of them broke when he hit his chin. His tongue is still there, but he tastes blood.
He listens.
From not too far away, he hears a scream and then a man yelling in a Slavic language. Two car doors slam. Someone honks twice, angrily, and yells a few choice four-letter words.
Beyond the trees, an older man hides behind the large black-and-white sculpture that’s been there for as long as Jack can remember. Near him, a woman in a short black skirt covers her ears with her hands.
Jack hears a sound like a car door slamming but different—perhaps a trunk. Then two more doors slam, and Jack moves a bit so he can see the street. A car picks up speed as it rounds a turn. It’s a black sedan, American made, the kind you slow down for on the highway, thinking it’s an unmarked.
Jack gets up slowly, still breathing hard. He scans the windows in the buildings for some sign of the sniper, the big gun. When he doesn’t see anything, he’s still not convinced he’s safe.
20
After a few minutes of nothing, when the old man and the woman in the black skirt start to walk out from behind the sculpture and look around, Jack trots over to where he last saw Mills.
Hopkins isn’t there.
His pool of blood covers a three-foot radius. His Panama lies on the ground, blown up against the trunk of a tree. Jack sees ragged marks of dirt along its side.
Jack swears. “Fuck” was the last word he heard from the cop. Even though he’s woken himself in the middle of the night saying the word more times than he can count, spitting it out of a dream he can’t remember, Jack knows this word shouldn’t be Mills Hopkins’s last. Hopkins deserves better. He’s a good cop, a hard man who tried to do right.
A trail of crimson drops leads to the street, to where someone put him in the trunk of a Crown Victoria.
“Fuck,” Jack says. “Fuck.”
He doesn’t know what to do now, standing in the park, the whole event spinning through his head, the few onlookers staring at him wide-eyed as though he’s the one who just killed Mills.
“You okay, buddy?” someone asks.
Jack looks around.
A man takes two steps toward him and then stops when Jack looks his way.
“I want to help,” the guy says. “Those dudes took your friend.”
From somewhere in the distance, Jack hears the sound of a police cruiser.
He’s sure of one thing: If the SFPD is as corrupt as Hopkins thought, he doesn’t want to be caught at the scene of a cop shooting, the second for the SFPD in a few days.
Jack touches his pockets, realizes he’s got the best lead he’s going to get. He steps toward the street, away from the pool of blood on the ground and waves for a cab.
“Where you going, pal? I think you’d better stick around.”
A cab stops, and Jack gets in, tells the driver to head toward Fisherman’s Wharf, that he’s going to the St. Francis but wants to take the long way. The safety of public places and crowds, then the quiet of his room for a little while so he can sort things out—that’s what he needs. That and a gun.
Jack’s eyes meet the eyes of the man who spoke to him, the guy who called him “pal.” They stare at each other for a moment. The man’s face is pure confusion, probably not so different from Jack’s.
He turns away, looking out the window on the other side as the cab starts to gain speed. He watches runners scampering up the sidewalk, trying desperately to keep up with their lives.
This is the second friend Jack’s seen gunned down in front of him, the third dead one since he left his house to work with Ralph and the Czechs. He closes his eyes, feels the rumble of the cab as its tires bump along the road.
Maybe he’d be better off running, never coming back to any of this. Get his Ducati and go. But he can’t. Seeing Hopkins shot cemented that fact. Better to watch his step and see what he can find, tear down whatever walls need demolition, than to walk softly for the rest of his life, worrying that someone’s close behind, lining him up in a set of crosshairs.
No. That’s not for Jack. He’ll choose life.
21
Jack gets out of the cab at the entrance to the bar in the St. Francis. The street outside is crowded, but a quick look inside the bar reveals it to be the quiet place Jack wants: a few couples talking, no ready-to-fight Russian suits, no hiding spots from where someone could line him up. The other patrons all appear to be tourists or people too old to be involved in the city’s latest mess.
He walks up to the bar and stops in the middle, directly across from the mirror that reflects the view into the lobby. Jack looks up at the Talisker bottle perched high on its shelf. Then something in the mirror catches his eye, and when he looks at the reflection, his blood goes cold. Way across the lobby, on a wide tan couch near the far entrance to the hotel, Freeman sits flanked by two guys wearing dark suits.
The one on the right side has a bandage across his nose, right below two black eyes.
They’re the same fucks from the alley, Black Suit and Gray Suit, the bad teeth brothers. Jack wonders if they talk to each other in the morning, make a collective decision about what color suit they should each wear. They probably share an apartment. Today they forgot to coordinate and both went with dark gray.
Jack looks right at Freeman, the friend he thought he could trust, and knows absolutely and completely that he is alone now. All he has is a “trustworthy” cop’s business card and one chance to go upstairs and get the thing he never thought he’d have a use for: a gun.
The big man checks his watch. “Why you so nervous, Freeman?” Jack asks the reflection. “You got somewhere to be? Is someone waiting?”
“Can I help you, sir?” Jack hadn’t seen the bartender coming, but now here he is, all starched white shirt, standing right in front of him.
Jack starts to say that he’s fine, but then Freeman looks right at him, right through the bar’s window and into the mirror, and their eyes meet. The big man squints.
“Shit,” Jack says. He drops down below the mirror.
The bartender leans over, looks down at Jack. “You lose something?”
“No.” Jack stays low and starts moving toward the bar’s other door, the one that comes out by the elevators. The bartender watches as though he thinks Jack’s a freak, but Jack has bigger issues to consider. As soon as he’s past the window, he stands and makes his way into the bay of elevators.
Right as one’s about to close, he jumps in. Behind him the doors shoot back open all the way. He catches a mean look from an older woman wearing some kind of brown fur hat. As the doors close all too slowly, Jack half expects to see Freeman’s wide arm jut in between them. He counts his breaths, planning to grab Freeman’s arm and break it back against the door.
Before the doors fully close, Jack sees Freeman pushing his way through the tourists.
Then the doors close and the car starts to rise. Jack slides to the back wall and tries to avoid making eye contact with any of the other riders. There are two white-haired women talking about something at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a mother and her teenage son standing in between bags from Macy’s and a few of the other stores around Union Square. The boy’s got his eye on an especially large bag from Niketown. The lady i
n the brown hat still eyes Jack with disdain.
Jack watches the numbers light up above the doors: They pass ten, and then twelve, then fourteen, and the car stops. The ladies get off. Then the mother and son pick up their bags, and they get off on fifteen. Jack follows them out. The boy takes a look at Jack and does a quick double take, probably recognizing him from Shake ’Em Down, but when he turns to say something to his mom, Jack cuts the other way down the carpeted hall, taking off for the vending machines and—he hopes—the stairway.
After a series of turns, Jack finds the entrance to the stairs. He checks the door to make sure it won’t lock him in as soon as it’s closed, and then heads up to the sixteenth floor. He’s quieter now, more careful as he moves through the halls. He stops before rounding the corner to his room and takes a quick, stealthy look. As he’d hoped, no one’s waiting for him in front of his door; it’s a good thing he didn’t use his real name.
Jack makes the turn and runs the last twenty feet to his room, fumbles with the card key to open the door, and then pushes it closed once he’s inside. Only when he’s done this does it occur to him that someone could have broken in and be waiting inside. But a fast look around shows him that’s not the case.
Jack crosses to the desk by the window and opens the drawer where he left the small revolver Freeman had given him after taking it off the suit in the alley. He never wanted to come to the point where he’d need it, but you’re better off having a gun and not needing it than needing it and not having it. At least that’s how Jack sees it.
He pops the cylinder to make sure the gun is still loaded: It is, but with two bullets spent. Jack slides it closed to an empty shell, so that when he cocks the hammer, a live round will rotate into the breech.
At a knock on the door, Jack wheels and listens. He hears Freeman’s voice. “Housekeeping, Jack. Open the fucking door.”
