I swore as our right front wheel slammed into a pothole on Amador Street, jarring my teeth and snapping my last nerve.
Conklin muttered, “Sorry.”
A thermos rolled off the front seat into the foot well, and as I bent to pick it up my partner jerked the wheel and I banged my head into the underside of the glove compartment.
“Hey!” I said.
“The road is like Swiss cheese, Linds. I’m doing my best.”
“Do better.”
It was getting late, sometime after five, and as the sun bled out, I felt a strong pull to be with Joe and Julie. Yesterday at this time, I’d been checking in with Martha’s dogsitter, then heading down to the basement cafeteria for mac and cheese with Joe.
My heart and soul were at Saint Francis.
But I was also being pulled toward a self-storage locker down the street, on the outskirts of nowhere. We hit a good length of road and Conklin gunned the engine. We sped past a rendering plant on our right and a cement factory on our left. Straight ahead, a spotlighted American flag flew at the entrance to the USA U-Store-It facility.
On Parker’s tail, we took a right turn into the asphalt-paved lot lined with rows of garage-type storage units, with their alternating red, white, and blue roll-up doors. We braked next to Parker’s SUV, in front of a red unit marked with the number 23.
We got out of the car and watched as the transport van containing the prison guards and a chained and shackled Randy Fish was unlocked and unloaded.
Parker tacked a notice to the wall, then took a bolt cutter to the padlock and rolled up the door. Fish swung his head around, saw me, then grinned and said, “Hey, Lindsay. It’s great that you’re here. This is going to be a very big moment for you.”
I looked at him, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I might tell him that he disgusted me, that the next time I saw him, I hoped he’d be strapped to a gurney, looking at the people whose daughters he had killed, parents who had come to witness his last breath.
Randy Fish didn’t read my mind, or, if he did, he didn’t care what I was thinking. He looked excited, but under control. Like one of those guys on the show Storage Wars who had just won an abandoned unit at auction for cheap, and suspected that a ‘64 Corvette was inside, all its original parts in mint condition.
I followed Fish’s gaze, but it was getting too dark to see into the shadows.
Conklin left my side, turned on our headlights, and the storage unit brightened. Everyone turned to face the locker as if an alarm had gone off.
No one coughed or fidgeted or said a word.
We were all waiting for Randy Fish to produce the body of a teenage girl who wouldn’t stop screaming.
Chapter 95
RANDY FISH STEPPED forward, his chained hands in front of him, sweeping his gaze from side to side as he took in the contents of the storage unit.
I saw dinged-up, mass-produced furnishings; a well-used desk; a table with a metal top; a rolled-up carpet; and stacks of cardboard cartons, about a hundred of them, each about eighteen inches long by fourteen inches high and wide. What I didn’t see was a freezer, or a fifty-five-gallon drum, or anything big enough to hold a body. Even the carpet was too thin to conceal a person. I didn’t smell decomp, either.
“I remember now. There’s a map in one of those,” Randy said, indicating the stack of boxes with his chin.
“Map?” Parker said. The anger in his voice was almost palpable. “You said you put Debra Lane in here.”
“I was confused. It’s like a dusty attic inside my head, Ronnie. I thought ‘body.’ Now I’m thinking ‘map.’”
“Map to what? Where’s this map?”
“Those cartons,” said Fish. “My books are in the boxes and the map to where I left the girls is in one of my books.”
“You’ve got three seconds to tell me which carton, which book,” Parker said. “Or I’m gonna cancel this outing and send you back to the smallest, darkest hole in the block. No privileges, Fish, and that includes no phone calls, no access to vending machines, no mail, and especially no books—for whatever remains of your miserable life.”
Fish said, “Sweet-talking me isn’t going to help, Ronnie. I don’t know which box. I was in a coma for two years, remember? I could have some brain damage. Maybe if I can look at the labels on the boxes, it’ll come to me.”
Parker stepped behind Fish, hoisted him by his elbows, and manhandled him into the unit.
“I need more light,” Parker yelled.
Six squad cars and cruisers rolled into the storage facility. Conklin waved them in and organized them in a semicircle, with their headlights pointing toward Randy Fish’s storage locker.
Car radios chattered, doors opened and closed, cops leaned against their vehicles to watch what might be an extraordinary event in the history of law enforcement.
Conklin followed Parker and Fish into the locker, swept a box of pots and pans off a table. Then he began taking down cartons, putting them on the table, and ripping each one open. I joined Conklin, took out books, turned them upside down, opened them, shook them out, dropped them to the floor.
I glanced at Fish. He looked like a guest at a wedding, wearing a nice smile as he watched the proceedings. I got the feeling that even now, he was manipulating the police, manipulating me.
“I drew the map on the back of a sales slip, put it between pages in a book,” Fish said. “I think that’s what I did.”
I got into a good rhythm—opened a book, shook it out, dropped it, repeat. But I didn’t lose sight of Fish, and every time I edged near the cheap pine desk, a muscle twitched in his temple.
Conklin reached for another carton of books.
“Hang on,” I said to my partner.
I went to the desk, placed my hand on it, and said to Randy Fish, “Am I getting warm?”
“Warm doesn’t cut it, Lindsay. I’ll let you know when you’re smokin’.”
I pulled at the desk drawers, all of which opened except for the one on the lower right. That drawer was locked. I rifled through the open drawers, came up with nothing. Then Conklin went to the squad car. He brought back a short crowbar and jimmied open the locked drawer.
I went right at that file drawer. It was full of old records, songs from the fifties and sixties. I took out the records, looked at each one in the light of the high beams, peeked into the sleeves, then passed them to Conklin so that he could take another look.
Fish was watching me and he was humming a tune, one of the “oldies but goodies” that my mom used to sing when cooking dinner or driving us in the car.
Parker said, “Shut up,” and gave Fish a shot to the back of his head with the heel of his palm. Fish fell at my feet just as I put my hands on the last record in the drawer.
The old 45 was by the crooner Johnny Mathis. Fish had been humming the song—“The Twelfth of Never.”
The vinyl record was inside a sleeve. I pulled it out and a piece of paper came out with it and fluttered to the ground. I reached for the paper—a U-Store-It receipt with a rough map of the West Coast inked on the back.
As I bent down, I was eye to eye with the Fish Man. I held up the map so he could see it.
“Am I smokin’ now, Randy?”
“You’re red-hot,” said the Fish Man.
Chapter 96
FISH HADN’T GIVEN me anything, but by humming “The Twelfth of Never,” he’d let me know that the map to his dump sites was inside the record sleeve.
I felt a flutter of hope, even elation. Good, Randy. Prove to yourself that you can change.
But now, Fish was laughing. Had he taken us on another flier into his twisted mind? Was he screwing with me again?
I asked him, “What’s the joke, Randy?”
“I’m just enjoying myself,” he said. “It’s okay for me to have a few laughs, isn’t it, Lindsay? You don’t have to play bad cop with me. I’m your pal.”
Parker hauled the killer to his feet, and he wasn’t too gentle about it. Since
Parker was doing a perfect bad cop, he’d left me free to wonder what that 1950s love song meant to Fish. “The Twelfth of Never” was about a man’s love for a woman. I remembered one of the first lines.
I need you, oh my darling, like roses need rain.
Did Fish love an actual person? Or was this psycho-killer love? Did Randy Fish “love” women so much that he had to be the last man to touch them, talk to them, own them …
I straightened out the map Fish had drawn on the back of the receipt. Conklin came up behind me and said, “So let’s take a look at the latest bullshit.”
Parker handed Fish off to one of the uniformed cops and joined us in the huddle. We scrutinized the x’s and tiny handwritten notations. I was pointing out previously unknown locations where bodies might have been dumped—when something inexplicable happened.
I was thrown to the ground, as if I’d been hit by a bus.
Everything went dark and silent and my brain flickered with a single thought: What had happened? I got onto my hands and knees, started crawling, bumping into things, like the deaf and blind thing I was.
A couple of long minutes later, someone shook my arm. I saw a blurry uniformed cop. His name was Mooney. Or Rooney. I wasn’t sure.
“Are you all right, Sergeant?”
Stars were popping behind my eyes. I could hardly breathe. I was gagging, but somehow managed to ask, “Is anyone hurt?”
“Can you see me, Sergeant?”
I fought nausea, said, “I can see you. I hear you.”
Conklin and Parker were on their feet. Conklin came over to me and said, “You okay? You okay, Lindsay?”
I grabbed his arm and stood.
Officer Michael Rooney was saying, “It was a flashbang. I saw this uniform pull the pin and lob it toward the locker. I couldn’t get to him in time.”
“Flashbang” was a descriptive nickname for a stun grenade, a nonlethal military weapon designed to knock down the occupants of a room to give the shooter the upper hand. The effective range is a five-foot radius from the point of impact, and the stunning effect lasts only a minute or two, but you still would not want to be in a room with one.
As it was, I was still dazed, but I could see.
“Tell it again, from the beginning,” I told the cop.
Rooney said, “One of ours fired that grenade. I didn’t know him. He was five six or five seven, young guy.”
“You didn’t know him? How did you know he was a cop?”
“He was in uniform. Drove a cruiser. After he threw the grenade, he grabbed Fish and pushed him into the passenger side. Then he took off.”
“It was an abduction?” Parker asked. “Or a getaway?”
“Hard to say. Fish was very wobbly.”
“When did the grenade go off?” I asked.
“It’s only been a couple of minutes,” the cop said. “The cruiser is headed west on Amador. Two of our cars are in pursuit.”
“Call dispatch and clear a channel,” I said.
Parker was moving through the semicircle of headlights toward his vehicle. I started toward ours. Conklin gave me an arm to lean on.
He dangled the keys. “I’m driving,” he said.
Chapter 97
BY THE TIME we blew past the American flag and turned onto Amador, I had gathered my wits, even the ones that had rolled into the far corners of my mind.
For instance, I understood what Randy Fish had thought was so funny. While we were rooting around in his book and record collections, his ride was coming to get him.
Very frickin’ hilarious joke on the SFPD and the FBI.
And the punch line was that a heinous serial killer and a rogue cop were taking us on a high-speed chase through the city on a cloudy night, visibility of about ten feet in front of the headlights, precipitation coming on and slicking the road.
I was on the car radio, using the designated clear channel, talking to May Hess in dispatch, also to Sergeant Bob Nardone and Officer Gary Hoffman in the lead pursuit car.
Nardone’s voice came through the speaker as he shouted over the blare of sirens: “Turning left onto Cesar Chavez at sixty. I can’t read his plates.”
We were gaining on Nardone and Hoffman, and other cars joined in as dispatch sent units ahead to cut off the renegade cop car. Conklin and I followed a more or less straight route over the Illinois Street Bridge, took a heart-stopping turn onto Cesar Chavez, then an equally hard right onto 3rd. We sped parallel to the streetcar tracks on 3rd and continued over the Lefty O’Doul Bridge.
On the far side of the bridge was AT&T Park, the Giants home field—and there was a game on tonight. I could see the neon marquee and the stadium lights like a row of stars blazing through the fog. If the sirens hadn’t been screaming, I might have been able to hear the fans cheering as a game-winning Giants home run cleared the wall and plopped into McCovey Cove.
As it was, the sirens were screaming, but I knew that the Giants had won because inebriated fans, euphoric with victory, had begun wandering out onto the glistening street.
I was looking ahead as we hit King Street and Willie Mays Plaza, and that’s when, in the space of an instant, Randy Fish’s ride ran into trouble.
A tractor trailer was coming toward us in the opposite lane, like a freight train appearing out of nowhere in the night. Fish’s car was speeding, weaving through traffic, and had almost cleared the length of the big rig when the driver turned the wheel ever so slightly to the left.
Maybe the driver miscalculated how far he was from the semi, or maybe his hand slipped on the steering wheel. But whatever the reason, the getaway car clipped the back wheel of the looming, fifty-three-foot, twin-screw tractor trailer, and the whole freaking night exploded.
Chapter 98
I SAW IT all go down, every second of it.
Time didn’t freeze. There was no stop-motion, just the awful sight of the rogue squad car winging the back wheel of a monster truck and the front of the car whipping around, being dragged beneath the undercarriage, where it was mashed and mangled.
Tires exploded like gunshots.
Plumes of sparks lit the pavement, trailing behind the semi, as its brakes screeched and the truck jackknifed across two lanes, smacking into cars like a bowling ball taking down pins before it came to a halt.
At the same time as the accident was burning up King Street, Conklin was braking and turning the wheel of our car in the direction of our skid. As I braced for a crash, I saw what was happening just ahead of us.
Nardone’s car had slewed into the railing alongside the Mission Creek and the following car had piled into it. Our car slid sideways. I don’t know if I actually screamed, but I can tell you that I was screaming inside my mind.
I was thinking of my daughter, my baby, and that I couldn’t leave her now. My God, not now.
Conklin was doing his best, but still our car caromed off a guardrail, sideswiped Nardone’s car, and continued moving in a sickening spin, rocking from side to side. We balanced on two wheels, right at the tipping point, then, mercifully, dropped into a four-point crouch.
Richie was blanched and sweating. He asked for the second time in about ten minutes, “You okay?”
“Yes, you?”
“Fine. Holy crap.”
He took my shaking, sweaty hand and squeezed it. I have never loved my partner more.
I said, “You did great, Richie,” then I tuned into the screams of people and the fire blazing under the tail of the rig.
Conklin called dispatch, ordered fire engines with heavy equipment, as many ambulances as we could get, and every available cop to clear the road of pedestrians and lock down the scene.
I bolted from the car and ran to the first of the two crashed patrol cars. Nardone was panting, said that his right ankle was broken and that he couldn’t move. The cop who’d been driving the second car brushed glass off his face with his right hand. His left arm was hanging at a bad angle. He asked if everyone had made it.
“Stay where you
are,” I told him. “Help is coming.”
Baseball fans were all over Willie Mays Plaza, some injured, moaning and crying, others forming a four-deep bank of spectators on the Portwalk, still others forming a matching wall of onlookers in front of the stadium. There were hundreds of people in harm’s way, a good number of them kids.
I smelled gasoline and that scared the hell out of me. The way that truck had slewed all over the street, the numbers of vehicles involved in the collisions—there could be gas everywhere.
I reached the big rig as the driver jumped down with a fire extinguisher in his hand. I followed him to the rear of the truck and he started spraying down the flames. I couldn’t see much of the car underneath the fifty-three-footer, but what I could see looked like a tin can that had gone into a meat grinder.
“I didn’t see him,” the driver was saying to me, tears flowing down his cheeks. “I didn’t know what had happened until I heard the racket. God help me. Please tell me I didn’t kill anyone.”
I ducked under the rig’s undercarriage to see what was left of the getaway cruiser, to see if by a miracle someone had survived.
Smoke burned my eyes and made them water. I forced my lids open and saw that the skin of the car was scorched, the roof of the vehicle flattened. No one could have survived this, I thought.
But then a groan came from inside the car.
And then—unbelievable but true—another sound ripped right through me. It was the wail of a young child.
Chapter 99
THE WALKWAYS AND streets in front of the ballpark were lit up like Christmas in hell. Red and blue lights flashed and spun, fire flared, sirens wailed, car alarms went off, and injured pedestrians cried out for help.
Ambulances came and went through the hastily erected barricades, ferrying people to emergency rooms, while Richie and other law enforcement officers corralled by-standers behind barrier tape and tried to keep the scene of an escaped convict’s crash intact.
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