One Clean Shot

by Danielle Girard

  He pulled her feet into his lap again and began rubbing them as though he could rewind the evening to where they’d been ten minutes ago, the subject of John dispensed. “Thinking about it. Looking for something bigger.”

  With one finger hanging in the air above the rug, Hailey traced a black triangle in its pattern. “Bigger?”

  “I’ve got some feelers out at the Department of Justice.”

  “Wait. Now you’re leaving the department?”

  “We can’t be together if I stay,” he said.

  Together. Did she want to be together? Bruce had never even met Cami and Ali. They were too young. Their dad had only been dead a year. Hailey crossed to the window and gazed out as though she could step out into the ether and drop down the three stories like Batman.

  “Hailey…”

  She didn’t respond, watching the back of a sedan driving by Washington Park, the rear left light dark, wondering if the cops in the city had time to stop people for brake lights anymore. Couldn’t imagine they did.

  Behind her, Bruce remained on the couch as though he, too, was afraid she might be heading out the window.

  He knew her as well as anyone and still he tiptoed around her a year later, as though she’d become a fragile crystal vase, balanced on a table with only three legs.

  He let her get away without answering for the changes in their relationship the same way Hal did, and the less they asked, the less she felt an obligation to tell them anything.

  “Okay. It’s still too soon,” Bruce conceded and Hailey wondered when she had stopped thinking of him as Buck, the way she had when they were first lovers.

  When had he dropped from the pedestal and become Bruce?

  After a moment, he said, “I’d just like to be able to take you out, to go to a restaurant.”

  She turned from the window. “We can do that without you changing careers or moving.”

  “Maybe I’m ready for a change.”

  “Maybe you are.” She returned to the couch, to her wine. “But not because of us. It has to be for you.”

  “Agreed.” Bruce reached for her hand and she hesitated then gave it to him, let him pull her back to the warm leather, let him press himself on top of her, closed her eyes as his mouth opened against hers, his tongue, both familiar and tentative, gently exploring until she met it with her own.

  “Buck,” Hailey whispered as though testing out an old emotion.

  He stopped kissing her, kissed her nose then sat up to look at his watch. “We should get you home. Are you okay to drive?”

  It felt like being shooed out, by a teacher or a parent and Bruce did this sometimes, took on this selfless, caretaking role, leaving her wishing she’d stayed.

  If John hadn’t come up in conversation, she might have simply taken his hand, led him to the bedroom and sought out the simple connection they’d had when theirs was an affair, rather than a relationship.

  Buck was fantasy, the unattainable, painted in a light that was brighter than reality.

  But now he was transformed to reality, to Bruce, and in the white, hot spotlight stood John.

  Dead John.

  Bruce was right. Maybe things could’ve been better for her and John if they’d tried.

  Or maybe not, maybe they’d have been in this same place.

  He was right, too, that it was no longer a choice.

  What he couldn’t fathom—what Hailey couldn’t explain—was that in the last minutes of John’s life, she forgave him for every bad thing that had happened in the decades before. Every harsh word, every cruel judgment and every selfish demand.

  Because eleven months after his death, the memory of John that played was rarely any other than those last words he’d spoken, “Take care of the girls. Make sure they’re okay.”

  The single memory made John incandescent.

  No one else created even a glimmer of that light.

  Chapter 8

  Hal had gone straight home. He’d pulled files on Dwayne Carson and Jeremy Hayden, the gunrunner who was found dead in the upstairs closet at the sting operation. The two had similar rap sheets, but it was impossible to say if they ran in the same circles.

  What was stranger was that neither one had any weapons charges in their pasts. They’d been arrested for burglary, B&E, a few assault charges, a drunk and disorderly.

  Nothing in their pasts suggested they were involved in organized crime.

  Hal brought the files home to look at again. He was too beat to stay at the station. He wanted a beer and his comfortable chair.

  Inside his apartment, Wiley greeted him by wrapping herself around his leg and mewing for dinner. He lifted the calico under one arm and carried her inside, bolting the door behind him and walking through the dark living room into the kitchen. The red light on the answering machine blinked three times, paused, then blinked another three times.

  It would be his ex-wife’s voice on the machine at least twice, if not all three. Sheila never called just once. Maybe his mother had called, too. Once in a while one of his sisters called to check in, but they never called his home line.

  Only his mother and Sheila did that.

  Plus, Sheila had already called his cell phone a half dozen times today.

  He set the cat on the counter and pressed the play button. Inside the refrigerator was half a container of Tunalicious cat food. He dished it into Wiley’s bowl as the machine zipped and clicked in reverse, then started forward again.

  After the first beep was Sheila’s standard hesitation, a pause like she was shocked that she had been connected to his number.

  As though her phone had rung, too—some force trying to pull them together.

  “Hey, Hal, sweetie. It’s me. Call me when you get in. I thought we could grab a drink or something. Old times, you know?” She waited again, maybe for him to pick up the phone, then said, “Okay. I’ll talk to you soon,” and hung up.

  She never left her name.

  Not that she needed to.

  A man didn’t forget the woman who charged up forty thousand dollars in credit card debt in his name—after they had separated. It still rubbed him wrong, that she didn’t say who she was.

  Maybe she assumed that she was the only available woman who ever called him.

  Maybe what bothered him was that she was the only woman who called him unless he was going to count his mother or sisters.

  A computerized voice told him the time of the message was five-seventeen. The next one came at five forty-seven. Her voice was looser this time, the background noise louder. She was calling from a bar somewhere. At the end, someone called her name, a man, and she stopped midsentence, told him he knew how to reach her.

  According to the clock on the microwave, she’d left the final message twelve minutes before he’d arrived home. “That’s it,” she said, slurring her words. “I’m going to have to come over there.”

  “Shit,” he said, wondering where she’d been calling from, how long he had to get out of there. He set the cat food on the counter, filled the other with fresh water and lifting the receiver, dialed from memory.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ken, it’s Hal. Any sign of Sheila out front?”

  “Hang on.” Hal waited while Ken looked out.

  Ken’s apartment was on the same floor as Hal’s but facing the narrow alleyway of Natoma Street where they lived.

  Hal’s apartment was on the west side and out his window was six feet of empty space, just wide enough for the garbage cans on the street below before the next building, a nicer-looking brick one, began.

  When it rained, his sill caught enough rain to fill a Dixie cup. When it was hot, the alleyway grew stale while the air quivered behind the window glass, waves of garbage and tar smells rising in the heat. When it was cold, he hardly noticed it. Wind was the one thing that didn
’t fit between the buildings. Tonight, it looked like rain, but sometimes Mr. Tatsumi above him overwatered his plant, and what Hal mistook for rain was actually fern runoff.

  “She still drive the white blazer?” Ken asked.

  Hal rubbed his face. “Far as I know.”

  “I don’t see her down there yet, man. You want to come hide out here? I got some beer.”

  “Your place be the first one she come to when I don’t answer.”

  “Probably true, man. You best get out of the building.”

  “I intend to.” Hal hung up and grabbed his coat and keys and cracked the apartment door, listened to the hallway for sounds of Sheila.

  Most likely she’d be drunk by now and she wasn’t quiet sober. The only sounds coming from the hallway were from the upstairs neighbor’s television. This was the time when his show came on, the one he liked to watch without his hearing aids because they bothered his ears.

  Down the hall, Frank and Angie Rossetti were fighting again. He left the apartment and closed the door, taking the back stairs to the street and half running to his car.

  The last time Sheila came over, he’d refused to let her in and she’d spent the night in the hallway.

  He took off back down 20th Street away from Dolores and Guerrero, the direction Sheila would come from, if she did actually come. But as soon as he turned right on Church, he found himself heading back toward the station.

  He called in, asked to be connected to holding and when the desk answered, he asked about Dwayne Carson.

  “They’ve got him back in interview. Neill, I think.”

  “Can you patch me through?”

  “Sure. Don’t know if anyone’ll answer but here goes.”

  The phone rang four times and Hal was ready to hang up when it was answered. “Inspector Neill.”

  “Mike, it’s Hal Harris. Of Homicide. I was calling on Carson.”

  “Yeah. We’re about to cut him loose. DA doesn’t think we have enough to make a case. We pulled him back in because his attorney says he never heard of him.”

  The only lead they had and it was a dead end. Hal wasn’t ready to give up. “You know where he’s headed?”

  “No idea. Lives with his mother and four siblings, one bedroom apartment in Hunters Point. Father’s AWOL.”

  Hal hated the statistics about the percentage of black men who were uninvolved with raising their children. “Lot of ‘em are.”

  “Right. Mom works two jobs. You know how it goes.”

  Hal thought about the business card Carson had for Martin Abbott. “The high-priced attorney bailed on him?”

  “According to the jail, Carson never talked with him, but who knows,” Neill said. “Maybe Abbott got a message to Carson another way.”

  “Why cut him loose?”

  “We don’t have enough to hold him. Roger’s team printed the weapons in the trunk. Carson’s prints weren’t on any of them.”

  “Defense would argue Carson was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Hal said.

  “DA’s office doesn’t want to prosecute, suggested we push him to give us something and cut him loose.”

  “Did it work?” Hal asked.

  “He did give us another name, the guy he said picks up the guns.”

  Hal turned down 14th toward Harrison. “Who’s that?”

  “Name’s Willie Redd. He’s the one who held Matthews at gunpoint.”

  “I remember,” Hal said, the tightness still in his chest from the experience.

  “Yeah. I’ll bet.” Neill paused a beat and said, “Since Redd’s a dead-end, we don’t have much left.”

  “It seem weird that Carson knew Martin Abbott? You ever heard of Abbott taking on a case like this? Doing pro bono or something?”

  “Pro bono? I don’t think you can have dinner with Abbott without paying his hourly.”

  That matched what Hal had heard, too. Why would Abbott suddenly take interest in a kid like Carson? “So, it seems weird, right?”

  Neill paused, sighed. “Yeah, it does.”

  There was no way Hal was going back to his apartment until a couple of hours had passed.

  Six months ago, he’d have gone to Hanlon’s to hang with his old buddies from patrol, maybe Beyer or one of the older stiffs in Homicide. Those guys were there most nights and it wasn’t so bad to show up from time to time, hang out and listen to the old stories they loved to tell again and again.

  But twice in the past month, Sheila had shown up there.

  Once, she’d left with a rookie patrol officer, a kid Hal didn’t know. They’d gotten out the door and into her car, or so he heard, when a couple of older guys, friends of Hal’s, had broken it up and told the kid off.

  The kid actually came back into the bar to apologize to Hal.

  “No skin off my back,” Hal told him, but Sheila had continued to carve little bits of him from somewhere not quite as obvious. And just because she’d been run off once, didn’t mean she wouldn’t be back. Maybe he’d go to the station anyway. Maybe he’d learn something to help them. Hell, they needed a break.

  “You still there?” Neill asked.

  “Yeah. Actually, I’m close to the station,” Hal said. “Maybe it’s worth following the kid when he’s out, see where he goes.”

  “Tonight?” Neill asked.

  Maybe it was desperation or maybe it was something about Carson. These kids weren’t that different than he was at that age. He just got lucky that he ended up on the right side of things. Unlike these kids, his father was there. Right up until his death. “What the hell. I’m in the area. You processing him now?”

  “Yeah. He should be out in about twenty minutes, half hour. Give me your number and I’ll call you when he’s on his way out.”

  Hal sat on the darkened street across from the main entrance to the department for ten minutes before his phone rang.

  “Harris,” he answered.

  “Hi,” Sheila said. “I thought you were avoiding me,” she continued, her voice soft and slurred in a way he remembered finding sexy once.

  He cursed silently. He hadn’t looked at the damn screen. “Uh, I’m working, Sheila.”

  “Okay. I just wanted to call and see how you are. I left you a message on your home number, too.”

  Three.

  “I’ve got to go, Sheila.” Before she could go on talking, he said, “I’ll catch you later,” and hung up.

  When his phone rang again, he checked the number before answering.

  “It’s Neill. Carson’s on his way out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Call me back if you learn anything useful.”

  Neill told him Carson was on his way out and gave Hal his cell number in case anything happened.

  A few minutes later, Dwayne Carson appeared.

  He pushed the front door open halfway then stopped. He glanced back and stepped out fully as a young prostitute pushed by him, talking over her shoulder and swinging a pink, sequined handbag as she tottered down the stairs in high, strappy red heels.

  Carson remained against the concrete façade of the building, descended the stairs and stood beneath the marble plaque where the department’s credo was inscribed.

  “To the faithful and impartial enforcement of the laws with equal and exact justice to all.”

  Carson scanned the street, looking for his ride, maybe. He appeared a different person now, his manner much less confident standing in front of the building than he had been inside it. Something about the way he surveyed his surroundings—the sidewalk, the buildings, the highway overpass a few blocks down—was tentative and wary.

  When Carson finally started toward the street, he stepped gingerly as though expecting a landmine, then went only a few yards before dropping to one knee to tie his shoe. He did this with his head up, still
searching.

  He was afraid.

  What the hell did Carson think was going to happen in front of the police department?

  Carson started walking east, moving quickly. His head down, arms crossed, he hugged the inside of the sidewalk, confusing a group of cops walking in the opposite direction, who expected him to pass on the right.

  As Carson walked, he kept an eye over his shoulder.

  Half a block down, he ran straight into a man in a suit, someone from the DA’s office, Hal thought. Carson didn’t pause, ducking around the guy and running a few steps before slowing again. His stride was rigid, his arms fixed across his chest. He was struggling with the urge to sprint. With Carson now almost a block ahead of him, Hal put the car in gear and started forward.

  Despite Carson’s behavior, Hal couldn’t locate any sign of danger.

  A car backfired on the freeway and Carson jumped as though bullets had been fired.

  Hal palmed his phone. He could call for backup but what the hell would he say? He had an antsy gunrunner?

  He pulled to the curb again when a black sedan with no rear plate steamed by, almost clipping his rearview mirror.

  It looked like a gang car.

  His gut told him something was up.

  He palmed the car’s radio. “This is five-Henry-one-seven requesting backup on Harrison Street, in front of the department.” He tried to remember the name of the street one down but couldn’t. “Possible one-eight-seven in progress.”

  As dispatch confirmed the request, Hal hit the accelerator, but the sedan was already thirty yards ahead.

  The driver honked the horn and Carson spun and ducked. Hal was too far back to do anything, could only watch as a hand reached from the driver’s side…

  Carson’s expression turned from fear to relief.

  Running, Carson crossed the street then circled to open the passenger door.

  “Shit,” Hal said, feeling like an asshole.

  He lifted the radio to cancel his call.

  The gunfire started.

  Hal tried to find the source of the gunfire. He moved the car forward, trying to get a look at Carson.