One Clean Shot

by Danielle Girard

  Gun drawn, he listened, waited.

  Cars hummed from the freeway. Someone’s bass pulsed in the distance. Up the stairs, his cell phone rang. The stench of sour milk, soiled diapers and something like rotting limes emanated from the garbage bags. Hal remained amongst them, counting the beats of the music above.

  The place was quieter than he’d ever heard it, his own heart louder.

  Only when he heard the beautiful sound of shrieking sirens growing close did he his heart finally start to slow.

  Chapter 15

  Hailey tucked the kids in and stepped back into the hallway, checking her phone again. Nothing. Why hadn’t Hal been in touch?

  He was up at Hunters Point, at James Robbins’s house. She hadn’t heard from him and it made her nervous. She should have gone with him.

  “Lock all the doors, Mommy,” Ali called out.

  “I will,” Hailey promised her. “You’re safe.”

  Hailey walked down the stairs and saw Jim and Tom Rittenberg standing in the entry hall. Their heads leaned together, they were talking intensely. Tom looked better than he had. The cane was missing and he stood straighter than he had last time she saw him. Dee was good for him.

  Dee walked in from the living room. Tom had been watching her. He was standing straight for Dee. Her face flushed, she enjoyed the attention. Tom and Dee. It made sense. Jim patted Tom on the back as Dee opened the door for him.

  How would Hal react to the fact that Dee was seeing Tom Rittenberg?

  How much closer could her personal life get to this case?

  Dee followed Tom out the front door and Hailey started down the stairs as Jim noticed her. “Glad you’re still up. I’ve got something for you.”

  Hailey followed him into the kitchen where he poured himself a large glass of wine, offered her one as well. Hailey shook her head. Hal was over at Hunters Point and she wanted to be sharp when he checked in.

  These days, there were too many balls to keep in the air and the alcohol didn’t help.

  Jim was drinking too much. He rarely looked drunk but she saw more empty wine bottles in the recycling bin than there should have been. The drinking was probably in reaction to something. Would he talk about it if she asked?

  He pointed to a manila folder on the table. “Dee put this together for you. It’s copies of all the media pieces she has collected—anything at all related to local politics, people I know. She’s thorough.”

  The folder contained maybe fifty pages of print. She set it aside to look at later.

  “She also made a list of everyone who’s been in the house. O’Shea asked for it, so I thought you’d like a copy.” The theory would be that Jim’s shooter knew the layout of the house. Which meant he—or she—had been there.

  Hailey flipped it open, scanned the names and addresses. At the bottom, Dee had written “UPS to deliver new computer” and “electrician—Liz looking for invoice.”

  “There was an electrician here?”

  Jim drank from his glass. “Dee told Inspector O’Shea she’d get the electrician information from Liz in the morning.”

  Hailey scanned the other names. She’d met so few of them. They were almost all here during the day—while she was at work and the girls at school. But what about in the hours between school and when Hailey came home? Had the girls met these people? “Any of them seem like possible suspects?”

  “No.” He swirled the wine around the inside of the glass.

  The Chateau St. Jean bottle sat mostly empty on the table. She hadn’t told Jim about Fredricks’s finger. Why would she? She stared at the cork. “How do you buy that wine?”

  “What do you mean—how?”

  “Do you buy individual bottles? By the case?”

  “We buy about six cases when it’s released each year.” He set the glass down. “Seems like this year I’ve gone through more.”

  “It’s been a long year.”

  He nodded without speaking.

  “Do you know the name Donald Blake?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re sure. Donald Blake?” she asked again.

  “I don’t,” he repeated. “Should I?”

  Hailey filled a glass with ice and added sparkling water.

  It was something Liz always bought—different flavors of water. This one was raspberry and orange. Hailey had actually started to like the stuff.

  She sat at the table and fingered the wine cork. The bottle on the table was now empty. “Was there something else you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Just the list,” he said. He was lying, but she had no idea why.

  “Seems like Tom and Dee are spending a lot of time together.”

  “They are,” Jim said.

  She studied his face as he drank from the glass. “Is that a good thing?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Why would it be a bad thing? Because Dee was Jim’s little sister or was there something about Tom that worried him?

  “Dee’s always done exactly what she wanted, so it’s not like we could stop her even if we wanted to,” Jim said with a soft smile.

  “Seems like you guys are close. She doesn’t talk to you?”

  “She doesn’t. Our family wasn’t good at talking,” he admitted. “She’s got her Valium when things don’t go her way. I’ve got my wine.”

  They stood together in silence for a moment then Hailey said goodnight and headed up to her bedroom. The cork was still in her hand as she climbed the stairs and checked on the girls. Camilla slept soundly, on her back, her arms splayed while Ali was a tight ball, frown lines deep on her face. Hailey rubbed between Ali’s eyes, watched as she relaxed. Her eyes opened.

  “Mommy,” she said, groggy.

  “Yes, baby.”

  “Is Daddy still dead?”

  Hailey bent down to kiss her forehead. “Yes, baby.”

  Her eyes fell closed again.

  Hailey lay beside her, cupped the tiny form against hers.

  A while later Jim climbed the stairs. A few minutes later came the creaking sound of water in the pipes.

  Hailey sat in the rocking chair in the girls’ room and went through the articles Dee had pulled. It was full of news of Abby and Hank Dennigs’ death but every article mentioned Tom Rittenberg. Dee had included policy articles and campaign news that related to the police or guns, but none of them were relevant to their case. What other articles had Dee kept?

  Had she missed something?

  When the house was silent, Hailey crept back downstairs. She stood outside the door of Jim’s office.

  She never came to this room. Even when Jim and she spoke, they avoided this room.

  John died in this room.

  In certain light, Hailey swore the bloodstain on the floor was still visible.

  It wasn’t.

  The carpet was new. But the stain of John’s blood was still there for her, the way a camera’s flash burns into your retina so that it’s there when you blink afterwards.

  She left the overhead light off and turned on the small desk lamp instead. In the corner was the old file cabinet. Hailey had assumed things would be filed alphabetically. Instead, the top drawer held all his campaign records—contributions financials, media, literature and speeches.

  Inside large green hanging folders were thin manila ones. The media file contained eight or ten manila folders—New York Times, Chronicle, the Washington Post. She drew out the Post folder, skimmed through the pieces, saw his name mentioned in reference to a couple of bills.

  The folder for the Chronicle was the fullest.

  Hailey skimmed for Donald Blake’s name, but his name wasn’t on any of the bylines.

  The articles were about politics. No mention of John’s death, nothing about the recent shooting.

  The lower dra
wers contained the bills he was working on and below that employee files. She skimmed through the names but none of them were familiar. Below that were things she didn’t even look at—life insurance files, records for his Keogh plan, medical bills…

  Hailey sat on the floor with her eyes closed. Jim had kept the letter from Nicholas Fredricks, so surely he’d kept other letters as well.

  Where were those?

  Why keep Fredricks’s letter here if the others were at the main office? Was it possible he had destroyed the others because Fredricks’s was discovered?

  Something Hal said came back to her.

  Why all this stuff was coming in the form of letters? Why not calls?

  An anonymous call or e-mail was infinitely easier than delivering a letter to the station.

  Someone was bringing letters in without being noticed.

  Could it be Jim? But what sense did that make? What reason did he have for leaking information he could so much more easily given them?

  Maybe Jim had a safe somewhere. She sat in his chair and opened the single drawer in the center of his desk. Rows of pens, a couple small notepads, paperclips and binder clips in a shallow dish. No keys or codes. When she shut it, his computer woke up, the screen growing bright. Hailey jumped at the light. She reached to turn off the monitor but stopped. Jim would know she’d been there. She’d have to wait for it to go back to sleep.

  She sat back in his chair and saw a paperclip on the floor, stooped to pick it up and noticed a hidden drawer under the desk. The drawer was small—maybe three inches deep and nine inches wide—and set all the way at the back of the desk. Hailey touched it, felt a small metal pull on its underside and slid it toward her, cupping her hand beneath it in case it fell. Amazingly, the drawer slid all the way to the front of the desk and beyond a few inches. Just enough to see it was empty. Hailey pushed it closed again.

  If anything had been in this office, Jim was smart enough to get rid of it. He had a shredder.

  She glanced around the office for it. Under the desk, Jim’s small wire trash can was empty. She looked beside the file cabinet then behind the door, circled the room. No shredder.

  Cabinets lined the wall behind the desk. The shelves were filled with stacks of printer paper, boxes of stationary and envelopes. She eased the doors shut again and opened the next two. More office supplies. Behind the third set of doors, Hailey found the shredder and drew it out, set it on the floor.

  The bin was empty.

  A fine white paper dust coated the surface of the dark plastic and a handful of tiny diamond shapes suggested it had been used, but how recently was impossible to tell. Hailey lifted the shredder and peered down into the metal slats of the machine.

  Nothing.

  Flipped it over and saw a thin strip of paper caught in the bottom.

  Her fingers were too wide to get hold of it. Using an unfolded paperclip, she pried the scrap loose. Blank on one side, the other side had only two letters, which read ‘ry,’ handwritten and photocopied. It could have come from anywhere.

  Hailey put it on the floor to reassemble the shredder and imagined all the words that ended with ‘ry’. Impossible to guess.

  Someone’s name? Harry or Mary?

  Hailey returned the shredder to the cabinet and looked at the narrow wedge of paper again. It looked like there was a line after the y. Not a line, an exclamation.

  She recognized the handwriting.

  She knew what this was.

  Still holding the tiny paper wedge, she shut off the desk lamp and ran up the stairs, avoiding the spots that creaked the loudest. Inside the small room she used for a den, she dug through her briefcase for the photocopies of the evidence. Beneath those was the page she was looking for—the article from the Chronicle.

  She lifted the tiny scrap to the edge of the page they’d been sent.

  “No source, no story!”

  The scrap from Jim’s shredder matched exactly.

  Hailey sank back into the chair, willing it to be different, to see some clear distinction that wasn’t there.

  They were the same.

  Jim had sent the police Donald Blake’s article. Or he’d gotten one just like it and hadn’t told her. And he said he didn’t know Donald Blake.

  Which meant Jim was lying.

  Definitely.

  With the scrap tucked carefully into a pocket of the bag, she booted up her laptop when her phone vibrated on her hip. Hal.

  “That took you a while,” she said.

  “Someone just shot at me.”

  “Hal! Are you okay?”

  “I’m still out here. I’ve called for backup. They’re en route.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Hailey—”

  “Text me the address.” She ended the call and started up the stairs to wake Liz and found her already halfway out her bedroom door. Since the girls and Hailey had moved in, Liz and Jim had turned the bed in their room around so Liz was on the outside, and she’d developed an almost supernatural sense for knowing when Hailey was coming. “I’ve got to go in.”

  Liz followed her down the stairs, disappearing into the girls’ room while Hailey sprinted for the front door.

  No text from Hal. When she called, it went straight to voicemail. The awful pit in her stomach. She called dispatch. “His backup is two minutes out.”

  She would not think about everything that could go wrong in two minutes.

  She counted to sixty, too fast to make a whole minute and counted again. Then, she dialed.

  Hal answered. “Hey.”

  “Shit,” she cursed, letting the fear course out. “Damn it, Hal.”

  “Yeah,” he said, breathless. “I know.”

  “You scared the crap out of me.” Hailey heard the sirens and said, “I’m on my way. I’m almost at Cesar Chavez. Be there in ten minutes.”

  “Hailey, this place is—”

  “Watch for my car,” she said, cutting him off. She wasn’t interested in being told it was dangerous. “And don’t let those patrol guys go anywhere.”

  Red police lights shone in the sky like beacons on the hill when Hailey turned off Third Avenue onto Evans ten or twelve minutes later and passed the closed down PG&E plant.

  Hal stood beside a black and white, arms crossed, talking to a patrol officer who took notes.

  She parked diagonally on the street, scanned the faces watching them in the dark and slammed the car door harder than necessary as she got out.

  She wanted to touch his shoulder, to hug him like a kid. Instead, she fought with her welling emotion. Since John, everything felt so much more dangerous, so much scarier. And what if these people had been targeting Hal? What if this was happening because of Jim?

  If Jim did something that got Hal hurt…

  Hal smiled. “You were asleep.”

  Hailey touched her head, the half done ponytail loosed into a frizzy mane. “Maybe you could go a day this week without getting shot at.”

  The patrol officer looked at her. Hailey glared until he returned to his notepad, started asking questions again.

  Where was Hal standing? How many shots were fired?

  She stood silent beside him until she could hear the hiss of his breathing, knew that he was really okay.

  Now she could be, too. She forced slow, even breaths.

  “We lose the shooter?”

  “Think so. My bet—he was gone before the black and whites got here.” Hal pointed down the hill. “Shots came from there, I’m guessing. First couple cleared my head, so he had to be shooting upward.” More sirens wailed in the distance. “Makes the most sense, anyway. It’s a straight shot to Palou down that way, then the freeway’s only a few blocks.”

  “I probably passed him.” Hailey nodded to the bystanders. “Anyone see anything?”

&nbs
p; “Nothing yet.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” she said. If the guy got away with shooting someone a block from the police station in the middle of the day, it didn’t seem likely they’d catch him in the projects at night.

  “Smart move.”

  Another patrol officer approached, clipping his radio back on his shoulder. “No luck.”

  “Think he’s a local?” she asked. “He’d know where to hide.”

  Hal frowned. “Maybe, but not too bright about it. If he’d waited another minute, I’d have cleared the stairs and he would have had a clean shot at me.”

  The thought was terrifying.

  “Inspector!” an officer called from the hillside below. “You guys got to see this.”

  They walked slowly down the hill, watching their path for footprints or evidence. The dirt was strewn with garbage—broken glass and bits of paper, cardboard. It was impossible to tell what might have been useful.

  They stopped a few feet from a V-shaped impression in the mud. “Tracks come from down there.”

  The tracks led down the hill and back up again. The shooter came up the hill and then went back down the same way.

  Probably not a local.

  “Christ,” Hal said. “You know what that is?”

  Hailey studied the footprints, the strange angle of the feet. The tread was heavier on the heels, sunken a couple of inches into the mud. The mud nearby was moist but not soft and it held firm when she pressed a finger into it.

  The firmness suggested that the shooter not merely paused in that spot—he had planted his feet there.

  The tight set of his jaw told her he was thinking the same thing. “Israeli shooting stance,” she said.

  “Goddamn right,” he whispered.

  Chapter 16

  Hailey’s phone buzzed as they left Hunters Point.

  “I need a drink,” Hal said.

  She wanted to go home, but she owed him after begging out the night Carson was shot. The night she went out with the Rookie Club instead. One drink. “Sure. Where?”

  “Hanlon’s?”