by Steven Gore
A metallic pop and a “Jesus fucking Christ!” startled Donnally awake as he lay in Mauricio’s bed at 2 A.M.
Branches thrashed against the glass and the wood siding as Pipkins flailed, each yank on the badger trap onto which Donnally had tied the ticket book driving the jaws deeper into the deputy’s wrist.
Donnally grabbed his shotgun and racked it.
He heard an “Oh shit,” then the crunching of Pipkins fighting his way toward the ground, deeper among the thorns and out of the line of fire.
“Don’t shoot, you son of a bitch,” Pipkins yelled.
“Give me a good reason.”
Pipkins didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t embarrass him in front of his department or make him appear even more pitiful than he already was, and they both knew it.
Donnally reached for his cell phone, located a number, and pressed “send.”
“This is Donnally. I’m at Mauricio’s. Come get your idiot kid.”
Chapter 26
Rain thudded against his truck’s windshield and hammered the pavement as Donnally sat in the parking lot of the Santa Rita jail, spread out in a central Alameda County valley.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly 3 P.M., kick-out time for Charles Brown and the rest of the prisoners who had completed their sentences.
Donnally wondered how much the place had changed since the few trips he’d made out to the campuslike facility more than a decade earlier. The long, wide hallways and the bare interview rooms, with their unscuffed paint and inmate-waxed linoleum, were then as sterile as hospital floors and lacked the grime of despair and hopelessness that sometimes made the guilty want to purge themselves. As he watched the entrance at the end of the rising, grass-bordered walkway, Donnally wondered whether the place had now deteriorated enough to make detective work possible.
The slow clunk-swish of his wipers provided more rhythm than clarity as he waited for Brown to emerge. A couple of defense attorneys ran from their cars toward the entrance, attaché cases gripped with one hand, legal newspapers held above their heads for shelter with the other.
He recognized one of them: Mark Hamlin, Sonny Goldstine’s lawyer, and wondered whether Sonny had finally been arrested for the gun he wasn’t supposed to own, and whether Hamlin had come to represent him, or maybe just to shut him up in order to protect others connected to the Tsukamata murder all those years earlier.
In any case, Sonny would surely have to wonder where Hamlin’s loyalties lay: with him or with former clients among the remnants of the sixties and seventies radicals whose secrets Sonny might want to trade to buy his way out of a third-strike life sentence.
For a moment, Donnally enjoyed thinking through the trajectories and anticipating the collisions, for time and distance and weariness had broken the gravitational pull of caring about Sonny’s future.
But then he remembered the dollar that tied him and Sonny together and that was still in the pocket of his Levi’s jacket. It made him feel queasy, doubting whether he should’ve accepted the money. Not only had he gotten nothing for it, but it felt like a leash around his throat.
A few minutes later, inmates began filing out through the front door and into the rain. They looked to Donnally like refugees who were still dressed in the clothes they were wearing when the bombs fell or the earthquake struck and destroyed their homes. He turned his wipers on high and peered out through the windshield, inspecting the men first for race, then size, then features.
The men streamed out one-by-one, then collected at the bus stop at the foot of the walkway. The weak stood in the rain and the strong under the surrounding trees.
But no Charles Brown.
Maybe he’d been moved to the county hospital psych ward, Donnally wondered.
Maybe he got released earlier.
Maybe—
The door opened again. It was Hamlin. Walking backward. His arms spread wide like he was trying to herd an escaped goat back into a pen.
Then Brown walked out, shaking his head and holding his hands out in front of him as though he was blocking an assault.
It wasn’t Sonny after all who had brought Hamlin to Santa Rita.
Hamlin backed down the walkway another twenty feet, moving side to side as Brown tried to slip around him with his eyes lowered and his body hunched. Hamlin reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. Brown pushed it aside, then cut across the grass, angling west away from the bus stop and toward the two-lane road leading to the freeway.
Hamlin watched him go, then stared at the receding figure like a salesman whose deal of a lifetime had been rejected by a customer.
In that gesture, Donnally saw Hamlin’s plan expose itself like a pervert opening his raincoat. Hamlin had intended to sign up Brown as a client, then call a press conference and display the hangdog lunatic as a victim of judicial abuse. He’d claim that the harmless, innocent man-child had pleaded no contest solely to end a miscarriage of justice, and then he would leverage that claim into a lawsuit against everyone who’d laid a hand on Brown, maybe even Donnally himself.
But Brown had walked away from it.
Why? Donnally asked himself. Too crazy to grasp his own self-interest? Rushing to reclaim his square of sidewalk in Noe Valley? Hurrying to get a blow job from a homeless crack addict behind a bush in Golden Gate Park?
Donnally watched the rain soak into Hamlin’s three-piece suit, then smiled to himself as the lawyer’s hair flattened to his head like seaweed on an exposed rock. Hamlin took a last look at his forty percent fee slipping away and then ran inside out of the rain.
Chapter 27
Brown, head down, seemed to Donnally not to be following a chosen route, but merely his feet, as he walked the maze of streets, lanes, courts, drives, and parkways that composed the Dublin Commons housing development.
Donnally tracked him from a distance, the space between them stretching and contracting like an accordion, Donnally pulling to the curb while Brown made progress, then catching up to close the gap.
Brown finally made it out of the neighborhood and under the freeway and into an office park. Another campus, but this one for software developers, temp agencies, and Internet startups.
The rain let up, but a cold breeze from the Pacific catapulting the hills bore down, causing Brown to shiver as he stood across the parking lot from the Sweet & Savory Café at the edge of a five-acre business complex.
Brown finally walked toward the entrance, but instead of going in, he sat down next to its double glass doors and wrapped his arms around his bent legs and rested his head on his knees.
A creature of habit, Donnally thought. A mascot again.
After Donnally pulled to the curb, he noticed that the restaurant served only breakfast and lunch. If Brown had reverted back to Rover the Mascot, he’d picked a bad place to start. Lunch was long over and breakfast wouldn’t be served until tomorrow morning.
Donnally glanced at this watch. In ninety minutes the sun would fall behind the hills and the valley temperature would begin sinking toward the forecasted twenty degrees. At some point in the descent, Donnally figured, Brown would be ready to accept the truck as the closest, warmest, safest escape from an alien, frozen suburb whose only refuges for the transient bore the names of Hilton, Hyatt, and Radisson, not Rescue Mission or Salvation Army.
When Donnally looked up again, a security guard was rolling up in a golf cart. The cart rocked and its miniature American flag whipped as a blockish man with a bovine face twisted into a scowl climbed out and approached Brown.
Donnally recognized the swagger. It was of a failed cop-wannabe whose life had already peaked, either when he’d made a game-saving tackle during his junior year in high school or when he got laid for the first time later that night.
The guard stopped a foot away from Brown. He scanned the parking lot, then kicked Brown in the ribs with the reinforced toe of his black work boots. Brown grunted, flopped to his side, and then shielded his head with his hands.
/> The restaurant door swung open and a woman in a baker’s apron pushed her way between the two and then slapped the guard’s face with a wet dish towel, all the while screaming words that were unintelligible to Donnally from where he sat inside his truck.
The guard raised his hands in self-defense, but didn’t grab for the cloth or strike back.
She screamed at him again, then turned toward Brown, now looking up from the wet concrete, cowering and bewildered.
Donnally decided that he couldn’t take the chance of Brown either being rescued by the woman or escaping into the complex beyond, so he jumped down from the truck.
Brown alerted to Donnally crossing the parking lot toward him. His eyes went wide, then he scooted backward, trying to rise and run away at the same time.
The woman and the guard turned toward Donnally and, like domestic combatants interrupted by the police, joined each other against him. As the woman pushed the security guard into Donnally’s path, the hulk transformed himself from a misbehaving puppy into her Doberman.
Donnally flashed his retirement badge as he ran by them, the sight of the gold shield first freezing the pair in place, then uniting him and the guard in common cause against Brown. Donnally grabbed the back of Brown’s jacket, swung him down to the concrete, and kneeled on his back. The guard held his feet while Donnally snapped handcuffs on his wrists.
“What did he do?” the woman asked as Donnally rose to his feet.
“He murdered somebody.”
She gasped and covered her mouth with the towel. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
Donnally glanced at Brown lying mute on the wet walkway, then looked back at her.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.”
He turned toward the security guard.
“I appreciate your help, but don’t go kicking people. Nobody appointed you judge and jury.”
A flash of lighting and a crack of thunder gave Donnally an excuse to haul Brown away before the two had a chance to ask enough questions to figure out that he’d already appointed himself.
Chapter 28
“It’s called kidnapping,” Janie said, standing at the foot of the stairs in the basement, her eyes locked on Brown. He sat handcuffed and chained to a metal workbench that was anchored to the concrete floor. She’d just returned home from a late group counseling session in the psych ward at Fort Miley VA hospital a few blocks away.
“He said he came here voluntarily,” Donnally answered, pointing at the tape recorder lying on the chair next to where he sat.
Janie glared at Donnally.
“Voluntarily? Like the way a cornered criminal surrenders voluntarily?”
“You could say that.”
“You’ve gone overboard on this.” She glanced back and forth between him and Brown. “I’m not sure which of you is more crazy.”
“I’m not crathy,” Brown said, rotating his head toward her. “It wath a lie. I’ve never been crathy.”
Donnally grinned at Janie. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to use the word ‘crazy.’ ”
“It’s not a diagnosis. It’s what we call otherwise sane people who go out of their minds just long enough to destroy their lives.” Her face flushed and she jabbed her fingers against her chest. “And take other people down with them.”
Donnally flicked on the tape recorder and held it out toward Brown. “You don’t blame Janie for anything that’s happened today, do you, Charles?”
Brown stared at her for a moment, then at Donnally, and shook his head.
“The tape recorder can’t see you. You’ve got to say it aloud.”
“No, I don’t blame Janie.”
Donnally switched it off.
“See?” Donnally said. “If he’s competent enough to enter a plea in the case, then he’s competent enough to let you off the hook.”
“What about the handcuffs?” Janie asked.
Donnally looked down at the tape recorder. “I don’t see any handcuffs.”
Janie was sitting at the kitchen table when Donnally returned from serving Brown his dinner. She had a half-finished glass of wine in her hand and an unopened box of Chinese takeout in front of her.
Donnally had the feeling he was about to lose his appetite, too. He set Brown’s plate in the sink, then sat down across from her.
“I shouldn’t have brought him here,” Donnally said. “I’m sorry. This is your house.”
“Until now, I liked having it as our house, whatever ‘our’ means.”
“Look, I’ll testify that you had nothing to do with it.”
“You won’t have to. It’s not like he’s going to run to the police, and even if he did, nobody would pay attention.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then she took a sip of wine and said, “I think it’s time for me to move out and move on. I’ve just been in orbit. Circling the same spot in the universe and not really bumping into anything.”
Donnally felt gravity give way. “But we’re—”
“What? We’re what? People who occupy the same space every few months, or like now when you happened by on a mission that you don’t even understand.”
“I understand it perfectly. The truth has got to come out.”
“If you’re worried about the truth, you should’ve started a little closer to home, like with your father. It’s the blood on his hands, not on Charles Brown’s, that drives you.” She smirked as if she didn’t care whether their relationship ended that second. “Or is that just a little too much truth for you?”
“He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“He’s got everything do to with it. Every murderer you ever hunted down was a surrogate for your father.”
Donnally leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t realize that you’ve been psychoanalyzing me.”
“I should’ve started a helluva lot sooner. I’m not sure why I gave you a pass all these years.”
“Maybe because then you’d have to figure out what, exactly, you’ve been up to. After all, it’s the Vietnamese that he always portrays as either monsters or cannon fodder, or as prostitutes.”
It was like every other argument they’d ever had, Donnally thought as he kicked at the Ocean Beach sand. Start someplace real, spin onto a tangent, recreate the past for whatever was the current need, and then he or she would say something meant to hurt worse than heartache. Somehow the real point, the real source of the pain, would get lost.
Donnally stopped a few feet from where the high tide died. It was only then, within the sound of the breaking waves and against the cold wind off the water, that he grasped why Brown’s no-contest plea had torn into him. It was as if no one had snuck into Anna Keenan’s bedroom, no one had climbed on top of her, no one had put his hands around her throat, no one had restrained her desperate thrashing, no one had muffled her screams, no one had felt her body go limp, no one had climbed out of her window—
Donnally felt his line of thought get hijacked and yanked off course.
Climbed out of her window?
He closed his eyes and locked his hands on top of his head.
Why would Brown climb out of her window?
Was it panic?
Was it guilt?
Did people like Charles Brown even feel guilt?
Donnally tried to visualize the police diagram he’d copied from the court file.
Why didn’t Brown just walk to the kitchen and out of the back door, or even out of the front door, like nothing happened?
But neighbors said they’d spotted Brown climbing the back fence and running away.
Donnally lowered his hands and opened his eyes.
Maybe it really was just a manslaughter. A premeditating murderer would’ve concealed both his approach and his escape in the normalcy of everyday life, not drawn attention to the crime or to himself by climbing over fences and running through yards.
Even so, Donnally swore as he turned back toward the city. I want to hear him
say it. No contest isn’t good enough.
Chapter 29
Donnally slipped through the kitchen door into the house. He wanted to force the words out of Brown, then drive him to Golden Gate Park and point him toward the bushes.
And he didn’t want to risk another argument with Janie.
The house was quiet, not even the sound of Janie’s bedroom television.
The basement stairs creaked as Donnally walked down. He wished he’d fixed them last year when she’d complained. The sound foreclosed the surprise he wanted. Without it, Brown would tense. Lock himself up. Bury his face in his hands and pretend the world away.
Donnally imagined Brown looking over at the stairs, watching his feet come into view where the overhead fluorescent fixture cast light on the steps, then his legs, and his torso and the semiautomatic holstered on his belt. Fear building in Brown’s mind. Maybe he’d even panic at the delusion that Donnally was coming down to kill him, cut up his body with the power saw on the shelf, and bury the pieces in the backyard.
Why not march down the stairs, Donnally asked himself, pound his heels into the wood, match crazy with crazy?
But he didn’t want Brown just to say the words, he wanted Brown to mean them.
He slowed his pace and lightened his steps. Just a friend coming to visit.
Donnally took the final turn.
Brown’s chair was empty.
The chains that had held him lay snaked on the floor.
Donnally grabbed a two-by-four, cocked it like a baseball bat, and ducked toward the space under the stairs.
Empty.
He tossed down the board and ran back up the steps.
Brown wasn’t hiding in the downstairs bathroom or in Janie’s office.
Janie.
Donnally ran up the next flight. Her bedroom door was open and her bed was in disarray. The bathroom light was on. He pulled his gun, imagining Brown standing over her bloody body lying in the tub.
