The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  “Run this,” Carver said. “They won’t see us now. Run it.”

  Jenner looked up the hill to make sure nothing was coming, then ran the light. He accelerated all the way to Powell, and braked through the left turn. The car skidded on the wet trolley tracks, then found its grip again on the asphalt as they went down the hill. There were half a dozen cabs in front of them now.

  “You see it?”

  “There,” Carver said. “Crossing Bush. She’s headed to Union Square.”

  “How smart is this girl?”

  “Smart.”

  There was an opening in the traffic, and Jenner could have closed the gap between them. But he held back, leaving three cars as a buffer. The hill was steep enough that they could still see the taxi clearly. Mia’s shoulders and head were illuminated by the car directly behind her. She still had her head down, almost as if she were trying to curl inside herself.

  “You think she’s talking to the cab driver?” Jenner asked. “That she meant to meet him?”

  “No way,” Carver said. “She caught it by accident. If he’d been expecting her, he was in the wrong lane—Mia saw a chance and she took it, to make this hard.”

  “Make it hard on us, you mean.”

  “On anyone.”

  “Who else would be chasing her?” Jenner asked.

  “That depends on what she knows.”

  They watched the cab pass through the intersection ahead. It swerved to the left curb and stopped. Jenner didn’t have any choice except to pass it. As they went by, Carver looked out the rear window. He saw the cab and the lights of Union Square behind it. The sidewalks were packed with shoppers. Uniformed patrolmen stood in front of the display windows and at the shop entrances with their batons out and ready. And then there was Mia, sliding into the throng on the sidewalk, meeting the driver as he climbed from his seat.

  “She’s paying—I’ll get out at the corner, double back.”

  “She goes into the Vendôme, it’ll be a zoo.”

  “That’s why she picked it,” Carver said. “Let me out.”

  “Keep your phone close.”

  Carver raised it, to show Jenner he had it in his hand. Then he stepped from the car, came around its rear bumper, and pushed into the crowd. He didn’t look up the block until he was close to a shoe store’s display window. Mia was weaving through the crowd, and then she vanished past the corner on her way to the Vendôme’s main entrance. All he saw was the spill of her hair over her shoulders, and the back of her black coat. But that was all he needed.

  As soon as she was out of sight, he began to jog, dodging through knots of shoppers until he reached the corner. He slowed when he got there, then rounded it and stood as if he were looking in the shop window. The mannequins on the other side of the glass looked back at him with empty eyes, their hands open and welcoming. He looked to his left and saw Mia stuck in a mob waiting to pass through the Vendôme’s revolving doors. He waited until there were five people packed behind her, and then he started along the sidewalk toward the doors. He called Jenner, who answered immediately.

  “You still got her?” Jenner asked.

  “For now,” Carver said. “She’s going into the Vendôme. Try and park on O’Farrell, watch the back doors.”

  “I can try,” Jenner said. “Cop comes, it’s not like I can flash my badge. I might have to keep moving.”

  “See what you can do.”

  He stopped again, this time in front of the window that had been shattered the night he and Mia first drove out. The yellow tape was gone, and there were no glass shards underfoot. The newly installed pane sparkled like the facet of a diamond, and behind it, the mannequins had been switched out. It was all perfect, the crime erased. But it was that way wherever there was money—nothing aged anymore. The wealthiest parts of the city regenerated each night. It was another story out at the edges, time and desperation grinding entire neighborhoods to sand.

  A whirl of movement drew his eyes back to Mia, to the mob she was joining at the entrance. Carver started toward her, thinking it was a stampede toward the door. He saw the off-duty cops rushing into the crowd with their batons up, and he began to run toward them. He was thinking only of Mia. Sprinting now, his one blind thought was that if he could pull her away in time, she might not be hurt too badly. But before he reached her, the commotion resolved itself and he knew she wasn’t yet in any danger. He stopped running and faded back toward the display windows, walking sideways, then backwards to keep his distance in case she turned around.

  The cops converged on the shoplifter. She was a young woman, a teenager probably. She’d made it through the doors before she’d been spotted, and she was struggling with a plainclothes guard who’d come out after her. She broke free of him and punched into the crowd, but by then the off-duty cops had converged on her. The crowd cleared back, giving them a circle of space on the sidewalk. Everyone knew what was coming. The girl was clutching an armful of small black boxes to her chest. She looked at the cops and at the crowd, and then she feinted forward, threw the boxes over the policemen’s white helmets, and turned to sprint for the street.

  She made it three steps before a cop laid her on her back with a baton blow to her throat. Then the rest of them were around her, bringing their batons all the way back and pitching forward as they swung at her. The girl’s screams were lost in the cries of the women scrabbling for the boxes of Black Aria she’d scattered. Some of the vials had broken, and the heavy fragrance of perfume filled the air.

  Carver scanned the swirling crowd until he spotted Mia. She was edging past the screaming girl, toward the Vendôme’s entrance. He could tell she was hesitating, that she wanted to step into the circle and try to stop the beating. There was blood on the sidewalk, droplets of it on the storefront, where it had been flicked back from the ends of the batons. But something more important than the girl was driving Mia tonight. She passed without stopping, and soon was inside the revolving doors, a whirl of polished metal and glass.

  Carver raised his phone to his ear.

  “She’s in,” he said. “Jenner—you there?”

  “Here.”

  “I’m going after her.”

  But first he went to the cops. He wished he had a badge. He loosened his jacket so his weapon would be visible in its shoulder holster, and then he grabbed the nearest officer by his shoulder and swung him around. The kid was wearing a white SFPD crowd helmet. His Plexiglas faceplate was down, and it was speckled with blood. The kid raised his club, but Carver caught his wrist. His eyes shot to the kid’s breast pocket to read the silver nameplate.

  “That’s enough, Wilson. Look at me—you want to put that down.”

  He’d tried to say it the way Jenner would. So calm and low that the kid wouldn’t know if he’d said it, or growled it. And to emphasize it, he twisted the kid’s wrist and squeezed until the baton fell from his grip, clattering onto the pavement between their feet.

  “Robbery and the patrol sergeant are ten-ninety-eight. They’ll be here in a minute. And look at you—look at all of you.”

  “Who the fuck ​—”

  The kid was half-crazed with adrenaline or Dexedrine, but when Carver slapped the side of his helmet, he blinked and looked down. Next to them, the girl had begun shaking, her feet hitting the sidewalk in an arrhythmic seizure. The other cops had stopped and now stood above her, watching Carver.

  He thought of what Mia had been trying to tell him. It hadn’t always been this way. There was something wrong—wrong with the five patrol cops staring at him, with the girl on the ground, with the state of the city and the world they all shared. It hadn’t always been so low. But it had sunk so slowly, the first subsidence so far in the past, he’d never noticed.

  “She resisted, and ​—”

  Carver hit the other side of the kid’s helmet, using the base of his palm like a hammer.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “And call an ambulance.”

  He went for the doors
before any of them could ask another question. He didn’t have to fight to get there: the crowd parted in front of him and closed behind him. There was complete silence until the sirens started on the other side of the square.

  Carver came out of the revolving doors and pushed past a line of saleswomen who had come up to the front to watch the beating. There was Christmas music playing, and soft overhead spotlights picked out the display cases from on high. Handfuls of unset diamonds were scattered beneath each glass countertop. The air was shot with their radiance. An entire wall of Black Aria stood next to the escalators, the boxes individually wrapped in silk organza and tied with red ribbons.

  He spotted Mia on the escalator, going up. She stood backward on the steps, scanning the room below her. Carver turned away before she saw him. Keeping his head down, he went deeper into the store. Only a fool would follow her up there. The escalators were a bottleneck, and she was watching her tail going up them. If her plan was to meet someone on one of the upper floors, she’d be able to do it out of his sight.

  He moved toward the store’s far corner, where the elevators came down from the top-floor restaurant. If she came down the escalators or any of the fire stairs, he wouldn’t see her. But he could see the front doors from here, and he could watch the elevators.

  He looked outside. There was no ambulance yet. The cops had rolled the shoplifter onto her stomach and cuffed her wrists behind her back. He hoped that meant she was still alive.

  His phone started to vibrate, and he answered it.

  “She just came out the back door,” Jenner said. “She’s heading east on O’Farrell.”

  “On foot?”

  “But walking like she means it,” Jenner said.

  Carver was already moving, winding through the store’s intentional labyrinth, searching for the rear exit. It took him a minute to get there. When he reached the sidewalk he started to jog.

  “She just crossed Stockton,” Jenner said. “She’s on the south side of the street and—I see you.”

  “Stay with the car,” Carver said. “Keep our options open.”

  “You have her?”

  “Not yet.”

  He reached Stockton and jaywalked. Most of the off-duty cops had drifted toward the front of the store to see the unconscious girl, and only one man yelled after him. He ignored it, then started jogging again, watching across the street to his right until he saw Mia.

  “I got her now,” he said.

  “Good—I just lost her.”

  He ran across the street so he could tail Mia on the south sidewalk, keeping a hundred feet back. She took a quick right and he could see her through the two sets of corner display windows at the Marshalls department store. She joined a line of people waiting to board a bus.

  “Better start driving,” Carver said. “Pick me up on Market. She’s taking a bus.”

  “This girl isn’t joking,” Jenner said. “What number?”

  “It’s a five, or a five L.”

  “Soon as she’s on board, I’ll come,” Jenner said.

  The bus was already full, and the line to board it moved slowly. Mia was shifting back and forth, perhaps thinking of abandoning the line and going for another taxi. But she stayed where she was, her fare clutched in her right hand. She was the last aboard, and the doors closed behind her.

  Tailing the bus was relatively easy.

  After picking up Carver, Jenner caught up to the bus and followed directly behind it, waiting there whenever it stopped to load and unload passengers. The only risk was that if Mia got out she might see them. But Jenner’s car wasn’t one she’d recognize, and his windows were dark.

  They were moving west now, away from the city center. The buildings grew lower and darker. Dozens of people had exited at the early stops, but Mia hadn’t been among them. The bus jogged to the left and a moment later they were passing through the bell tower shadows beneath St. Ignatius. Not long after that, Golden Gate Park appeared on the left.

  The streets were quiet enough now that Jenner could follow the bus from a block back. When it pulled to the curb at the Fourteenth Avenue stop, Jenner hit the brakes.

  Mia stepped out, keeping her head down. She was out of view as Jenner sped up and passed the bus. He took a right and stopped at the curb. Carver was already getting out.

  “I’ll circle back and tell you what she’s doing,” Jenner said.

  Carver nodded and shut the door, then dialed Jenner’s cell.

  “She’s heading into the park,” Jenner said.

  “All right.”

  At least he’d had fifteen minutes to rest in the car. Now he was running up the hill, stopping behind a parked car to watch for Mia. He saw her for a few seconds in the amber cone of a streetlight, and then she took a footpath that curved into the park through a grove of cypress trees.

  Carver reached the path a minute behind Mia and put his hand against a tree trunk. He closed his eyes to let them adjust to the park’s shadows, and then whispered to Jenner between breaths.

  “Headed along a footpath,” he said. “Near Shoreline Highway.”

  “That’s close to the redwood grove,” Jenner said.

  “I know it.”

  He followed the path in the direction Mia had gone, walking off to the side so that his footsteps were muffled by the grass. He couldn’t see Mia right now, but if she’d stuck to the path, then he knew where she was. She’d be passing fifty feet from the spot where they’d found Hadley Hardgrave’s split and carved body.

  “Why would she be going there?” Jenner asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He went off the path and jogged through the trees until he caught up with the wrought-iron fence that bound the western edge of the rose garden. Then he followed that, at a full sprint, until he came to a wide clearing in the trees that led into the Fourteenth Avenue East Meadow. He stood at the edge of the meadow and looked across it. It was there, in that dew-soaked grass, that they’d found Hadley.

  Of all the places Mia might have come, she chose this spot.

  On the far side of the meadow, the path came out of the redwood grove where it crossed John F. Kennedy Drive. There was a working streetlight above the crosswalk. He knelt in the grass, breathing hard again, and waited. He began to wonder if he’d made the wrong move. She could be meeting someone right now, passing along the information she’d learned tonight at the Irish Bank.

  But before he’d made up his mind to try to creep into the grove, she emerged from the trees, alone. She came to the crosswalk, following the edge of the light’s pale reach, and started along the path to Stow Lake. This time when he followed her, he could keep her in view. She headed up to the boathouse and disappeared behind it. He went to the edge of the lake where he could see over the cattails and across the dark water to the docks. There were rowboats stacked on top of each other along the shore. She walked past them and went out onto the dock. It was quiet enough that he could hear her boot heels clicking on the wooden planks. She knelt down at the end of the dock and reached under it, then came up a moment later with a small cylinder in her hands. He watched as she unscrewed the cap from the cylinder and checked inside it with her fingers. Then she twisted it back together and replaced it.

  She stood on the dock for five minutes, just staring at the water. He wasn’t sure if he could hear her crying or not. Then she turned and retraced her steps, but this time Carver made no move to follow her. He dialed his phone again.

  “Jenner?”

  “Still here.”

  “She just checked a dead drop.”

  “She get anything from it?”

  “I couldn’t see,” Carver said. “She’s headed back out—probably to the bus or a taxi.”

  “You following her?”

  “I need to check the drop, see if she left anything. Where are you?”

  “Back at Fifteenth, where I let you out.”

  “Keep an eye on her when she comes back to Fulton,” Carver said. “She’s coming your
way.”

  “Okay.”

  But Mia didn’t walk out as fast as she’d come in.

  She’d done whatever she’d left her apartment to do, and now her drive was spent. He watched her pass along the path above him. She was hugging herself, walking as if each step cost more than she could pay. When she was gone, and he could no longer hear the drag of her feet on the gravel-strewn path, he got up and came around the shoreline to the boathouse. He went out onto the end of the dock and fished beneath the cold lake water until his fingers found a short length of steel pipe attached to the dock with a spring clip. He pulled the dead drop out of the water, unscrewed the cap, and lit up the inside with his flashlight.

  It was empty.

  He put it back onto its underwater clip and sat on the dock, looking out at the lake as Mia had. After ten minutes, his phone rang and he picked it up. His hands were still wet, but he didn’t care.

  “She’s just sitting at a bus stop on Fulton,” Jenner said.

  “She’s done now,” Carver said. “She’s going home.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Come pick me up. If we take Geary, we can beat her by half an hour.”

  “And then what?” Jenner asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  17

  CARVER CAME INTO his apartment and went to the hall closet. He reached up to the shelf, feeling along it until he touched the leather case that held his backup set of picking tools. These weren’t as good as the ones in his crime scene bag, but he wouldn’t have time to go to the parking garage to get anything from his car. And he didn’t really care how much damage he did to Mia’s lock.

  He left his trench coat and hat on their hooks, then went back to the hallway and crouched in front of Mia’s door. It took him five minutes to open the deadbolt and another twenty seconds on the simpler lock in the doorknob. He put the picks back into his closet, then went across the hall and into Mia’s apartment before he could change his mind.

  “Mia?”

  He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. He closed the door and locked it. Then he went into the living room and sat at the wingback chair by the fire. The window was behind him, and the chair’s back rose above his head. She wouldn’t see him when she came in.