The Vig

by John Lescroart

  Hardy excused himself to go to the bathroom.

  “I appreciate the last meal,” Rusty said.

  Abe nodded, noncommittal. “Your nickel.”

  “I’ve heard stories about Mexican jails, you know. Where it’s just like a hotel. I mean, you buy your food, have women sent in, same as a hotel. Just depends on how much money you have.”

  Abe sucked the meat from the tail of a shrimp. “That’s nice,” he said. “And you’ve got money, right?” He drank some beer. “Though I don’t think you’ll be there too long.”

  “Yeah, well, you gotta make the best of the cards you’re dealt.”

  Glitsky didn’t pay much attention. He ate as though he was hungry. Hardy came back up to the table.

  “You got him?” Abe asked.

  Hardy nodded and Abe got up. “Later,” he said.

  “Personable guy,” Rusty said, looking after him. “Very personable.”

  Hardy picked up his fork. “I don’t think he likes you.”

  With two shrimp cocktails, two beers and a cup of coffee inside him, Rusty felt good, but Hardy wasn’t being much company. Abe had been gone about a half hour. Rusty moved his chair back into the shade of the umbrella over their table. It was still hot, but the sun was moving lower.

  “What’s taking him so long?”

  “Think about it. You in a hurry?”

  Rusty smiled. “No, I guess not. But he could’ve just taken me straight in.”

  “Not really. He had a little explaining.” He looked up the street. “Here they come.”

  A couple of guardia with their green uniforms and submachine guns were following a few steps behind Glitsky. Next to him walked a very tall, skinny man in a black suit, white shirt, electric-blue tie.

  “A regular party,” Rusty said.

  The guardia stood on the sidewalk. Glitsky and the tall man pulled up chairs. “This is Lieutenant Mantrillo,” Abe said. He turned to Hardy. “We’ve been having a nice talk.”

  Up close, Mantrillo’s face was sallow and pocked. He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and threw them onto the table. Several other patrons looked over.

  “Do you speak English?” Rusty asked.

  Mantrillo nodded. “Pretty good.”

  He smiled and pointed a finger at Hardy. “This guy’s got a gun on him. Right now. Under that jacket.”

  Mantrillo’s black eyes flared in his sad face. Good, Rusty thought, it was the reaction he had hoped for. Mantrillo turned to Hardy, back to Glitsky, who shook his head wearily.

  “He came with us voluntarily,” Abe said, “like I told you.”

  Rusty was getting into the performance. He shook his head back and forth. “No! Check him! I came with them because I thought it was my only chance to get away from them. They’ve had a gun on me all day!” Rusty met Mantrillo’s eyes. “Lieutenant, they’ve got the gun. They’re breaking your laws, not me.”

  Damn! he was thinking, I am good. Just like in court. He looked again at Hardy. “Please, check him.”

  Mantrillo didn’t have to move. Hardy stood up, unsnapped a few buttons, and lifted his jacket away from his body. He turned all the way around. “Lieutenant, I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Hardy said. He looked down at Rusty. “Too many beers, buddy. Ain’t no gun here.”

  Mantrillo was pushing up, reaching for the handcuffs. “Let’s go,” he said. “We will get the …”

  But it was impossible! Hardy had the gun. He had been with him the whole time except …

  “The bathroom!” he cried out. “He left it in the bathroom!”

  Hardy smiled at him. Rusty whirled, or tried to whirl, to run back and check for himself—Hardy had stashed the gun to set him up for this—but Mantrillo grabbed him by his good wrist.

  He heard Glitsky say, “The poor boy’s deluded.”

  Mantrillo was starting to pull him around, get the other wrist. “Let’s go.” Roughly now.

  He pulled back, came free. “No! No, you can’t do this—”

  He backed up into another table. The customer turned around. “Hey, watch it!”

  Hardy was coming around the side of him, cutting him off. He stepped forward and grabbed a knife from the table with his good hand. He tipped the table up, spilling everything, shoving it at Glitsky and Mantrillo. He swung the knife at Hardy. The guardia had come up into the eating area, behind Mantrillo. There was only one way out through the other tables, and Rusty broke for it, vaulting the low fence, sprinting up the sidewalk.

  With the confusion around the tables, Rusty got a good start. Mantrillo blew on his whistle. The two guardia were pounding down the pavement after him, blowing their own whistles, blocking the crowd aside. Several people were on the ground.

  Hardy, his foot killing him, was trying to keep up behind Mantrillo and Glitsky. More guardia had appeared from the narrow streets leading back into the city.

  It was too crowded. There was a sound like firecrackers and screaming ahead, people lying down now, getting off the sidewalk onto the sand. Far ahead of him a sea of bodies still was visible, parting to let the runners through.

  Now Hardy saw Rusty, maybe a hundred yards ahead, suddenly appear on the beach. The crowd on the sidewalk must have pushed him out into the open. Either that, or Rusty thought they were slowing him down. Breaking his stride, slogging through the sand, Rusty threw a glance over his shoulder, around the sunbathers and vendors.

  Glitsky and Mantrillo were twenty yards in front of him, now crossing the sand themselves. Hardy took the short fall off the pavement. A dozen guardia were crossing the beach.

  Rusty got to the hard sand near the water and turned, backtracking, up toward Hardy. But that area had pretty much cleared with everybody coming up to see what all the excitement was about. Rusty ran along, silhouetted against an orange evening sky on the nearly deserted stretch of the beach.

  More firecrackers seemed to be going off everywhere, and Rusty cut into the water, back up, running with his legs high.

  Another burst cut a line in the sand coming up to him, and he stopped, abruptly. He started to raise his hand up, his other hand, the one in the sling. He half turned, and a string of cherry bombs went off fifty yards up the beach to Hardy’s right.

  Rusty Ingraham lay in a heap. When Hardy got to him, Mantrillo and Glitsky were kneeling on the sand. The lieutenant had turned him onto his back, and the wash of a wave was retreating from him in a pink foam. “The dumb shit,” Glitsky said. Hardy took the weight off his hurt foot and went down to one knee. Rusty opened his eyes. He stared at the sky, gradually focused on Hardy. “Hey, Diz,” he said, “don’t let ‘em tell you gamblers always die broke.” He tried his courtroom smile. “I’m loaded.”

  “Where is it, Rusty?” Hardy asked. “The money?”

  He closed his eyes, opened them. “I tell you, I lose the leverage,” he said. He started to laugh, then coughed once. His face froze in that rictus, and then his eyes, still open, weren’t seeing anything.

  EPILOGUE

  Marcel Lanier put a leg over the corner of Abe Glitsky’s desk. “You’ll be happy about this,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Louis Baker.”

  Abe put his pencil down. “Louis is back at Quentin.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “That makes me happy?”

  “No. What’ll make you happy is you know how the D.A. didn’t go on the Holly Park thing—no evidence he killed Dido?”

  Abe suppressed a small smile. “Yeah, justice prevailed.”

  “And you don’t think he did it anyway?”

  Abe shrugged. “Evidence talks, shit walks. Not that I’m burning a candle for Louis Baker, but he looked better for Maxine Weir than he ever did for Dido.”

  Lanier got a little defensive. “He looked okay for Dido.”

  “Well, hey, Marcel, this is America. Let’s pretend if you can’t prove it, he didn’t do it, huh?”

  “Well, he didn’t, is the point.”

&
nbsp; Abe leaned back in his chair. “No shit.”

  “‘Nother guy, street name of Samson, took over Dido’s cut and seems he stepped on a runner—this kid called Lace. Where these people get their names, Abe?”

  “They make ‘em up, Marcel. So what happened?”

  “So Lace evidently got this guy’s gun, Samson’s, and being aced out of the cut, had no place to go, so he shoots Samson. No mystery, does it in front of about forty people, two of whom remember seeing something about it. But two’s okay. I can live with two.”

  “And?”

  “Ballistics matches the gun with the one did Dido. So how do you like that?”

  “Lace—the kid—killed Dido?”

  “No. Samson did. It was his gun. He did it to take over the territory. Timed it slick, figured we’d lay it on Baker.”

  “Which we did.”

  “But didn’t nail him for it, did we? Score one for the good guys.”

  Abe looked out the window at the October fog. It was late in the day. He tapped his pencil on his desk. “If you say so, Marcel. If you say so.”

  The trees across the street, at the border to Golden Gate Park, bent in the freshening wind. Hardy pulled a Bass Ale for a customer and limped up to the front of the bar where he’d put his stool, where Frannie sat with a club soda.

  She looked at her watch. “Ten minutes. Where’s my brother?”

  Hardy reached over and took her hand. “He’ll be here. He’s always here.”

  Hardy had been back three weeks. He had told Jane. Jane had met someone in Hong Kong and was going to tell him. They had laughed about it. They had also gone to bed, cried about it, put it to rest. Friends. No doubt forever. Maybe.

  He squeezed Frannie’s hand. She was showing now. Still radiant, blooming. Sometimes, lately, Hardy hadn’t known at all what to do with it. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Okay. Nervous. Do you think he knows?”

  He squeezed her hand again. “I think he suspects.”

  “Do you think it’s too soon?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m glad you’re sure. I kind of need you to be sure.”

  Hardy watched the wind bend the trees some more. The fog was swirling ten feet away outside the picture window in the near dusk. The Traveling Wilburys were on the jukebox, singing ‘bout last night. Hardy thought of last night at Frannie’s just kind of wondering if she would like to be married to him.

  Remembering how she had answered him, he slid off the stool and stood on his good foot and leaned over the bar, kissing her. “I’m sure,” he said.

  Read on for a preview

  of John Lescroart’s

  riveting novel

  The Hunt Club

  Available from Signet

  in January 2007

  Although he was now considered an official hero, Inspector Devin Juhle was coming off a very bad time. Six months ago, he and his partner, Shane Manning, were on their way to talk to a witness in one of their investigations at two in the afternoon, when they’d picked up an emergency call from dispatch—a report that somebody was shooting up a homeless encampment under the Cesar Chavez Street freeway overpass. As it happened, they were six blocks away and were the first cops on the scene.

  Manning was driving, and no sooner than he had pulled their unmarked city-issue Plymouth into the no-man’s-land beneath the overpass, a man stepped out from behind a concrete pillar about sixty feet away and leveled a shotgun at the car.

  “Down! Down!” Juhle had screamed as Manning was jamming into park, slamming on the brakes. One hand was unsnapping his holster and the other already on the door’s handle, and Juhle ducked and hurled his body against the door, swinging it open and getting below the dash just as he heard the blast of the scattergun and the simultaneous explosion of the windshield above him, which covered him with pebbles of safety glass. Another shotgun blast, and then Juhle was out of the car on the asphalt, rolling, trying to get behind a tire for shelter.

  “Shane!” he yelled for his partner. “Shane!”

  Nothing.

  Peering under the car’s chassis—he remembered all of it as one picture, though the images were in different directions, so it couldn’t have been—he saw two bodies down on the ground by a cardboard structure and behind them a half dozen or so people crouched in the lee of one of the concrete buttresses that supported the overpass, penned in so they couldn’t escape. At the same time, the man with the gun had retreated behind the pillar again. To the extent that Juhle was thinking at all and not just reacting, he thought the killer was reloading. But it was his only chance to get an angle and save himself and maybe these other people as well.

  He bolted for the low stump of a tree that sat in the middle of the asphalt. It shouldn’t have been there—Caltrans should have uprooted the thing before they poured, but they hadn’t. Now there it was and he’d reach it if he could. Running low, then diving and rolling, he got to it in two or three seconds, enough time for the shooter, who had come out in the open again, to fire his next round, which pocked into the stump in front of him and sprayed him with wood chips and pulp.

  Juhle, on his stomach and with the side of his face and body pressed flat to the ground, knew that the stump didn’t give him six inches of clearance and that the man was advancing now, sensing his advantage. He was still probably sixty or seventy feet away—and coming on fast. Once he got to forty feet or so, the shooter’s height would give him the angle he needed. The next shotgun blast and Juhle would be history.

  There wasn’t any time for thought. Juhle rolled a full rotation, extended his gun gripped in both hands out in front of him, drew a bead, and squeezed off two shots. The man stumbled, crumbled, dropped like a bag of cement, and did not move.

  Juhle called out for his partner again and again got no reply. Still in a daze, his adrenaline surging, he eventually got to his feet, his gun never leaving the downed man. In half steps, he warily crab-walked sideways toward him, with his gun extended across his body in a two-handed stance. When he got to his target, he saw that he had made the luckiest shot of his life. One bullet had hit the man between the eyes.

  Which should have been the end of it. After all, Juhle had six witnesses to everything. Manning was dead, killed by the first blast. The car was a shot-up mess. It was clearly self-defense at the very least and heroism by any standard.

  But not necessarily.

  Not in San Francisco, where every police shooting is suspect. One of the homeless in the encampment, a highly intoxicated diagnosed schizophrenic, insisted that police had run up to the deceased and executed him for no reason. The fact that he claimed there had been five such officers and that he maintained that the man had not had a shotgun—in spite of Manning’s death by shotgun blast—didn’t even slow down the right-minded public nuisances of the antipolice crowd.

  Beyond that, Juhle’s shot was so perfect that it led Byron Diehl, one of the city’s supervisors, to opine that perhaps the killing had, in fact, been an overreaction by an overzealous and enraged cop. Perhaps it had, in point of fact, been an execution. Nobody could hit a moving man with a pistol between the eyes at fifty or sixty feet. That just wasn’t a possible shot. The man with the gun might have already surrendered, laid his gun down, and Juhle—out of control because of the murder of his partner—had walked up and shot him point-blank.

  The other witnesses? Please. Most of them wanted the shooter dead, anyway. Plus, they were naturally afraid of the police. If Juhle told them they’d better back up his story or else, they’d say anything he wanted. They were simply unreliable and their testimonies worthless. Except for the schizophrenic, of course, who was struggling with his substance abuse issues. The idiocy was so palpable that it may have been fun to watch but not to be part of.

  So Juhle spent the next three months on administrative leave, under the shadow of a murder charge. He testified four times before different city and police commissions, not including a form
al session defending his actions and confronting Diehl in the chamber of the board of supervisors. He was asked to demonstrate his prowess with a handgun on various police ranges in San Francisco, Alameda, and San Mateo counties, where they had pop-up targets that demanded speed as well as accuracy.

  Finally, a couple of months ago, he’d been cleared of any wrongdoing. Returning to his place in homicide, though—Manning was of course gone forever—he found himself newly partnered with an obviously political hire, Gumqui Shiu, whose ten-year career didn’t seem to have included much real police work. He’d been an instructor at the Academy, worked in the photo lab, and been assigned to various other details, where his progress had been rapid but unmarked by any real accomplishment. He clearly had juice somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where it came from.

  This morning, Juhle was at his desk. Insult to injury, he still had his right arm in the sling from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery—three little holes. His doctor had told him it was an in-and-out-in-the-same-day procedure, little more than an office visit. He’d be pitching Little League practice again in no time.

  Not.

  Like he ever wanted to do that again, anyway. Little League was pretty much the reason he’d thrown out the damn arm in the first place, letting his macho devils con him into a little mano a mano with Doug Malinoff—perfect baseball name—the manager of Devin’s son Eric’s team, the Hornets. Doug-was a good guy, really, if maybe slightly more competitive than your typical major-leaguer during the playoffs, talking Assistant Coach Devin into playing a game of “burnout” for the enjoyment of the kids. Give them a taste of what it’s like to really want to win.

  Burnout’s a simple game for simple adults and preadolescent boys: You throw a baseball as hard as you can starting from, say, sixty feet. You use regular gloves, no extrapadded catcher’s mitts allowed, and you move a step closer after each round. First one to give up loses. Devin was no slouch as an athlete, having played baseball through college. He still had a pretty good gun of an arm. Nevertheless, he gave up, conceding defeat, after seven rounds, his opponent nearly knocking him down on his last throw from thirty-five feet. Malinoff had played shortstop in minor-league ball, made it to double-A. He could throw a baseball through a plywood fence.