“Karma. A good sign, anyway. What’s he do?”
“Construction, I think. Something physical anyway. Salt-of-the-earth guy.”
“Very cool, Beth. That’s perfect for you, since you’re a pretty salt-of-the-earth person yourself.”
“Well, I’m trying not to load too much expectation onto it. I mean, it’s one night, and speaking of which . . .?”
“What?”
“ ‘What?’ she asks.” Beth lifted her cup and sipped. “I’m really, sincerely hoping you took my advice last week and did not pursue anything to do with your fantasy guy. What was his name again?”
“Peter.” Kate tried a dismissive smile, gone in a flash, then shook her head. “No.” She lifted her own cup, drank distractedly, replaced it carefully on its saucer. “Of course not.”
Beth hung her head, then looked back up. “My God, Katie. What are you thinking?”
“I said nothing happened.”
“Yes, you did. But you may remember that I’m a trained investigator and if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s knowing when someone isn’t telling me the truth.” Beth sat back in her chair, eyeing her friend in disappointment and even anger.
“No, I . . .” Kate began.
“Please, stop. Don’t even start.”
Kate played with her cup.
“This isn’t like when we were teenagers, Kate. Or young adults. Or whenever it was when we played around. What about Ron? What about your kids?”
“It wasn’t anything. There isn’t going to be any fallout around Ron or the kids. And okay, you were right. I mean, it was a mistake. I wish now I hadn’t done it. I really do.”
“And the guy? What about him? He just went along with it?”
Kate gave her a knowing look. “You just said it. He’s a guy, Beth. You know how guys are. What do you think?”
“He’s a married guy, and I think that’s depressing as hell.”
“Well, maybe it is if you think of it that way.”
“I don’t know any other way to think of it. It’s just when I’m marginally entertaining the idea of putting my foot in the relationship waters again, I hear about this and go ‘What am I thinking? Am I an idiot?’ ”
“You’re not an idiot. This was one guy. And he probably regrets it, too.”
“But not enough to have stopped him from doing it in the first place.” Beth found herself getting more and more worked up. To slow herself down, she took a long sip of her coffee, then with exaggerated control lowered it into its saucer.
“I—” she began.
But suddenly, from outside in the main hallway came the booming sound of an explosion, followed quickly by two others, and then a volley of pops, like strings of firecrackers.
Both women turned toward the restaurant’s entrance where now they heard another enormous explosion, then more of the popping sounds, accompanied by the completely unexpected, terrifying, and unmistakable noise of people screaming.
Then Beth was on her feet, reaching behind her back for her service weapon, which she realized too late that she never carried on their walks. Swearing, she turned, looked back at her table. “Get up! Get up!” she yelled at Kate. “Let’s go!”
But another explosion—a grenade blowing up outside the restaurant’s front door, close enough that they felt the impact—froze them where they stood. All around them now, people were out of their seats, pushing, yelling, rushing to the exit, to the outside seating and service area. The shots—for they could be nothing else—rang out in bursts inside the pavilion amidst the by-now continuous screaming and mayhem, as thick smoke wafted its way into the room.
Another volley of shots sounded just outside the restaurant’s door that led to the main indoor pavilion. The giant window by the check-in station shattered and people who hadn’t made it to the exit went down in front of it like sheaves of wheat.
A man in green camo, his head completely covered and his face concealed by a black mask, now appeared in the doorway. Much to her horror, Beth saw that he was holding an assault weapon, leveling it at chest height.
Kate and Beth stood next to each other, together, twenty feet in front of him. Beth turned, intending to tackle Kate and get them underneath the line of fire.
11
THE WORD REACHED TADICH’S BEFORE Peter got his sand dabs and it had no sooner registered than he left some cash on his table and queued up to get outside, although right from the start it was terribly slow going. When he finally made it out to the sidewalk, he realized that all traffic westward was at a dead stop, so he turned up north with the idea that he could get to his firm’s office and find out what was going on from the relative safety of the high-rise.
But whatever plans he tried to make felt like a jumble. He wasn’t able to get control of his thoughts.
Christ! Was Kate dead? Could she just die randomly like that? Out of any context, simply here then gone?
Without a doubt, she had still been in the building when the attack had begun. Even at a quick glance, he thought it had been obvious that the two women had settled in. But even if they’d called for their check when he’d seen them, there was no chance that they could have paid it and gotten out in the very few minutes between when he’d left and the firing started.
People all around were using the word terror in all its forms. Here in San Francisco? It was, he thought, unimaginable.
But they had no doubt thought that in Paris as well. As they had in Mumbai. And New York. And San Bernardino and Orlando. And everywhere else.
Sirens—an uncountable number, an endless wailing scream—were cutting through the noise of the crowd and blending with the thwack of helicopters overhead.
Cutting through the crowd, Peter made decent progress. He got to his building in six minutes by his watch and was surprised to encounter people fighting their way out. Against that current, he finally made it to an elevator in which he was the only passenger going up.
The reception area was deserted, although around the corner in the hallway he could see that some of the secretaries were still in their cubicles, glued to their monitors.
Down to his left, Theresa wasn’t at her station. Peter half-ran down to his office, where the door stood ajar, and stepped inside.
Theresa was standing by his floor-to-ceiling windows, outside of which the sky had gone black with smoke.
Hearing him, she turned, bringing her hands up to her tear-stained face. “Oh God, thank God,” she said, and in three or four steps crossed the office to where Peter stood, where he’d closed the door behind him. She put her arms around him, and he held her for a long moment until she pulled away enough to look up into his face. “I thought you were down there. You said you were going there, didn’t you? The Ferry Building?”
“I changed my mind. I went to Tadich, and I’m fine. Any word on what’s happened down there?”
She backed away a step. “They’re saying it was a terrorist attack. At least four men with hand grenades and assault weapons. Lots of dead and injured. And come over, have you seen this?” She went back to the window, to the three round depressions in the thick, reinforced glass.
Following her, he took in the bullet holes. But scary and immediate as they were, they didn’t prepare him for the view down below, where the Ferry Building was still enveloped in black smoke and the occasional lick of bright orange flame.
“I am so afraid,” Theresa said. She turned back into his arms.
* * *
One of the paralegals in Ron and Geoff’s firm came running down the hallway, yelling. “Somebody’s shooting up the Ferry Building!”
Seconds later, Ron was out in the conference room with most of the rest of the firm. The television set was already on, and everybody was straining to see and pick up details amid the smoke and the panicked throngs along the Embarcadero.
Second nature, he pulled his cell phone from his belt and punched up Kate’s number. The call went straight to her voicemail. Of course it would, he remem
bered, since this was her day to walk with Beth. She wouldn’t have her phone with her. He checked his watch. It was 11:21. They probably wouldn’t be done yet, and even if they were, they sometimes went out to lunch after. Nevertheless, he tried their home number as well, left another message asking Kate to call when she got it, no matter what. Just to make sure he reached her—she often left her phone on in her purse but didn’t pick up—he texted her as well. “Please call immediately. Urgent.”
Wherever she was, when she heard about the Ferry Building, she’d call him anyway. He was sure of that.
Something like twenty eternal minutes passed with no response from Kate. Telling himself that there was no reason she would have been at or anywhere near the Ferry Building, Ron finally thought to put in a call to Beth’s cell phone, where again he left a message and then a text. He then tried Beth’s number at work, but the police phone lines were jammed.
Out in his reception area again, the news was not good. Apparently, the four assailants had all taken their own lives after blowing through their grenades and ammunition; not counting them, the casualties numbered fifty-four dead and 141 injured. Both numbers were expected to increase.
The television commentators were urging people to stay away and give the emergency teams and vehicles room to access the scene and do their work. Nevertheless, it was utter chaos everywhere the cameras looked, massed humanity on the sidewalks and the streets blocked with cars well into the city proper.
He tried his wife again, left messages with both of his children for when they got out of school that he was all right, but that they should call him as soon as possible and come straight home after their classes. He didn’t want to panic them by asking them if they’d heard from their mother. He tried to convince himself that the silence from her end was due to the unusual amount of traffic on the phone lines, clogging the cables or the airwaves.
Or something.
By the time he tried to take the elevator down to the building’s garage, it was jammed with people leaving work. Standing behind the mob in the packed hallway, he watched the doors open and close in front of him four times before he gave up and walked down the twelve flights. In the stairwell, the nervous shoulder-to-shoulder herd probably wouldn’t let him get to the garage any faster than the elevator, but at least this way he was moving.
When he pulled out of the parking garage entrance, he was stopped by cars immobile in the street, some of them seemingly abandoned, people walking between the lanes. After an interminable wait—ten minutes? fifteen?—he finally squeezed into an opening and made a right turn toward his home way out near Fillmore.
It took him another twenty minutes, the traffic slowly thinning as he got farther away from downtown. Scanning the cars parked on his street, he caught sight of his wife’s green Volvo in its usual spot. Which didn’t mean anything except that it might.
He pulled into his driveway, ran up to the front door, first knocking on it, then letting himself in with his key. Inside, he listened to their landline voicemail on the kitchen phone and only heard himself asking Kate to call him soonest.
The cell phone buzzed at his belt and in his haste to pull it from its holster, he lost control of the damn thing. It fell out of his hand and onto the floor with a clatter.
“Shit! Just a second.” Finally, he had it. “Kate?”
“No. Dad? It’s Aidan. Isn’t Mom with you? Is she okay?”
“I’ve been trying to get to her. She was out walking with Beth and probably doesn’t have her phone.”
“But you haven’t heard from her?”
“Not yet, no.” Best, he still thought, to appear unconcerned. “They’re probably halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, oblivious to any of this. Have you gotten in touch with Janey?”
“Yeah. I’m on my way over to get her now.”
“Good. Then straight home, okay? Both of you.”
“Got it. Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Is this really happening? I mean, we’ve been watching it at school . . .”
“Yeah,” Ron said. “It’s happening. Just get home, would you?”
“Will do.”
* * *
To Ginny Tully, Beth’s daughter, her mother’s absence when she got home from school was not by itself a matter of grave concern. After all, her mom was a cop, and the terrorist attack at the Ferry Building was going to lead to a mass call-up of law enforcement. Ginny had no doubt that’s what was going on. Her mother was on emergency duty.
What felt vaguely wrong to Ginny was that her mother had left neither a note nor a phone message telling her what was up. Of course, Beth knew that her daughter would figure it out without any message from her, but it wasn’t like her not to give her one anyway. Usually, even if she’d just gone shopping, she would let Ginny know where she was and roughly when she would get home. And at least, her mother would check her phone and text messages from Ginny and get back to her, but that hadn’t happened. Not yet, anyway.
Still, after she got home she sat in dead-eyed shock, mesmerized by the TV and the horrific images. The good news was that it seemed that all of the assailants were now dead, and with every minute that passed, the likelihood decreased that there would be another attack in another location in the city.
But the bad news, far outweighing the good—the death toll was now up to sixty-seven, not including the four terrorists, with a hundred and fifty-six injured. To Ginny, these seemed impossibly huge numbers, although she knew, somewhere in her brain, that the number of dead was smaller than in the Paris attack. On the tube, the first responders—cops, firemen, ambulances, and paramedics—filled the screen from every angle. Of course, that’s where her mother would have gone, where she probably was right now, helping out, securing the crime scenes.
Still . . .
Although the practice was heavily discouraged, putting in a call to her mother’s partner was acceptable under certain conditions, and Ginny finally decided that this was one of them. Steeling herself, she tore herself from the television and punched in Ike’s number.
“McCaffrey.” From the ambient noise in the background, he was in the middle of it, too.
“Hey, Ike, it’s Ginny.”
“Who? Talk loud. It’s bedlam down here.”
“It’s Ginny, Ike. I’m trying to locate my mom. Have you had any word from her?”
“No. I thought she might have gone down to pick you up at school. She’s not with you?”
“No. And she’s not answering her phone.”
“I know. I’ve been trying her all day.” He paused. “But I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. The phones are all whacked out. And it’s crazy down here.”
“Are you at the Ferry Building?”
“Just outside. But she could be right across from me on the other end and I wouldn’t know it. Today’s her day off, right? Remember?”
“Okay, but it’s not like her to be off her phone. Especially with something like this going on. She’d want me to know she was okay. And vice versa.”
“Yeah, well, all right. I’ll try to hook up with her down here, and I’ll make sure she gets back to you the minute I reach her. But it might really be a while, Gin. We barely have a command center set up down here. The structure’s kind of fallen apart. She’ll turn up. You just stay cool by your phone. And hey, if she gets to you, have her call me, too, huh?”
* * *
Alan Shaw was working on a remodel out in the Avenues. The residents had moved out while that process was going on and today he’d sent his two subs on this job—Ryan and Felipe—over to another site while he finished up the taping on the new drywall they’d put up around the living room. Alan considered one of the big pluses about working alone was that he didn’t have to listen to the radio blasting all day long. There was something profoundly peaceful and satisfying in just going about your work, making sure you got it right, without the blast and bleat of music or political commentary.
He finished up today’s work at a
few minutes past six, drove his F-150 home through dense fog to his cottage out on Forty-First, almost to the beach and the Cliff House. His place shared half of a lot with another tiny house that stood in front of it, closer to the street. After showering and shaving, he put on a clean pair of jeans and an ironed shirt, then after a moment of hesitation grabbed one of his two sports jackets. On the way back out to his car, he noticed that the roses along the path from the driveway to his door were in full bloom, and he took out his Swiss Army knife and cut half a dozen perfect specimens, all red, whittling away the thorns.
Ten minutes later, seven o’clock sharp, he found a miraculous parking spot on Lake, the same block as Beth’s duplex, and backed into it. Checking his watch for the tenth time, he grabbed the roses and opened his door.
He still didn’t have a clear idea of what he and Beth were going to do. He’d just asked her if she’d want to go out and she’d said yes and he’d supposed that he should probably take her someplace for dinner where they could talk and get to know each other a little bit more. A quiet place with decent food.
But he was seriously out of practice—he hadn’t had a date in almost a year, and the last one had been a complete disaster with some stoner who’d asked him out, or rather in, since she’d tried to snare him into her bedroom before they’d said more than a few dozen words. Which in her case he did not find to be a turn-on. So tonight he was nervous about the etiquette, whether, for example, Beth might see even the roses as too presumptuous or silly or something.
Well, he’d find out soon enough.
Beth lived upstairs in a duplex that looked like every other one on the street. Double checking the address at the bottom of the steps—this was the place—he huffed out a quick breath and hit the steps. Pushing the button by the door, he heard the chime echo in the house.
But nobody came.
Fatal Page 8
