But the yips I heard weren’t only in my mind. They were getting louder, which meant someone had let the dogs out of the house.
Despite the fear choking me, I managed to let out a scream, a scream so loud and long it hurt my own ears and turned my throat raw.
My attacker dropped back. The knife clattered to the floor and his footfalls faded as I fell to my knees, retching. I heard nothing but blood roaring in my ears and the furious pounding of my heart. I huddled against the ground and gripped the knife in my hand, just in case.
But it wasn’t only my heart pounding—footsteps closed in, stopping next to my head. A hand landed on my back and I shrieked.
“Belle?”
Terrified, I looked up, expecting to see him again. “Don, thank God you—”
“What the hell happened? Who did this to you?” he demanded.
“I don’t know. He ran out the door. But please don’t—”
Then Don was gone, whistling for the dogs.
I should’ve saved my breath. Don wasn’t the type to cocoon me when he had a chance to inflict damage on someone who’d dared attack me. Part of me feared what Don would do to the guy; part of me wished I could watch him do it.
I remained crouched on the floor, knife clutched in my hand. Too stunned to cry. Too scared to move.
When Don returned, huffing and puffing, anger contorting his face, slamming the door hard, I knew he hadn’t caught the guy.
I launched myself at him. His strong arms encircled me and held me tight. “Oh, God. Don. If you hadn’t—”
“Shhh. Baby, I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”
After years together and countless questions from people asking how we ended up together, I couldn’t explain it. No one had ever looked out for me the way Don did. No one had ever loved me the way Don did. He’d do whatever it took to make me happy, and I’d learned firsthand how broad his definition of “whatever” was.
Once I stopped trembling, he eased back to look me over. His hard gaze zoomed to the cut on my neck. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s just a scratch.”
His jaw tightened. “You calmed down enough to call the police?”
Don hated cops. Hated them. That he planned to dial 911 meant he was worried. I lifted my hand to touch him, to soothe him, and I’d forgotten I still held the knife. He didn’t even flinch with the blade so close to his face, just kept his eyes on mine as he unwrapped my fingers from the handle and tossed the knife to the floor. “It’s okay. We’ll get the guy who did this to you.”
“No cops.”
“Belle. You’re not thinking straight. We have to let the police know what happened.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Jesus Christ. The fucker cut you! He could’ve killed you. I can’t believe you’d let him go free. What if the kids’d been home, huh? Would you be as careless with their safety as you are with your own?”
I shook him, hoping it’d clear his brain. “Don. Listen to me. This wasn’t a random attack.”
He froze. “What?”
“The guy… knew me. He knew my name. He knew about my visit to Rosemary the night before the execution, and he somehow suspected that she gave me—”
“For Christ’s sake, Belle,” Don roared, “that’s ten times worse. If this guy is gunning for you, then we definitely have to report this.”
Silence.
We stared at each other. Measuring each other.
After a minute or so, Don threw up his hands in defeat. “Fine. No cops. But it proves I’m right. You can’t go to the memorial, Belle. No way. This has gotten too goddamn dangerous.”
The dogs barking and scratching at the door took his attention away from me.
We both knew his blustering was just that. I had no choice but to attend Rosemary’s memorial service, even though I was pretty sure whoever attacked me would be there too.
11
MATTHEW PEARL
Waking up, sometimes you wonder whether you’re really that godawful person you were the day before. But sometimes nothing so profound finds a way into your head—dizzy, used up, in the morning you think, What the—? Then, nothing.
Jon Nunn, in these years since Rosemary’s death, had to try to remember himself every single creaky morning of his life. For years, he’d alternate days filled by the righteous urge to save someone (typical for an ex-cop feeling out civilian life) and days darkened by the urge to strangle and bust up someone bad. Stan Ballard, who’d stolen his wife, was one imagined victim, sure, but sometimes just anyone would have done fine, anyone blamable for the happiness and freedom that came with not being him.
The hard guilt radiated from Rosemary’s death (No, her execution, jackass, his unrested brain would nag him), but it had actually gone further by now. Having found no satisfaction on that score, it traveled back to Christopher Thomas’s murder, as though Jon were responsible for that one too, for stuffing Thomas in an iron maiden, and responsible for all the chains of calamities in the world before and after the death of Rosemary. (Execution, Jon boy, ex-e-cution.)
It had started in small spurts, hardly noticeable a couple of years after… after all of it had settled in. All of it gone: his career, his wife, his balance. He’d begun to take walks where Christopher had been seen in the weeks before his murder. He’d stroll the streets around the museum where the art types would meet up with other art types for lunches, coffees, trysts. He’d drive to the grocery store where Rosemary did her shopping for the kids and sit in movie theaters where she had gone to cry in private and to get away from everything. Who would stop his meanderings? He wasn’t flashing any guns or fake badges, he wasn’t womanizing and manipulating the way Chris Thomas once did, he was just walking, talking, listening, looking. He was using up time between meetings. Better than drinking; anyone would have to admit that.
There were those parts of the city that the tourists pretended not to see on their way to the Golden Gate: the Tenderloin, the Mission, the dark corners of old Chinatown, where the city felt real and feral, like the New York City nobody remembered correctly from the 1970s. And sometimes the city didn’t feel real at all—like Night of the Living Dead. It was as if the worst of the derelicts and addicts had some unspoken arrangement to stay in their zones, except sometimes they’d be seen roaming around downtown alongside shopping tourists, looking like lost zombies escaped from their pens.
Or was it Jon Nunn who was the escaped zombie?
Nunn saw a sign he tried to make sense of like a riddle of the meaning of life on one of the streets where small residences backed onto dangerously vacant lots. IF YOU DEFECATE ON MY HOUSE AGAIN, I WILL COME OUT AND SHOOT YOU WITH MY GUN.
What the—
Ex-detective Nunn was still learning to see San Francisco from a civilian side. San Fran was seen as a tolerant place, but inside it was a city with judging, searing eyes everywhere. The hordes of homeless, who took up whole city blocks in the zombie districts, even seemed to judge. Most of all, the police he once knew. They judged the harshest.
“Jon, you know I can’t help you.”
“I’m just taking a walk,” Nunn had answered on that day, six years after turning in his badge, almost smiling. Help me? No one can help me until I know. “I’m just walking around,” he told the other cop.
“Yeah, here you’re walking,” replied Todd Drainer, a vice cop Nunn had run two or three cases with fifteen years before. They both turned their eyes in unison to the worst of the run-down buildings lining the crumbling Chinatown block that Nunn had turned onto. A million miles, it seemed, from Jon Nunn’s apartment. Yet, here gave him some hope for peace.
“I heard there’s a fortune-cookie factory here,” Nunn had said, as if he’d only just learned of its existence. “The tourists like it.” He turned to face Drainer. “What’re you doing here, Drainer?”
“Scaring up some cooperation for a case,” Drainer said. “And unless you’ve become a crack addict instead of a raging drunk—” Nunn gave h
im a dark look. Maybe he was about to sock Drainer in the face, maybe not. “Sorry, Nunn. Didn’t mean anything. My partner had a hard time after he retired, would wander around the red-light district like he was goddamn Batman and Robin. Fortune-cookie factory is that way, I think. I’d rather not ever see you back here.”
“I’d rather not see you either, Todd.”
Drainer had snickered and mumbled to himself as he walked away, and Nunn was sorry he hadn’t socked him.
Nunn had gone through the back of the factory, stood in a dingy hallway watching a room filled with coughing and smoke, indistinct bodies in slow-motion decay. Nothing had changed from the last time he’d been here, years ago, looking for Christopher Thomas, who had been seen here several times in the months before his murder. Why? If he had a drug habit, that could have opened up all kinds of trouble for him. But the witness pool in this neck of the woods was too unreliable and high to make much out of this lead during the investigation or the trial.
In the meantime, a man known as Hong, the main drug dealer for this area, and a man not unknown to fencing anything—a television, a car, a piece of rare art—was arrested with a few of his men on drug charges. Nunn had pleaded with Drainer to hold off on the raid while he was investigating Thomas, but Drainer went ahead. Hong’s coded ledgers noted payments to a scribbled name that looked like Odd Body. Two right before the date of Chris’s disappearance. Nunn wondered if there was some connection. He wasn’t sure what but had ideas. He had combed through the records of the museum and found that several pieces of art had gone missing in the years before Chris’s death. If he had been in deep with Hong, was he keeping himself alive by paying him back in stolen artwork, or was Hong fencing it for him? Nunn couldn’t find evidence that Chris had been anything more than a recreational drug user. Hong wouldn’t say a word, then was stabbed in the neck in a holding cell by another prisoner with an old grievance and bled out. It had been a dead end then. It was still a dead end. For now.
Nunn had never turned up anyone named Odd Body either, though he’d looked.
Jon Nunn had felt the empty eyes of some of the habituals mark him and follow him out when he had passed through pretending he was looking for a lost drug-addled uncle.
When he got home one of those aimless days, something else had clicked in him. And Nunn had put a call in to Regina Cooper.
No, Jon Nunn wasn’t running the case again—the case was running him, completely.
“I’m not buying,” Regina said when she saw him there with that stubborn look on his face.
Nunn held up his seltzer with cranberry in a short glass. The favorite drink of the ex-drinker because it looked like something that could contain alcohol. Inconspicuous. “You won’t return my calls.”
“I should start changing up my haunt,” said Regina, frowning a luminous, humorous frown as she took her usual place at the Mad Dog in the Fog, and her usual Jameson neat and a Bud were placed in front of her without her asking. “You remember something about real life, don’t you? Imagine how much I’d get done if I tried to entertain every dying ex-cop.” Regina Cooper had written several books about the big cases her office had helped crack during her time as chief medical examiner of San Francisco. They were considered masterworks in the field of forensic sciences, and she had become a staple on the cable crime show circuit before quickly tiring of it. During that time, a television network had bought the rights to her life and hired a former swimsuit model to play a funny and quirky version of her, though Regina was funnier, quirkier, and smarter in real life.
“What have you heard? I’m not dying,” Nunn said, hearing himself laugh under the rumbling din of the Irish pub. It smelled like cardboard and old beer, the wood below his hand knotty and warped from slipshod cleaning.
“Yes, you are, of boredom, if you’ve called me. ‘For a good time, call the chief medical examiner of the city of San Francisco.’”
“You know why I called,” Nunn said soberly.
Regina closed her eyes shook her head. “Na-ah. No way, my friend.”
“What does it hurt?”
“To look into a case that was closed ten years ago, with all the original examinations done in Germany? That hurts my head, Jon.”
“Just noodle it a little before shooting me down.”
“The thing about you, my friend, is you’re timeless. You could have lived a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now, and people would still know what you are.”
“Which is what, Regina?”
“Lost.”
“Don’t you care that we might have had a part in sending an innocent woman to death?”
“You’re looking for the TV version of me, I think.” Regina stood and fished in her pocketbook for a few dollars.
“Wait!” Nunn put his hand on her wrist as an earnest Bob Dylan song came on. She froze.
“Everything all right, Regina?” Mick, the globular and imposing bartender, appeared, looming over Nunn.
“Yeah, fine,” Regina said.
“Please,” Nunn said to her when the bartender had warily scooted back to his spot. “You used to trust my instinct.”
Nothing discomfited a woman who relied on humor in her personal interactions as much as seriousness.
“McGee.”
“What?”
“Ignatius McGee,” she said. “Forensic anthropologist. Nobody digs up the old bones like he does. But he’s a tough one to get ahold of. He’s based in Boston and booked up for years at a time. Plus, he doesn’t really like living people.”
Nunn went on, “I’m getting closer to ending all this. I need this, Regina. Can you at least get me a conversation with this McGee?”
Regina surrendered a little around her shoulders, returning to her stool and pushing her whiskey to the side.
The routine had solidified itself now. In San Francisco, the early morning was the kind of gray cold you feel in your bones. The late afternoon too. This left only a small window in the middle of the day that was clear and beautiful. Nunn would sleep most of the morning so that he could wake to the beautiful hours instead of to the painful fog. He knew it was temporary relief, but it was still something to help him to his feet.
Sometimes he’d tail Stan Ballard in the late afternoon. Stan must have thought his souped-up sports car put him above and beyond the reach of mortal men, but instead, it made him an easy target—he stood out like the arrogant bastard he was. Nunn would watch from afar his wine-and-cheese meet-ups with Peter Heusen on Peter’s boat.
Nunn still couldn’t think of Stan as Sarah’s husband. It was just Sarah and that… bastard, sonuvabitch, scumbag—these were all words that blocked out husband.
Nunn had followed the sonuvabitch bastard scum and wondered what the hell he’d been doing visiting Rosemary Thomas’s grave, with that god-awful smirk across his face.
There. That proves it. It’s not just that I hate him for stealing my wife. He’s hiding who he really is. He’s hiding it from my Sarah and from the world.
Peter, meanwhile, that two-bit snake, almost made Nunn equally angry with the dissipated life he had built on the foundation of his sole control of the old, drying family money.
More and more, Nunn would end up back at the old fortune-cookie factory, back in the rear encampment for heroin and methadone addicts that started as an informal needle exchange. The crack smokers poisoned the air. The smokers and shooters were supposed to stay in separate rooms along the corridor, but really, was anyone here going to complain? A filthy, scraggly dog desperately whined at Nunn—then choked and coughed. The mutt was attached to the wrist of a pierced, tattooed, formerly middle-class runaway who only used the dog to beg aggressively for money in the Haight and fed him the minimum to keep the dog alive.
When asked what he had to sell by one of the occupants, Nunn mumbled his stale story about looking for his confused uncle—what he used to say back when he was looking for Christopher Thomas years ago. Even though many of the shades in here had been there w
hen he’d done this before, he didn’t exactly worry about anyone putting one and one together.
“Tell me. Have you seen him here?” Nunn asked.
“Who?”
“My uncle,” Nunn said, and showed a photo of Chris Thomas.
The shade went pale and shaky, looking over Nunn’s shoulder to a new arrival. Dropping his head, the shade stumbled his way down the corridor.
Now two lean, tall, well-dressed young Asian men were standing at the entrance to the den. Their robust, healthy auras were all too conflicting with those of the place’s occupants. They were the weakened leftovers from Hong’s years of control.
“You lost, or are you a cop?” the more slender of the two asked.
“I could be neither,” proposed Jon.
“Then you don’t belong. That’s a problem. And a problem here is a problem for me.” He had a white scar across the length of his upper neck as if someone had tried to commit suicide for him.
“Maybe I’m just looking for a fortune cookie that finally gives me some good news,” Nunn said, faking a laugh.
“You a cop?” the man repeated. The hulkier man had his hand inside his fatigue-colored jacket. Nunn could see by the way the arm was positioned it probably wasn’t a gun he was reaching for—maybe a knife, or knuckles.
It would have been all the easier for these men if Jon were a cop. He could either be bribed or ignored, depending on what he was here for. Here was where Jon’s anonymity came to good use. Without knowing who he was, any attack on him could be dangerous.
“Funny thing. I was looking for my uncle. You know him?” Jon held up the photo of Chris Thomas and watched their faces cautiously. Their eyes both flickered ever so slightly and they said nothing. They wouldn’t talk, but still, the hornets were stirred by his visits. Jon hadn’t felt this alive in ten years.
Rosemary, you watching this?
“No, I guess you don’t. Oh, well. Long shot.”
No Rest for the Dead Page 12
