The First Law (30 page)

But he believed with all his heart that he had a reason now. He cranked a round into the chamber and snapped the safety off. He tucked the gun into his belt and the bullets into the pocket of his three-quarter-length leather coat. Letting himself out the back door of the Ark, he double-locked it up and started walking. He arrived at Michelle’s an hour later.

Now they had been holed up inside for about another hour. It turned out, when Michelle accidentally saw the gun, that she wasn’t much a fan of firearms. There had never been a gun in her parents’ house when she was growing up. She wasn’t going to tolerate one now. She had wanted to warn John about the police, but had never considered what it might really mean, who this man she’d been seeing really was.

When he showed up with a loaded gun, it more than worried her. It made her feel as though he’d duped her somehow.

So she’d told him no gun, he didn’t need it here, she wouldn’t have it in her apartment. If he was intent on keeping the gun, he had to leave. In the end, she reluctantly agreed to a wimpy compromise—he would unload it and put the gun and the ammunition out of sight in one of the bedroom drawers. She agreed not because she wanted to, she realized, but because suddenly some part of her was afraid of him.

She’d been attracted to him at the beginning—and consistently since—because she’d chosen to ignore all the outward signs that he might finally, at heart, not be the man he pretended to be. Now she was forced to consider that he might, in fact, be a true criminal. The seedy bar, the nomadic lifestyle, ex-convict associates, heavy drinking, even his own drug arrest. He had explained away all of those dark and telling realities with a lighthearted and eloquent insouciance, and she’d wanted to believe him in large part because of the powerful chemistry between them.

Clearly he had a sensitive side. He’d apparently endured great pain and loneliness after the loss of his wife and child. He was smart as a whip. He could be very funny. He was a great lover. She had convinced herself that most of the time he simply chose to hide his essential goodness from the world because people would take advantage of it. The same way she handled her physical beauty. This was something she could relate to, a defensive coloration.

But now, here he was in her private and special place with a loaded gun. The homicide police had been searching his duplex.
How blind was she?

And now she’d not only helped him escape, she was harboring him.

When he had stowed the gun, he came over to where she stood looking, holding a crack in the blinds open with her finger, out the window over the city. When he put his arms around her from behind, he felt her stiffen. “What’s the matter?”

She let go of the blinds, shrugged out of his embrace, took a step away, turned to face him. “Oh, nothing, John. Whatever could be the matter?”

He smoothed the side of his mustache. “I just put the gun away, Michelle. That’s what you asked me to do.”

She crossed her arms. “Where did you go Friday night?”

He cocked his head. “What was Friday night?”

“The night after Thursday, a week ago today, when you walked out on me. I know you remember. Chinatown. Where were you?”

“I don’t know. Home, I guess.” He strove to sound casual. “I can’t believe how many people are interested in where I was every night this past week. Maybe I should make up a calendar and pass it around.”

“Or maybe you could answer me.”

“I just did, didn’t I? I was home.”

“On Friday night?”

He gave every indication of counting back the days, making sure. “Yep. I worked the day, handed it off to Clint, ate at Little Joe’s, went home, watched TV, went to sleep.”

“That’s funny,” she said.

“What is?”

“When I went by there today, when the police were there, I picked up your papers down at the bottom of the stairs, and there were three of them—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.”

“Michelle . . .”

She held up a hand. “Never mind. Don’t even start. I’m going out for a walk. You and your gun don’t have to be here when I get back.”

Roake had been a defense attorney for twenty-one of her forty-eight years. After graduating from King Law School at UC Davis, she passed the bar and, at twenty-five, took her first job with the San Francisco District Attorney’s office. Two years later, genetically predisposed to favoring the underdog and the dispossessed, the unfortunate and the unlucky, she switched to the defense trade. There she was often unsuccessful, although typically defense attorneys would under the normal definition be considered to fail most of the time. (A ripping success is often an accepted plea to a slightly lesser offense, or eight years in the slammer for the client instead of twelve.) After thirteen years working mostly with and for other lawyers, she finally hung out her own shingle and had done exceedingly well exclusively handling criminal cases.

Unlike Lennard Faro, who believed he had seen it all, Gina Roake
had
seen it all. She had defended clients—and come to know them as people, as far as this was possible—from the netherworld of the gene pool all the way up to educated professionals and wealthy business people: suburban housewives turned murderers, children who’d killed their parents, addicts of every drug known to mankind, sexual criminals from simple misfits to the truly perverted, thieves, rapists, con men, pickpockets, shoplifters (lots of shoplifters!), lowlifes, gangbangers and muggers. A million drunk drivers. Nothing surprised her. Humans were flawed, but worth defending.

And so, she felt, was the system. Her job, her lifework—keeping some balance between the two—meant providing the best defense the law allowed to those who had fallen. Everyone had a demon; most people had several, from grinding poverty to sexual abuse, from unseen psychic trauma to pampered irresponsibility, and these demons
would
be served, forcing their victims to commit crimes against themselves and against the society that had maimed and scarred them. She’d always believed that the crimes should be justly punished, but that the criminals themselves—the human beings who did these things—ought to be viewed with an eye to mercy, with an understanding of what had led them to their acts.

This was why now she felt so adrift, so foreign to herself. Along with the grief to which she had not even begun yet to grow accustomed, her desire for vengeance against the people who had done this to David—
to David!
—was making her feel, quite literally, insane. “If I knew who they were, Dismas. I swear to God, if they were here in front of me, I would personally beat them to death. Gladly.”

Unable to concentrate, Hardy had left work early again. He had a Band-Aid of a splint around the pinkie and ring fingers on his left hand, but the others were intertwined on the table between them in the hospital’s tiny coffee shop. Cups sat untouched in front of them. “I’d say that’s natural, Gina.”

“It’s not for me; that’s my point. It’s the polar opposite of everything I’ve ever believed. I would literally kill the sons of bitches.”

“I doubt that.”

“Try me.” She brought her hands up to her face and wiped a palm down each side of it. “Oh, God, what am I saying? I’m losing it here, Dismas; I really am. What am I going to do with this?”

“Have you slept yet? At all?”

A brittle laugh collapsed into a pitiable cough. “I’m sorry,” she said when she’d caught her breath. “No. Sleep has not happened. Not to you either, I’d say.”

He didn’t want to burden her with his own problems, his own fury and fears. He forced a smile. “I had a little bit of a tough night last night, that’s all. Car problems. Have you seen him?”

She nodded. “They let me in whenever they can now. An hour or two. I try to tell myself he’s squeezing my hand back or something, but . . .” She shook her head in misery, bit her lip. Then, as though if she said it aloud it would be more true, she whispered, “His kidney function seems to be slowing down.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s one of the things they measure. Of course if it stops entirely, it would be bad.” Closing her eyes, she sighed deeply. “I’m trying to prepare myself. I just feel so . . . so helpless and then so goddamned furious. I’m in there pleading with him, talking out loud like he can hear me, like I’m . . .” The words stopped. She looked across at Hardy. “You don’t need to hear this. You know.”

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “You’re a big girl so I don’t have to tell you, but if you could sleep, it would help. Especially if you can’t do anything here.”

“I keep thinking maybe he’ll wake up and if he does I won’t be there.”

“He’d get over it. He might not even notice. No, never mind. It’s David. He’d notice.” He shrugged. “Still . . .”

“Still, you’re probably right. Oh, and Sergeant Blanca came by here for a few minutes. He said he’d talked to you. He didn’t have much.”

“He still doesn’t, not as of about a half hour ago.”

A silence. Then Gina said, “They’re not going to find anything, are they? I wonder if it’s somebody I got off. If some scumbag was back on the street because I was such a goddamned whiz of a lawyer. Wouldn’t that be special?”

Hardy squeezed her hand. “Don’t go there.”

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

Hardy hesitated for an instant, then decided that he’d known her for a long time. He could push a little. “Gina. Sorry to be a broken record, but how about going home, then to bed? Give the nurses your number. They’ll call you if there’s any change. This isn’t doing anybody any good.”

“I’ll still want to kill them,” she said. Somehow the comment didn’t seem off the subject. It was as though they’d been talking about it all along.

“I hear you,” Hardy said gently. “If it’s any help, so do I.”

When she saw Holiday wasn’t gone, Michelle stood just inside her doorway, uncertain about whether she should simply turn and give him more time, or walk out and call the police herself. But she hesitated long enough for him to start explaining.

The television droned near him. He stood in front of it, his coat back on. She assumed he had rearmed himself.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you back so soon.” He took a tentative step toward her, then stopped. “Look, I’m sorry about everything. I didn’t mean to lie to you. I’ve got a bad habit of . . . never mind, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m going now in a minute. I just wanted to catch the news. Maybe see if they’ll show what I’m up against.”

Still in her camo gear, including hat and boots, she came up next to him as the program began, then backed up and sat on the corner of the bed.

Since it was both local and lurid, they didn’t have to wait long. The handsome and serious anchor hadn’t gotten twenty words into the lead story when Holiday nearly jumped forward to turn up the volume. “. . . these grisly Tenderloin murders. The victims have been identified as Clint Terry and Randy Wills. Terry, a bartender at a downtown watering hole, was a former football star with the . . .”

“Oh my God.” Holiday folded himself down to the floor, cross-legged. As the anchor continued with the details, his head fell forward. After a minute, he reached up to support it with his hands, rocking his whole body from side to side.

On the television, the story continued, running through a cursory review of the related killings and a tantalizing film clip of Crime Scene Investigators removing allegedly “highly significant evidence” from the scene, and closing with the not entirely surprising news, though no less unwelcome for that, that the chief suspect for that crime and also the murders last week of Sam Silverman and Matthew Creed, was John Holiday.

He finally glanced up again at the mention of his name. His four-year-old mug shot filled the screen as the anchor finished up with the words that a warrant had been issued for his arrest and that he should be considered armed and dangerous. As they cut to the next story, Michelle walked to the set, picked the remote off the top of it, killed the power.

Head in his hands, Holiday still rocked his whole body on the floor—back and forth, side to side.

“John?” She reached over and touched his shoulder. “John, are you okay?”

When he looked up, she wasn’t sure he even saw her. His eyes shone with panic. His voice, when it came, was a suddenly ravaged and hoarse whisper. “I don’t believe Clint and Randy are
dead.
They can’t be just dead.”

She lowered herself down to the floor, facing him. He kept shaking his head from side to side. She reached out and put a hand on his knee, and she left it there.

The sun descended enough so that a few bars of sunlight through the blinds inched up the wall over her bed. A dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood, the call was taken up by another; then both died away.

Eventually, Holiday cleared his throat one time, again, didn’t meet her eyes, then began quietly, matter-of-factly. “What I do, see, is find somebody like you and then try to fuck it all up, cheat on you or do something else you can’t forgive . . .”

“Shut up,” she said. “Just shut up. I get it. You don’t think I get it? I know what you do, what you always do. You know why? ’Cause I do it, too. It keeps things manageable, doesn’t it, making people you might love hate you when they start to get close? So my question to you is, ‘What are you going to do now?’ I’m talking with you and me.”

“You told me to get out.”

“Right. And you didn’t leave. You had most of an hour. What does that mean about us? Anything? Or were you just afraid to go out because of . . . because of all this? And don’t tell me you needed to find out what they were saying on the television.”

“No.”

“What then? If your plan is to hang around and have a few more fights and go out on me to make me hate you, I can save you some trouble. Just walk out now, no hard feelings. Because do it again and I
will
hate you. I promise.” She stood up and went back over to the window, checked the blinds again. She turned back to him. “You didn’t kill any of those people, did you?”

“No. I’ve never killed anybody.”

“Do you know who did?”

He nodded soberly. “The same people who planted whatever they found in my apartment.” He looked up at her. “I don’t understand this at all, Michelle. The last I heard, the police were talking to Clint about Mr. Silverman, and now they’re both dead.”