Joe Gores - Interface

“I’ve got Blaney and Daggert on their way out. Armed.”

“He’ll go through them like a maggot through shit.” Neil Fargo’s voice was almost bitter. Then his tone changed, lightened. “Still, maybe not. He’s got a bum leg now he didn’t have when I knew him in Nam, it’s got to have slowed him down some. At least it’ll limit the ways he can come at you. All right. Put Blaney on the front gate, Daggert on that point of rock out by your observatory...”

“Shouldn’t somebody be inside?”

“You’ve got guns there, haven’t you? Point one at the front door and pull the trigger if anything you don’t recognize comes through it. Tell your strongarms to stop anything that moves. If it doesn’t stop, shoot it. Tell them not to let Docker anywhere near them. I mean anywhere — not within three or four yards. I remember that son of a bitch once...”

He stopped. Hariss said, “What about you?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. But the fucking fog has started to come in, that’s going to slow traffic on the Bayshore. It’ll probably take me an hour or better.”

As he was talking, the sound of a doorbell came faintly through the closed study door. Panic surged into Hariss’ voice. “There’s... somebody at the front door, Fargo! Some...”

“That’ll be your troops.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“I doubt if even Docker’s got that much nerve. If you’re worried, have your daughter answer it. He doesn’t have a hard-on against her, does he?”

“I don’t even know why he has one against me,” said Hariss lamely.

“Go let in your troops.” The detective laughed. “Let’s hope it’s your troops. Tell that fucking Blaney not to put a bullet in me when I show up. I’m on my way.”

The fog Neil Fargo had mentioned had thickened, was rolling in from the sea through the Golden Gate, pouring white and silent up the natural passage of the bay and reaching thin greedy fingers out at the city. Alcatraz was blotted out, gone, as were the lights of Sausalito north in Marin County and the garlanded string of lights which marked Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond in the Eastbay.

In the city, especially in the Marina District which lay close to the water, it was wetting down the streets, haloing the headlights and streetlamps, muffling the sound of traffic and city night noises.

Neil Fargo was driving west on Lombard toward the Golden Gate Bridge approach through the mist-pastelled neons of US 101’s motel row.

He turned on his wipers and the defroster to keep the windshield clear, maneuvered his car into the left lane. This would allow him to stay on Lombard when the bridge traffic took an angle right into Richardson Avenue and then Doyle Drive and the bridge approaches. Lombard, suddenly narrow and tree-arched once it lost the bridge traffic, would take him to the Presidio Main Gate.

Through the Presidio was the shortest, most direct access to Twenty-Fifth Avenue, where the winding, rich, very private streets of Sea Cliff began.

Neil Fargo waited through the traffic to the green arrow, went across the in-bound lanes past the traffic islands. He had gone less than a block on this narrow, uncrowded Lombard before stopping the car. Across the street was a small bar splashing yellow light out into the fog. Directly ahead were the Presidio Main Gates, open and unguarded. Beyond them, Lombard became curving Lincoln Boulevard.

The detective had to wait for two cars to pass before he could trot across the narrow blacktop to the phone booth outside the bar. In the open air the mist was palpable, able to be felt on the face, between the fingers, in the nostrils. It was chill and fresh.

He shut the door so he could see to dial; the fog-dimmed corner street lamp was not enough. His fingers ticked off a familiar set of digits, five-five-three-oh-one-two-three. His face was absolutely icy.

“Police.”

“Give me the radio room.”

There was a series of clicks, a pause, then another voice — this one hard and male — came on with “Central Dispatch.”

“Yeah, I want to report a stolen vehicle.”

“You want the Auto Detail.”

“This is hot,” said Neil Fargo. “It’d better go out on the air right away. I’ll shove the details to Auto later.”

“Shoot.”

“Nineteen-seventy-four Mercury Montego sedan license six-three-three, Zebra, Frank, Frank, color yellow. My name is Neil Fargo, that’s F-a-r-g-o.”

“You the registered on the vehicle?”

“Ah...” He had to consider his reply. “I’m the... ah... one who rented it. It was stolen by a man named Docker, that’s D-o-c-k-”

“Docker, did you say?” The voice had been startled out of its habitual and professional phlegm.

“That’s right, Docker. And you’re right. You have him on an APB, material witness on a homicide down on Bryant Street this A.M. You might not have it yet, but San Mateo’s going to be putting him on the air in connection with the killing at the airport of—”

“Jesus! He in on that one too? The car’s already going out on the air, Mr Fargo. You got a vicinity where it was stolen?”

“Sixteen hundred block of Pine, that’s Pine and Franklin, about ten minutes ago. I think he took off out Frank... Jesus Christ!”

From the phone booth window, Neil Fargo had been casually scanning traffic, the cars in and out of the Presidio, as he had been talking. Even in the couple of minutes he had been there, the fog had gotten thicker, heavier, an opaque blanket instead of rolling patches with clear spaces between. Visibility was down further yet, but the detective’s face was suddenly crammed against the glass.

“The son of a bitch just drove by me!” he yelped into the phone. “Right by me in the goddam car!”

“What is your 10–20... er... your location?”

“Oh! Lombard. Lombard and, ah, what the shit’s the street at the Presidio ga— Lyon. That’s it. He went through the Presidio gates!”

“We’ll alert the Military Police as well as SFPD units,” said the dispatcher. “And thanks, Mr Fargo.”

Neil Fargo hung up, stood in the booth for long moments, his head down as if in contemplation of unwelcome thoughts. Finally he opened the door. Through the fog, he could hear a police siren somewhere far off. Or, considering the fog, perhaps not so far off.

As if released from his regrets by the sound, he sprinted across the street toward his car, which he had left with the motor running and the wipers still snickering at the fog.

The yellow Montego was blocked by three cars waiting at the stop sign where Lincoln and Presidio Boulevards rub noses. Docker, big hands steady on the wheel, face set in concentration, didn’t even shift his foot off the accelerator. Instead, he goosed it.

And whipped into the left-hand lane on the wrong side of the miniscule triangular concrete traffic island, horn blaring to freeze traffic. He slewed across Presidio untouched because a sports car driver had damned good reflexes, fishtailed the rear end on fog-wet blacktop and was heading down Lincoln toward the old wooden building that had been Letterman Army Hospital until the new plant had been completed.

Behind him, the air was full of sirens. Directly ahead, an olive green Military Police jeep went into a skid of its own, broadside across the street to block his way, shedding MPs expecting the crash.

Docker jumped the left-hand curb, skun the left side of the Montego on the ancient stone retaining wall in front of some officer’s white frame house, hit the blacktop still accelerating, fighting it under control with big, competent hands.

Ahead on his right behind masking palm trees, the greyish stucco cube which housed the MP Headquarters spilled men in Army greens and wearing white plastic helmet liners. They ran at the road drawing cumbersome Army-issue .45s. Docker aimed the Montego at the closest one, slewed away as the man dove back.