Steven Gore - A Criminal Defense

The flurry of calls ended with notes from Hamlin’s meeting with Camacho.

Agreed. Debriefing in a week. Lange will sit in.

Even as he searched for other notes, a phrase kept repeating itself in Donnally’s mind like a tune he couldn’t get out of his head.

Can keep his taqueria.

The last time Donnally walked toward a taqueria on Mission Street to meet an informant was also his last day on the job as a police officer.

Can keep his taqueria .

Donnally pushed the notes aside and thought back on that day, then winced at the clash of past and future in his present memory, and closed his eyes. He saw himself getting out of his car on the west side of Mission Street, looking over his hood toward the restaurant door.

A laugh from his left. A young couple, maybe Salvadorean or Guatemalan, compact bodies, Mayan faces, sitting at a wrought-iron table in front of a coffee shop. Magazines spread on top. A woman posing in a wedding dress smiling from the cover of one.

He had taken a step toward the front of his car, then-

Bam-bam-bam.

Gunshots from behind him, but not at him, from a Norteno gangster up the sidewalk, ten yards away, maybe fifteen, shooting at a Sureno down the other way.

He’d ducked behind his hood, reaching for his gun and yelling to the couple, “Down! Down! Down!”

Too late. The male slumped over. The female screaming.

Bam-bam from Donnally’s left. He caught the motion of the Sureno’s black, silver-toed boot and pressed Levi’s pant leg disappearing behind a trash can.

Donnally’s gun had followed his eyes. Barrel steadied by a double-handed grip braced against his car. So focused on each other, neither the Norteno nor the Sureno had spotted him yet.

Bam-bam. . bam-bam-bam. The Norteno firing. But Donnally had lost sight of him. He was using the cars behind Donnally’s as cover.

The Sureno tumbled forward and over the curb, then raised his semiautomatic, but Donnally fired first.

Bam-bam from his right.

The Sureno slumped onto the oil-slicked pavement.

Then again from his right. Bam-bam. . bam-bam.

Donnally felt a thud against his hip and his leg gave way. He reached up, locking the fingers of his left hand into the gap between his hood and the windshield. Pain from shattered bone lit up the wound, then vibrated down his leg and up his side.

Thunking leather. Boot heels on concrete getting louder, running toward him.

Metal scraped against metal as the Norteno jammed in a new clip.

Bam.

Glass fragments burst from holes in the back window and windshield.

The footsteps stopped.

Bam-bam-bam.

The clunk of punched metal and the tink, tink of fractured glass.

He pulled himself up and fired at the Norteno through his own car windows.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-click-click-click.

The Norteno reached for his chest and staggered into the street.

Screeching tires. No thud.

The Norteno dropped to his knees, balanced for a moment, then pitched forward. A head-thunk against a bumper.

The smoke of burned rubber swirled and attacked Donnally’s eyes. He looked toward the woman, now splayed over the table, dead arms reaching in a final gesture toward her fiance.

Distant sirens, then silence.

Coming to consciousness again.

An EMT putting pressure on his hip. A paramedic leaning over him, speaking into his radio.

Officer down. Four dead.

Donnally opened his eyes. The legal pad a bright, painful yellow on the desk in front of him. He thought of Hector Camacho sitting in his office at the back of his restaurant. El Raton . Norteno gangsters at one end of the block. Surenos at the other. .

I don’t want to do this again.

Donnally left the city just before noon by way of the Golden Gate Bridge, heading north through Marin County on the Redwood Highway toward the Russian River. With “Proud Mary” playing in his head, he realized that what Lemmie had seen as merely juvenile-Hamlin and Hancock getting stoned and singing and pounding the table-was worse, it was corrupt and cynical. In their minds, “rolling” referred not only to smoking pot, but to snitching one client on another. It was nothing less than a celebration of betrayal.

He knew he’d be going back to Mission Street. He knew that soon enough he’d pull up in front of Camacho’s taqueria, get out of his car, look up and down the sidewalk, and head toward the entrance-

Just. . not. . yet.

The Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit to coastal Highway 1 rose up like a suppressed temptation, and not just because a longer trip up along the ocean to the mouth of the river then inland to Guerneville would delay his return to Mission Street. But because he hated the outlet malls and car dealerships that were filling in the land between San Rafael and Novato, and between Novato and Petaluma, and between Petaluma and Rohnert Park, and between Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa. Driving past them was like walking down the aisle of an Eddie Bauer outlet store filled with people buying clothes they didn’t need and pretending to themselves they’d go places where they’d never go. Or maybe it was like a dollar store, the oppression of too much stuff overwhelming the necessities of life.

A minute later, the urge to cut off the highway had faded and he was shooting north past where redwoods used to be. And a few minutes after that, the Marin County Civic Center appeared on his right. He remembered driving there soon after he completed the police academy to pick up a suspect, wondering where else but in Marin did people hire an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright to design a jail. But then San Francisco built one that looked like a European art museum, undulating like a wave that seemed to wash the jail out of jailed.

An hour later, Donnally slipped off the freeway onto the Old Redwood Highway, turned west on River Road, and headed toward the bookstore owned by Ryvver’s mothers.

Donnally felt a tingle in his fingers and a bump up in his heart rate when he got his first glimpse of the Russian River, wide like a lake and blue like a lagoon except where sunlight painted yellow and gold on the moving surface. He knew that people fishing for steelhead were working the riffles and holes downriver, maybe one now stood waist-deep in waders near the sand and gravel spit where he’d caught his first one, each turn and run by the fish, each pump of the rod shooting adrenaline through his body. It was that moment, more than any other, that fated him to someday move north to Mount Shasta where redwoods still grew and close to where steelhead and salmon still ran. That someday had come a lot sooner than he’d expected, but he’d made it nonetheless.

River Road turned into Guerneville’s Main Street, a few mostly one-story commercial blocks north of the river that was just inside the far border of quaint and that had become too gay even for Ramon Navarro. He’d once told Donnally that anyplace referred to as a playground wasn’t for him.

As Donnally stepped down from his truck in front of Mothers’ Books amp; Cafe, a blue-facade Tudor storefront, he wished he wasn’t wearing cowboy boots. He should’ve checked with Navarro about local politics, whether the leather-soles-in-cow-shit locals from the dairy farms in the foothills were still at war with the Vibram-never-leave-the-sidewalk outsiders.

At least in Guerneville, unlike San Francisco’s Mission District, he didn’t have to worry about finding himself in anything worse than a verbal crossfire as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

A tinkling bell announced his arrival as he pushed open the door.

He’d checked the bookstore Web site before he left Hamlin’s office, so he recognized Scoville Mother Number One behind the drinks counter in the cafe half of the store. She was a little shorter and a little wider than her picture, but was wearing the same wire-rimmed glasses and a similar tan work shirt with the business name stenciled in brown on the front. He walked up, ordered a decaf coffee, and asked if he could talk to her.