James Patterson - 11th hour

“His son almost OD’d. Go on,” Brady said. He sat down and began tapping the underside of his desk with his foot.

“Randall found him lying in the street, got him to a hospital. His life was saved, but the kid’s brain took a bad hit. He was a bright boy, but now he has the mind of a baby.”

“So are you saying the kid’s overdose is Randall’s motive?”

“Exactly,” I said. “Randall has a good, clean record in the department and a sad personal story. Our working theory is that he’s on a one-man crusade to take out dealers who sell drugs to kids.”

“But here’s the thing, boss,” Conklin said. “Meile and Penny both interviewed Randall. He has an alibi for the Morton Academy shooting. He says he was home with his wife and family when Chaz Smith went down. Mrs. Randall vouched for her husband, said, ‘Will was at home. He’s always home after work.’ The top cops bought it.”

“And so why exactly do you like him for the shootings? Put me out of my misery, will you, Boxer?”

“He’s obsessed with drug dealers. Obsessed with them.”

“How do you know that?”

“My source says that Randall has compiled dossiers on every dealer in the Bay Area. He knows things about them that Narcotics doesn’t know. He has sources on the street, both dealers and hookers. Add it up. He had access to our property room and could’ve stolen the guns. He’s an excellent marksman. Maybe he’s got a whole lot of anger because of his brain-damaged son.”

Brady said, “Yeah, okay. It’s plausible. What’s your plan?”

“Same as before. The three of us and two teams from Narcotics. We take shifts and we watch Randall’s movements. And we stay off the radio.”

“I like it,” said Brady. “Set it up.”

Conklin and I followed William Randall, at a discreet distance, from the Hall to his home, cutting the headlights when we crossed the intersection of Elm and Scott in the Western Addition. I found a spot toward the end of the block where we could get a good three-quarter view of Randall’s yellow Edwardian-era house.

It was now 11:30 p.m. and we’d been watching Randall’s street for five hours. There wasn’t a house or alleyway or garbage can I hadn’t committed to memory, and I knew every line and plane of Randall’s house by heart.

His three-level home was typical of its time and this neighborhood. There was a small garage on the lower level. The second floor was the main floor: living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. The third level, the attic, had probably been converted into two small rooms.

Lights were on in the house and Randall’s midsize black SUV was parked in his driveway. It had been there since before we began our shift.

It’s been said that stakeouts are as interesting as watching grass grow, paint dry, water boil. But working Homicide means you don’t get neat nine-to-five shifts, and Conklin and I don’t mind sitting together for long hours at a stretch. We’re compatible and maybe a little more than that.

Once upon a time, before he was seeing Cindy and at a point when Joe and I had split up, the spark between us kindled and almost burned up a hotel bed in Los Angeles.

I’d called a breathless halt to what would have been a hot fling with a short duration and no future. I’d reconsidered that decision many times, but as Conklin was telling me that he loved me, I was thinking about how much I loved Joe. How much I missed Joe.

Joe and I got together again.

Conklin hooked up with Cindy and they were so perfect as a couple, you had to wonder why it had taken them so long. I put on the big diamond ring Joe had given me and we got married in a magical ceremony by the ocean. And now I was running it all through my head again.

Conklin passed me the thermos of coffee. I took a couple of sips and passed it back to him. He stowed the thermos in the door pocket and called Cindy.

“You going to bed?” he asked her.

Pause as she said either yes or no.

“I don’t know when. I can nuke something. Don’t worry.”

Pause as Cindy said okay.

“I don’t care how late it gets, I’m going to wake you when I come in.”

He laughed at something she said.

“You too.”

He closed the phone. Put it in his pocket.

“She’s okay?” I asked. “She’s writing. Don’t bother her when she’s writing. Look,” he said.

I looked past the sofa that had been put out at the curb for garbage pickup, and saw a man, probably Randall, moving around on the main floor of the house.

Then the lights went out.

I had been hoping that Randall would leave his house, fire up his SUV, and take off so that Conklin and I could follow him and find out where a cop-and drug-dealer-shooting executioner went at night.

But that didn’t happen.

Soon the inside of the house was dark except for the attic rooms. I saw a TV jump to life in one of those rooms, and a few minutes later, I saw Randall walk between the lamp and the window shades in the second room. Then that light went out too.

“He’s packing it in for the night,” I said.

“Lucky guy,” said Conklin.

We had three more hours before the next team took over.

Will Randall had been watching the two-year-old blue Ford sedan from his rear window, had seen it pull into the empty space on Elm with its headlights off.

And the car was still there.

Will had expected to be tailed and surveilled, but his brothers in blue hadn’t seen him do anything and had nothing on him; if they had, they wouldn’t have been sitting outside in their car.

Will went down the hallway, stopped in each of the bedrooms, and checked on the younger kids, all of whom were sleeping. He filled the hamster’s water bottle in the boys’ room, then went to the den, where his father-in-law, Charlie, was sitting in an easy chair, asleep in front of the television.

The TV was on really loud, so Will lowered the sound and then the thermostat, opened the sofa bed, and helped Charlie get under the covers. From there, Will went into the hall bathroom and jiggled the handle on the toilet until the water stopped running; after that, he turned off the overhead lights on the second floor.

Then he went upstairs.

His oldest son’s room was right off the staircase and next door to the room Will shared with Becky. He pulled a chair up to the hospital-type bed where his son was lying and said, “You want to watch a little TV, Link?”

“Dah,” Link said.

“David Letterman it is.”

Will pointed the clicker, turned on the TV, raised the angle of the bed with the other clicker, and when Link was sitting up, he put a straw into a water bottle and held it to his son’s lips.

Father and son watched Letterman for a few minutes, Will’s mind drifting to the unmarked car downstairs, to what would happen to his family if he was caught. He’d had these thoughts before, and now he ran through the same questions and came up with the same answers.

He was in free fall, but he wasn’t done yet.

He brought his attention back to Letterman, who had finished his monologue and gone to a break. Will put the clickers down and said, “I’ll be back in a little while, okay, son?”

Will went next door to his bedroom and saw Becky sacked out, completely zonked from a day of running this asylum.

He loved her, worried for her health, admired her selflessness, couldn’t imagine life without her.

He sat down on the side of the bed, put his hand on her cheek. She opened her eyes.

“Coming to bed, honey?” she asked. “In a little while.”

“Okay,” she said.

Will pulled down the shades, first standing for a moment in front of the window, knowing that a couple of cops down on the street were seeing his silhouette. Then he turned off the light.