John Lescroart - Damage

The trick, Eztli felt, was to see the man in his natural environment and determine where, when, and what kind of pressure to bring to bear on him to control his decision-making. What Eztli had said to Ro was true-Farrell was his best friend. It really wasn’t in Ro’s, or Eztli’s, best interests to eliminate Farrell, to take him entirely out of the picture. No, Farrell needed to be part of any equation that could keep Ro permanently out of prison. He would be crucial to that.

Eztli simply had to make him understand the seriousness of the situation. So far, Farrell had mostly stood aside and let things happen, and the Curtlees’ influence had carried the day. But eventually he was going to have to make a decision-to prosecute Ro or to let the matter drop. Eztli did not want him confused as to the proper choice.

So he had to get to know him a little more. See where the pressure points were.

When Farrell dragged himself back into his home at nine thirty that Monday night, he could not ever remember being so tired. Somewhat to his surprise, the house was completely dark. Well, he wouldn’t blame Sam if she had decided to go out to have dinner somewhere by herself or even with one of her friends. He’d been terrible company lately.

Tonight he hadn’t called her to tell her he’d be late, hadn’t even thought about it in the hurricane of emotion and upheaval that had swept through his office at the news that Matt Lewis had been found shot to death in his car out in the Fillmore district. Amanda Jenkins breaking down, inconsolably wedged between grief and guilt, John Strout, Treya, and Farrell himself administering to her while Glitsky and Becker headed out to the crime scene. Lapeer herself, the chief of police, had gone down to the magistrate on duty to try to get whoever it was to sign off on a search warrant for the Curtlee home, since no one had the tiniest doubt as to who was responsible for Lewis’s death.

Farrell flicked on the light by the front door and in a second he heard the familiar click, click, click of Gert’s nails on the hardwood floor as she came padding out of the kitchen to meet him. She’d probably been sleeping in her bed in there, and now he reached down and petted her. “Where’s your mom?” he asked, putting down his briefcase, turning on more lights, heading for the refrigerator.

The answer came in the form of a note she left him on the kitchen counter:

“Wes-Sorry if this seems abrupt, but we both know I’ve been thinking about taking a little time off from us for a while now. You not calling or making it home tonight, after all of our discussions about just keeping on communicating with one another…

“Anyway, it was a wake-up call telling me that I should actually do something, rather than just taking things as they come and building up resentment against you. If I was choosing to stay around here and just keep taking it, whose fault is that? So I’m going to be staying over at Marianne’s house for at least the next few days and I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me my space so I can think about what comes next for us. I don’t know, maybe you won’t want me back once you get used to me being gone, either. You’ve got to admit we haven’t been having much fun lately. I’m not really much of a politician’s wife, or even girlfriend, I’m afraid. I just don’t seem to have much of a stomach for it. The compromises, the deals, Ro Curtlee, all of it.

“I do still love you-I do-and I’m fine. But I don’t know if I can live anymore, or want to, the way we’ve been lately. Sam

“P.S. Gert has had dinner, but probably needs a walk before bed. If you want, you can leave her at the Center during the days, and I’ll drop her back here at night, if you’re going to be around. Just let me know.”

Farrell let himself down on one of the kitchen chairs, laid the note on the table in front of him. Gert had put her head on his leg and he scratched the top of it absently.

After some time had gone by-he had no sense of how much-Gert started nudging his leg and whining. Moving like a zombie, Farrell put her leash on her and retraced his steps back to the front door, and then out into the night.

The street that his house was on mostly encircled the park, and he and Gert had a regular route they walked in the morning and before bed where she took care of her business. The park itself, now in the dark, was its usual open expanse of nothingness, and suddenly tonight, as he walked around its periphery, Farrell in his numbness gradually became aware of an ominous something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Stopping, he looked out into the park’s center. Several of the lights in the street all around were out, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember if they’d been working over the past few days. Ahead of him, there were no lights at all, either in the park or on the street. At the end of the leash, Gert started in with a high-pitched whining. Farrell walked on a few more steps, then stopped again.

He stood completely still for a minute or so. There was no sound at all in the street, not any movement that he could see. Finally he whispered down to his dog, “Come on, girl. Back we go.”

But Gert, with hair standing up now down the center of her back, strained at her leash, growling low and harsh, and now barked at something out in the invisible distance.

Keeping a tight rein on her, Farrell moved up next to her head and petted it. “Come on now, come on.” Pulling her around, heeling, back toward his house.

When they got back inside, he closed and locked the front door behind him. He took off Gert’s leash and started to go back again into the kitchen. As a matter of course, whenever he did this, Gert would tag along next to him. But this time, she turned back to the front door and another low rumbling came out of her.

“Hey, easy now,” he said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” But holding her by the collar, he opened the door again and took a quick look outside at his benign street upon which nothing moved.

After he finally got Gert calmed down, doing her business out the back stairs in their tiny backyard and then lying back down on her cushion in the kitchen, Farrell went over to the liquor cabinet and pulled down a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon. He free-poured himself most of a juice glass full, threw in enough ice cubes to take the liquid to the rim of the glass, then drank it all off in a gulp.

This-losing his woman and imagining threats on empty streets-was not by any stretch what he had bargained for when he’d run for DA. In his heart, he didn’t really think that he was that serious a person. He had some verbal skills and he got along reasonably well with people from most walks of society, but he’d never considered himself to be a leader of men. He had originally been talked into running for DA with the thought that he’d bring a measure of enlightenment to the law enforcement community within the city. From his perspective as a lifetime defense attorney, he had believed that there was in fact often a problem with cops using more force than was justified. He thought that police often overstepped their mandates with immigrants as well as many of the other assorted minority populations in town. And by the same token, he’d represented a host of people who had made mistakes and, no question, were not angels-but through a mixture of glib humor and just the right amount of backbone, he had never felt in danger from most of these miscreants.

Well, there had been one. Mark Dooher had been Farrell’s best friend for years. A fellow attorney, but inhabiting an entirely different stratosphere from Farrell’s, Dooher had been counsel to the Archdiocese of San Francisco, among a host of other high-end clients. When Dooher’s wife was killed in a home invasion, the overweening, overreacting police-Abe Glitsky, in point of fact-had launched what Wes took to be a vendetta against his friend, eventually bringing him to trial charged with his wife’s murder. Farrell had taken on his defense, and in a brutal and grueling trial against Amanda Jenkins, had won an acquittal. That trial, moreover, marked the beginning of Farrell’s rise to prominence in the city’s legal community.