John Lescroart - The Vig

He made out the wooden porch a couple of steps off a back doorway. Stepping away from the house, avoiding the garbage can lid, he saw some stairs going down under the porch. There were two windows side-by-side down there in a little well under the porch, and one of them was open an inch at the top.

Louis wasn't going to throw the house. He was going to find out if Hardy still lived there, then if so, wait until he came home. He let himself into a laundry room and felt his way in the dark to the doorway, then up a couple of steps to what felt like a kitchen.

His eyes were adjusting. There was also a little light seeping down the hallway from the living room. On the floor by the front door he saw a pile of mail that had been dropped through the mail slot. It appeared whoever lived here now was someone named Jane Fowler, and she'd been gone for at least a week already.

He dropped the envelopes back on the floor and returned to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, but the pickings were slim. A couple of bottles of white wine, one of them half empty. A loaf of bread. Some plastic containers wouldn't hold enough food for a child. Four bottles of dark beer.

He took out one of the beers, the bread and a jar of peanut butter and went over to rummage through some drawers near the sink for a knife. The light from the refrigerator cut an arc through the darkness of the kitchen, falling on the wall by the door to the hallway.

Chewing on his sandwich, he took a hit of the beer and nearly gagged. The stuff was dark and thick and tasted like liquid sen-sen. He looked at the bottle-he had thought it was beer but it was called stout and the only thing it had in common with beer was its bottle. He poured it out into the sink.

He took one of the half-bottles of wine from the refrigerator and washed out his mouth. With the light he could now make out things in the kitchen. He walked over to where the light fell near the door and looked at the calendar-and stopped everything.

The name Dismas-not very common-appeared about five places in September. He smiled, swallowed his sandwich in a gulp and went back to work.

The telephone was in an alcove in the hallway, and he risked now turning on the hall light. He would only be here a few more minutes. The phone sat on an answering unit on a built-in shelf under which were a couple of phone books. Next to the phone was a Rolodex. Louis Baker flipped to H and there it was. Out in the Avenues, maybe two miles west. Take him fifteen minutes.

Flo was doing the dishes. Glitsky sat at the table, playing Monopoly with the three kids. The boys were named Isaac, Jacob, and OJ.-Flo had drawn the line at Esau. OJ. was only eight, but he already had a hotel on the boardwalk and Glitsky was hanging out in jail, waiting for doubles. The boys always got a kick out of their father the cop being in jail, but Abe didn't want to get out and land on anything, and this way the other boys could eliminate each other and he might have a chance to buy some cheap property and get back in the game.

The telephone rang, and Abe was in the middle of yelling "Let it go!" when Flo picked it up on the first ring. He heard her say, "Just a minute, he's right here," then appear in the doorway. "It's work," she said.

"It always is."

"But it's your turn," OJ. whined.

"Let Jake roll for me." He shook a finger at his oldest son. "Don't get doubles."

He walked into the kitchen. "Glitsky," he said into the receiver.

"Sergeant," the voice said, "this is Paul Ghattas." There was a pause. "From the lab."

He pictured the Filipino boy he had chewed out earlier in the day. There was a scream from the other room as one of his sons landed on a bad property. Flo disappeared, and he heard her telling them to keep it down. Ghattas was saying something, but Glitsky couldn't get his mind on it. He had told himself he was leaving the force as soon as he could and relocating to Los Angeles, and these cases that no one else seemed to care about could take care of themselves. "I'm sorry," he said, "what did you say?"

He grabbed the pencil and pad of paper from their spot stuck to the side of his refrigerator and started taking notes. Ghattas had evidently cajoled someone he knew at ballistics into doing some work, and they had definitely identified Ray Weir's gun as the murder weapon. Of course, in the barge itself they had found prints from the female victim and from Rusty Ingraham, but on the lamp they had picked up prints from a small-time local enforcer named Johnny LaGuardia. There was a last print that kind of confused Ghattas.

"There was a drinking glass, tagged 'Galley,' with as clear a print as you'd want of a guy named Louis Baker."

Glitsky felt a chill in his back.

"Problem is, we ran Baker and he's in San Quentin."

"The computer hasn't caught up," Abe said. "Baker got out on Wednesday."

"Looks like he went right back to work."

"Yes it does."

Flo had come back into the kitchen and saw Abe staring at what he had written down. She heard him thank the man on the phone, saying he appreciated someone who still cared about getting his job done.

When he hung up he didn't move for a minute, and Flo came over behind him and rubbed her hand up and down his back.

"Hardy's in big trouble," he said. "Baker was on the barge."

Hardy felt Frannie's hand in his back pocket. He felt the gun in its holster in the small of his back.

The fog had descended once again on the city. They were walking in zero visibility, three blocks straight uphill from where they had had dinner on Noe, three blocks to go before they got to Frannie's place. Hardy had his arm around her-she walked leaning into him.

He looked up the hill. He knew there were streetlights all along, but he could only see the next one perhaps twenty feet ahead of them. Sometime during dinner, after the euphoria of proving that Rusty Ingraham could indeed have floated out into the bay had passed, he had come up against what that might mean in his here and now. But he had already had most of a bottle of wine by that time, and now he was explaining to Frannie that he felt unprepared if Louis Baker took this moment to attack.

"But he doesn't even know where you are," Frannie said.

"He found Rusty."

"Rusty happened to be where he lived. You're here."

Hardy kept walking. Baker had had four days to locate him, and it was getting to the time where it was reasonable to think he'd have made some progress. It couldn't be that hard to find someone you wanted to kill real bad.

They were coming into Frannie's block now, the buildings tight up against each other, blue light from front-room television sets showing through a few windows. The wind blew straight downhill at them and they leaned into it and each other. Up ahead of them, Hardy heard a car door open and close. He tried to make out a shape in the dark fog, but there was nothing. Then, faintly, he heard footsteps echoing on the asphalt. He tightened his arm around Frannie.

"Hold it a second," he said. He stopped them both, pulled them back into a building entrance a few doors down from Frannie's. He took off his jacket and helped put it on Frannie. "You start walking back and wait around the corner," he said. "If you hear anything sounds like shooting, get into a building somehow. You hear me?"

Taking his gun from the holster behind him, he squinted into the fog up the hill.

"Dismas, what are you-?"

He put a finger to his lips. "Go!" He watched her for a few steps, then he ran across the sidewalk. The curb was lined with cars. Hardy stepped between a couple out into the street, then turned uphill.

Okay, he said to himself, the guy's big enough to be Baker. The man wore a heavy coat and a cap pulled low on his forehead. Hardy, crouching behind the wall of cars, did not take his eyes off him. It wasn't just somebody taking a walk. He came down the street slowly, taking his time, looking into doorways, perhaps looking for a street address. He kept his hands in his coat pocket.