John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

Mullen's hands were still out on the pitted table. Now he turned them up, guileless, with maybe a touch of embarrassment. 'Who knows anymore? We were pretty drunk, Petey and me, mourning for Mikey. We sort of crashed through the sliding door.'

Glitsky came up to the table and put his mouth near Banks, whispering just loud enough. 'The famous Irish break-the-sliding-door ritual to lay the dead to rest.'

'It's what happened, like it or not.'

The lieutenant laid a hand on his inspector's shoulder, then turned and walked out the door without a glance back at the witness.

The idea was that Wes Farrell and Kevin Shea would meet at Saint Ignatius Church on the campus of the University of San Francisco and from there Farrell would drive them to his apartment on Junipero Serra down by Stonestown, where they would try to figure out a strategy.

The problem was that to get to USF, Kevin – on foot – first had to climb the second steepest hill in a city justly renowned for them, then had to find his way across the Western Addition, which was burning down. He had overlooked those details when he'd suggested USF as the meeting place and they were proving to be significant.

The temperature was an unbelievable, for San Francisco, ninety-four degrees. The air smelled of fire. The sky was a white-edged pewter plate pressing down on him. Kevin limped his way up the Divisadero escarpment, panting through his ribs, trying to ignore the throbbing in his useless arm, the remains of yesterday's alcohol still pounding behind his eyes, doubling his vision, forcing him to sit every three or four houses, resolve to continue, move another twenty feet up the hill.

He had to get something non-alcoholic to drink, put something in his belly or he wasn't going to get anywhere. But when he finally reached the top of the hill there was nothing resembling a fast-food place. As he would have known if he'd been thinking, if he'd been able to think. This area – with the view and, normally, the freshening breeze – was prime real estate, full of embassies and private mansions. Shea knew that the mayor lived up here, one of the senators.

It was the wrong place to be if you craved a slurpee.

He stood a minute at the crest, breathing hard, looking north – the million-dollar view from the Pacific to Berkeley. The Golden Gate. The Presidio. Alcatraz. Today none of it gleamed – the air was too bad. The water was the color of lead – poisoned and flat.

A siren wailed nearby and Kevin turned too quickly, bringing on another rush of dizziness. He collapsed into a planter box filled with rosemary, leaning back into the hedge. The patrol car passed, slowly over the hill, gunning it down into…

Were the cops staring at him? He'd forgotten how exposed he was. He forced himself up, walked a block west, then turned south again onto a tree-lined street, blessedly shaded. Under the boughs, and then farther on over the low, dun apartment buildings of the Western Addition, he could see the spires of Saint Ignatius not a half mile away as the crow flew.

But between it and where he stood, several plumes of smoke roiled upward. And directly in front of him, on California, he saw an overturned car and what looked like army troops in some loose formation along the sidewalks.

Then another black-and-white patrol car – or was it the same one? – turned into the street and was coming up toward him. For an instant he thought he'd step out, turn himself in and beg for an isolated cell. They could at least protect him, couldn't they?

Except that even here, already, stuck on one of the trees, was the wanted poster with his own face staring out at him, grimacing with the effort of holding up Arthur Wade. Or – for the first time now he saw it objectively – contorted in what could have been taken for hatred.

The numbers were printed on the bottom. One hundred thousand dollars. But, more chillingly, hand-lettered, the addendum – 'Dead or Alive.'

Hoping that the shadows had camouflaged him, he turned into the nearest walkway, a brick path between a manicured lawn leading to a shingled Victorian with a covered entryway, a front door with a large pane of inset cut-glass. Kevin curled himself back inside the recess.

The patrol car passed again, slowly. He didn't dare look.

A light came on overhead and the door to the house opened. A well-dressed woman in her mid-fifties, the television news droning in the background. 'Can I help… Oh…'

Recognition. She must have been glued to the tube all morning. Backing up a step, she got herself behind the door, putting something between them. She whispered through the crack. ' You're Kevin Shea .' Suddenly she was begging him, terrified. 'Please go away, I don't want any trouble.'

The door slammed. The bolt slammed to.

When he wasn't working the streets Philip Mohandas had arranged to base his operations out of a converted two-room storefront in the Bayview District, a mile or so north of Hunter's Point, only blocks from the apartment building Jerohm Reese called home.

Having been out on the barricades from the middle of the night until nearly noon, he was now taking a moment of rest on a low couch in the darkened room in the rear of the storefront. The coat to his business suit hung on the back of a folding chair, and he lay there breathing easily, his tie loosened the half-inch that allowed his prominent Adam's apple to pass unobstructed under his collar when he swallowed. His eyes were closed and a folded damp towel rested on his forehead. On his chest, his hands were together in an attitude suggesting prayer.

Philip Mohandas was not going to sleep very long. He never did, getting by, often for days at a time, on catnaps. He had two personal assistants – Allicey Tobain and Jonas, with the unfortunately phonetic last name of N'doum – who travelled with him at all times, scheduling his time and protecting his privacy. Now they were stationed outside his door on their own folding chairs.

In the outer room, copies of the Kevin Shea poster vied for wall space with several different color posters of Mohandas in mid-speech, invariably with one fisted hand held in the air – his trademark.

The afternoon sun was beginning to stream through the plate-glass windows. Newspapers littered the floor and the wide windowsills. A long, folding table had been set up along one wall, sagging under the weight of African Nation literature and cases of bottled water. Reporters, the occasional minicam crew, professional activists, and concerned citizens all ebbed and flowed through the outer doors, speaking – mostly – in low tones.

Out in the street, a late-model green Plymouth pulled to the curb and stopped. An attractive, diminutive black woman, from the looks of her maybe forty years old, opened the driver's door, squinted at the bright facade of the storefront, and started to come around her car.

One of the reporters recognized her. 'My God, that's Senator Wager.' In the back, Allicey Tobain knocked once and pushed open the door she'd been guarding.

'What is that woman doing here?' Mohandas swung his feet to the ground, wiped his face quickly with the damp towel, then stood and let Allicey arrange his coat. 'I have got nothing to say to her. She is in the wrong camp.'

His assistant touched his hairline briefly with a comb, correcting it, then without a word handed him two Tic-Tac mouth fresheners.

Mohandas was frowning, apparently trying to find an advantage in this. 'Did she call?'

'No calls.' Allicey pulled an imaginary strand of lint from his coat. 'No word at all. She's making a play.'

'But what for?'

Allicey crossed to the door and flipped the light switch. A tall, big-boned, ebony-skinned woman with an enormous bust, her hair done in corn rows, she was wearing black pants, sandals, and a black, red and yellow dashiki cinched at the waist by a gold thong.