John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

But Mo-Mo had worked a long time with Carlos, so he gave him a chance, with the condition that if the heroin wasn't delivered to Mo's place, the Kit Kat Klub, by sundown the next day, the deal was off. Mo-Mo would take his delivery from somebody else.

Which alone would have been all right, perhaps a hassle to reestablish Mo-Mo's confidence in the Carlos/Jerohm supply line, but nothing too serious. As it turned out, Richard finally did arrive near the end of the next day as the sun was sinking. Carlos had a commitment to buy the drug, but without the sale to Mo-Mo he wouldn't have anything to pay Richard with, and the last man who didn't pay Richard didn't see any more mornings.

Now Jerohm, by the time Richard showed up, had figured he wasn't going to have any work today, no run to the Kit Kat, so he had helped himself to a little PCP, and suddenly he found he had to go steal a car off the street in the time it might take him to blow his nose. And, with angel dust driving his engine, paranoid over Richard and Carlos and most everything else, Jerohm took his.38 Police Special from the place he kept it stashed under the stairs.

There had been no cars on the street. Nobody had parked and left their keys inside, he couldn't get the use of any wheels. And Jerohm was out of time.

Which turned out to be the worst bad karma for Mike Mullen, who was sitting, window down, bouncing along to some tune on the radio. Jerohm couldn't believe he had come all the way to Dolores Street already, which seemed as though it were halfway across town. He had to make his move. The sun was going down and if he didn't get his hands on a car he was dead meat.

So he shot Mike Mullen, pulled him out of the car, and took off. There wasn't any remorse, any particular thought involved at the time or later. Jerohm's feeling was that everybody had their allotted time and this had been Mullen's. It could have been anybody. It was nothing personal. He was merely the agent of blind fate.

Jerohm got the car, got it back to Carlos, took the heroin to Mo-Mo. Everybody was happy.

But though that episode had worked out fine from Jerohm's perspective, generally speaking he had been forced to do what he did, and in that direction lay trouble.

The other way, why he was out tonight, was when it was easy.

Jerohm was wearing black nylon warm-up pants, a black turtle-neck under a black sweater and a pair of Converse black tennis shoes. There had been riots earlier in the day not far from his house on Silver Avenue, and then later tonight up in the Mission District, Dolores Park. Jerohm reasoned they'd pull the National Guard up from Silver, leaving the place deserted, hoping most everybody would stay in because of the curfew.

He smiled to think of it. Citizens were so lame.

He was in good shape. The few days in jail hadn't hurt him any. He could have just run up to Silver but he needed something to carry the stuff away in, and he thought he'd wait a while before trying to score another car off somebody new. Last time hadn't worked out the best.

So leaving his apartment a little after one in the morning, he took his under car – the throwaway he used for business – and rode with the lights out all the way up to Silver, where he slowed down looking out at the playground, although nobody was playing.

He kept driving, running dark, until he came to the row of storefronts, then pulled over in front of the second building – Ace's Electrics – and got out, his sneakers crunching the broken glass under his feet. A few steps over the sidewalk and he was through the broken window, into the shop. He took out his flashlight and checked the shelves. More than he thought there'd be – the guard must have been doing good, keeping out the looters, until they left.

The problem was that the stuff in the shop wasn't high-end – it was the wrong side of town for that. Only radios, clocks, whatever the hell else Mr Ace thought he'd call 'electrics.' But Jerohm didn't waste any time moaning about it. Whatever was here was here for the taking. It would bring him something. Lifting a few of the fancier-looking radios, he came back out through the broken window and put them in his back seat.

Three doors down was Ratafia's Body Shop – a lot better, though he had to break his own window to get himself in. They had a couple of pretty good looking toolboxes jammed to the top with shining gear. They weighed a ton but it would be worth it to carry out – bring some real cash.

Across the street was the liquor store, window broken but bars, and he had to make do reaching through, pulling maybe twenty, thirty bottles out, the ones he could reach by hand or hook with his tire iron.

He kept moving steadily up the street, seeing no one, hearing nothing but his own footfalls over the broken glass. The thrift store was hanging open, but who wanted anything in there? He just lifted a couple of suits that might look good for himself, two or three dresses for Carrie and threw them into the car. Then, thinking about it, he reentered and grabbed a large toy truck for Damien, some scary looking guys with swords, couple of realistic submachine guns. The kid would think it was Christmas.

It wasn't much of a street, but hey, he wasn't complaining. It was all his. Couple more shops – bulk grains and canned goods that he piled in the trunk, a whole passel of what looked like good food stamps in the cash register.

Eighteen minutes. That was enough. He got back into the car, rolling back down Silver, turned onto Palou. Hadn't seen a living soul, which is what he'd told Carrie would happen. Curfew, he told her. People hang inside. Scared of getting shot at, which he wasn't.

But she worried. That was her. Let her. She'd be glad enough to see it when he got it all home.

He knew better, how it worked. You did things when you had to or when it was easy. And tonight was easy.

Wes Farrell had vague memories of no sleep.

If he recalled correctly, and he thought he did, Susan – Moses McGuire's wife – wasn't enthralled with the idea of her husband bringing home from his bar a drunk guy she didn't know to spend the night on their couch.

The baby woke up at least three times, although that assumed that she'd been asleep to wake up, and you couldn't have proved it by Wes. He had kept hearing noises all night, one or both of them shuffling around, opening the refrigerator, arguing – 'Would you please bring her in here? I'm not walking around in my nightgown with your friend out there on the couch.' To say nothing of the baby's cries.

As rosy-fingered dawn had lightened the sky, a bleary-eyed Moses McGuire had come into the room and dropped Wes's keys on the floor by the side of the couch. Subtle.

Lydia – Wes's ex-wife – had wanted the dog for companionship because Wes spent so much time away from the house, in the courtroom, and once the kids were gone she did not want to be all alone in the big house. A dog would make her feel safer, too.

But, during the divorce negotiations, Lydia had decided she didn't want the dog anymore. Well, Wes didn't want the boxer either. He'd never wanted it in the first place. It was always Lydia 's dog – Bartholomew D. (for 'Dog') Farrell, Bart for short. Bart, the sixty-five pound dog-doo machine.

And Lydia had said, 'Okay, then he's going to the pound.' It amazed him how Lydia could cut things like that. Had she always been able to? He just didn't know anymore, maybe had never known.

Wes couldn't let that happen. Too many other things had fallen apart in the short years after his youngest – Michelle – had moved out. For some reason he found himself incapable of allowing Bart to go to the pound.

This particular morning he figured that Bart would be pissed off at him. After all, he had been gone close to eighteen hours. He turned the key and there was Bart, whining.