John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

Drysdale was right – his boss and buddy Chris Locke had been killed and Glitsky, the head of homicide, was neglecting to investigate the death thoroughly. No wonder Art had come down and mentioned it to Dr Strout.

But damn – Glitsky's blood was rushing – he couldn't do everything. He had every one of his inspectors, including himself, triple-assigned – hell, quintuple-assigned – and he knew that the odds of getting even a long-shot lead to finding the man who had shot Chris Locke – on a dark evening in the midst of a riot – approached absolute zero.

This was the kind of extra helping of the unexpected personal stuff that made his job so frustrating. Not that Drysdale didn't have a point. Not that he wasn't justified that his best friend's death wasn't getting the priority he felt it deserved. But that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how responsible you were – he remembered Loretta's remark – you could never do enough. You were going to piss off someone, hurt someone, let someone down.

And Drysdale, whom Abe worked well with, was having a tough enough time. In fact, he knew, he should have assigned it, long shot or no. Many – most – murder investigations were long shots. The simple, galling truth was that he'd gotten distracted and hadn't entirely been doing his job. And that made him furious at himself, at Drysdale, even at the messenger right here.

But there was no point in losing it with Strout. The person with whom he was really put out lived closer.

'You see Art before I do,' he said evenly to Strout, 'tell him I realized the same thing, thought I'd come down and correct the oversight.'

Just as he entered the building someone started yelling in the cavernous, packed lobby.

The person manning the metal detector at the back door was a former street cop named Jimmy Mercy who had been hit on the head with a tire iron years before and appeared punch drunk ever since. A sweet guy.

'Been like this all night, sergeant.' Mercy would need another year or two, if ever, before he got used to Glitsky being a lieutenant. 'Everybody's in real bad moods lately.'

'Everybody includes me, Jimmy.' He was moving forward, into the noise.

Which was escalating quickly.

A pair of uniforms came out the double-doors of the hallway – the downstairs of the Hall of Justice contained a regular administrative police post, Southern Station, out of which a small contingent of cops worked. Glitsky also knew that the police assembly room on the sixth floor had people on call the last few nights, ready for 'disturbance' assignment. He hoped some of them were still up there now because it looked like the party was coming here tonight.

One of the uniforms turned around and yelled to the area behind him. 'WE GOT SOME SHIT HAPPENING OUT HERE!'

A shrill emergency bell started to ring in the building.

In the lobby Sheriff Boles had continued with his makeshift booking procedures. And in spite of the National Guard presence and Mayor Aiken's orders, looting was continuing throughout the city. From Glitsky's perspective, basically nothing was working.

They had more than a hundred people in the lobby and had just unloaded what looked like another bus from another scene. Thirty-five city policemen were roaming around inside and outside the Hall, herding in the new group; another twenty-five or so sheriff's deputies, all inside, were guarding the lines and doing paperwork at the desks. In the line itself mingled a complete set of San Francisco's ethnicities, some of them bruised, some crying, all pissed off.

And after the procession, Boles was simply letting these people go. And there was nowhere to go. Some people wanted to get away as quickly as they could, but most were turned loose downtown in the middle of the night – no cabs, no friends picking them up, a loose mob of recent rioters and looters milling on the steps and environs of the Hall of Justice.

Another fight seemed to be breaking out in the ranks of the new arrivals. Inside, the line of detainees, unruly at best, swelled toward the entrance, pushing. A couple of men went down. A woman screamed.

The bell kept ringing and more policemen appeared from the hallway, out of the elevators – probably from the sixth floor.

A burly white youth broke from the inside line, ran at the three cops at the front door, took down one of them, punched at another. Glitsky saw him go down in a flurry of nightsticks – echoes of Rodney King – kicking, refusing to be subdued.

More cops, and as they ran to the outbreak, leaving their guard posts, more detainees began rushing for the door, a stampede where the line had been breached. Some of them making it outside. Whistles blowing, that damn bell just going on and on, and over it the sound of explosions outside. Was some idiot firing his gun in all this?

Jesus, all hell breaking…

Forty minutes later Glitsky was behind his desk. They had finally subdued the riot – two hundred and fifteen police, and by the time it was over they had recorralled one hundred and four rioters. The rest of the potential arrestees had either seen or made their chance and taken it. The sheriff's tables that had been in the lobby were tipped over, torn apart. There had been a small paper fire. The earlier records of citations, for the most part, were gone.

Sheriff Boles and his deputies had packed the remaining detainees into the commandeered busses and were taking them to Alameda County, where they would discover what a real jail was like.

It was eleven-fifteen.

Adrenaline was surging through him.

This thing wasn't going away, wasn't even getting any better. For some reason his mind turned to the French Revolution, to a truth he'd only realized for the first time earlier this summer when he'd read about it in one of his continuing self-improvement programs. It was about the storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. (He reflected on the fact that revolutions always seemed to happen in July, which was now only forty-five minutes away.) At the time the Bastille event hadn't seemed to mark the end of the monarchy. For weeks afterward Louis XVI had made his rounds, giving speeches, doing damage repair, the usual. But from Bastille Day onward he was doomed. He just didn't realize it.

Glitsky wondered if they were all in the same boat here in the City by the Bay. Three days in and, if tonight were any indication, on a roll.

The pile of messages on his desk had grown exponentially, Chief Dan Rigby's message labeled 'URGENT' on top, but the first thing Glitsky did was go through the whole pile on the chance that Farrell had called.

Nope.

Why the hell not? What was going on with that guy?

Next he called Rigby's office, only to hear the extension ringing and ringing in the War Room. It wasn't really any surprise – Rigby had probably gone home, along with his staff, for at least a few hours. If he had been in the building during the riot Glitsky would have seen him. He would check back with the chief first thing in the morning, find out what was so urgent.

Supervisor Greg Wrightson had called him again. Although a nominal liberal, like every other supervisor, Wrightson was one of few members of the Board of Supes who at least pretended to care about the mostly so-called right-wing issues that concerned the police department. He also was in the bad habit of believing that he, as a city supervisor, somehow had a mandated authority to order police action whenever it suited him. He had been known to call up Rigby himself and ask him to start enforcing the violations on parking meters around City Hall. Important stuff like that.

Glitsky knew Wrightson wouldn't be in his office in the middle of the night, but he moved the message onto the center of his desk, under Rigby's. If Wrightson had called twice in one day, he had something on his mind.