John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

Too true, he admitted every time this topic surfaced. He even believed it. But there were moments – as for example when five pre-ten-year-olds were playing some kind of parade game with every pillow, blanket, cushion, and stuffed animal in the entire house on the living-room floor – that his parental role seemed limited, more or less, to just baby-sitting. Neither his kids nor their friends really cried out to have old Dad guiding their development at that particular moment.

This was not to say there was not a great deal of crying out in general – and screaming and giggling and fighting and running around – and Hardy never for a moment doubted that if he wasn’t in baby-sitting mode, they would destroy the house as surely and as efficiently as Vesuvius had destroyed Pompeii.

Finally, Frannie came home. Hardy, nearly insane with enduring the kid stuff, asked her if she minded if he took a little break. He’d be back in a while – going for a jog.

Until three years before, Hardy had been religious about running a four-mile circle from his house on 34th Avenue, out to the beach, south as far as Lincoln, then back east along Lincoln to Park Presidio, up through Golden Gate Park, and back home.

Frannie warned him that maybe he should warm up for a week or so, get back in some aerobic condition before tackling four miles. To which he’d beaten his chest like Tarzan, getting a big laugh from the kids – their dad was funny – and told his wife he’d be home in forty-five minutes. He was still in shape.

He had never given the workout much thought; it had been part of his daily routine. Today, before he’d even made the fifteen or so downhill blocks to the beach, he was truly winded. But never one to let a little physical discomfort stand in his way, especially when he thought it could be overcome by an act of will, he turned south and kept jogging.

Frustrated by the burning in his lungs and leg muscles, he decided he’d just show his uncooperative body who was boss and run in the soft sand, not the hard pack by the breakers.

When he finally realized that the cramp that stopped him a mile farther on was not a fatal heart attack, he was in a real pickle. He hadn’t brought either his wallet or keys.

So now, at the farthest possible point from his house, he was stopped in agony, without cab fare or ID. He was going to have to walk, or limp, home.

He’d better start walking. Getting back home wasn’t going to be quick. It was sometime after noon and the wind off the ocean had picked up. His sweat glands worked fine, and the dampness of the sweats he wore made it even colder.

He wasn’t going to make it home. He would die here, limping on the beach. The fine-blowing sand would imbed itself into his damp sweatsuit, his very pores, and turn to cement, and leave him permanently frozen in place.

He could see it clearly: generations hence, tourists would flock to San Francisco, to the binoculars at the Cliff House, and pay a quarter to look down the beach and marvel in wonder at the origins of the manlike form that had magically appeared one day in the late nineties, an eternal sandstone monument to middle-aged flabbiness and stupidity.

It took him nearly an hour and a half to get home from the beach. He had a bath, tried Glitsky and Graham again to no avail, got in a twenty-minute nap. He was going to survive, although the next few days might not be much fun.

That night, he and Rebecca were having their own ‘date.’ The word had a lot of emotional resonance in the family due to the traditional Wednesday ‘Date Night.’ They’d instituted something of the sort with their kids – Hardy with the Beck, Frannie with Vincent.

He and his daughter got to North Beach with time to kill before their dinner reservation, so they strolled the neighborhood together. The Beck’s dress was a flounced floral print in pinks and greens. She wore black patent leather shoes and white tights. Holding hands, flushed with excitement to be in the grown-up world with her dad, Rebecca chartered her way through the tail end of Chinatown with its ducks hanging whole in the windows, its bushels of strange green vegetables and even stranger brown tubers on the sidewalks, its fish in tanks, live poultry in cages.

‘Can we go in one?’

‘Sure.’

In front of them a tiny Asian woman ordered something and the man behind the counter took a turtle from a tank and a cleaver from the butcher block, eviscerating and cleaning it as he would have any other foodstuff.

‘I didn’t know people ate turtles,’ she whispered as they left.

Hardy bought an orchid from a street vendor and leaned down to arrange it under his daughter’s hair band.

They quickly passed – Rebecca silent, holding Hardy’s hand tightly – through the gaudy tourist Saturday-night gauntlet of strip shows and adult theaters, the hawkers and gawkers and rubes from out of town, and then up Broadway by the tunnel to the quiet serenity of Alfred’s.

At their banquette the Beck smiled at her father with an adoring radiance. Her strawberry-blond hair was pulled back off her broad, unlined forehead, usually hidden by bangs. It made her look three or four years older. Her manners were flawless.

‘What a little doll!’ ‘Such a charming child!’ ‘You are one lucky man!’ ‘You must be so proud of her!’

The two of them – Rebecca was meant to hear – took the compliments in stride, modestly, graciously. ‘Thanks.’ ‘She is a gem, isn’t she?’ ‘I know – her dad is so proud of her.’

It was difficult to reconcile the sophisticated daughter who sat across from him now, dazzling the waiters and staff, with the jelly-covered dervish of the morning. But then Hardy realized it would be equally difficult to recognize the well-groomed man in the dark suit as the limping, teeth-chattering hunchback of Ocean Beach he’d been only a few hours ago.

‘And for the lady?’ the waiter asked.

She ordered a Shirley Temple in a martini glass to go with her father’s Bombay. After the drinks arrived, they clinked their glasses. ‘To you,’ Hardy said. ‘I’m so glad we do this.’

Rebecca looked down demurely. ‘Me too.’ She sipped and put the glass down carefully, then looked back up at him. ‘Daddy? That man you’re helping, why did he kill his father?’

Out of the mouths of babes, he thought.

‘Well, I don’t know if he did.’

‘They said at school he did.’

‘They did, huh?’

She nodded solemnly. ‘Because he was sick – the dad, I mean. We had a big talk about it, if it was okay. They said he killed him because he was so sick, but I know I wouldn’t want to kill you, even if you were sick. Then I wouldn’t have you anymore.’

‘No, that’s true, you wouldn’t.’ Hardy searched for an approach. ‘Have you been thinking about this a lot?’

She shrugged. ‘A little. I mean, I know you’re helping him, right? So you must think it’s all right.’

‘I don’t think it’s bad, hon, not necessarily. It depends on the person who’s sick, I think, if he wants to die.’

‘But that would mean he’d want to leave his son too.’

‘Well’ – Hardy rubbed at the table with his fingertip – ‘not that he’d want to. But what if he was hurting all the time? What if I was? You wouldn’t want me to spend my life suffering, would you?’

‘But I wouldn’t want you to die !’

He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. ‘This is just something we’re talking about, Beck. I’m not going to die, okay? We’re talking about my client’s dad, and he was old and really really sick. I think he wanted to die and he needed his son to help him. He couldn’t trust anybody else to do it right.’

‘Well, then, why is there going to be a trial if it was the right thing?’