Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

The dogs barking and scratching at the door took his attention away from me.

We both knew his blustering was just that. I had no choice but to attend Rosemary’s memorial service, even though I was pretty sure whoever attacked me would be there too.

Waking up, sometimes you wonder whether you’re really that godawful person you were the day before. But sometimes nothing so profound finds a way into your head-dizzy, used up, in the morning you think, What the-? Then, nothing.

Jon Nunn, in these years since Rosemary’s death, had to try to remember himself every single creaky morning of his life. For years, he’d alternate days filled by the righteous urge to save someone (typical for an ex-cop feeling out civilian life) and days darkened by the urge to strangle and bust up someone bad. Stan Ballard, who’d stolen his wife, was one imagined victim, sure, but sometimes just anyone would have done fine, anyone blamable for the happiness and freedom that came with not being him.

The hard guilt radiated from Rosemary’s death ( No, her execution, jackass , his unrested brain would nag him), but it had actually gone further by now. Having found no satisfaction on that score, it traveled back to Christopher Thomas’s murder, as though Jon were responsible for that one too, for stuffing Thomas in an iron maiden, and responsible for all the chains of calamities in the world before and after the death of Rosemary. ( Execution, Jon boy, ex-e-cution .)

It had started in small spurts, hardly noticeable a couple of years after… after all of it had settled in. All of it gone: his career, his wife, his balance. He’d begun to take walks where Christopher had been seen in the weeks before his murder. He’d stroll the streets around the museum where the art types would meet up with other art types for lunches, coffees, trysts. He’d drive to the grocery store where Rosemary did her shopping for the kids and sit in movie theaters where she had gone to cry in private and to get away from everything. Who would stop his meanderings? He wasn’t flashing any guns or fake badges, he wasn’t womanizing and manipulating the way Chris Thomas once did, he was just walking, talking, listening, looking. He was using up time between meetings. Better than drinking; anyone would have to admit that.

There were those parts of the city that the tourists pretended not to see on their way to the Golden Gate: the Tenderloin, the Mission, the dark corners of old Chinatown, where the city felt real and feral, like the New York City nobody remembered correctly from the 1970s. And sometimes the city didn’t feel real at all-like Night of the Living Dead . It was as if the worst of the derelicts and addicts had some unspoken arrangement to stay in their zones, except sometimes they’d be seen roaming around downtown alongside shopping tourists, looking like lost zombies escaped from their pens.

Or was it Jon Nunn who was the escaped zombie?

Nunn saw a sign he tried to make sense of like a riddle of the meaning of life on one of the streets where small residences backed onto dangerously vacant lots. IF YOU DEFECATE ON MY HOUSE AGAIN, I WILL COME OUT AND SHOOT YOU WITH MY GUN.

What the-

Ex-detective Nunn was still learning to see San Francisco from a civilian side. San Fran was seen as a tolerant place, but inside it was a city with judging, searing eyes everywhere. The hordes of homeless, who took up whole city blocks in the zombie districts, even seemed to judge. Most of all, the police he once knew. They judged the harshest.

“Jon, you know I can’t help you.”

“I’m just taking a walk,” Nunn had answered on that day, six years after turning in his badge, almost smiling. Help me? No one can help me until I know . “I’m just walking around,” he told the other cop.

“Yeah, here you’re walking,” replied Todd Drainer, a vice cop Nunn had run two or three cases with fifteen years before. They both turned their eyes in unison to the worst of the run-down buildings lining the crumbling Chinatown block that Nunn had turned onto. A million miles, it seemed, from Jon Nunn’s apartment. Yet, here gave him some hope for peace.

“I heard there’s a fortune-cookie factory here,” Nunn had said, as if he’d only just learned of its existence. “The tourists like it.” He turned to face Drainer. “What’re you doing here, Drainer?”

“Scaring up some cooperation for a case,” Drainer said. “And unless you’ve become a crack addict instead of a raging drunk-” Nunn gave him a dark look. Maybe he was about to sock Drainer in the face, maybe not. “Sorry, Nunn. Didn’t mean anything. My partner had a hard time after he retired, would wander around the red-light district like he was goddamn Batman and Robin. Fortune-cookie factory is that way, I think. I’d rather not ever see you back here.”

“I’d rather not see you either, Todd.”

Drainer had snickered and mumbled to himself as he walked away, and Nunn was sorry he hadn’t socked him.

Nunn had gone through the back of the factory, stood in a dingy hallway watching a room filled with coughing and smoke, indistinct bodies in slow-motion decay. Nothing had changed from the last time he’d been here, years ago, looking for Christopher Thomas, who had been seen here several times in the months before his murder. Why? If he had a drug habit, that could have opened up all kinds of trouble for him. But the witness pool in this neck of the woods was too unreliable and high to make much out of this lead during the investigation or the trial.

In the meantime, a man known as Hong, the main drug dealer for this area, and a man not unknown to fencing anything-a television, a car, a piece of rare art-was arrested with a few of his men on drug charges. Nunn had pleaded with Drainer to hold off on the raid while he was investigating Thomas, but Drainer went ahead. Hong’s coded ledgers noted payments to a scribbled name that looked like Odd Body . Two right before the date of Chris’s disappearance. Nunn wondered if there was some connection. He wasn’t sure what but had ideas. He had combed through the records of the museum and found that several pieces of art had gone missing in the years before Chris’s death. If he had been in deep with Hong, was he keeping himself alive by paying him back in stolen artwork, or was Hong fencing it for him? Nunn couldn’t find evidence that Chris had been anything more than a recreational drug user. Hong wouldn’t say a word, then was stabbed in the neck in a holding cell by another prisoner with an old grievance and bled out. It had been a dead end then. It was still a dead end. For now.

Nunn had never turned up anyone named Odd Body either, though he’d looked.

Jon Nunn had felt the empty eyes of some of the habituals mark him and follow him out when he had passed through pretending he was looking for a lost drug-addled uncle.

When he got home one of those aimless days, something else had clicked in him. And Nunn had put a call in to Regina Cooper.

No, Jon Nunn wasn’t running the case again-the case was running him, completely.

“I’m not buying,”Regina said when she saw him there with that stubborn look on his face.

Nunn held up his seltzer with cranberry in a short glass. The favorite drink of the ex-drinker because it looked like something that could contain alcohol. Inconspicuous. “You won’t return my calls.”

“I should start changing up my haunt,” said Regina, frowning a luminous, humorous frown as she took her usual place at the Mad Dog in the Fog, and her usual Jameson neat and a Bud were placed in front of her without her asking. “You remember something about real life, don’t you? Imagine how much I’d get done if I tried to entertain every dying ex-cop.” Regina Cooper had written several books about the big cases her office had helped crack during her time as chief medical examiner of San Francisco. They were considered masterworks in the field of forensic sciences, and she had become a staple on the cable crime show circuit before quickly tiring of it. During that time, a television network had bought the rights to her life and hired a former swimsuit model to play a funny and quirky version of her, though Regina was funnier, quirkier, and smarter in real life.