12th of Never

Chapter 58

AT SIX THIRTY the next morning, my former partner, chief of police Warren Jacobi, swooped down on Lake Street in his shiny black sedan. He pulled up to where I was waiting for him outside our apartment building, leaned across the seat, and opened the passenger-side door for me.

He took a look at my face and said, “Good morning, sunshine.”

“Don’t start with me, Jacobi. I haven’t slept.”

“You worried about our meeting with Fish?”

“I meant I haven’t slept since Julie was born.”

“Well, you do look like hell.” He laughed. “On you, it looks good.”

I pulled a face, got into the car, took a container out of the cup holder, and pried off the lid with my shaking hands. Jacobi was a worn-looking fifty-five, white-haired, jowly, and, to my eyes, beautiful.

“Julie is in the hospital,” I said.

“Shit. What for? What’s wrong with her?”

The coffee was black, two sugars. Jacobi knew how I like it. I strapped in, then told my former partner everything I knew about what was wrong with Julie.

I didn’t know much.

Jacobi listened as we cruised up Lake Street, the nose of the car pointed east toward Modesto and then south to the U.S. penitentiary in Atwater.

Jacobi said how sorry he was that the baby was sick, and he also told me that I always worry too much and that everything would be fine.

“Of course, when you stop worrying, that’s when things really turn to shit.”

“I’ve really missed you, Jacobi. Like a migraine.”

He laughed and got me to do it, too.

It was almost like old times.

During the ten years I worked with Jacobi, we logged innumerable twenty-hour days in a squad car, arrested a few dozen killers and unrepentant dirtbags, and we both took bullets one bad night in an unlit alley in the Tenderloin.

We could have died and almost did.

A year later, Jacobi stood in for my dead father and gave me away to Joe Molinari. I tripped down the petal-strewn path, fumbled the wedding ring, and Jacobi laughed out loud on the best day of my life. We’ve had hilarious times and horrific ones, but we’ve never doubted that we’re friends forever.

As Jacobi drove, I told him, “I’ve never been so scared, and I mean never. You don’t know what love is until you have a sick baby.”

Joe had insisted that I go to work and he’d promised he’d sit at the hospital all day, all night, never leave Julie alone. I’d left the house only a half hour before, but I called Joe anyway.

“Just—call me if you learn anything, anything at all.” “I will, sweetie. You know I will.”

After I hung up, Jacobi and I talked about the Faye Farmer case and the ugly shootings foreseen by the so-called clairvoyant professor.

And we talked about Randy Fish.

Jacobi said, “I’m glad that sack of crap is alive and can still use his shit for brains. Doubly glad he’s back in maximum security.”

In another couple of hours, we were going to be talking to that sack of crap. I hoped that, having almost died, Randy Fish would feel some compassion for the parents of the missing girls. He was on death row. He had nothing to lose by telling us where he’d disposed of their bodies.