Bleeders

2

Golden Gate Park has plenty of daytime attractions — museums, tiny lakes, rolling lawns and playing fields, windmills, an arboretum — but on a foggy November night it’s a mostly empty place to pass through on your way to somewhere else.

It does have its night denizens, of course, like any large park in any large city: homeless squatters, not all of whom are harmless, and predators on the prowl through its sprawling acres of shadows and nightshapes. On a night like this it also has an atmosphere of lonely isolation, the shifting fog hiding city lights and turning streetlamps and passing headlights into surreal blurs.

The buffalo enclosure is at the westward end, less than a mile from the ocean — the least-traveled section of the park after about eight P.M. There were no cars in the vicinity, moving or parked, when I came down Kennedy Drive. My lights picked out the fence on the north side, the rolling pastureland beyond; the trash barrel and bench were about halfway along, at the edge of the bicycle path that parallels the road.

I drove past there, looking for a place to park and wait. I didn’t want to sit on Kennedy Drive; a lone car close to the drop point would be too conspicuous. I had to do this right. If anything did not seem kosher, the whole thing might fail to go down the way it was supposed to.

The ideal spot came up fifty yards or so from the trash barrel, opposite the buffaloes’ feeding corral — a narrow road that led to Anglers Lodge where the city maintains casting pools for fly fishermen to practice on. Nobody was likely to go up there at night, and trees and shrubbery bordered one side, the shadows in close to them thickly clotted. Kennedy Drive was still empty in both directions, so I cut in past the Anglers Lodge sign and drove up the road until I found a place where I could turn around. Then I shut off my lights, made the U-turn, and coasted back down into the heavy shadows. From there I could see the drop point clearly enough, even with the low-riding fog. I shut off the engine, slumped down on the seat with my back against the door.

No detective, public or private, likes stakeouts. Dull, boring, dead time that can be a literal pain in the ass if it goes on long enough. This one wasn’t too bad because it would be short, only about an hour, but time lagged and crawled just the same. I kept my eyes off my watch, not that that did any good. I’d been doing this kind of thing for so many years I could almost hear the retarded ticking-off of the seconds inside my head. One... two... three...

Kerry and Emily were still foremost in my mind. Another call to the condo? Kerry might be home by now. If not, I could talk to the kid; it wasn’t her bedtime yet. That was where she’d be, though, in her room with Shameless the cat, listening to music or reading or fooling around with her computer or maybe just staring off into space. She spent more and more time in there, drawn deep inside herself. Communication had become increasingly difficult. It wasn’t that she was despondent or dissatisfied with us, her new school, her new life. She was simply not there much of the time. Lost or maybe hiding in a place neither Kerry nor I nor anyone else could go.

So what would I say to her if I called now? “Hi, I’m sitting out here in the fog in Golden Gate Park, getting ready to catch some bad guys, and I just thought I’d call and see if you’re all right and remind you to brush your teeth before you go to sleep.” She didn’t need to hear my disembodied voice on the phone. She needed me there with her, to hold her and try again, lamely if earnestly, to make her understand that her life wouldn’t always be full of pain and loss and loneliness and uncertainty. To convince her that someday she’d be happy again.

Six months an orphan. Six months... not much time at all. Unless you’re ten years old and everything you’ve known and believed in and trusted for those ten years has been ripped apart; the past and its relative comforts suddenly dead, the future impossible to imagine, and all you have to cling to in the present is a couple of relative strangers old enough to be your grandparents but with no experience whatsoever in raising a child your age or in finding meaningful ways to give you the constant reassurance you need. In that case, it was a hell of a long time. It might even seem like a piece of forever.

Hard. So damn hard for all of us. Cybil, Kerry’s mother, helped as much as she could, but Cybil was eighty years old and led an active and productive life of her own over in Marin County. Friends and neighbors had been helpful, too, dependable and supportive, but they were strangers seldom seen and even harder for a child to relate to. What Emily needed were full-time parents, and what she was getting was a collection of part-time caregivers. It wasn’t nearly enough. And because it wasn’t, the strain was starting to tell on everyone concerned.

The best thing would’ve been for either Kerry or me to quit working and devote the necessary time to Emily’s welfare. But that was not going to happen. We’d been at our jobs too many years; we were too set in our ways; neither of us was that selfless. It had nothing to do with finances; money was not a motivating factor in our lives. We loved Emily, but we loved our work more because it defined us, sustained us, gave us purpose. At our ages we were simply incapable of making that kind of sacrifice. If one of us did, it would likely lead to resentment and do the child more harm than good.

But that didn’t change the fact that we were committed to Emily, to the bargain we’d made. The right time for her to be handed over to Child Welfare, made a ward of the court, and put in a foster home had come and gone; we’d all of us seen to that. Emily by making it plain to all concerned, including the judge at the adoption hearing, that she did not want to live with anyone but Kerry and me. Cybil by working on us repeatedly, breaking down our reservations. The two of us by talking it out endlessly, waffling back and forth but knowing in our hearts we were soft touches and in the end would give in because it was what we wanted, too. Once we were granted custody, it was too late for any other viable alternative. To back out now, simply because we were having the problems we’d expected to have and had yet to find ways to bridge the wall of years and need, was unthinkable. We’d hate ourselves if we did that; and more importantly, abandoning Emily at this point might damage her almost as much as losing her real parents had. She was so fragile she might never recover.

So that was not going to happen, either. What would happen: We’d continue to do the best we could, take care of her and be there for her as often as we could, give her as much love and support as we knew how. The crisis period would ease eventually, the wounds would begin to heal as she grew toward adulthood. We had to believe that. No, not just believe it. Somehow we had to make it happen.

Sitting there in the dark, thinking these thoughts, added to my discomfort. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Now and then a car drifted by, its headlights reflecting off rather than boring through the wall of mist. The ones heading west may have been able to see my car briefly in dark silhouette as they passed, but none happened to be a police patrol, and nobody else was curious enough or venal enough to stop and hassle me.

I shifted position for the tenth or twentieth time, to ease an incipient cramp in my right ham. A thin coating of fog-damp had formed on the windshield, so I turned on the ignition long enough to use the wipers. There was condensation on the inside of the glass, too, even though I had the driver’s window rolled partway down; I cleared that away with my hand. Must be close to nine now, I thought. I gave in to the urge to check my watch. Right: six minutes to nine.

And that was when Cohalan showed up, predictably early because he was anxious to get this part of it over and done with.

He came barreling along Kennedy Drive too fast for the conditions; I heard the squeal of brakes as he swung over and rocked his white Camry to a stop near the trash receptacle. I watched the dark shape of him step out and run across the path, the heavy briefcase a squarish bulk banging against his leg. He made the drop, ran back at the same speed. Ten seconds later the Camry hissed past where I was hidden, again traveling too fast, and was gone.

Nine o’clock.

I sat upright now, a little tensed, both hands on the wheel.

Nine-o-five.

Headlights put a glare on the wet road surface, but they were high and bright — truck lights. An old stakebed rumbled past without slowing.

Nine-o-eight.

Another set of beams appeared, this one belonging to a small car heading east. As it approached, I saw that it was low-slung, dark-colored. Vintage MG. It rolled along slowly until it was opposite the barrel, then veered at a sudden sharp angle across the road, its brake lights flashing blood-red, and rocked to a stop. I reached out to tighten fingers around the ignition key. The door over there opened without a light coming on inside, and the driver jumped out in a hurry, indistinct in a coat and some kind of head covering; ran to the barrel, scooped out the briefcase, ran back, and hurled it inside.

I had the engine started and in gear as the driver hopped in. Fast takeoff, even faster than Cohalan had fled the scene, the sports car’s rear end fishtailing slightly as the tires fought for traction on the slick pavement. I was out on Kennedy and in pursuit within seconds.

There was no way I could drive in the fog-laden darkness without putting on my lights. In the far reach of the beams I could see the other car a hundred yards or so ahead. But even when I accelerated, I couldn’t get close enough to check the license plate.

Where the Drive forks on the east end of the buffalo enclosure, the MG made a tight-angle left turn, brake lights flaring again, headlight beams yawing as the driver fought for control. Scared, maybe stoned, and a little crazy to be driving so recklessly on this kind of night. I took the turn at about half the speed. I still had the MG in sight as we looped around Spreckels Lake toward the park exit on 36th Avenue, but it would have taken stunt-driver skills to catch up.

The stoplight at 36th and Fulton glowed a misty red when the sports job reached the exit. The driver, without slowing, made a sliding right turn through the red, narrowly missing one oncoming car and causing another to brake and skid sideways. The MG came close to spinning out of control and into a roll that probably would have killed the reckless damn fool at the wheel. Caught just enough traction as horns brayed angrily, and disappeared, swaying and roaring on Fulton to the east.

The near-accident shook me up a little. If I tried to continue pursuit, somebody — an innocent party, maybe — was liable to get hurt or killed, and that was the last thing I wanted to happen. High-speed car chases are for lunatics and the makers of trite action films. I pulled over to the side of the road, still inside the park, and sat there for a minute or so until my pulse rate slowed to normal. Thinking I should have anticipated something like this, should have handled the whole thing differently. Too late now. Be thankful that somebody hadn’t got hurt or killed and that my overloaded conscience had been spared yet another heavy burden.

Cohalan threw a fit when I rang him on the car phone and told him what had happened. He called me all kinds of names, the least offensive of which was “incompetent idiot.” I let him rant. There were no excuses to be made and no point in wasting my own breath.

He ran out of abuse finally and segued into his old self-pitying lament. “What am I going to do now? What am I going to tell Carolyn? All our savings gone, and I still don’t have any idea who that blackmailing bastard is. What if he comes back for more? We couldn’t even sell the house, there’s hardly any equity...”

Pretty soon he ran down again. I waited through about five seconds of dead air. Then he said, “All right,” followed the words with a gusty sigh, and added, “But don’t expect me to pay your bill. You can damn well sue me, and you can’t get blood out of a turnip.” He banged the receiver in my ear.

Some Cohalan. Some piece of work.

And now, by God, it was my turn.