Bleeders

7

The rest of that night is recorded in my memory as a series of blurred images, disconnected and time warped, like fragments of a film edited and projected by a madman.

Cops in uniforms asking questions that I answered, questions that I couldn’t answer.

Kerry, anxious, hovering close by.

Latino police lieutenant named Fuentes, mole on one cheek, humorless half-smile frozen on his mouth. Wanting to know about the money, Carolyn Dain, Cohalan, Annette Byers. Taking the answering machine tape and putting it into a plastic bag. Saying more than once, as if he were making an accusation, “You sure you don’t have any idea who the bald man is?”

Paramedics, two of them, male and female, probing my wounds and talking at me and around me. One of them saying, “Head wounds can be tricky, you’d better let us take you to the ER for an X-ray.”

Emily, arms tight around my waist, small face upturned, luminous eyes full of wet.

Riding in the ambulance, lights beyond the windows making crazy-quilt patterns on a black backdrop.

Hospital smells, doctors and nurses hurrying, scurrying. Somebody with blood all over him, somebody else moaning and saying over and over, “Está muerto, Dios Mío, Está muerto.” Machines humming and the touch of cold metal.

Kerry again, telling me in relieved tones that the X-rays were negative, she could take me home now.

Lying next to her in bed, wide awake waiting for some kind of medication to take effect, watching the dark.

And through it all, in every fragment, behind every voice and every sound, I heard the clicks, listened to the clicks — an endless hollow rhythm that matched the beating of my heart.

I was better in the morning. My head ached, there was an odd sort of thrumming in my body like you sometimes have the day after a long plane flight, but otherwise I felt well enough physically. The clicks were muted now, like the faintest of background noises. I told myself I was okay. No head trauma, none of the wounds serious. I was going to be fine. Still alive, still kicking.

I should have been dead.

The click of the hammer cocking should have been the last sound I heard on this earth.

Jammed cartridge, faulty firing pin — pure blind luck. One-in-a-million chance. The gun hadn’t misfired for Carolyn Dain, and she was lying dead in the cold room at the morgue. The gun had misfired for me, and here I was moving, thinking, breathing. Alive.

Dead man walking.

I could not drive that thought out of my head. I tried to tell myself that last night’s experience was no worse than others I’d lived through. The ordeal in the mountain cabin... three months shackled to a wall, three months alone facing my own mortality every minute of every day. The arson fire in the China Basin warehouse, the rigged shotgun at Deep Mountain Lake, too many other close calls. Death was no stranger to me; I’d lived with it in one form or another most of my adult life. And I’d survived. That was what really counted, wasn’t it? Survival?

Yes. Right. But this was different somehow.

This was different.

The bore of the revolver tight against the bone above my ear, the click of the hammer cocking, the sudden realization that I was about to take my last breath, live the last second of my life. The helplessness, the fury. And the terror. All of that concentrated into a single instant, intensified a hundredfold. You do not survive a moment like that unchanged in some profound way. Do not simply walk away from it telling yourself you’re lucky and then get on with your spared life as if nothing much had happened.

But how had it changed me? In what way was I different this morning than yesterday? I had no answer yet to that question. I felt oddly detached, the way you do in certain dreams, as if part of me was standing off at a distance watching the other part perform the usual daily rituals of showering, shaving, combing hair, getting dressed. I felt calm enough, except for a persistent restlessness. The anger was still there, but it was a faint glow without heat. There was the hate when I thought about the bald man and a desire to see him punished for what he’d done to me and to Carolyn Dain; but they were nothing at all like the consuming hatred and hunger for revenge I’d felt last night or nurtured for so long against the man who had chained me to the cabin wall. No urge to go hunting. No bloodlust. No strong emotion of any kind. Yet it was not as if I were dead inside. Feelings were there but weighted down, smothered. All except one — more of a sensation, really, that had been there when I woke up and that had stayed with me unabated.

I felt as though I were bleeding.

As though the piece that had been torn loose after the gun misfired had left an open wound, and the wound was leaking in a slow, steady seepage that would neither cease nor clot. As though a pool of blood were being created deep within, and the weight of that pool was what was smothering my emotions. Irrational notion, but I couldn’t shake it. I could not stop the bleeding.

Kerry was Kerry, as always: wife, lover, best friend, buffer zone, and rock in a crisis. She asked if I wanted to talk about what had happened, and I said no, not yet. I didn’t want to relive last night even for her, and I had no words to express how I felt. Space was what I needed, separation from everyone for the time being. She’d been through this kind of thing with me before; she understood. She not only left me alone, she got rid of somebody from the media who rang the doorbell and deflected half a dozen callers, including Tamara, my old reporter buddy Joe DeFalco, and Fuentes, the Daly City cop, who wanted my complete file on the Dain-Cohalan case as soon as I could get it to him.

She must have had a talk with Emily, too, because other than a kiss and a hug, I got the same hands-off treatment from her. Only her eyes betrayed her feelings: she was still very frightened and upset. Looking into them, I remembered our little talk yesterday at the zoo, her words You might not always be here, you might go away, and my glib philosophical reassurances. And I remembered the way she’d looked when she came running into the Daly City house, and how she’d called me Daddy. I felt badly for her, and angry at myself for not being able to protect her from last night’s brand of evil, for putting her in a position where she might also have been a victim. Poor Emily, poor hurt lonely little girl. My little girl now. Yet all the feelings — the empathy, the anger, the sadness, the love — were dulled and superficial at this moment. I was not capable of any strong emotion today, not for anyone including myself.

Daddy, you’re bleeding...

The three of us sat quiet at the breakfast table. I drank coffee and made an effort to eat a little of what Kerry put in front of me and couldn’t do it. Finally I pushed the plate away. Tried to smile and couldn’t manage that, either, as I said, “I don’t think I’m up to the Delta trip today.”

They both made of-course-not-we-don’t-care-about-that sounds. Kerry said, “Why don’t you just rest? I’ll call Tamara and ask her to take the file to Lieutenant Fuentes. There’s no need for you to go out...”

“Yes there is. My car.”

“It can stay where it is until tomorrow.”

“I’d rather go get it now.”

“You mean right now?”

“Yes.”

“... All right, if that’s what you want.”

Emily asked to go along. Kerry put up a mild objection, but this was not a good time for the kid to be alone. We piled into Kerry’s car, and she drove us out to Daly City. I thought I might have some kind of flashback reaction when I got to the house again; I felt nothing at all. It was just another tract home wrapped in morning fog, nondescript even with the yellow crime-scene tape strung across the front entrance and a couple of sensation-seekers gawking on the sidewalk nearby.

Kerry pulled up behind my car, and when I opened the passenger door she said, “What now?”

“Go fetch the file for Fuentes, I guess.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel.”

She gnawed at her lower lip. “You won’t?...”

“Won’t what?”

“Nothing. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Always.”

Emily murmured, “Please come home soon,” and I said I would, and they went away. And I was alone.

Instead of going downtown to the agency, I found myself driving aimlessly for a time with the radio tuned to a music station, the volume up high so I would not have to listen to the sounds inside my head. Then, without any conscious intent, I was back in Daly City — at the police station on Sullivan Avenue. Inside, I asked for Lieutenant Fuentes and was told he was off duty. My name and ID got me an audience with another plainclothesman attached to the Dain case; his name was Erdman. He thought I was there to deliver the file, and when he found out I wasn’t and that I had no new information to impart, he adopted that faintly hostile, faintly arrogant attitude some cops have toward citizens they perceive to be uncooperative. He wouldn’t tell me anything about the progress of their investigation, despite my personal involvement. Ongoing and privileged, he said. We’ll contact you if there are any developments you need to know about, he said. And don’t forget to bring that file as soon as possible, he said.

It made me angry. I wanted to say to him, “Listen, you son of a bitch, how would you feel if you’d come within one second of dying last night? You have any idea what it’s like to have a revolver misfire when the muzzle’s pressed against the back of your head?” But I held my tongue and my temper and walked away from him, out into the thinning fog. He was insensitive, self-involved, but he wasn’t my enemy. Right now I had only one person to worry about, and it was not Fuentes or anyone connected with the bald man or even Baldy himself.

The one person, one potential enemy was me.

I sat in the car, reminding myself that I was in a state of crisis, vulnerable and prone to overreaction and misjudgment. I needed to take things very slow, to think carefully before I acted. I needed to maintain perspective and distance. In short, and in spite of what I’d thought and felt in the immediate aftermath last night, I needed to stay out of the investigation and on the sidelines. Let the law handle it — Fuentes, that asshole inside, any other police agency that might come into the case. They’d find Baldy sooner or later. Might have a line on him already. It wasn’t my job and I had no real, lasting desire to see him dead or to dance on his grave. Justice, not revenge. Revenge was a fool’s game — I’d learned that lesson after my escape from the mountain cabin, at the end of a hunt for the sad, sick bastard responsible for those three months of hell. Since then, I’d grown to hate violence in all its forms, vowed never to harm another living creature. Let a judge and jury pass sentence on Baldy, let society execute him if the sentence was death. Life in prison without possibility of parole would be even more fitting. Years, decades behind bars... that was less than he deserved, maybe, but punishment enough for murdering Carolyn Dain and almost murdering me.

Except that he hadn’t almost murdered me, he had murdered me. The gun misfiring didn’t change that. He’d put it to my head, he’d said, “Lay still, you old fuck,” meaning lay still forever, you old fuck, and he’d pulled the trigger. Clear intent, cause and effect. I was still alive but he’d murdered me last night.

Then there was Emily. If I’d let her go inside the house with me, or if she’d gotten out of the car too soon and he’d spotted her, he’d have shot her dead, too. A ten-year-old kid, and he’d have executed her without hesitation or compunction. Kill one, kill two — kill three.

Take things slow, think carefully before acting, maintain perspective... yes. Stay out of the investigation, let the cops handle it? No. He murdered me, he might have murdered my little girl. How could I stay out of it?

Nobody answered the bell in Annette Byers’ apartment. On the mailbox marked 1-A, L. Timmerman, was a Dymo label reading “Bldg Mgr”; I rang that bell. No response there, either. I tried the other apartments, found one woman home, but she hadn’t seen Byers yesterday or today, nor anyone answering Jay Cohalan’s description.

I drove around the neighborhood, looking for her MG. Gone. Nor was Cohalan’s Camry anywhere in evidence. It was possible the two of them were on the run, or maybe holed up someplace together. And just as possible that the Daly City cops had located them, or Cohalan at least had gone in voluntarily when he learned of his wife’s death. I had no real reason to suspect the pair anyway, without a definite link between one or both and Baldy.

Saturday-afternoon quiet in the office. I sat at my desk with the paper file on the Dain-Cohalan case spread out in front of me. Tamara kept all our records on computer disk, but in deference to my technophobia, she printed out all pertinent information as well. I kept the printouts for open investigations and those for closed ones dating back six months in my old file cabinet.

Possibilities were what I was looking for — names, details, anything worth checking on. There were two. Annette Byers had not been Cohalan’s first extramarital fling, according to what his wife had told me, and my investigation had turned up one other name: Doris Niall, a programmer with a dot-com outfit in his office building. That was before I’d confirmed his relationship with Byers, so I’d had Tamara do a little digging on Ms. Niall. She had a brother who’d been in and out of trouble since he turned sixteen — half a dozen arrests for drug-related offenses, tours in the juvenile detention center and the San Francisco county jail. Steve Niall. Present activities and whereabouts unknown.

The other possibility was a Byers connection. When she’d been busted for selling meth, she hadn’t been alone; also arrested in the sting was one Charles Andrew Bright, age 28. She’d got off with little more than probation, but Bright had been slapped with a felony conviction that had gotten him a year as a state minimum-security guest. His relationship with Byers wasn’t clear, and I hadn’t bothered to clarify it because it hadn’t seem relevant at the time.

I looked up both Steve Niall and Bright in the phone directories for San Francisco and half a dozen other Bay Area cities and counties. No listing for either man.

All right. Tamara. I rang the number of the apartment she shared with her cello-playing boyfriend. Nobody home. I left a message to call me as soon as she came in, car phone or home phone. With her computer skills and contacts, it shouldn’t take her long, even on the weekend, to track down some of the available data on Niall and Bright. And maybe get a line on what the Daly City cops had turned up so far; she had a friend, Felicia Jackson, who worked in the SFPD’s communications department.

And meanwhile?

Deliver the file to the Daly City cops... except that after my little run-in with Erdman I had no intention of rushing it out there. I considered other options. Only one had any appeal, the one that called for direct action and held the best chance, slim as it was, for a lead to Baldy.

The bottom drawer of my desk is a catchall for miscellany. I rummaged around in there until I found the pick gun somebody had given me years ago. Eberhardt? I seemed to remember it had come from him when he was still with the SFPD, confiscated from a hot-prowl professional burglar and delivered to me as a birthday joke. Some joke.

A pick gun is a homemade tool that has a hand grip, a trigger, a lockpick for a barrel, and a little knob on top that you twist to adjust the spring tension. Insert the lockpick and pull the trigger, and the pick moves up and down at a rapid speed; when you have the tension just right, it bounces all the pins in a cylinder lock at once. It’s a lot faster than using hand picks and tension bars to release the pins one at a time, but less reliable. It doesn’t work in all locks, deadbolts and most newer varieties, and like Baldy’s revolver last night it has a tendency to jam. Most professional burglars refuse to use one. I had never used this one or any other myself; I’d kept Eberhardt’s little present as a souvenir, not a functional business tool. I’m not the kind of detective who believes in illegal trespass, except in extreme circumstances.

Like mine, now.

When you’re hunting your own murderer, anything goes.