Come Morning

Chapter 12

Cronin shifted the cheap plastic suitcase between his feet and leaned back further into the shadows, feeling equal terror and elation. Catty-corner across the intersection was the Chinese restaurant; in a few minutes Runyan would walk the half block from there to his hotel and would go up to his room.

And would be killed.

It had to be tonight, because Runyan had met the fence in that little park just as Cronin had suspected. He’d been too far away to hear anything, but after sending the little girl away they’d obviously argued price.

With a shotgun, you couldn’t miss, right? BING BANG BOOM, it was done. The guys in Vegas sometimes joked about it — making their bones, like that; now he was going to do it. What the hell, Runyan had killed guys in Vietnam, hero, decorated, all that shit. Now it was his turn. That’s just the way life was.

Moyers adjusted his rear-view mirror slightly when it picked up a heavy bearded guy angling across the street to the Westward Hotel, checking in with his cheap plastic suitcase. Transient neighborhood of meaningless guys like Runyan who’d screwed up their lives and would never get on track again.

Except that Runyan had slept with Louise Graham. A loser like Runyan didn’t deserve that sort of luck. Since his divorce a few years before, Moyers hadn’t had much luck with women he hadn’t paid for, and Runyan and Louise together had really burned him. So he was glad that now Runyan would be carrying her in his mind, wondering where she’d gone and why, wondering what he’d done wrong — and not able to do a damn thing about it except hurt.

Runyan was thinking of Louise and hurting. He wished he had the resources, knew the angles to find her again. But what if she hadn’t left because she was ashamed? What if she’d merely been called back to report to whoever had hired her in the first place? Stew about that one for a while, Runyan.

The bright-eyed black-haired old Chinese man brought his check and laid it on the table.

“Good soup?” he asked. Runyan had eaten fried chicken.

Runyan rubbed his stomach and grinned. “Very good soup.”

The old man giggled and went away with Runyan’s money.

Cronin came out of the room he had rented and tapped the sawed-off muzzle of his shotgun against the bare low-watt bulb of the nearest hallway ceiling fixture. The bulb shattered with a subdued POP which drifted down thin warm shards of pale glass.

He moved down the hall on silent stockinged feet, repeating with the other lights. Nobody came from any of the rooms at the sound of the bulbs breaking. Most of them were pensioners, what did they have to do anyway except go to bed early and stare at the ceiling in the dark?

The cross-hall was now very dim. Runyan would have just enough illumination to see the keyhole of his door. Which was the last thing he would ever see.

Runyan turned into the darkened cross-hall, checked at the slight crunch of glass under his shoe, then went on. For those few moments, still distracted by Louise, he rejoined the majority of mankind. Because most men, their survival no longer dependent on identifying another by his scent, the rate or timbre of his breathing, the precise click of tendons in knee or elbow, have lost the ability to perceive physical threats instinctively.

But Runyan was a born survivor. He had been around the corner from three murders in prison because his survival instinct had stopped him from turning those corners. Those same senses now strove to warn of danger, but Runyan was ignoring them.

Even when he stepped on the second litter of fragments, he didn’t connect it with himself. Since nobody knew the diamonds no longer existed, nobody could move on him, right? He was safe. By the dim light of the window, he bent to thrust his room key into the lock. Twenty feet down the hall, in darkness his eyes could not penetrate, a fingertip slid surreptitiously across a shotgun safety catch.

Runyan heard the tiny metallic click of his father’s shotgun safety before he heard the beat of the pheasant’s wings as it rose from the clump of red rye grass, and he knew, I’m between him and the light, and was already throwing himself backwards and sideways out of the closed fire-escape window while his conscious mind was still trying to fit the key into the lock. The frame and curtain six inches above his hurtling body splintered and shredded with the shotgun roar.

Runyan hit the slatted metal platform in a sideways tumble and kept rolling, right over the edge. Grabbing handholds recklessly, he dropped down the steel framework of the fire escape like a monkey, careless of torn palms, ripped clothes, or gashed skin, jinking first one way and then another to create a difficult target. Tricks that had become second nature from years of rock climbing and rappelling in the Sierra carried him down.

He hit the alley on the balls of his feet with his knees flexed, tucking and rolling even as he landed, tight up against the side of the building. Two more shots ripped down at him, the goose pellets whining and rattling down through the metal struts of the fire escape to gouge the blacktop where he had landed a second before. None hit him.

He heard the squeerk! of metal two stories above even as running footsteps pounded down the alley from the street. Runyan rolled quickly back from the wall and sprang to his feet, so when the cop’s torch beam impaled him he was standing in the middle of the alley, gawking upward.

“Shots!” he cried, turning toward the light, shielding his eyes with one hand, still pointing upward with the other, “Up there!”

The uniformed beat cop swung his light up, service revolver in hand. The fire escape was empty except for tattered remnants of curtain blowing through the gaping second-floor window.

“Second floor!” yelled Runyan.

The cop ran for the mouth of the alley which would take him around to the front of the building, gun still in hand.

Cronin ran lightly down the hall, rage at Runyan’s escape turned to fear. Just as he had rehearsed it in his mind, except now, goddammit, he didn’t have the diamonds. He didn’t have anything. Jesus, lucky it was the sort of hotel it was — nobody even stuck a head out of a room. He threw the shotgun into the suitcase, shoved his feet into his boots, and ran down the hallway toward the front stairs with his laces flapping.

He was at the head of the stairs when the street door opened and the cop came pounding up. He ducked, terrified, around the edge of the stairwell, and the cop ran right by toward the back of the hotel without even a turn of the head.

He went down the stairs very quietly and quickly, keeping to the edges so they wouldn’t creak. It was just over two minutes since he had fired his first shot.

Moyers, standing outside his car and wondering what had happened, saw the big bearded guy come back out, still carrying his suitcase, and go up the hill with his boot laces flapping. Drug pusher, rousted by what had sounded like gunshots, getting out while he could? But if they had been shots, why had the cop let him go? And where was Runyan, who had entered the hotel less than five minutes before?

Runyan slouched to the mouth of the alley, hands in pockets, just another nighttime Tenderloin drifter. He checked and faded back into the shadows without any quick movements.

Uphill across the street was Moyers, standing beside his parked car, staring intently at the entrance of the hotel. Staked out, probably had been there when Runyan had come carelessly home. Damn prison, the way it had dulled his reactions! Would he ever be what he had been, thinking with his gut, survival instincts in control, instead of being distracted by his emotions to the point where they nearly got him killed?

Survival thinking meant getting a wall at his back and keeping a clear field of fire in front of him.

He was loose right now. Nobody had a finger on him. Not Moyers, not whoever had tried to kill him, not whoever had called him, not Cardwell, not anybody. Not even Louise.

He had to make his own moves, follow his own rules, use his own logic. No more counterpunching. From now on the initiative had to be his. Otherwise he was going to be dead.

And in that hallway a few minutes ago, his body had told him what his mind, in his misery, had perhaps forgotten: that he wanted desperately to be alive.