The Crooked Street

30

Frost arrived home after dark. The only thing he could see inside the Russian Hill house were the lights of the city through the rear windows. A low, intermittent rumbling rose out of the silence, and that was Shack, snoring on the living room sofa. Frost didn’t turn on any lights. Instead, he went to the refrigerator and got himself a bottle of Torpedo ale, and he went out to the cool patio, leaving the glass door open behind him.

He leaned on the railing. This place felt like an oasis on top of the world, with the glowing neighborhoods below him and the black mass of the bay in the distance. Trees clung to the hillside, making a jungle on the steep slope. He drank his beer, listened to the wind, and wasn’t even aware of time passing. Throughout the day, he’d barely thought about the fight two nights earlier, but now that he was alone and his adrenaline had seeped away, the pain caught up with him again. The wound on his leg where the knife had slashed him throbbed. His neck stabbed him when he turned his head. He was tired, and all he wanted to do was tumble onto the sofa and sleep.

A tiny noise like the chiming of a bell rose from the darkness at his feet. He looked down. Shack was awake and had joined him on the patio through the open door. The cat bumped his head against Frost’s leg, but with every step he took, a metallic music followed him.

“You’re jingling, buddy,” Frost said. “What’s up with that?”

Frost bent down and scooped up the small cat with a hand under his stomach. He lifted Shack up until they were nose to nose. The cat licked his face. Shack normally wore a black collar, and although he was microchipped, Frost had also attached a badge to the collar with his cell phone number on it, just in case Shack decided to go exploring.

Except there was something else on his collar now.

A small charm, the kind that would hang from a teenager’s bracelet, jangled against the ID badge. Frost had no idea how it had gotten there. He couldn’t make it out, and he had to open up his phone to shine a light on the collar to see what it was.

When he did, his heart stopped.

His whole body shook with a wave of rage and fear.

The charm hanging on Shack’s collar was a snake. Its coils glinted in red. Its jaws were open, its teeth bared, as if it were hissing and laughing at him all at the same time.

Lombard.

Lombard had been here. In his house.

The naked cruelty of the threat overwhelmed him. He put Shack calmly down on the patio floor and stroked his black-and-white fur from head to tail as the cat purred. Then Frost grabbed the railing tightly with both hands and tried to drag breath out of his chest. He closed his eyes and opened them, and he felt a sting where he’d bitten down hard on his tongue.

He had no idea if he was alone or if anyone was on the wooded hillside to hear him. He shouted anyway.

“Don’t... you... dare! Don’t you try it, you sons of bitches! I will rain down hell on all of you! Do you hear me? Are you listening to me?”

The exhaustion, the ache, the loss, the confusion, the sleeplessness of the days since Friday night cascaded over him. He pounded both fists on the iron railing until he thought his bones had broken. Everything in his life felt brittle, like glass riddled with cracks, about to split open.

“Frost?”

He heard a voice behind him, and his reaction was instantaneous. His gun was in his hand. In a single fluid motion, it was cocked. He spun, ready to fire. His arm stretched out; his finger went to the trigger. Halfway through the turn, his mind caught up with him, and he realized that the shadow in the doorway was Tabby. He froze, but he couldn’t seem to let go of the gun. She saw it, too, and the starlight showed the panic in her face.

“Frost, it’s me!”

He breathed hard and came to his senses. He secured the gun and returned it to his holster and squatted next to Shack on the patio. When he did, he found he couldn’t even stand up again. He ran one hand back through his hair and left it awry. Tabby came and bent down beside him and put an arm around his shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

Frost shook his head. “No.”

He said it again in a whisper. “No.”

She helped him inside. Shack followed, and Tabby locked the patio door behind them. She eased him onto the sofa, and when she started to get up, he pulled her down beside him. She didn’t protest. She sat next to him in silence and stroked his hair, until he winced when her fingers neared the bruise at the back of his head. They sat like that for a long time. Neither of them said a word.

Eventually, she got up and went to the kitchen to get him another Torpedo. She brought back one for herself, too. They sat and drank, but they didn’t talk. When those bottles were empty, she got them two more. And two more after that. And again. By the time he was able to say anything, they were both drunk. Being drunk only made her more beautiful to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

It was probably an hour later.

Tabby gave him one of her incandescent smiles. “Well, it’s not like it’s the first time you’ve pointed a gun at me.”

He couldn’t help but laugh.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

He didn’t want to, but he did. It was wrong, but he did. He told her everything. He told her about Denny and Lombard and Coyle and Gorham and Mr. Jin and Filko and the snakes and Herb. He told her about the invisible fight in the darkness, Coyle with his throat cut, his fear of dying. He told her about Shack and the charm. When he did, Tabby simply undid the cat’s collar, removed the snake, and went out onto the patio. She threw the charm into the thick of the trees below the house, where it would be buried forever under mud and leaves.

She came back inside and sat next to him again. She looked calm. Brave. That was just one thing he loved about her.

“So what are you going to do?” Tabby asked him.

“I have to get him,” he said. “I have to get Lombard.”

“Frost, maybe you should stop,” she replied. “This is too dangerous.”

“I wish I could, but I can’t do that.”

Tabby didn’t look surprised to hear him say that. “How can I help?”

“You can’t. What you can do is stay a thousand miles away from this. And a thousand miles away from me.”

“Well, maybe you didn’t hear me. How can I help?”

“You. Can’t. Help. Do you understand me?”

Tabby sighed in annoyance and rolled her eyes. She didn’t like being put off, and she didn’t give up easily. “So what are you going to do next?”

Frost leaned his head back against the sofa. “I need to prove that Martin Filko and the mayor were really on Denny’s boat on Tuesday, and then I need to figure out why they called in Lombard. Obviously, something bad happened that they couldn’t let go public.”

“But how do you prove they were on the boat if no one saw them?” Tabby asked. “At least, no one who’s still alive.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

Tabby sat next to him with her hands on her knees. She reached over to the coffee table where she’d put her phone. He watched her run a search, and then she glanced over and asked, “What’s the code for blocking your number?”

“What?”

“If you don’t want your name or number showing up when you call,” she said.

“It’s star six seven. Why?”

Tabby tapped the keys and dialed a number. She put the call on speakerphone and put a finger over her lips to keep him silent. He had no idea what she was doing.

Then a voice answered. “City hall answering service.”

“I need the after-hours contact for the mayor’s office, please,” Tabby said brightly.

Frost began to protest, but Tabby reached over and put her fingers against his mouth.

Another voice picked up the call. “Mayor’s office, this is Justine.”

“Oh, hey, Justine,” Tabby announced, as if they’d been friends their whole lives. A strange little Southern accent popped into her voice. “I just knew someone would be there to help me in the evening. You all are so efficient out there. This is Lizzy in Martin Filko’s office. Martin’s got a friend coming into San Fran tomorrow who needs a good limo service. He was pretty impressed with the driver last Tuesday and was wondering if you had a contact number for the limo company. It would be a big help, hon.”

There was a long, tentative pause on the line.

And then, “Sure, Lizzy, hang on a minute.”

The minute turned out to be no more than a few seconds before Justine came back on the line. “Lizzy, are you there? It was DiMatteo Limousine. Oh, and the driver’s name was Jeffrey, if that helps.”

“It sure does, hon. You’re the best.”

Tabby hung up.

Frost stared at her. “I can’t begin to tell you how crazy that was.”

She winked. “Uh-huh. You can thank me later. Right now, how about I make dinner for the two of us? That was the whole reason I came over here, you know. Duane promised a care package, but he wasn’t sure he could leave the truck, so I volunteered. How does shrimp risotto sound?”

“It sounds great,” Frost said.

Tabby picked up Shack from the floor with one hand. “Yes, you get some, too,” she said.

She wandered unsteadily toward the kitchen, and he pushed himself off the sofa to join her. They were both feeling the effects of the alcohol. He turned on the downstairs lights, and the house looked warmer and brighter. Like the professional chef she was, despite the lack of mobility in one hand, she began to assemble ingredients from the brown grocery bags she’d brought and to manipulate everything into her mise en place. As she was heating a pan, she said, “How about some music? I like to rock when I cook.”

“Sure. Anything you want.”

Frost hooked up his speakers. He shuffled the songs on his phone, and the first song that boomed into the room was Parachute’s “Can’t Help.”

“Oh!” Tabby exclaimed happily as she recognized the beat. “Oh, I love this song!”

Her head tilted back and forth with the music. Her hips swayed, and her red hair flew. Drinking with him for an hour had erased her inhibitions. She left the stove and strutted from the kitchen into the middle of the living room. He’d never seen her dance before, and he admired the utterly natural flow of her limbs, the ease she had inside her own skin.

At the moment the words began, she surprised him by spinning around with her arms outstretched and both index fingers pointed at him. She lip-synched the song, which she knew by heart, and the lyrics crushed him. They just crushed him. Like the song said, he couldn’t help himself from falling in love with her. He found himself frozen with a smile that told her everything that he needed to hide. His emotions were like Mr. Jin’s posters of Niagara Falls, a torrent that threatened to drown him.

He tried to walk away because watching her was torture, but she grabbed his hands and made him dance with her. He couldn’t find any rhythm; he simply circled the room, nodding to the song, while she followed him and teased him. He mouthed the words to her, too, but he wasn’t pretending. He meant it. He couldn’t help it. The only thing he could think about was wrapping her up in his arms right there.

When the music finally stopped, they were inches apart. Tabby was breathless, and her flushed face beamed. They were out of control. They were drunk, they had no idea what they were doing, and they didn’t care. She slung her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. He was falling, falling, falling, and there was no way she didn’t know it, no way she couldn’t see the truth in his eyes. He wanted to kiss her back hard. On the lips. He wanted to show her what he’d been feeling for months. Something in her face said she wanted it, too.

“Girl can dance, can’t she?”

The voice from the foyer stunned them like the blaring wake-up call of an alarm. It was Duane. He’d been watching the whole thing.

Tabby disentangled herself from Frost as if she were running from a burning building. She put her hands on her pink, blushing cheeks. “Oh,” she said to Duane. “Oh, hi.”

“Hi.”

“I didn’t think you could make it.”

“I got out of the truck early,” Duane replied.

Her voice stuttered. “Well, good. Great. That’s great. I was starting risotto. Can you stick around?”

“Sure I can.” Duane stared at the two of them with a strange coolness in his eyes. “Assuming that’s okay with you guys?”

“More than okay,” Frost said.

Tabby turned and disappeared into the kitchen with an embarrassed sideways glance at Frost. Duane didn’t join her. Not right away. He let her get to work. The clatter of pans sounded extra loud and extra fast, as if she were throwing a wound-up ball of nervous energy into the sizzle of shrimp. His brother simply stood in the foyer with his hands on his hips. He watched Frost, and Frost watched him back. Neither one of them said a word.

“So,” his brother said finally, when the silence had gone on for too long. “I guess I should go help my fiancée.”

Frost didn’t miss the little emphasis Duane put on that last word.

“I guess so.”

“What can I get for you, bro? Is there something you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Because it sure looks to me like you want something. How about another beer?”

Frost heard the innuendo in Duane’s voice and tried to ignore it. The room spun as he collapsed onto the sofa. His headache was back, like a spike burrowing into his neck. He couldn’t remember another time in his life where he’d felt as if the walls were closing in on him the way they were now.

“No,” he said. “I’ve had too much already.”