The Vig

Chapter Eleven

Hardy lay on a blanket looking at the clear blue sky, his head on Frannie’s lap. A friend of hers, Cindy something, was finished singing an old Jackson Browne song about just packing up your sorrows, leaving them on the curb, and the Trashman, he’d just haul them away…

“I wish,” Hardy said.

“Oh, stop.” Frannie cuffed him on the side of the head. “How many days like this do we get, and you just won’t let yourself enjoy it. That was great, Cindy, in spite of old sour face here.”

“Hey, I loved the song.” Hardy sat up. The holster felt plain silly under his arm, but he was not about to go out to a public place like Golden Gate Park and risk running into…

So in spite of the warmth of the day, over his shirt he wore an old blue-and-white Yosemite windbreaker that had belonged to Frannie’s late husband Eddie.

“That’s all you can do with troubles,” Cindy said. “Just let them go. What’s gonna be is gonna be.”

About as comforting as it was original.

“It shouldn’t be so bad,” Frannie said. “Look where we are right now.”

Which was in the Shakespeare Garden in the park, the three of them sitting on a blanket littered now with the remains of the lunch Cindy had brought over for Frannie. She had friends who kept doing nice things for her. She was that kind of person, Hardy knew. He and Cindy had split a couple of sips of Chianti out of a straw bottle, but Frannie was sticking to her no-alcohol pregnancy regime. A light breeze blew high in the trees over them.

Cindy strummed some other chords on her guitar. Hardy thought Cindy was cute. Nice. But no Frannie. Not close. Most of the other people Frannie’s age struck him as way younger than he was, which of course was true, but in Frannie’s case he never thought about it. Cindy, with her turned-up little nose and her guitar playing, seemed more a contemporary of the teenagers who were playing frisbee out across the lawn than a twenty-five-year-old woman.

Hardy leaned back down on Frannie’s lap. “You’re right,” he said. “Look where we are.”

Cindy played another song, and Hardy, drowsy, closed his eyes. He felt Frannie put her hand on his chest where the Yosemite logo was, probably thinking about Eddie. He pushed that out of his mind. He was here and Cindy was right. Never mind originality. Que sera sera, Hardy thought, but it meant something different for him. No doubt Cindy… maybe Frannie too… thought Jackson Browne was an oldie-how about Patience and Prudence doing ‘Que Sera Sera’ on the Hit Parade? Hardy had only been four or so but he remembered that…

When he opened his eyes, Cindy had gone. The frisbee game had stopped. The breeze had died down.

“Hi,” Frannie said.

“Did I sleep?”

“About an hour.”

“Where’d Cindy go?”

“Back home. She says good-bye.” She put both her hands under his head and lifted. “You want to get up? I’m a little stiff.”

“You could’ve woken me, you know.”

Frannie stood and stretched her back. “I don’t think you’ve been getting very good sleep these past few nights. Couldn’t hurt to catch up a little.”

“I can’t believe it. I never do that.”

Frannie shrugged, gathering up the blanket. “Well, you did.”

“I hope I didn’t hurt Cindy’s feelings.”

“She liked you a lot.”

“Why? What did I do? Fall asleep. Kvetch about her songs.”

Frannie stopped her picking up and faced him. “Dismas. You are yourself. No games. You do what you do, not trying to make any impression. It’s just who you are. And I think you’re great. You should know that.”

“Okay.”

“And now you’re embarrassed.”

Hardy leaned back against a tree. Frannie’s eyes were bright green under her shining red hair. Although looking at her no one would have concluded that she was pregnant, she had filled out so that Hardy could hardly see the frail girl he’d caught when she fainted at Eddie’s graveside.

“You’re the one,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.”

She knew what he was talking about. Her eyes seemed to shine with the threat of tears, but she held them back, scrunching her nose up and forcing a smile. She walked up to him, put her arms around him and hugged him hard. “You go and pack your sorrows,” she said. “Trashman comes tomorrow.”

He felt something turn over inside of him. He looked out through the trees, trying to decide what it was.

“A body?”

“Well, something very close to a body.”

“That’s dead.”

“Yeah.”

Pico Morales shook his head. Pico was the curator of the Steinhart Aquarium, also located in Golden Gate Park, and Hardy had dropped Frannie off at the Japanese Tea Gardens and gone over to see his friend, who worked every day but Sunday. They stood now in the glow behind the tanks in the tropical fish section. In the tanks fluorescent reds and blues and yellows and greens floated against the glass or darted from rock to rock. On the other side a steady stream of people filed by, hypnotized.

“I don’t have any ideas,” Pico said.

“Come on, Peek, seawater is your life.”

“But bodies aren’t.”

They moved down a couple of tanks. “What I need is just something that would act like a human body in seawater. That would float the way a body would.”

“A rubber mat, something like that?”

“I don’t know. Wouldn’t something like that, on the surface, catch some wind? And that would affect it.”

Pico made a note on a clipboard attached to one of the tanks.

“What do you see?” Hardy asked. Both of the men were squinting into the tank.

“That angel fish, see under its eye, that little spot? It bears watching, is all. We’ve been getting these cancers lately, maybe fungus. I don’t know what it is. We’re analyzing our tropical water.”

“You have different water?”

Pico straightened up. “You’re the one who said it. Seawater is my life. It might be anything. Second-generation problems if we got a goddamn cyanide batch. Who knows?”

“Cyanide?”

Pico was moving to the next tanks. “The tropical hunters, Diz,” he said. “A lot of them use cyanide over the reefs.”

“But doesn’t cyanide kill the fish?”

“It does. Breaks my heart. Another hundred years we might not even have any reefs left. I’m not kidding. The cyanide kills the coral too. But”-he held up a finger-“but a few of the hardier little devils make it, and they fetch a small fortune, which is why it keeps getting done.”

“And you buy your fish from these guys.”

Pico looked at him. “You think we’d support that shit? We are very picky about our suppliers, but some fish get through the cracks. At least maybe they do. We see some pink-eye in an angel fish, it makes me wonder.”

They came out to the room Hardy was most familiar with, just off Pico’s office. A huge circular concrete tank sat four feet off the floor, three-quarters filled with seawater. In that tank Hardy, Pico and a small group of other volunteers had spent many hours walking around with great white sharks. A great white shark can’t breathe if it isn’t moving through water, and these giants had almost always been hauled in traumatized near to death from being caught and taken on fishing boats. Every one had eventually died, but it remained Pico’s dream to have the first great white shark in captivity in his aquarium.

The two men pulled themselves up and sat on the concrete lip of the pool. Pico took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit up. “But bodies,” he said, “you know what a human body is, essentially? It’s a big bag of seawater.”

“I think it’s your poetic side I love the best,” Hardy said.

“It’s true. Chemically, it’s like ninety-seven percent the same thing.”

“Okay.”

“So a body floating in seawater would be like part of the water. Fresh water, depending on air in the lungs and how much the tissue had become waterlogged or whatever, the body would move up or down, but in salt water, the specific densities are so close it would always float. You could spray dye on the water and watch where it goes, and that’d tell you the same thing.”

Hardy kicked his feet against the concrete. “Nope. Same thing as a rubber raft, where the wind or a passing boat might change the course. It’s got to float, but not on the surface.”

Pico said, “Aha,” and jumped down onto the floor.

“What?” Hardy followed him into his office.

Pico reached behind the door and pulled down one of the wetsuits that hung there. They were always there-the volunteers used them when they walked the sharks.

“The closest thing to a body is a body. Put this on, go and hang in the water and see where it takes you.”

How did things get so complicated? Glitsky was thinking. He was driving south on 101 past Candlestick Park, on his way out of the city and out of his jurisdiction to interview an ex-cop with only the slightest connection to any active case. He shook his head. Flo was right-he cared too much. He had to turn over every rock to make as sure as he could he at least didn’t get the wrong man…

One of his first cases… Haroun Palavi, in the country about seven months, importing rugs from Iran, had killed his wife and the in-laws living with them. Neighbors had heard them all screaming at one another for weeks. When Glitsky questioned Haroun he had no alibi-he’d been in his warehouse working alone. There were no other plausible suspects. Haroun’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, which he’d tried to explain by saying that he’d come in and just picked up the gun he’d found near his wife’s parents. He was scared. He thought the killer might still be around.

So Glitsky had arrested Haroun. He’d investigated and found that one of the neighbors, another Iranian woman, had talked a lot to Haroun’s wife and found out that she was miserable in this country and wanted to go home. Haroun was ruining her life and her parents’ lives. At the time, Glitsky had thought that she’d probably just nagged Haroun until she pushed him over the edge. He didn’t understand these Iranians anyway, but he did know, or thought he knew, that they had this eye-for-an-eye mentality, and seemed, in general, to hold life pretty cheap. Haroun hadn’t done a very good job of learning English, either.

So Haroun had gone to trial and was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen-to-life second-degree murder plus two for the gun, of which he served three days before they found him with a crushed skull and a broken neck on the floor of his cell. It was an effective way to kill yourself, Glitsky thought, diving headfirst from your upper bunk onto cement, although most people lacked either the nerve or the imagination for it.

And that would have been the end of the case except that about two months later the Iranian neighbor woman turned up dead, too, and it finally transpired that Haroun’s business partner, Revi Mahnis, couldn’t take a woman’s no for an answer. Under questioning he revealed that Haroun’s wife had threatened to tell Haroun that he’d been propositioning her. So he’d had to kill her or be humiliated and out of business. Both. And, because her parents were there, he had to kill them, too.

It had been Glitsky’s darkest moment on the force, knowing that his preconceptions and prejudices had killed an innocent man. He wasn’t about to let it happen again…

He took the San Bruno turnoff and doubled back on the frontage road, looking for a street name. It was a light-industry and duplex neighborhood wedged between the freeway and El Camino Real.

He didn’t want to be hasty in jumping to a conclusion about who had murdered Maxine, but it still bothered him, coming down here because the lab was backed up and Hardy had said that Hector Medina had a possible connection to Rusty Ingraham. It was a reach. Here he’d got a righteous murder victim and, if you looked at the statistics, the best suspect-an estranged husband. If he was writing a book on murders he’d start with the chapter on families. After that the book would get thin pretty quick.

But the lab still didn’t have squat on the results of picking apart Ingraham’s barge, so he still couldn’t place Ray Weir at the scene. He was pretty sure they’d find something that did that, and when they did he’d go down and bring Ray in. Not exactly open-and-shut, but just about as close as they came.

As for Rusty Ingraham, Abe wanted to believe that he was hiding out from the jealous husband Ray Weir. But he had to admit Hardy’s point that he would have at least gotten in touch made some sense. Of course, until there was either a body or some compelling reason why there wasn’t one, Rusty remained officially alive, and, more to the point, not a homicide victim. And if he wasn’t a homicide victim he wasn’t Glitsky’s business. Life was complicated enough.

He’d gotten Medina’s number from the telephone book and called down for an appointment.

“So the faggot told, huh?”

Glitsky hadn’t known what he was talking about. “I wanted to see you about Rusty Ingraham.”

A laugh. “That, too. All the roosters home to roost. Well, come on down. I got nothing to hide.”

There were cars parked on lawns all down the street, oil smears on driveways, bottle caps, beer cans and broken glass in the curbs. It was a hot, still, gas-smelling afternoon. The four trees on the street had lost their leaves; an abandoned yellow schoolbus with broken windows sat on its rims at the corner. The sky seemed to hang low, a hazy blue-white.

Medina was wearing a dirty white tank-top T-shirt over baggy khakis, washing his car in his front yard with a teenage girl. The one-story frame house had once been painted lime green with yellow trim, colors from a decade before, once perhaps brightly gay, now faded to garish.

As Glitsky got out of his car Medina began drying his hands on a chamois. The girl didn’t even look up-just kept wiping at the front windshield with a soapy sponge. Medina crossed the small yard and met Glitsky near his car by the curb.

“I’d rather we didn’t say anything in front of Melanie,” he said. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

Glitsky leaned against his car’s hood. “You got me stumped,” he said.

Medina, squat and flat-footed, turned the chamois over in his hands. “You don’t have to play games with me. I used to be a cop.”

“Sure, I remember you. I understand you got a raw deal. What kind of games might I be playing?”

“Good guy, bad guy?”

Glitsky spun around from his waist, exaggerating. “Somebody else here I don’t see?”

The girl called, “Daddy, I need more soap.”

He turned to her. “In the bucket, sweets. Just go to the bucket.” He came back to Glitsky. “My daughter. She’s not all here.”

Glitsky watched her go to the bucket and squeeze out her sponge, then come back to the car. He took a breath and let it out. “Why I’m here is because you talked to a friend of mine, Dismas Hardy, and said you’d had something to do with Rusty Ingraham in the last couple of weeks. Ingraham’s missing and I wondered if you might have a lead on it, if he said anything to you about where he might go.”

Medina shook his head, as if clearing it. “Hardy said Ingraham was dead.”

“Hardy jumps to conclusions. Something went down where he lives. We found some blood matches his type, but no body. He could be alive, anywhere.”

“Shit,” Medina said.

“Shit what?”

“Shit he’s not dead, that’s what.”

“Well, he might be. We just don’t know. But either way, if you talked to him-”

“I didn’t. I told your friend I didn’t.”

“He said you’d called him.”

Medina shifted on his feet, stared out over Glitsky’s shoulder. Abe waited him out.

Medina turned around and said his daughter’s name. “Melanie.” She stopped cleaning the windshield, obedient. “You wanna get us a couple beers?”

He motioned with his head and went to sit in the shade of the cement steps by the front door. Glitsky followed, glad to get out of the heat. When Melanie came out, Medina patted next to him and she sat down. He popped the tab on a can of Lucky Lager and handed it to Glitsky, did one for himself, giving Melanie a little sip first.

“I never talked to him. You can believe me or not, I don’t care.”

Glitsky drank beer.

“I did call him, but I just hung up. What was the point? What was I gonna say that would make any difference after all this time?”

“Okay…” Glitsky didn’t know where he was going.

“I mean, Ingraham was the wrong target. If I wanted to do something, not feel so goddamn”-he stopped, searching for the right word-“impotent, there’s better fish to fry.”

At Abe’s lack of response, he said, “I’m talking about Treadwell.”

“Who’s Treadwell?”

“Treadwell. The faggot who’s trying to set up Valenti and Raines.”

“Treadwell,” Glitsky repeated. “Is there a connection here I’m missing?”

Medina wiped some sweat off his forehead with the chamois. “The thing with Ingraham, what he did to me, that’s done now. I do my job, take care of Melanie best I can. I mean since Joan left after the… the trouble, it’s been all me. And this, this anger is in me all the time.” The aluminum can made a cracking sound in his hand. “So for a minute there I had a notion to go settle things with Ingraham. That’s all it was. The call.”

“So what about Treadwell?”

Medina’s eyes narrowed to a squint as he brought the beer can up to his mouth. Stalling. “Nothing,” he said. “Treadwell was nothing too.”

“Hector,” Abe said. “You brought up Treadwell. I didn’t.”

Medina squeezed the can again, studied it. “I figured if I talked to Treadwell it might do some good for those cops Valenti and Raines. Ingraham, it was long past the time it could mean anything.”

“So you talked to Treadwell?”

“Yeah.”

“About Raines and Valenti?”

He nodded. “Tried to talk him out of it. Of his charges of police brutality, gay-bashing.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” Medina said. “Nothing. He listened to me, about what it’s like being accused of something crazy, how you never get out from under it. Then he said fuck you, good-bye.”

Glitsky looked at Melanie, watched a kid ride by on a skateboard, tried to figure what he was missing here. “So why were you afraid Treadwell had talked? When I called you, you said, ‘So the faggot told.’ Remember? What did that mean?”

“I don’t know. I guess I been afraid he’d accuse me of something again-trespass, I don’t know. Something. It’s his style. And I’m the right guy to do it to. People are lined up to believe bad shit about me.”

Glitsky gave it a moment, finishing his beer. “But nothing about Ingraham?”

“I never said a word to him and that’s God’s truth.”

Glitsky stood up, stretched out his back. “You know, Hector,” he said, “you’ve been in this business so you know. There’s a feeling you get when people aren’t telling you everything. They may not be lying exactly, but there’s something else happening.”

“I never talked to him!”

Melanie jumped next to her father. He patted her leg and she leaned into him, staring now at Glitsky.

“That’s what you said. For the record, though, do you remember where you were Wednesday night, three days ago?”

Medina didn’t even have to think. Knew right off. “I worked a double shift that day, eight to four, four to midnight. It’s in the log.”

Glitsky nodded. “I’m sure it is.”

Medina patted his daughter again, this time on the head. “Let’s do the tires next, honey,” he said. She jumped up and ran over to the bucket. “Look, I got this kid to raise. That’s what I do. I lead a quiet life, keep out of trouble.”

“But you went to Treadwell’s.”

Medina looked up at the white sky and drained his beer. “Hey, sometimes you gotta do something for your soul.” He gestured around the hopeless plot. “You think this is enough?”

Abe took it in, nodded, and thanked Hector for his time.

Back on the freeway Glitsky opened his car windows and let the wind blow over him. Hector Medina talking about the good of his soul rang as true as ex-Interior Secretary Watt claiming a deep and abiding concern for the environment. And if talking to Treadwell was good for his soul, worth threatening the quiet life he had with his daughter, how much more satisfying would it be to have aced Rusty Ingraham? Now that would have been real good for the soul.

Of course the log said he had worked a double shift on Wednesday, so he had an alibi, but alibis were made to be broken. His name might be in the log, but Glitsky wondered if anybody had actually seen him. And even if they had, it wasn’t a far stretch to imagine that a guy like Medina knew people who did bad things-either returning favors or for cash up front.

So now he had two out of three suspects with a reason to dust Ingraham. If only he could count on the fact of Rusty’s death. And maybe Hardy would find something…

He guessed it all came down to the lab. If there were prints or hairs or fibers on the barge that belonged to Ray Weir, he’d have probable cause and go get the guy. On the other hand, what if they found evidence that Baker or Medina had been there? Then, even without a body, Glitsky had to admit that things started to look bad for Rusty Ingraham. And maybe for Hardy too.

When he had been released from prison, Louis Baker was given his two hundred dollars gate money. Buying the paint for Mama’s place, the windows, some food, had run him $161.19 all told. And he’d given the Mama a ten for the tennis shoes. The bus ride home, this and that, had come to another ten, give or take some change, and breakfast this morning had been three and a half.

So he was down to fifteen bucks. And no place to stay, and still no gun.

It was different than it had been before he was sent down. Every pawnshop had bars on the windows now. He could see the thin tape around all the doors and windows with the alarm trip-wires, and although he’d always been able to pick a lock, he had never really been much of a B and E man. The technology made him cautious.

But the fact was he needed money, and he needed a weapon. He was not about to be brought back in, even for questioning. If they tried to take him back down, he’d take some of them with him. He was thinking about the wardens, about Ingraham, about Hardy, about all the people who’d done it to him. There might even be something fun about shooting it out, going out in a blaze. Quick and easy. And it sure wasn’t shaping up that he was going to have much of a life on the outside.

It was a small liquor store. He’d been watching the traffic for about two hours, a small steady trickle of people in and out. There had been bars up across the windows before it opened, but now they were tucked back accordion-style on both sides of the front door.

Louis walked in out of the afternoon sunshine. He was pretty sure when he’d been outside, but once he was inside he was positive. The location was right. A white guy running a liquor store in this neighborhood ought to have a gun under the counter, but you couldn’t always bet on it. But when you saw the National Rifle Association calendar over the cold cabinets you could start putting your money down.

He came in the door, saw the counter ran along the wall to his right about fifteen feet. The man was in his mid-fifties. He sat on a stool behind the register, and Louis nodded at him, friendly as you please, as he came in. He’d made sure the place was empty, but he hadn’t gotten five feet inside the door when a police car pulled up out front and a guy in blue got out.

Shit.

Louis walked casually to the back left corner of the store. What he wanted was something long and relatively heavy. The cop went to the back, opened one of the cold shelves and stood looking at soft drinks.

You didn’t want to start with the cop, especially with his partner out in the car. A lone guy, you could maybe get him from behind, put him down, but if he did that here the proprietor would probably shoot him, and if he didn’t the partner would.

Louis kept scanning the shelves as though he were looking for something, thinking c’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Finally, the cop found his 7-Up or whatever cops drank and was at the counter.

He had to stall a minute or two, but he couldn’t take very much longer without getting somebody suspicious. He reached into his pocket and made a pretense of counting his money. Showing he already had money, that was a good idea. Counting to see if he had enough to buy that special bottle of something.

He heard the register ring. Okay, it was time. He reached up to the top shelf and took down a bottle of Galliano. It was made for this kind of work.

But the cops were still there, parked right at the curb. Louis looked right at them. “Bright out there,” he said.

The man turned his head and squinted a little. The cop in the passenger seat was lifting the can to his mouth. Louis saw a display of sunglasses at the other end of the counter. Come on, he kept thinking. Drive.

The man behind the counter had taken the bottle and was ringing it up. Louis put on a pair of shades, looking at himself in the mirror above the display. The cop was saying something to his partner, laughing. Goddamn, move.

“That all?” the proprietor said.

Louis left the pair of glasses on, reaching into his pocket for his money. The car outside made a clunk noise, dropping into gear, and Louis smiled. “I think the shades, too.”

The man had put the bottle into a paper bag and Louis threw some bills on the counter, picking up the bottle.

The man leaned forward to pick up the money. “I don’t think this is…” was as far as he got before Louis swung, hitting him over the left ear.

Before the man hit the ground Louis had vaulted over the counter. A snub-nose revolver hung by its trigger guard from a nail under the counter. There was a box of cartridges next to it on the shelf. Louis put the gun and the cartridges into his pants pocket, jabbed at the register until it opened and took out all the bills. He lifted the tray and found two hundreds and five fifties. He put a foot against the man’s head on the floor and gave it a nudge. He was out cold and would not be waking up in the next thirty seconds, which was all Louis needed.

He jumped back over the counter and stood at the door, looking both ways. There was no one within fifty yards so he walked outside, hands in his pockets, and turned right. At the corner he turned again, heading back up toward Fillmore and Mama’s car.

If they were going to nail him for a couple of murders, a little candy-ass liquor-store boost wasn’t going to have much effect on his sentencing either way. And it evened out the odds, which was what you needed to survive-a little edge. That and knowing who to take out next.

“Are you kidding me?” Abe Glitsky was saying. “Are you kidding me?”

The tech, a young Filipino, maybe twenty-six, seemed to shrivel back into himself. “These were my orders, sir.”

Abe put his hand to his head and pulled at his hairline. He took a step backward, spun around in a full circle, trying to get a grip, and came back to the counter.

“Look, son, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to take it out on you, but I have a murder investigation I’m running my ass all over town trying to complete and I need your reports.”

“Yes, but we’re told to… we have an inventory of nearly eighty objects from the chief’s office that we are to give first priority.”

“Over a murder scene? The chief wants the chicken-shitters apprehended over a murderer? I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“Does Rigby think whoever did this was dumb enough to leave prints around? You think cops might think of that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Abe put both hands on the counter and pressed down. On the wall behind the boy was a poster of a laughing man saying, “You want it when??!!” Another one, next to the first, said, “What part of NO don’t you understand?” Ha ha.

Suddenly he let up his pressure on his hands, untensed his shoulders and, without another word, turned and walked through the door, slapping the wall on his way out.

It was clear what he had to do. He had to stop fighting the system here. It was what it was, and you were either a part of it or you weren’t. For a long time he’d been a part of it. Now he’d just spent a Saturday trying to do things right. Because he cared about doing his job. He could accept not getting paid for his time, could accept Lanier’s easy-out attitude with Louis Baker. Might have even accepted a lab refusing to work overtime and having him wait until Monday.

But what he couldn’t handle was that the chief of police was using the crime lab on a priority basis to catch a couple of pranksters who’d put some chickens in his office.

Downstairs at his desk Glitsky opened his top drawer and took out the application he’d filled out for the LAPD. He sat down, read it over, signed it and addressed an envelope. On his way out he dropped it in the mailbox by the back door of the Hall.

Hanging in the water, motionless, the tide pushing him where it would, Hardy thought he’d give it a couple of tankfuls worth of air-maybe forty-five minutes-and see where he was when he came up.

Still reluctant to go back to his house and not wanting to overstay his welcome at Frannie’s-was that really it?-he had borrowed one of Pico’s wetsuits, rented the tanks, bought a mask and dropped into the water off Ingraham’s barge at a little after six o’clock when the tide was already running out. It was a feeble current at this point, but it was moving him and Hardy thought it would be strong enough.

If Rusty had been in bed when he was shot it was reasonable to think he hadn’t been wearing much that would weigh him down, so he would simply float out, just under the surface, as Hardy was doing now.

He started immediately moving out toward the bay, which was good for his theory about what had happened to Rusty. He had thought there was some chance, hard by the barge, that the tide would create an eddy and he would go around in circles. But he had swum to the point he thought Rusty had gone over and then let himself hang in the water, and after a couple of false starts when he was nudged back into the barge, he found himself out in the channel.

Even with the face mask, visibility was very poor, perhaps two feet. Under the water there was only the sound of his breathing. He wore gloves and foot pockets without fins, the same material as his wetsuit. The China Basin canal was a rarely used waterway, but he kept half an ear out for the sound of an engine-he didn’t favor the idea of being rammed by a boat coming in to tie up.

Otherwise, he hung in the water, warm, insulated, invisible-and safe. In some ways it was comparable to a night drop in a parachute, an experience Hardy had had more times than he cared to remember. For the first time in four days Louis Baker left his consciousness.

But he also felt Frannie’s arms around him as he’d held her in the park. He saw her eyes boring into his, her smile working its way under his fears and defenses. There was her body pressed against him, full breasts and belly, not any kind of little girl, not anybody’s little sister… a grown woman in full flower waiting for her baby’s birth.

Hardy remembered, was forced to remember, the time with Jane when she was carrying Michael. The beginning of nesting. The changes in the house, painting the baby’s room, buying the things that had seemed so impossible -tiny sets of clothes, rattles, stuff.

He shook himself out of that. When Michael died, it had nearly killed him. Jane too. Even now he wasn’t sure how far over it he had gotten. He tried never to let himself think of him, of that time with Jane, and he thought there was no way he’d allow that to happen to him again. Some things you learned your lesson-he wasn’t meant to be a father. It got into him too deep, that sense of hope, where there was meaning to things that even his well-practiced cynicism couldn’t deny… And the baby Frannie was carrying wasn’t even his.

And what about Jane?

Jane had been through it with him, all of it, finally getting back to him, reaching through whatever dark tunnel he’d constructed to let him see some light, to realize that life wasn’t all black. There were good times. There was love. Sex. Whatever it was, it was more than sex. He’d gotten along well without that for enough years to know. So call it love, Diz. You tell Jane you love her. You feel like it’s love.

But, admit it, not like it used to be. Not the bells ringing and heart pounding and choked up with happiness, unable-to-talk kind of love.

So what do you want? Be real, Diz. That’s puppy love, and sure, you don’t have that with Jane. How could you, after you lost your baby together, after the divorce, after another intervening marriage for her?

And come on, be fair. There are good things with Jane but she just has much more of her own life, doesn’t need you as much as Frannie seems to.

No commitment, though, right? He, once in a while, trying to talk about the long term, and Jane not ready, always not ready yet…

He yanked himself away from such thoughts. The water had, by degrees, become clearer. He could easily see his hand at the end of his extended arm. A shadow-perhaps a striped bass-flashed in his peripheral vision.

After surfacing he saw he was within fifty yards of the mouth of the canal. He looked at his watch. It had only taken twenty-two minutes and the tide wasn’t even running at full ebb yet. The last rays of the sun still lit the top of the skyline and the towers on the Bay Bridge, but the canal and its banks were in shade. He struck out for the shore, feeling he’d accomplished something.