CHAPTER 38

The DA reluctantly agreed to the bargain. Fuller came to see me again. “You think you got away with it. But I will get you if it’s the last thing I do. I will be clutching an old man’s walker, shuffling along the courtroom corridor with the evidence in my hand.”

Once again, I said nothing.

“You’re getting a free ride, “he said. “I know you pulled the trigger on two of those deaths and I know you set off that fucking bomb. But I don’t have the smoking gun, as they say on television, and you’ve kept your fucking mouth shut and I hope you get offed in prison. I hope you do something that will get you on the wrong side of somebody and they will find your body in your cell. We found the body of that detective and he was shot with the same nine mil that killed the kid in West Marin and I know you did it. And I will search for that gun until I find it. I will search for it until I am an old man. I will retrace your footsteps and sooner or later that gun will surface. “

I kept silent. Like the egret, I waited. I was motionless. I stood at the edge of the water and waited. Nothing could make me move or speak. Nothing that Fuller said would make me say anything, and he sat there on the other side of the glass and said, “You’re a fucking evil person. You blew up two human beings and you shot two others. All in the name of vengeance. Your daughter is dead. It was an accident. Can’t you fucking get that through your head?”

I remained silent.

“You left a man you never met and a beautiful young woman in pieces in a smoking wreck that caught fire. What makes that young woman different from your daughter? She, too, had parents. They are, like you were, devastated by what happened. I know you meant to blow up Earl Winslow, but you didn’t. He sits down to breakfast every morning, like he’s done all his life. And you shot that kid in West Marin. I have no idea why, but I’m guessing that he had something on you and you decided to shut him up. Just like that. Close his mouth forever. Somewhere along the line, that part of your brain that tells you, this is the wrong thing to do, got wiped out. Just like a wet cloth on the blackboard at school. Wiped clean. So you could do your evil deed. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

I am the egret, is what I think I am, but I didn’t say that to Fuller.

I stayed in my cell in the Marin County jail while my lawyer worked out the details. It took some time and the DA wasn’t happy but the outcome meant that I was bound for prison and that was enough. Then I was transferred to San Quentin to wait for transportation to another prison. I would go off to High Desert in Susanville because my crime was not serious enough to warrant a place like San Quentin or Soledad. I had used a gun, and that was what put me in High Desert with others who had used a gun, in marital disputes or arguments or holding up a 7-Eleven, but none of them had been convicted of killing anyone. The irony of me ending up in Susanville was not lost on me.