Six

The end of November drew near.

Christmas lights went up in celebration of the feast of Thanksgiving, and the following morning, still bloated from her dinner at the house of Rosalyn and Maj, Kate rode around Union Square on her way to the Hall of Justice, just to look at the windows of the big stores, filled with lace and gilt, velvet and silks, sprinkled with white flakes to evoke the wintery stuff seen in San Francisco perhaps twice in a century, set up to attract throngs of shoppers anxious to recapture the fantasies of a Victorian childhood, no matter the cost. The pickpockets and car thieves had a merry season, a coke dealer in the Tenderloin took to wrapping his packets in shiny red and green foil, Al and Jani set their date for the eighteenth of December, and people went on killing one another.

It was wet and miserable outside three days later, on the last Monday of November—a fact Kate could well attest to, as she’d been out in it a fair part of the day, following up witnesses to a domestic shooting in Chinatown. She had used departmental vehicles for the trips out, but she was now faced with either climbing into her damp moon-walk outfit, which would keep her mostly dry on the motorcycle, or getting a ride up the hill and having to cope with public transport in the morning.

The phone on her desk rang. She eyed it sourly, making no move to answer it. At the fourth ring, the man at the next desk looked up.

“Hey, Martinelli,” he called. “That thing’s called a tel-uh-phone. You pick it up and talk into one end; voices come from the other. Really fun, you should try it.”

“Gee, thanks, Tommy boy. Thing is, my psychic reader told me never to answer any call that comes two minutes before I want to leave—it’s sure to be a bad omen.”

They both sat and watched it ring.

“Who’s on call?” he asked.

“Calvo.” There was no need to say more: They both knew he would be late. He was always late.

“Could be the lottery,” he suggested.

“I never buy lottery tickets.”

It rang on.

“You answer it, Tommy.”

“It’s my wife’s birthday tonight; she’d kill me if I was late.”

Ring. Ring.

“If you wait long enough, the shift will be over and you can leave.”

Ring.

“Sounds pretty determined,” he commented.

Kate stretched out a hand and picked up the instrument. “Inspector Martinelli.”

“Kate? I thought I had missed you. This is Grace Kokumah, over at the Haight/Love Shelter. We talked, three, four weeks ago?” Her voice added a slight question mark at the end of the sentence, but Kate knew her instantly: a big, dignified black-black African woman with the flavor of her native Uganda rich in her voice and her hair in a zillion tiny glossy braids that ended in orange beads. Kate had met her three years before, when Lee had worked with her on the case of a fourteen-year-old boy with AIDS.

“Yes, Grace, how are you? Enjoying the rain?” Too many years of drought made rain the central topic of most winter conversations.

“We have many holes in our roof, Kate Martinelli, so I do not enjoy the rain, no. We have run out of buckets. The entire neighborhood has run out of buckets. We are making soup in roasting pans because our pots are busy catching drips. Kate, are you still interested in a boy called Dio?”

Thoughts of time clocks and home vanished.

“Do you have him there?”

“I do not have him, no. But one of my girls, who heard from a friend of a friend…You know?”

“Is she there? Will she talk to me?”

“To the famous Inspector Casey Martinelli? Yes.”

Kate made a face at the receiver.

“I think it is better for you to come here,” Grace suggested. “Tonight?”

“I can be there in half an hour, less if the traffic’s clear.”

“We will be very busy for the next hour, Kate. We are just serving dinner. Best you come a little later, when we have finished with the dishes. Then Kitty will be free to talk with you.”

“If I come now, can you use a hand, with serving or washing?”

Grace’s laugh was rich and deep. “Now I think you know that to be one stupid question, Inspector Martinelli.”

“Fine, see you soon.” She dropped the phone onto its hook and started to gather up her papers.

“Sounds like a hot date there, Martinelli.”

“Sure you don’t want to bring your wife? Dinner at the soup kitchen, give her a slice of life for her birthday present?”

“It’s not my wife’s birthday. What gave you that crazy idea?”

“I can’t think. G’night, Tommy.”

“Stay dry. So much for your psychic reader.”

Kate’s steps faltered briefly as his words triggered a vivid memory: Jules, speaking with such seriousness about her long-past childhood, when she lay in bed inventing horrors as a talisman to keep the real ones at bay. Anything that can be imagined won’t happen.

Now why should I think of that? Kate asked herself as she waited for the elevator. Dio, I guess, and Jules, and meeting Dio at last and what I will see in his eyes and his nose and his skin, how far gone he’ll be.

The serving was over and the nonresident recipients were reluctantly scattering for their beds in doorways and Dumpsters and the bushes of Golden Gate Park when Kate blew into the Haight/Love Shelter. Grace Kokumah stood with her hands in the pockets of her sagging purple cardigan and watched without expression as Kate came to a halt next to the thin and already-yellowing Christmas tree and dropped her burden with a clatter before beginning to strip off the astronaut helmet, the dripping and voluminous orange neck-to-ankle waterproof jumpsuit, and the padded gloves. When Kate had popped open the snaps on her leather jacket and run a hand through her brief hair, the woman shook her beads.

“The city’s finest, a vision to behold.”

“Do you want the buckets or don’t you?” Kate growled.

“Where did you find them?” She studied the waist-high stack, no doubt wondering instead how Kate had managed to transport them without being lifted up, cycle and all, by their wind resistance and dropped into the San Francisco Bay.

“Stole them from the morgue; they use them for the scraps. Joke! That was a joke!” she said to the horrified young people at Grace’s back. “Macabre cop humor, you’ve heard of that. The cleaners buy soap in them, nothing worse than that. Do you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”

“This is a soup kitchen, despite the temporary absence of stockpots. We have bean soup tonight, which has had a dry ham bone waved through it, we have white bread with margarine, and we have weak orange drink.”

“The season of plenty, I see. Do I have to wash dishes first?”

“A person who brings us eight five-gallon buckets is permitted to eat before she labors. Kitty, would you please show Kate where to wash her hands, and then give her a bowl of soup?”

Once in the cramped corridor that wrapped around the kitchen, Kate touched the girl’s arm.

“Grace tells me you might help me find a boy named Dio.”

The girl cringed and fluttered her hands to shush Kate. “Not here. Later. I’ll come to Grace’s room.” She scurried off.

So, Kate thought, I wash dishes after all.

After bean soup, and after a largely symbolic contribution to the piles of dirty dishes, Grace rescued her and sent her off to the room she used as counseling center, doctor’s examining room, office, and, occasionally, extra bedroom. Within five minutes Kitty skulked in, shutting the door noiselessly behind her. She wasted no time with small talk.

“You’re lookin’ for a guy named Dio?”

“That’s what he called himself last summer, yes.”

“What do you want him for?”

“I don’t, particularly. Why don’t you sit down, Kitty?”

“God, I don’t know if I should do this. I mean, I don’t know you.”

Kate reached into the pocket she’d taken to using instead of the awkward handbag and held out her identification folder between two fingers, mostly as a means of keeping the girl from bolting. Kitty took it, looked at it curiously, handed it back. She sat down and studied Kate’s tired face, recently cropped hair, and biker’s leathers.

“You look different.”

Kate snapped shut the picture of the good Italian girl with the soft hair and the wary smile without glancing at it.

“Don’t we all.”

“You are that dyke cop whose girlfriend got shot?” she asked uncertainly. Kate did not wince, did not even pause in the motion of putting the ID back into her pocket.

“Yep. Now, tell me, how did you hear I was looking for Dio?”

“Grace put it on the notice board. Course, I don’t know if it’s the same guy, but it’s not like a common name, is it?”

“She posted a notice that I was looking for Dio?”

“Not you. Just that there’s word for him. You haven’t seen the board? It’s in the dining hall, just a bunch of those really ugly black cork squares Grace glued up and sticks notices on, like if someone calls her from Arkansas or something saying, ‘Have you seen my little girl? Tell her to call Mummy.’ There’s just his name and a note to see Grace. Lots of them have that. She talks to kids and tries to convince them to call home, once they know someone’s interested.” From the way she spoke, nobody at home had expressed any interest in Kitty for some time.

“So you met Dio.”

“Not me. A friend. No, really,” she said, seeing Kate’s skeptical look. “This guy I met walking down the Panhandle, you know? He gave me a cigarette—and honest, it was just a cigarette. Grace throws you out if she smells weed on you. Anyway, we got to talking about, well, things, you know? And he came back here for dinner and to look at the board and see if maybe…Well, there wasn’t nothing for him on it, but then he sees the name Dio and acts kind of surprised, and he goes, ‘I thought Dio was an orphan,’ and I go, ‘You should tell Dio his name is up’—I mean, not like anyone wants to go home, you know, but still, it doesn’t hurt to make a phone call, does it, and they might send some money or something. Well, anyway, he said he’d tell Dio if he saw him.”

“When was this?”

“Last week. Friday maybe. Thursday? No, I remember, it was Friday because we had a tuna casserole and we talked about Catholics and that fish thing they used to have.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, that’s why I talked to Grace, isn’t it, ’cause Bo—because my friend asked me to. He came here this afternoon. Well, really this morning, but I wasn’t here, so he came back. He said he found Dio, and he’s really sick—Dio is, I mean—and a couple of Dio’s friends are really worried about him.”

“Sick how? OD?” If so, he’d be long dead.

“I don’t think so. Bo—my friend said he was coughing real bad, for the last week or so.”

“Why didn’t his friends take him to the emergency room? Or the free clinic?”

“Well, that part I didn’t really understand. There’s something about this guy Dio lives with, him and a bunch of other kids, all of them guys, I think. Anyway, there’s this old guy who kind of heads up the place they’re living in. It’s a squat in a warehouse the other side of Market, down where the docks are? Anyway he—the old guy—doesn’t like outsiders, like doctors.”

I’ll bet he doesn’t, Kate thought bleakly. “I’d like to talk to your friend about this.”

“He said no, he doesn’t want nothing to do with it. He’s just worried about Dio and thinks somebody should take him out of there before he dies or something. He’d probably freak if he knew I was talking to a cop about it. He said he doesn’t want the old guy to know, ’cause he makes my friend nervous. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with him. I mean, he takes care of the kids and doesn’t feel them up or anything, but he’s just…weird. That’s what Bo says, anyway. Bo’s my friend.”

Secondhand and from a limited vocabulary like Kitty’s, “weird” could mean anything from a drooling madman to an Oxbridgian with a plummy accent and boutonniere.

“Okay, I’ll go see him. And I won’t tell how I knew he was there. What’s the address?”

Kitty had to stand up to get her hand into the pockets of her skintight jeans. She pulled out a grubby scrap of paper folded multiple times into a wad. Kate unfolded it, saw that the address was clear enough, and put it into her own pocket.

“Thanks, Kitty. I’ll do what I can. It was good of you to take the chance, talking to me.”

“Yeah, well. If us kids on the street don’t look after each other, who will?”

The rain was taking a break when Kate left the center, and the wind had dropped below gale force, so she decided to go by the address on the scrap of paper Kitty had given her. She was almost surprised to find, when she got there, that it actually existed. It proved to be a deserted three-story warehouse with plywood sheets nailed up across all the ground-floor windows, in an area slated for redevelopment. Kate went past it slowly, continued on a couple of blocks, and then doubled back, blessing the Kawasaki’s efficient muffler system. Pushing the big machine into a recessed entranceway that stank of urine but was at the moment unoccupied, she climbed out of the bright orange jumpsuit, opened the storage box, took out a long flashlight and shoved in the wet jumpsuit, closed and locked the top, and clamped her helmet onto the bike with the rigid lock. She thrust the flashlight into the deep front pocket of her leather jacket and cautiously approached the building.

The front was, predictably, padlocked. She found the entrance currently in use down an alleyway on the side of the building, covered by a sheet of corrugated metal that screeched loudly when she pulled it aside. Over the noise of the wind and the occasional heavy drops, she could not tell if there was any movement inside the building. Trying to reassure herself that this really wasn’t so stupid, that even though she felt like an empty-headed female on a late-night movie investigating attic noises with a candle in her hand, she actually was an armed cop (admittedly, with no official reason for being here, far less a search warrant), she stepped through the gap.

She had fully intended to make her presence known in a straightforward manner. After all, she hardly looked like a police officer, and she only wanted a chance to talk with the boy Dio. She even had her mouth open to call a placatory greeting when it began, the cold ripple of the skin up along the back of her hand, over her wrists, and up her forearms to her shoulders and the nape of her neck, the creepy-crawlies that told her something really bad was about to go down. She hadn’t expected this, had only planned on talking with some unwashed boys in a squat, had arranged no backup, but the moment it started, she didn’t stop to think, only reacted.

Gun up in both hands and ready, back against the wall, every hair alert, and…nothing. Nothing.

There were people in the building, though, she would swear to it, could feel them over her head, silently waiting for—what?

She, too, waited in the darkness, long minutes straining to hear, see, anything, tried to make herself open her mouth and call a friendly “Hello, anyone there?” but the ghostly touch along the tops of her arms did not go away. Finally, moving as stealthily as her heavy boots would allow, she sidled back through the gap, trotted down the alley (keeping a wary eye overhead) for a quick glance at the rear of the building, and then made her way back up the alleyway and through the shadows to the cycle, where she unlocked the storage compartment again and took out her mobile radio. She turned the volume right down and spoke in a mutter.

The marked unit arrived within three minutes, drifting to a stop with its headlights out. The dome light did not go on when the two men opened their doors with gentle clicks, and neither of them slammed his door. Kate was relieved; they knew their business. She cleared her throat quietly and walked over to them.

“Kate Martinelli, Homicide,” she identified herself. “What do you know about that three-story building just this side of the garage?”

“It’s been a squat for a couple of months now. No problems,” said the older one. “We reported it, but the attitude this time of year is, if it stays quiet, let it go. There aren’t enough beds for them in the shelters, anyway,” he added defensively.

“I know. But it’s been quiet? No sign of johns, not a crack house, shooting gallery, anything like that?”

“No customers of any kind. Why?”

“I don’t have a warrant. I’m just looking for a boy, was told he was in there sick. I went in, but I…I don’t like the way it feels inside. Wanted some backup.” The younger man looked at her sideways, but the older one just nodded.

“I know what you mean. I’ll go in with you,” he offered. His voice sounded familiar. Kate looked more closely.

“Tom Rawlins, isn’t it? Rawlings?” He seemed pleased to be recognized. “Thanks, but I think I’d better go in alone, I don’t want to scare them off. Just watch my back? And maybe your partner here—”

“Ash Jordan,” he said, introducing himself.

“Maybe Ash can watch around in back? There’s a fire escape.”

“Fine.”

“What’s he done?”

“As far as I know, he’s only a status offender—assuming that I have his age right. I’m trying to track him down as a favor to a friend.”

The men both accepted this, understanding the language of favors and friends and the problems of runaways.

“He calls himself Dio, light-skinned Hispanic, five seven, skinny, looks about fourteen.”

“If he comes out, we’ll just sit on him for a while,” Rawlings assured her.

“That’s great, thanks. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

She went back through the hole behind the metal sheet with the reassuring feeling of a brother cop at her back, and it made all the difference. She made her way cautiously, although not afraid, and found herself in a warren of what had once been offices and a showroom, empty now of stock but in an appalling state of dilapidation, Sheetrock drooping off the walls, ceiling joists exposed, filthy beyond belief. If there was a group of boys in the building, she decided after a quick search, they did not live down here.

Her flashlight found the stairs, stripped of the rotted carpeting, which had been left in a heap in one of the offices. They were firm, although they squeaked here and there as she started upward. She held the gun in one hand, the light in the other, and though her flesh still crawled, there was no turning back now.

At the top of the stairs, she stood just outside the door and stuck the flashlight and one eye around the corner, and here she found the boys’ living quarters. It was a big room, one single space with a heavy freight elevator on one end, frozen with its floor two feet beneath the ceiling. Ropes of dust-clogged cobwebs dangled from the steel beams fifteen feet overhead, but on closer observation, she noticed there had been some effort to clean the floor, which lacked the jumble of bottles, needles, glue tubes, paint cans, used condoms, and general squalor that these places usually held. In the middle were a rough circle of chairs and milk crates on top of a frayed circular rug, pillows on some of the crates, one of them upended with a camping lantern set on top. Around the edges, against two of the walls, there seemed actually to have been an attempt at marking out eight or ten separate quarters with a hodgepodge of crates, cardboard boxes, and bits of wood draped with pieces of incongruous fabric, from flowered bedspreads to ancient paint-splattered tarps. Keeping well out in the center of the room, her ears straining for the least sound, Kate began to circle the floor. She probed each of the quarters with the beam of her flashlight, finding the same semblance of order that the circle of chairs showed. Some of the mattresses even had their rough covers pulled neatly up, though others…

She paused, went back to one Spartan and tidy cell, and ran the flashlight beam over the heap of—well, for lack of a better word, bedding. Yes, that was indeed a foot that she had seen protruding from the pile, enclosed in at least two layers of frayed sock. And now that she was closer, she could hear the sound of labored breathing above the slap of heavy raindrops against the black plastic someone had nailed up against the broken windows. She slid her gun back under her arm, transferred the light to her right hand, squatted down, and reached out gingerly for the covering layers at the opposite end of the mattress from the exposed sock. Black hair, long and greasy and soaked with sweat, straggled across a flushed face that had the high, broad cheekbones of a Mayan statue. His breathing sounded like a pair of wet sponges struggling to absorb a bit of air—it hurt Kate’s chest just to listen to it. The boy’s forehead was burning, and she pulled the covers back up around his neck. Somehow she was not surprised to see a neat stack of shoe boxes, two wide and three high, next to his mattress. On top of them lay a small, grubby notebook: There was a rainbow on its cover.

“Hello, Dio,” she said quietly. She stood up, took the radio from the pocket of her leather jacket, spoke into it, and had gotten as far as “We’ve got a sick boy here at—” when all hell broke loose.

With a distant thunk, the overhead lights went on, and Kate’s body was already automatically moving down and back when the gun started roaring at her from the freight elevator. She dove into the base of the makeshift walls, sending boxes and wood scraps flying and keeping just ahead of the terrifying slaps at her heels, until finally she had her own beautiful piece of metal in her hand. From the spurious protection of a packing crate, she aimed her gun at the source of the murderous fire. Her fifth bullet hit something.

A noise came, half yelp, half cough, followed immediately by a sharp clatter of metal dropping into metal.

“Police!” bellowed Kate at the top of her adrenaline-charged lungs. “Anyone reaching for that gun, I’ll shoot!” She heard voices, then panicking shouts, and a number of feet on the floor overhead broke into a run, heading for the back of the warehouse. At the same time, one pair of feet came pounding up the stairs toward her, stopping just outside the door.

“Police!” he shouted, then said, “Inspector Martinelli, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. There was a single gun from the freight elevator; doesn’t seem to be another. I hit him and he dropped it. See it? Hanging just under that strut?” She narrowed the beam on her flashlight to illuminate the spot.

“No, I—yes, got it.”

“Keep an eye on it; I’m going up.”

“Wait—”

“No. Is your partner around back?”

“Yes.”

“Hope he stayed there—I don’t want these kids to get away. I’ll clear the elevator and then call you up. Oh, and the one I was looking for is down at the other end. I was just in the middle of calling for an ambulance—it sounds like pneumonia.”

Kate had lost her radio in her rapid trip through the walls but had miraculously retained her flashlight, which even more miraculously still functioned. As Rawlings spoke into his own radio, giving rapid requests for backup and ambulance, she took off across the dusty wooden floor at a fast, low crouch, hit the now-well-lit stairs at a run, and, at the top landing, seeing no switch, put her leather-clad arm up across her face and then reached up in passing to swipe at the hanging bulb with the butt end of the heavy flashlight. Safe now in the concealing darkness, she pushed the flashlight into her pocket, took up a position to one side of the door to the third floor, turned the handle, and pushed it open. Nothing. Silence came through the doorway at her, but for the wind and the raindrops, and the only light was the dim illumination creeping in through the windows and up the elevator shaft. Gun at the ready, she slipped inside; there were raised voices outside and three floors down—Rawlings’s partner, Jordan, had indeed stayed in his place. And then the most beautiful sound in the world: sirens, from several directions at once, getting louder every second. Beneath them, half-heard, came a low groaning sound from the direction of the freight elevator. Out came the flashlight again, and, holding it well to the side of her body, she flicked it on. The room was open and empty of anything large enough to hide a person. Just a matter of making sure the shooter couldn’t retrieve his gun. Kate took two steps away from the wall, and no more.

There was no pain, no burst of light, no time for fear, much less anger, just the beginning awareness of movement above and behind her, a faint swishing noise registering in her ears, and then Kate was gone.