I HAD THE HORRIBLE FEELING of coming full circle. My last sight of Dono before I’d left Seattle, when I was eighteen, had been in the kitchen of this same house. He’d been lying on the floor then, too. His face dark with rage. I’d been aiming a gun at his heart.
But any blood Dono and I had spilled back then could be measured in drops. Not like this.
The running footsteps outside were gone.
Dono was still warm. I leaned down and put my ear near his cheek. One breath. Two. Light as a spiderweb.
“Dono!” I shouted in his face. “It’s Van.” No response. Not even a twitch behind the closed eyelid.
More blood was pooling on the floor under his head. My knees slipped in the wet. Then I caught the smell of singed hair and burned powder. Gunshot.
I tore off my jacket and my T-shirt, wadding up the shirt and pressing it against the oozing hole behind his left ear. His hair was sticky.
“Dono!” I shouted again. “Hang on!” With my other hand, I felt for a pulse at his carotid. It was there. Barely.
Come on, you tough old bastard. Stay with me.
I kept one hand on Dono’s head and reached out with the other to my jacket. His blood was seeping through the wadded layers of T-shirt cotton. I was fumbling to unbutton the pocket and reach my cell phone when I heard a creak of wood on the porch outside.
Had the guy who ran out circled back to finish the job? I didn’t have a gun. Dono and I would both be easy.
I heard many quick and muffled footsteps outside, coming toward the door. Then silence.
Cops. Had to be. Coming in quiet, until they got in position.
“Here!” I yelled. “In the front room! He’s been shot!”
“Police! Who’s inside?” shouted a male voice.
“Me and my grandfather,” I said. “Somebody ran out the back door a minute ago.”
“Come out of the house, sir. Now.”
“He’s bleeding out, goddamn it. I’ve got pressure on it.”
Ten long seconds passed before silhouettes appeared at the edge of the door. Stick formation. Single file.
“Here,” I said again.
“Let me see your hands,” the cop in front ordered. He had a shotgun leveled at me.
I raised one red-stained hand up high. “I’ll step away. But somebody has to take over, fast. His skull might be fractured.”
“Do it,” the cop said. I put the other hand in the air and stood up. Blood dribbled down from my palms onto my forearms and bare shoulders. “Turn around,” he said. I did a one-eighty so he could see there was no weapon tucked in my jeans.
“Now back slowly toward the door,” he said.
I backed up. One of the cops ran around me to kneel by Dono. His partner covered me as I edged out toward the one holding the shotgun.
They let me come all the way out onto the porch, backing up to keep some distance between us. The second cop in the line was big, maybe six-three with an extra layer of padding in the face and belly. He spun me around so that my nose was three inches from the dark blue paint. Shotgun was on the other side of the doorway, watching the entry and the hall beyond.
The big cop reached for his shoulder radio. “We’re inside. Detaining one male at gunpoint. Victim down. Need rescue.”
“I’ve got combat medical training,” I said to the cop. “Let me help.” I willed Dono to keep breathing.
“The officer there is an EMT. We’ll take care of him. Is anybody else in the house?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I got here two minutes before you did. The door was open. My grandfather was on the floor. Somebody ran out the back when I came in.”
And someone must have called 911, before I’d even arrived. A neighbor? Or the same guy who’d shot Dono?
“What’s your name?” Shotgun said to me.
“Van Shaw. My ID is in the jacket on the floor by my grandfather.”
“You live here, sir?”
“No. I flew in to Sea-Tac about an hour ago. All right if I turn around?” I wanted to see if the cop working on Dono had the wound stanched.
“Go ahead.”
I edged sidewise to look through the entryway. The EMT cop had pressure on Dono’s head, and with his free hand he was checking for pupil dilation.
More cops were moving around upstairs, sweeping the place. I’d cleared my share of houses and other structures. Their team knew how to do it. They moved fast and quiet, checking every room and closet and anywhere else a human might hide.
“Gun,” said the partner of the guy kneeling by Dono. He was pointing at the floor of the front room. In the low light and with the rush to help my grandfather, I hadn’t seen what had been there. A tumbler glass had fallen and broken near Dono’s ancient leather wing-back chair. Lying behind it was a snubnose .38 revolver.
“Yours?” the big cop said to me. His name tag read OLSSEN.
“No.” And whatever gun had made that hole in Dono, it wasn’t as big as a .38. Maybe the revolver belonged to Dono himself. Had he been carrying it? And had he been too slow on the draw to save himself?
Two paramedics came running down the porch and past us into the house. They had a pressure bandage on Dono’s skull in under a minute and a ventilator down his throat one minute after that. I was trembling slightly. A little from the cold air, mostly from adrenaline. Tiny droplets of half-dried blood quivered off the ends of my fingers.
Fight harder, Dono. You have to wake up.
Every time the EMT squeezed the bulb and forced air into Dono’s lungs, I exhaled as if to push a little more life into him. The medics counted three and lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the door.
“Harborview?” I said. Too loud. One of them flinched.
“Yes,” he said.
“Sir, I’m gonna need you to stay here,” said Shotgun. R. VOH. “You said your identification is in the room there?”
We stepped inside, Voh and Olssen keeping me between them. I pointed at my jacket on the floor. Voh stepped carefully into the front room, around the spatters of blood and bloody footprints. He fished out the contents of the jacket’s pockets without moving it from where it lay.
He glanced through my papers. “You’re deployed overseas, Mr. Shaw? Or Sergeant Shaw?”
“Yes.” On the wall of the foyer was a shallow metal panel, the size of a paperback book. Dono’s house alarm. Homemade. I reached out and flipped the panel door open.
“Hey,” said Olssen. “Sir, don’t touch anything, all right?”
Dono had upgraded the system since I’d lived here. It was plain-looking, just flat stainless steel and a ten-digit keypad with a single light to show when it was armed. The light was off.
So maybe somebody knocks and Dono wakes up and turns off the alarm to open the door. Or maybe the shooter was here already and the alarm never got turned on because the old man never went to bed last night.
Either way, odds were damn good that Dono knew the person. Hard to imagine a stranger getting close enough to put a gun to his head at five-thirty in the morning.
Two men came in through the front door. Detective badges clipped to their belts.
The first was forty-something, with prematurely white hair. His blue suit was pressed and clean. The second detective was closer to my age, a thin guy in a brown sport coat and a shiny shirt with matching tie. He took in the scene in the front room and let out a low whistle. His partner frowned.
The white-haired cop took my identification and papers from Voh and looked at me for a moment. “I’m Detective Guerin,” he said. “This is Detective Kanellis.”
“Van Shaw.”
“Would you excuse us for a moment, Mr. Shaw?” He motioned to Voh, who followed the two detectives out onto the porch. Before he stepped outside, the thin cop looked me up and down.
“Keep an eye on things here, Bob,” he said to Olssen.
Olssen and I were left in the foyer. He shifted his feet.
“You in the war?” he said.
“Yeah.”
I had been on base in Germany, fourteen hours ago. Less than a day before that, I’d made the decision to come back to Seattle.
Damn it, Dono. I’d been ready. I’d been locked and loaded to actually talk to you again. I know you, old man. That letter had not been easy for you to write.
I felt a cold breeze across my chest, coming down the hallway. The shooter must have left the back door open when he ran out. Christ. If the cops had been quicker getting here, they might have caught the fucker.
And if I’d taken a cab instead of renting a car, I might have kept Dono from getting shot entirely.
The detectives and Voh came back in, and behind them I heard more footsteps tramping along the porch. A parade of four tired-looking men in blue SPD Windbreakers and carrying tackle boxes followed. Guerin pointed, and they carefully edged into the front room. Crime-scene crew.
Guerin motioned to me. “Let’s talk in the back, where it’s a little quieter.”
The two detectives followed me down the hallway. Voh and Olssen stayed with the techs.
Dono’s kitchen was small and crowded with cabinets and appliances. There was almost no counter space, so he kept a butcher’s block in the center of the tiled floor. A fat man would have trouble squeezing between it and the refrigerator. Next to the kitchen was a dining alcove with a circular pine table and three rickety wooden chairs, the same old set that had been there when I was a kid. The breeze coming through the house was stronger here, icy across my face and bare chest.
Guerin motioned to a chair. I stayed standing. Kanellis sat.
“I’m sorry about your grandfather, Mr. Shaw,” Guerin said. “Or do you prefer ‘Sergeant’?”
“‘Mr.’ is fine.”
“Okay. Tell me what happened,” he said.
I recapped what I knew. From receiving Dono’s letter all the way to finding him on the floor. It didn’t take long. The detectives listened and nodded. Kanellis fidgeted in his seat.
“Do you know of anybody who might have wanted to hurt your grandfather? Or any arguments he might have had with anyone?” Detective Guerin said.
“No.”
“The front door isn’t broken open. Did anyone else have access to the house? A girlfriend, maybe?”
“I don’t know.” Christ, Dono might even be married. There wasn’t any sign down here that a woman now lived in the house, but I’d only seen three rooms and the hallway.
“Do you have a key to the place?” Kanellis said.
“No.”
One of the crime-scene guys came into the room. He said, “Excuse me,” and began to put adhesive strips on my hands and wrists. Testing for gunshot residue. When he peeled the strips off, the dried blood came up with them, leaving rectangular tiger stripes of pink. I walked past Kanellis to the kitchen sink and began to scrub my hands half raw with Dono’s scouring sponge.
There was a clock with a picture of a bull on it hung over the window. Another new addition. By the little hands shaped like matador’s swords, it had been forty minutes since the medics had taken Dono out.
He’d be through triage by now. The hospital would be able to tell me something.
I looked at Guerin. “I need to follow him to Harborview.”
He thought about it. I knew he was going to check out my story from stem to stern and back again before he crossed me off as his primary suspect. If he ever did.
“Do you have a cell phone?” Guerin said. I gave him the number. I saw that the phone had one of my fingerprints on it, in Dono’s blood, from when I’d started to dial 911.
“Who called for help?” I said.
Kanellis nodded. “A neighbor heard a gunshot. They called 911.” He was careful to avoid mentioning the sex of the neighbor. Which meant it was probably a woman.
“But I didn’t hear the shot,” I said. “Even though I parked and walked almost halfway up the block to get to the house. So the shooting happened at least a couple of minutes before I came through the door.”
Guerin considered it. “All right,” he said.
I glanced at the open back door. “The guy was still inside when I came in. Why stay in the house that long? What was he doing?”
“Tossing the place?” Kanellis said. “Looking for cash? Or something to sell?”
I didn’t answer. Guerin didn’t either. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was. The shooter would have to be batshit crazy if he were searching the house after shooting Dono, with the front door still wide open. Or he was one ice-veined son of a bitch.
“I’ll be at Harborview,” I said.
“We’ll meet you there,” said Guerin, “after our team is finished with the scene.”
“Don’t leave town,” Kanellis said. His partner exhaled, almost a sigh.
The lab rats had taped off the front room. One was taking photographs, and the rest were spreading fingerprint dust on everything. I grabbed an old barn jacket from a hook in the foyer and walked out.
Out on the street, clumps of people stood around the cluster of police cruisers and unmarked vehicles. Neighbors, holding their coffees. Early-morning joggers, pausing to watch the show.
“Hey!” one of them yelled as I ran back to the Charger. “What’s going on?”
I wished to hell I knew.