Cole stomped down Vallejo, headed towards Powell, hood over his head, shoulders high, passing a woman walking a stroller with her grocery bags in it. Her husband was next, holding their kid.
A patrol car whizzed the other way, the two boys in blue inside not recognizing him. Funny what a hood could do to your identity.
A Nissan Cube crawled down the street next, its two windshield wipers colored hot pink. That’s what Cole was looking for. The wipers were their brand signifier. VROOM is what they called it: a ride-sharing service, easy as thumbing an app.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
That was as far as formalities went with ride-sharing; driver and passenger formed a silent social understanding that for the duration of the trip they would act like friends, casual enough to not have to talk, but insecure enough that you have to offer little waters and ask if the music is okay.
Cole told him where to go and off they went. If he couldn’t get the department to lend him a car, fuck it, he’d hop in someone else’s. He’d bill the trip to the station anyway. His own ride was an ’04 Honda Civic, the silver polish dusty from the Diablo wind every year. The kind of car people stole for fun in the wrong neighborhood. Cole wasn’t driving that thing anywhere.
San Francisco’s apartments glided by out the window, all marina style, tip-toeing the incline like stair steps on either side of the asphalt. Central Station wasn’t located in a posh part of town. Nevertheless, he could see how the technological miracles of the twenty-first century were shaping the city’s atmosphere even here, with pedestrians glued to phones. No one ever asked strangers for directions anymore.
They just asked them for rides.
“It’s killing the taxis,” said Cole’s driver, name of Brandon, so said his ID on the phone app. “All these drivers going around, without the pendants or the badges or whatever taxi people get? And it’s not even cheaper necessarily. Fuck ride-sharing.”
Cole wasn’t listening.
“I’d be a taxi driver, legit, if I could. They’re the originals. But you know how hard it is to get that job? Seven green cards ahead of you gunning for it. Seven, at least.”
Cole wasn’t listening.
“I wish I could get a taxi. I’d kill for a taxi. Maybe I could finally get fucked, I bet, if I had a taxi,” the driver brooded.
They were on Mason now. They hooked a right on Pacific Ave and kept west. Normally, Cole took a left there. There was a brothel called the Wu Xing down in Chinatown with Cole’s name on it.
His little secret.
A young Chinese woman had her way with him while he focused on a big blue pillow in a small red room.
He cringed and let the memory fade away with the passing pedestrians out the window, all coupled up with their phones or their lovers on the sidewalks.
They kept going west, then worked their way down to Pine, which turned into Masonic, and after rounding the bases of Golden Gate Park, they cruised down 28th Avenue, close to Golden Gate, where trouble didn’t throw a fit.
They weren’t anywhere near the Tenderloin.
Cole had to make another stop first.
The big bay windows of apartment buildings had disappeared from view. The city had thinned out, giving way to two-story middle-class homes lined like dominos along hilly land, some of them old-school Victorian. Most of them stupid expensive. This was the Sunset District, a gorgeous escape from the neon-cement black hole Cole was used to.
He’d floated past these homes so many times. They had a Pavlovian effect. He could feel endorphins buzzing through his skull past every mailbox. What for?
For Mia. Her house was just three up.
The Hattaran residence.
“Right up there,” he said.
The house was painted a dark blue. As blue as Chuck’s frosty dead lips. Its front deck opened like a mouth to a gravel yard, the stones of the finest quality, offering texture and personality without the perils of maintenance.
Mia had never been big on maintenance.
Cole hopped out of the Nissan and let the driver roll away. He pulled back his hood, absently brushed at the part in his hair, and tugged at his jacket as he climbed the steps to the deck. There was a lit candle visible behind the front window.
He knocked on the door and waited.
Mia answered.
“…Hi,” she offered.
Ah, there it was. That pink face all eyebrows and pouty lips, though the brow drooped too low and the lips pouted too much, leaving the pink nowhere to reside. She was dressed in pajama pants and a blanket wrapped around her shirt. The door was only half open.
“Hey, gorgeous.” Cole’s line, practiced in the car.
“Why are you …” Mia searched for the word, “here?”
Yes. Why was he here?
She wasn’t expecting him.
She hadn’t expected him for months.
In fact, it had been some time since he and Mia had been together. Or spoken. Or seen each other.
Okay, it’d been a year and a half.
“I need to be a good wife,” she had said at the time.
“I get it.”
“I need to respect the marriage thing.”
“I get it.”
“You understand?”
Cole had been asking Mia to run away with him. He had been prepared to leave the city behind, travel up north, maybe Eureka, Portland, Seattle. Who knows!
But she needed to be a good wife.
That was then. This was now.
She wasn’t anyone’s wife anymore.
“I wanted to check in with you,” Cole muttered while brushing his feet along the floorboards of Mia’s deck. She still held the door half open.
“I care about you,” he tried again.
“I was just in the neighborhood,” he added.
“I’m investigating who did it,” he concluded, and some of that pink finally returned to her beautiful face.
Now she was sitting at the table as still and as quiet as the espresso machine they kept on the kitchen counter. Chuck’s espresso machine. Mia never cared for coffee.
“He loved so much.” She had said some version of that over and over the last ten minutes, her hands digging into the blanket she kept herself coiled within.
“He just wanted to do things the right way. He wanted to be honest. He wanted to follow the rules. You know?” Mia turned to Cole for agreement. Cole, the man with whom she broke the rules. Cole, the man with whom she had been dishonest. Cole, the man who couldn’t do anything right. Yeah. He knew.
“Mia,” Cole reached for her blanket-bundled hand but came up empty, “I want you to do something that isn’t going to be comfortable. I want you to think about why he would’ve been in the Tenderloin that night.”
Mia pressed her lips together like a baby rejecting her dinner.
“I want you to think back and square it away for me. What was he up to? Who was he looking for? What secrets was he keeping? Who had it in for Chuck? …Is there anything he wasn’t honest about? Had he ever lied to you? You ever notice changes in his attitude? Think about that hard. The littlest things, you know, they could mean something. Maybe he wasn’t as right as rain as you think. What was the last thing he said to you?”
The kitchen was populated by candles lit in Chuck Hattaran’s honor. One of them went out. Mia promptly stood up and brought the fire back to its wick.
“If this is too hard, Mia, I understand. But I can only help you if you let me.”
A memory from a couple years ago. “Let me see it,” she had said, leaning over Cole’s Ikea bed to grab at the folder on his nightstand. Cole plucked it just in time and held it out of reach. It was the day after Christmas. It was cold.
“C’mon,” she tried. “I defend punks like this for a living. I can tell you right away if the kid’s got a case.”
“That’s got to be breaking ten different laws. That can’t be allowed.”
“You ought to be used to it.” She finally stood up from the bed, dropped the covers, her soft, curvy body naked in the cold winter air, as bold and as fearless as it was those days, most days, when she had on a smart suit jacket, ready for work. Her breasts a matching pair of Christmas gifts good for any day of the year. A five-and-a-half foot, two-legged tower of life that made up for every cadaver he would ever have to see, and it wasn’t even close. Cole dropped the folder. True to the laws of conservation and energy, the folder and the covers hit the floor at the same time. No laws broken.
“You ought to think back, slowly,” suggested Cole, back in the now, his concern pushing through the candlelight at the kitchen table. “Let’s think about you. Were you here? That night?”
Mia nodded. Baby steps.
“Was he?”
Mia nodded. Another baby step.
“When did he leave?”
The blankets rustled with her shoulders.
“You can stay if you want,” offered Mia, “but I was going through emails.”
She was pouring Cole a glass of water from the filter on the sink. Cole never noticed the veins on her hands and fingers just like that, their ten-year age difference so pronounced just as she handed him the cup.
“What emails? Whose emails?” Cole asked.
“Work emails.”
“This is no time for that.” This was upstairs. He said it at her office door frame.
Mia was huddled around her laptop at a desk. Her hand stuck out and clicked on her mouse. The blanket coiled around her made her look like a giant pillow.
“Mia,” he began. If he didn’t say it now, he never would. “I fully admit this might be comin’ out of my mouth a little early …”
She shushed him and kept leading him to the front door. This was a few minutes later, after she realized he had just been watching her type. They were in the foyer now. As she pawed at the knob of the front door, her eyes drifted to the end table.
Something glistened there. It was a ring. A wedding ring.
Cole felt inside his jacket pocket. He still had Chuck’s wedding ring. He kept it concealed and pointed his finger at the end table.
“Yours?”
“His,” she exhaled.
But Cole had his.
So this one on the table was … whose?
Mia opened the door for him.
No. Not yet. He had a plan for when he first came here. Eloquent words. A beautiful confession. He wanted to filibuster her love away. Rip through that blanket and grab at her heart. It could be us now, baby. You and me. Cole and Mia! But all that came out was:
“If you’re ever, uh, lonely …”
He didn’t remember what she said back. He didn’t want to remember.
But whatever she said, while she replied, with her eyes caught on his shoes …
Cole snatched the wedding ring off the end table.
“Goodbye, Mia.”
He promised himself.
He swore to himself.
He would bring the ring back.
He looked forward to it.