The sirens made it real. Rich, rough, persistent. All four directions sang, a choir in the round. And in the middle, Cole Hoffer was the preacher, frozen at the altar, reeling from hands slapping against the stained glass of his personal church, the voice of God close.
No. No, no, no.
The palms actually pounded against the glass of a big metal, emergency exit door. They insisted on welcome, demanded access to the rooftop, blocked by the corpse of a man named Dups.
The voice of God was in Cole’s own hand, speaker squawking on a cell phone, contending with the furious sirens on the street level below. The sirens that made it real. It. The act. The crime. Murder.
He pressed his toes in his shoes on the rubber of the rooftop. Reality gone back to life, resetting in the daylight, sun sifting the morning cloud cover above him, yellow and blue beyond. (Reminding him tragedy didn’t just happen in rainstorms.)
“Cole!” Blake said, the voice in the phone. “Are you still there?”
“Yes.” He looked ahead at the faces in the glass of the door. Construction, waiting for the boys in blue and black to tag in. Take over. Topple him. Cuff ’im tight.
He heard a helicopter.
“Tell me how to help. Hey,” Blake said. “Hey! Where are you?”
“The Sears Building,” he said back. “Oakland.”
“Why in the world—?”
The chopper blades made it fantasy again. Each faraway thrum like a kink in a dream. Cole laughed despite himself.
“How can I help you?” Blake said.
“I just want …”
What did he want? Freedom? What did that look like? His apartment. His desk at Central. In someone’s arms. In the middle. Cole white and squishy like the crème of an Oreo. Bad for your health. Bad for your teeth. (He could still use some floss.) Bad for this city. Corrupt. Accused. Convicted. Read ’im the riot act!
“I just want you to forgive the hell out of me,” he said to Blake. He thumbed off the call, staring at Dups’s choice of phone background. A Chinese character, some letter, looked like a stick figure, reminding him that there were now at least two gangs, both connected to this dude, the Fire, who definitely wouldn’t forgive Cole: the 4FC, whom Dups pretended to work for; and the Mighty Kings, whom Dups actually worked for.
Cole pocketed the phone. Raised his arms in the air, one hand pink and the other red, yellow, and gross. Yielded himself to officers scurrying along the roof, come from another doorway, all of them in isosceles stances, guns out, spread out, and lured in by the bad cop with the leather jacket, Cole Hoffer, Inspector, Homicide, San Francisco. His arms were swung back. Cuffs snapped. Reach-arounds for weaponry.
“The dead guy’s got my gun,” Cole said, helpfully. “Don’t lose it, please.”
“Jesus Double Hockey Sticks … Inspector. Why’d you kill him, Inspector?”
“Like I said, he got my gun.”
He was led along the rubber rooftop to another exit door. The blade slap of ARGUS, the Oakland PD helicopter, crowded out the wail of the cherries. Or maybe they were all here by now, sirens shut off, no more need to scream. Just like himself, going back down those half-made wooden steps, his hands at his back; other hands on his head. No need to scream, not anymore. Time to account for what he’d done, or what he had allowed. The shoot-out in Napa. The murder of Moses. Fleeing the scene of a crime (or a war) with Four Fingers. A thousand lies. A million mistakes.
Out through the tarp to Telegraph Avenue, choked off on all sides by squad cars and barriers. (All this for him.) That made it real again. It. He was inside the green zone, but his role was reversed. The faces and badges and batons spun together, dark blue thread. His heart pounded, but in his noggin, he felt calm. This felt right. True. Lawful. Final. He played along as the back door to a squad car opened. He let the shaky hand at the back of his head sneak him inside, scoot him along the thin plastic seat that barely covered his ass. The door shut. The car sputtered to life. The voices and the blade slap and the whole wide world shut the fuck up for once.
“I’ve seen bad,” said the cop in the driver’s seat, voice too rough and high for his throat, body too big for his shirt, but face out of view, sullied by the cage mesh between him and the back seat. “I’ve seen bad as big as buildings of men and more evil than a kid killing his pet cat.” He shifted into drive. “Kid with a smile, no less.” He waited for a barrier to be moved up ahead, to give him right-of-way. Cole then realized the scanner wasn’t on, the car quiet save for the cop at the wheel. “My life has been a slideshow of seeing people being bad.” The barrier was removed, but before the cop hit the pedal, the other passenger door opened, and another cop tumbled in, big as the driver. An unspoken exchange between the two.
“I have seen bad,” the same cop said, rolling out of the green zone, heading down Telegraph, hooking a right at 19th Street. “I see the blacks deal the dope. I see the Mexicans beat their wives. I see the junkies lose their grip, offering sex no one wants. I see the whites sticking their noses in the air, then on the table, sucking up the coke.” That voice. Cole knew that voice. And then the other guy, in the passenger seat, chuckled.
Kinsey’s chuckle.
The driver peered back at Cole through the mesh, caught at a red light.
It was Lieutenant Grunk, with the bumper-car jaw.
“I’ve seen bad,” said Grunk, “and you ain’t it. You’re just a killer.”
“And that’s not so bad?” asked Kinsey. Grunk got the green.
“People gotta die somehow.”
“That they do … Somehow what?”
Grunk drove again, a right at the intersection, now up San Pablo. He ugly-eyed Kinsey all the same.
Kinsey repeated: “Somehow what?”
“Somehow, sir.”
“Hey. Where we going?” Cole said, out of fizz.
“Maybe he’s not so bad,” Kinsey said, without looking back, “but he’s lousy.”
Kinsey. Grunk. Hombres. Some kind of clique, with one over the boss of the other, despite the fact that the “sir” was a basic inspector from San Francisco and the other was a lieutenant from Oakland. A secret society of cops, maybe? One Cole wasn’t privy to. A Ring with donuts instead of orgies—and now Cole was in the donut hole, surrounded by dirtbag badges. Who else donned their baton in league with these losers? Maybe the undercover cop who worked for Four Fingers—the one squelched in Napa Valley? The do-nothing traffic cops along the Bay Bridge? Lieutenant Puliard in the Central Station basement? He shared that last hunch with his travel buddies.
“Puliard’s a loner,” Kinsey said. “And a screw-up. Failed upwards since academy.”
“So, you gotta be good at policework if you want to do … whatever it is you two do,” Cole said.
“Bingo.”
“Whatever it is you’re doing with me right now.”
“Badda bing.”
“And what are you doing?”
No answer to that one. They were headed north along San Pablo, nowhere near Oakland Police Station. Even further away from San Francisco, where his brother Blake, his sister-in-law Jean, and their unborn kid sat pretty. Unbeknownst to them, Four Fingers had their home address spinning in his rolodex, an X on a treasure map. By now, the Jamaican must have fled to safety, growling about Cole, seething after Sibs’s bold claim of star-crossed love. Hands clasping glass, clasping bottle, popping cork, pouring booze, one, two, three, four, to the lips, and then an idea. Go after Cole’s family anyway. Just for kicks. Teach the white boy a lesson. How much time did Cole have? He tried for the phone in his front pocket, but was quickly reminded of his cuffs at his wrists, and then, more importantly, noticed the phantom absence on his thigh. He didn’t have Dups’s phone anymore.
Kinsey did. He thumbed through until the device vibrated in his palm. Incoming call.
“You know it?” Kinsey asked. He held it in front of the cage mesh for Cole’s benefit. It was just a number—but one Cole knew. The number was Blake. Likely trying back.
“No clue,” Cole said.
Kinsey let it go to voicemail, shut off the phone, fished an old toothpick out of his pocket, and poked out the SIM card. Snapped it in half against the dash. All the while, Grunk whistled a tune. Auld Lang Syne.
“Hey,” Cole said. “Lieutenant. Where’d you hear that?”
“Where do you think, killer?” Grunk said.
“I think …” But Cole stopped himself. His mind was like a balance scale, seesawing his options. He had a hunch Grunk had been in the same stark apartment complex where Moses first got pinched and tossed in a taxi cab. But was it worth implicating him—here? How far to play his hand? If he pushed, would he get shoved? Should he reason with these guys first—or go for the kill, behind this mesh cage like a snarling beast? His assumptions about Grunk screamed. The song, from the Tenderloin. His voice, from the phone call with Inforcement Inc., manufacturer of Chuck Hattaran’s mysterious body-cam.
“Your boy. He whistled it on the bridge,” said Grunk. He meant Four Fingers. “Where else would I hear it?”
The ride tilted right again, now along Alcatraz Avenue, looking ahead to Claremont Canyon. It lorded over Oakland and Berkeley just to the north, Mother Nature’s toes, two of a big green body that stretched along the full eastern edge of Oakland and its sister cities. The place city people went to get away … or to be gotten rid of.
“I think I’ll skip the nature hike,” Cole said.
“C’mon,” Kinsey said. “A little fresh air. Bird songs. Pretty girls running in sports bras. You don’t want to skip that.”
“He’s had a long day,” Grunk said. Then, “Sir.”
“So you think we just get to the end of it, then?” Kinsey said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And miss out on all the nice weather.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’d be a shame.”
“Or,” Cole said, interrupting, “we could just not go. We could turn around …”
Grunk hooked a left on Claremont Avenue, ever closer to the canyon’s reach.
“We could turn around,” Cole said, continuing, “and go back to Oakland Central, and you can book me, uncuff me, put me in a cell, or in the box, ask me questions, convict me …”
Grunk was speeding up, as if the revving of the engine might drown out Cole.
“Or—or whatever! I’m guilty, you guys. I admit it.”
“What a prince, this guy,” Kinsey said.
“I killed that Dups guy! I—I did.” Cole’s knees suddenly forfeited, and he nearly slid off the plastic seat, propped up by the cage wall, his body welling up with guilt. “I killed him.”
“What’s it like?” Kinsey asked. “What’s it like to kill someone?”
What was it like? Pft. This was Cole’s third now. The Bayview boy, world’s greatest dad Moses, and now the so-called Fire. He wanted their ghosts close. To be haunted by them would be a blessing. But when he focused on them, like looking at stars in the sky for a little too long, the feeling disappeared. He was left with the numb mutter of his broken right hand.
“It feels like nothing. Nothing at all. Like staring at a wall,” Grunk said, filling the void Cole had created. “I’ve seen bad, and I’ve killed that bad. And the first one, you feel that. But then it’s just bad on bad. Then it’s just going to work. Yes, sir.” Grunk hit the gas pedal again.
They stopped off-road fifteen minutes later, deep in Siesta Valley, hidden from the city’s gaze by earthy hills pimpled with bushes and trees. The sounds of civilization had no home here, though its history still pressed on the tops of rocky mounds like fingers, old basalt quarry grounds peeking along ridges high above the squad car, parked and shut off. Grunk opened Cole’s passenger door. He had his pistol out.
“Is that necessary?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m doing everything you say. A to Z.”
“Wrong. I haven’t told you to do a damn thing yet. Out.”
Cole slid from the squad car, stumbling onto rock and weed. Grunk took him by the cuffs, held the link behind Cole like it was a dog leash.
Kinsey shut his passenger door and clocked the perimeter. As far as Cole could tell, they were three peas in a very large pod, alone with the elements on a sunny, breezy morning. Kinsey seemed content and came around the back hood of the car.
Should Cole have been frightened? Anxious? Impossible. This was just one more frying pan or bubbling pot on a mile-long stovetop. Cole the lobster was bound to land in one sooner or later. He thought he saw that kid from Bayview-One hiding behind a bigleaf maple tree, his audience, but it was a bush rustling in the breeze, the ghost lost until Cole finally took his impending trip into the Big Dark. He well expected to find the boy there, in his personal hell, or whatever existed in the after. That comforted him. The anxiety of it. He was so serene, it made him nauseous.
“It’ll be the right thing, in a way,” Cole said, eulogizing his own death, “Justice.”
“Sure,” Kinsey said. “Whatever you want.”
But Cole remembered. “My brother. Blake?”
“Property Crimes.”
“He and his wife. You need to make sure they’re okay after this.”
“Why in the world would I give a hoot to do that?”
“Because you’re a decent man,” Cole said. “Deep down. That’s what I think. Because good things still matter. Because you’re a tool of this city, just like everybody else, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better tool to do real good, to make you sleep better at night and all that, than my brother.”
“Nah. Good sleep freaks me out.” Kinsey was putting on blue, nitrile gloves. When he had them on, he unclasped his sidearm. “Now you.” He was talking to Grunk. Cole felt the grip release from the cuffs’ chain. With the sound of a glove’s snap, he assumed Grunk was following Kinsey’s lead.
“You got his sidearm?” Kinsey said, referring to Cole’s gun.
“Right here,” Grunk said with a pat. Cole clocked that at Grunk’s side.
“People are gonna be asking about me,” Cole said.
“Inspector Obvious,” Kinsey said.
“You have a plan for that? If they ask?”
Kinsey cocked his head, as if everything out of Cole’s mouth was so stupid, it was cute. “You know up in Napa, they found an undercover cop up there? Fellow named Ryan Carson. Good cop, I imagine. Deep undercover like that; that ain’t easy. You know what else, up in Napa? He was wearing a thing. One of the new body-cams. Shoots sixty frames per second. Little lens sticking out from under his shirt. Barely visible. Didn’t wear it often. Only when he thought he had a real scoop. You see where I’m going with this? People are already asking about you.”
For a moment, Cole mentally reassembled himself in Yaromir’s hallway, standing over the man as he took his firearm, his head half-blasted. He had no idea.
“Who else?” Cole asked. “Who else two-times?”
“What do you care? Jacket.”
Grunk grabbed Cole’s jacket from behind by the lapel and pulled back. The sleeves got as far as the cuffs and left the leather hanging behind Cole like a tail. Grunk belched lightly and checked all the coat pockets.
“Wallet’s in my jeans.”
“Shut up.”
Grunk found the blank check (Blake’s check) in a jacket pocket. That was the only thing.
“No key.”
“What key?” Cole asked.
“Shut. Up.”
Grunk clamored for the jean pockets next. Kinsey whistled.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a hot-pocket second now,” Kinsey said, eyes on Cole’s arm. The arm.
The one with the 7K tattoo.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Kinsey chuckled and waved for Grunk to continue his search.
“No. You don’t—that wasn’t me,” Cole said, jerking from the feet up, on account of Grunk’s grabby hands. “I for sure, hundred percent, hella didn’t kill Chuck Hattaran. And no way you believe that, no, nah! This was—I saw the Mighty Kings—in Chinatown—you can ask them—they forced me—they made me—this whole thing—like an insurance thing, man!”
“Mighty Kings. Always wanted to get buddy with them. You surprise me, Cole.”
“Kinsey!” Cole said, voice breaking like he was twelve. “You’ve got to …” Grunk was at Cole’s shoes now, checking the soles. “I’ll go in for Moses. I’ll go in for Dups. I’ll go in for whatever … something I did, but I did not kill Chuck. Period. Exclamation point. Double exclamation point.” And then Cole spit.
Grunk finished with the shoes, shaking his head. “No key,” he said.
“What key?!”
“Quiet,” Kinsey said. “The tub.”
The tub? Grunk hobbled to the back of the squad car, unlocked it. From within, he pulled out a big blue plastic tub. Cole couldn’t see what other goodies the trunk promised, but he suddenly felt a latent rush of adrenaline winding its way up his spinal cord.
“Wait!” Cole said.
“For what? My pension?”
“I can help you.”
“By dying.”
“With a connection!”
Grunk pulled what looked like closed, plastic paint cans out of the trunk until Kinsey snapped at him to stop.
“Enough,” Kinsey said. Grunk seemed miffed. “What kind of connection?”
Yes, what kind, indeed? Who would help Kinsey? How would Cole be of benefit to him? What tantalizing name could he drop to save his life?
“Damian Buchanan,” Cole said, proud as possible. “Four Fingers.”
“You hear what the inspector said? About Napa?” Grunk said. “We saw you two together. Didn’t exactly end with a first kiss, did it?”
“And you saw me with him again,” Cole said. “At the bridge. You saw that we made up. Matter of fact, you let me skip off with him.”
Kinsey chuckled. Grunk shrugged.
“What was I supposed to do? Arrest him? Then what? No bad guy. I’d be out of a job.”
“Well. We had a real heart-to-heart,” Cole lied. “Plus, he’s down two deputies now, and he doesn’t know I knocked one of them off. He needs whatever connection he can get and you need to connect to him. So. Where does that leave us?”
“Acid,” Kinsey said.
“Got it, already,” said Grunk. “Sir.”
“He’ll listen to me!” Cole said. “He has to. He’ll do anything I say, bet you dollars to donuts.”
Grunk raspberried. Kinsey shut him up with a wave.
“And why’s that?” Kinsey asked.
Cole took a step forward, jacket still swinging from his cuffs behind his back. “Because the woman he loves happens to love me.”
Kinsey seemed to think on that a minute, then turned to Grunk with a snap of his fingers. “You got that sidearm of his, right?” Grunk did. He unclasped it, and on Kinsey’s beckoning, handed it to him.
Kinsey undid the safety and shot Grunk clean in the head. The big guy with the bumper-car jaw retched with the impact and knocked the plastic tub over as he collapsed to the ground.
Cole almost ran for it, but when Kinsey turned back Cole’s way, there was something kindred about it, like that was the only bullet that needed to find a home. Then Kinsey exhaled deeply, laughed at a high pitch, and dropped the firearm in the dirt, his hand shaking.
“My God … Good God! That is a feeling, Hoffer. That is something you feel!” Kinsey whistled. “Never killed a man before. Never before … W-wow—wow, wowee!”
Cole secretly tried to wiggle the bones of his good hand through one of the cuffs, but it was useless—and impossible without aggravating the pulses of hell in his other hand at the same time. He was at Kinsey’s mercy. Kinsey, the potato in human form, still shuddering and reeling from his actions, though putting on the strong face out of habit best he could, eyes, nose, mouth, and hat. The silence felt longer than it was. Like hours. A passenger jet flew overhead at one point, oblivious to the nightmare below. Finally:
“The right bower. The left bower,” Kinsey said, apparently recollecting his hold over Cole. The right bower: Cole’s snooping. The left bower: Cole’s woman, Amy, the one that was caught in the middle of the Bayview Riot. “What a hand I had, huh?”
He paused again. Cole tried to fill in the blanks. “Does, uh … this mean we’re even?”
Kinsey gawked at Cole like he just told a dirty joke, then laughed until he coughed. He held up his firing hand, making a point to voila the glove he was wearing. “Incorrect. This means that you shot Grunk.” A tear ran down Kinsey’s eye as he said it, but he quickly rubbed it away. “How about that magic trick, huh?”
Cole didn’t understand. Was he brought to die here or wasn’t he? Was he getting his due or not?
“What do you want from me?”
Kinsey stomped along the earth like an elephant, hand on his actual firearm at his side, just in case. He stared down Cole, yet his eyes seemed elsewhere. When he finally resolved his focus, he explained. “I didn’t like him anyway. But Hoffer, I’ve always liked you. Pluck. That’s what you have.”
Kinsey turned back towards Grunk and the tub, stepping slowly, carefully.
“I had the right bower and the left bower. Now I got a lay-down hand, the whole damn thing. I can use you like a raincheck. Better yet, I can use you right now, unlike old Grunk. Piece of shit.”
No way Kinsey could use him. No way Cole would give in. He was ready for judgment. Hungry for it. But then Kinsey said: “Hoffer?”
And Cole said: “Yeah.”
“I’m gonna undo your cuffs,” said Kinsey. “You’re gonna run. You’re gonna find Four Fingers, and you’re gonna make your inroads. Then I want you to call me. And I want to hear that Jamaican tongue out the other end of my phone. I want that relationship. If you cannot give it to me, I get the APB on you yesterday. You are my tool. Is that understood?”
Cole nodded.
“Get your inroads.”
“Yes. Sir.”