Internal Affairs was part of the Risk Management Office, which in turn was part of the Chief’s Office, located at San Francisco Southern Police Station, a towering glass house off 3rd Street, south of AT&T Park, kissing the coast of the Bay. On the inside, the glass exterior proved to be an illusion, for most of the offices were windowless, small, and as warm as snuggling into the insides of a dead animal. The Risk Management Deputy Chief was named Sylvia De Luca, a sleepy sixty-year-old woman who picked up her fashion sense from the movie Working Girl, shoulder pads and all, and never fixed what wasn’t broken. Her red, velvet jacket framed her wealthy décolletage of hanging jewelry, all of it clacking together like a golden plate of armor as she wrote in shorthand on a yellow notepad at her wobbly, wooden desk. De Luca was a rich gal, no bones about it, but the rich didn’t get richer by ponying up for better furniture they didn’t care about in the first place. Hence the shitty desk. Hence the shitty bookcase, filled with books and odds and ends. Pictures. Pieces of art. If you could call it art. She wrote left-handed. It was the first thing he’d noticed about her when he was brought here. He couldn’t help it. She wore a very familiar-looking wedding ring on that hand.
“Mr. Hoffer?” she quietly said, barely raising her head.
Cole sat in the corner on a couch with a rose-petal pattern, cuffed to a hook in the wall meant specifically for wonderful people just like him. He didn’t respond to his name. He clinked his cuff instead, letting the metal do the talking for him.
The Metal. Eastwood. He wasn’t talkin’ no more.
“My grandson made cookies on Sunday,” she said, her thin lips pursing together to fight off her stupid smile. “Would you like one while you wait?”
“I bet they taste like shit.”
Sylvia tittered and returned to her notepad, referring to her laptop now and again as she did so. He couldn’t see the screen, but he imagined it was a slideshow of Ring-around-the-rosie. This went on for the next ten minutes. At one point, she unzipped her purse, pulled out a Ziploc bag of cookies, and nibbled on one.
“They’re a bit burnt,” she said.
“Told you.”
“I like them burnt. It reminds me that the boy was busy doing whatever it is boys do. So busy, he forgot all about his cookies. It reminds me boys will be boys.”
“You sayin’ you get off on your grandson?”
She tittered again and nibbled at her goddamn cookie.
“Mr. Hoffer, I don’t know what rise you think you’re going to get out of me.”
“Trying to get to the part where we lock me up and throw away the key.”
“And do you have the key?” she said quickly, sharp.
But then, she dropped the confusing, urgent question like it was never asked. She nibbled on her cookie again.
“Mm. M-hm. Or …” she said, gazing around her office and returning her attention to Cole. “Maybe we leave you in here awhile, until the afternoon sun makes it warmer than it already is.”
“Whatever you want, lady. It’s your paperwork now. Not mine.”
“Like I said, I like them burnt.”
She licked her thin lips.
It had been five days since the Fillmore fire. He’d spent the long weekend locked up at Central. He’d learned fast that the station had kept his incarceration on the down-low. A need-to-know basis kind of thing, which was no easy feat, considering cops came and went in and out every day. But then there was that gentle reminder, brought on by the crotchety habits of the guys who tended to lock-up supervision, that the boys in blue who worked in Central were the old fogies, the company men, the less-is-more, paperwork-averse, see-no-evil-hear-no-evil know-nothings who’d been at this gig since before the Miranda rights were a thing. Any one of them’d be damned if they were gonna make a stink about what the people upstairs wanted to do about a bad cop. Given enough time, everything’s got a tendency of being shortened, tightened, shrunk, abbreviated. Just like Fillmore. And especially paperwork.
Cole switched to his other ass cheek on the couch, one gone numb.
“You know there was a price on my head,” he said, almost a boast.
“Was there now?” She didn’t give a shit.
“Big price. Lots of money.”
“Well. Looks like I won out.”
“I just thought this’d go down different,” he said, quiet.
“Ah. There’s the remorse.”
“Nah. Nothin’ like that. I figured more of a kangaroo court kind of thing. At least a gavel to bang or something, you know? This feels like I’m seeing the guidance counselor.”
The landline phone at her desk rang. She didn’t pick it up until it rang three times, her eyes clocking the caller ID. When she was satisfied, she grabbed the receiver.
She mumbled to the person at the other end while Cole aired out his shirt with his free, freshly bandaged hand. He’d been given a rationed dose of Tylenol for the pain twice a day since lock-up (they always had to watch him swallow, making sure he didn’t stash it and try to off himself). The Tylenol did shit for his hand, but it did keep his mind in a woozy flow he’d come to silently enjoy, allowing him to observe his emotions from afar, like looking through an aquarium.
Sylvia had hung up the phone.
“He’s just arrived,” she said. “We’re about to get started.”
“Excitement.”
“Need your password,” Kinsey said.
This was in lockup. Saturday. Kinsey had run his sterling silver San Francisco badge along the bars back and forth like a xylophone until Cole woke up from a woozy Tylenol dream.
“I was dreamin’ about you,” Cole lied.
“Shut up. Password.”
“Open sesame.”
“For your computer, wise-ass.”
“Hell you want on my computer?”
“Your cases have become my cases.” Kinsey looked more tired than usual. Maybe even lost some weight in the last few days. He grabbed one of the bars in a meaty hand, clenched it. Sucked up snot through his sinuses.
“Huh,” Cole said. “Double the work then. You’re welcome.”
“You don’t use the password I.T. gave you.”
“You don’t, either.”
“Just … just give it to me.”
“Or what?” Cole looked through the bars on one side, toward other cells. They were empty. “Left bower, right bower, trump card …” Cole said. “What?”
“Cole …”
“Or what?”
“Hoffer …”
“It’s funny. I was so scared before. Especially after Grunk,” Cole paused for effect. “You know. The things I could say. Not that anyone would believe me”
But Cole stopped there. Kinsey was holding the bars tight, now with both hands. He realized it was the only thing keeping Kinsey up. Then the big guy shuddered, gasped, and gripped the bars tighter.
“Uh … Kinsey?”
Kinsey quietly cried, shoulders like two quaked mountains.
“Kinsey, man … If you wanted the password that bad … It’s the name of your beat-wife upstairs, plus Joe Montana’s number.”
His cries finally choked up and away.
“What?” he asked.
“My password,” said Cole. “Jane16.”
“You’re telling me … you use my password?”
Kinsey laughed, snotty and gross, then drifted to a dull, incessant groan. “What am I?” His words came out in a wet whisper. “What am I now?”
Cole didn’t respond fast enough. Kinsey punched one of the bars.
“Why’d you make me do it?”
He punched and he punched and he punched. No one came down to stop him.
“This feeling,” Kinsey finally said, when he calmed down. “This feeling goes away. It’s like the flu. It’s bad and then it goes bye-bye. And then it’s like it never happened … Right?”
He peered at Cole through the bars with a vulnerability he had never seen before. These were the eyes of a ten-year-old bully caught or lost or excluded for the very first time, wet and wide and expectant.
Cole got up from the plastic cot. Stepped across the cell until he was opposite Kinsey. Touched Kinsey’s clenched fingers with his own.
“Nah, man. I’m sorry.”
“So …” Kinsey said, after a long pause where Cole had half-expected to be strangled through the bars. “S- so, it just stays like th-th-this. This-is-is … sh-sh-shit-in-a-b-box feeling.” He said the last word like it went from first gear to third, and back again, and then he sucked up air.
“Yeah, man.”
“I feel so fucking bad.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to forgive myself.”
“I know.”
“I don’t—d-don’t d-deserve!”
“It’s allowed.”
“I told him to take a few days off,” said Puliard. Cole was still on the couch with the rose-petal design. “He showed up unfit for duty. That was last Monday. He had no history of this kind of thing. I thought boys will be boys.”
“Boys will be boys,” repeated Sylvia.
“I just had no goddamn idea he was so bent out of shape. How could I?”
Puliard had been on the speakerphone. This was before Sylvia pulled out her grandson’s burnt cookies. They were referring to the developing latticework of Cole’s last week. An eyewitness had finally put Cole at the church the night of the Tenderloin riot, where it appeared as though Cole had led a man off the rooftop to his death. The Ryan Carson body-cam had identified Cole in Napa Valley the night of Yaromir Yevseyev’s death, palling around with “Four Fingers” Damian Buchanan. Of course, there was the dead body at the top of the Sears Building in Oakland, where Cole was first cuffed before “mysteriously evading the police.” And there was his as-yet-unexplained presence at the Shape Note prior to and during the Fillmore fire.
Oh yeah, and Cole had confessed to breaking into the house of Mia Hattaran, where he discovered her dead body in a closet.
“It certainly paints a questionable picture,” Sylvia said.
“Eh?” asked Puliard.
She spoke up for the speakerphone’s benefit, “I said it sounds like an exciting week.”
“That’s not the half of it,” said Puliard. “We had a guy in a jail cell just fucking disappear!”
“Moses Dillard,” said Cole.
“Eh?”
Cole was too far from the speakerphone for Puliard to hear him.
“He said Moses Dillard,” Sylvia repeated.
“I shot him in the head,” said Cole, absently. “He’s dead. Probably at the bottom of the Bay by now.”
“Eh?”
Sylvia slit her eyes at Cole.
“What was that?” Puliard said.
“He didn’t say anything,” said Sylvia. “Thanks for your time, Lieutenant.”
She hung up with him, wrote some things down on her notepad, and eventually asked Cole if he wanted cookies.
When she received word that their visitor had arrived downstairs, she cleared her throat.
“You don’t seem nervous.”
“About what?” he asked.
“About what I said.”
“You mean what you didn’t say. About what I said. About Moses.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Why would I be nervous?”
Sylvia nibbled on another cookie. “Don’t you think it suggests I have an ulterior motive with regards to the disappearance of Moses Dillard?”
“Hope you didn’t want him alive.”
“You’re being awfully cavalier, Mr. Hoffer.”
“So are you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You wear that every day?” Cole motioned to Sylvia’s left hand. More specifically, the wedding ring on her finger. “Everywhere you go?”
Sylvia’s thin lips tightened, fighting that damn smile again.
Cole leaned in, feeling the woozy Tylenol high drifting away, and feeling the limit of his cuff.
“Do you even care?” Cole asked. “That she’s dead?”
“We’ve lost a lot of members, yes.”
“But doesn’t it affect you? Didn’t you love them?”
There was a knock on the door. Their visitor. Sylvia nibbled on another cookie.
“What do you think love is, Mr. Hoffer?”
She finally got out of her chair and made for the door, unlocking it.
“Thank you for joining us,” she said.
Their visitor was Blake.
“Please sit.”
Sylvia had no arm chairs in her office, besides her own desk chair. The only place to sit was the couch.
“I’d prefer to stand, deputy chief.”
“Okey-dokey. Shut the door for me, then.”
Blake did as asked.
Instead of returning to her chair, Sylvia leaned against the front of her desk, assessing both Hoffer brothers at once with those sleepy eyes.
“Let’s make this quick.”
“Actually, all due respect, I have a number of issues to bring up about my brother,” said Blake. “I feel it’s important …”
Blake crowed on from there, Sylvia’s sleepy eyes patiently drinking them in. Cole didn’t listen to another word, though. Instead, he clenched his bandaged hand to summon the pain, willing his brain to equate the pain with his brother, so that the two would be forever inextricably linked. He made a silent vow to never speak to Blake again.
It was the first thing that made Cole feel good in days.
“Are you done?” Sylvia asked when Blake finally shut up.
Blake nodded.
“Good,” she said. “So here’s the quickie-ness. My office has already made its recommendations. Those recommendations have been approved.
“Blake,” she said, “effective immediately, you have been demoted from inspector to officer—”
“What?”
“—due to your unsanctioned activities leading to the wrongful arrest of inspector Cole Hoffer.”
Cole slid to his other ass-cheek. Blake nearly buckled. Neither could respond.
The fix was in.
But what did this fix fix?
“Cole,” she said, “effective immediately, you have been transferred to Oakland Police Department, and will report to the Special Projects division as detective. You’ll see a slight pay raise but don’t get too excited. It’s not much.”
The ventilation kicked in above Cole. All hot air.
Sylvia returned to her seat, lazily gazing at them both.
“I’d like a verbal response, boys.”
“Mr. Hoffer? Blake? Officer?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Blake said, knee-jerk.
“Mr. Hoffer? Cole? Detective?”
“Fine.”
“Officer,” said Sylvia, a moment later, breaking the silence apart. “Would you be so kind to grab the key off the desk here and uncuff the detective?”
Blake nearly fell forward, but found his step. He missed the key on the first attempt, then clutched it, drifting like a ghost to the hook by the couch. He unlocked the cuff from the hook, then unlocked the cuff around Cole’s wrist.
“Thank you. That’ll be all, officer.”
Blake never looked Cole in the eye. He left, shutting the door behind him.
“Why?” Cole finally asked.
“What do you mean, why? You’re a good man. An honest man. You’re a tool of this city. Both cities. And starting right about now, I think you’ll finally start believing it. Won’t you?”
Three cops and three criminals are on one side of the Bay. You’ve got to get everyone on the other side, but you only have one boat, and if there’s a cop on one side, he can never be outnumbered by criminals. How do you get everyone across?
Only way to do it is to let the criminals cross the Bay on their own.
“Have a cookie.”
Cole complied, standing up. The bag of cookies sat on the desk next to a framed photo of Sylvia and her husband. A man with a particularly long nose.
“He a painter?” Cole asked.
“Not anymore. What makes you say that?”
“I’ve seen his work.”
“It’s going back on auction. Yevseyev’s estate sale.”
He stood there. Ate the cookie. It tasted like shit. The blackened crumbs stuck between his teeth like stowaways.
“Where is it?” Sylvia asked.
“Where is what?”
“The key. You know where the key is.”
First, Grunk. Now, her. What key?
Ah. That key.
“Nine down. One over. In the rocks.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s it unlock? Besides an empty house?”
“That’ll be all, detective.”
“For now.”
He’d play along.
He’d finish this puzzle.
He’d be a tool of the Bay.
But as he tongued at his teeth, he felt like the artwork in the bookcase behind Sylvia’s desk—the jaws of some mysterious beast, poorly used and oddly valuable and horribly out of place.
He left.
First stop. A pharmacy.
He needed more Tylenol.
And he needed some floss.