The First Law (52 page)

Sitting on his bed, Glitsky slid the bullets into the cylinder on the first gun, snapped it closed, did the same with the second. Twelve shots, less than he’d get with two automatics, but less chance of a jam or a misfire. Speed loaders for quick reloads. People disagreed with him, but he’d take a revolver every time.

Taking off his shirt, he went to his closet and pulled his vest off the nail where it had hung undisturbed for probably ten years. He realized suddenly with a pang of regret that if he’d continued wearing the darned thing to work as a matter of course, his last eighteen months of medical madness and recovery might have been avoided. He might have only had a bruised rib for a couple of days, a black-and-blue stomach instead of IVs and antibiotics, tubes and monitors, to say nothing of the pain, the guilt, the self-doubt.

He shook himself to clear those thoughts. No point in whipping himself further on that score. It was what he had done—gone into a potentially violent situation unprepared. He would not do the same thing again.

With his regular shirt back on and buttoned over the vest, he checked himself in the closet door mirror. With a jacket on, no one would be able to tell. Since he wore a shoulder holster every day, it felt natural under his left arm, even with the slightly unwieldy bulge of the rig he used for the revolver. He hadn’t worn a belt holster, though, since he’d been on a beat, and he was slightly surprised at how comfortable it felt, high on his right hip.

It had been unusually cold, even for November in the city, and it would probably be worse on the pier jutting out into the Bay, so he forsook his standard leather flight jacket in favor of his old dark blue goose-down ski parka. Snapping the lower buttons, he pulled the hem down and checked the mirror again to make sure that it covered his hip weapon.

Glitsky almost never looked at himself. When he’d come to college, as a kind of private joke to himself, he started telling people that he got the scar through his lips in a knife fight with some gang kids in high school. In reality, it had been a prosaic accident on parallel bars when he was in junior high. But whatever had caused it, the scar itself didn’t heal perfectly and came to be something he tended to avoid looking at. The same thing with the blue eyes in his dark face. They made him uncomfortable. Was he in fact black like his mom, or a nice Jewish boy like his dad? As a young man, all the superficial stuff was too confusing to him and, in the end, he realized, meaningless. He was who he was inside. And so was everybody else.

Now, though, he stood an extra moment before the mirror, trying to glean in the image there some hint of his essence as he was today. Why was he doing this? He had an incredible wife and a new daughter and everything to live for. Had it really gotten to the point where he had no other choice? Weren’t there other cops he knew, friends and allies over the years, to whom he could turn? Or at least from whom he could request backup? What was he hoping to accomplish?

But then he ran down the numbers—Chief Rigby, no. Deputy Chief Batiste, no. Jackman, no. Lanier, impossible. The FBI, no time. Paul Thieu, dead. What was he going to do next, go to the mayor? Any man on the force who joined with him now risked his career at the very least. Beyond that, Glitsky had always been a loner on the job, a solo inspector for his entire career, and then as lieutenant, mostly a by-the-book justice freak. He’d always believed that although people might not like him, he was at least respected. Recent events called even that minimal standard into question.

Now he couldn’t afford to care about that public opinion. He only had to answer to his family. These threats to them could not be allowed to stand. If he could not enlist help among those whose job it was to provide it, then it was up to him. And him alone, if need be.

He glanced one last time at the middle-aged man in the mirror. Knocking three times on the Kevlar over his heart, he drew a deep breath, then let it out heavily. “Okay,” he said.

He’d chosen Pier 70 quickly and intuitively out of several possibilities that had occurred to him as he’d spoken to Gerson. The more obvious spot might have been the outer edges of the parking lots at Candlestick Point, where there would be no opportunity for his enemies to ambush him and where, frankly, if it came to a gunfight, there would be less chance of bystanders becoming victims. But to his mind, more than equally balancing out the ambush question, was the parking area’s total lack of cover for himself. If Gerson came out with enough friends to surround him, Glitsky didn’t want to be standing alone in the middle of a concrete field, where Gerson could see Holiday was in fact not with him, where even a mediocre shot with a rifle could take him down from outside the county.

By chance, Glitsky, along with most of the workers at the Hall of Justice, had come to know Pier 70 very well about three years ago, when it had been the major crime and finale scene in a movie one of the big-shot Hollywood directors was always shooting somewhere in town. For about three months, the tinseltown crew had worked out of the Hall of Justice, and everybody had become starstruck to some degree. One of Abe’s inspectors, Billy Marcusik, even got tapped for a credited speaking role in the eventually awful film, playing essentially himself. After shooting wrapped, Billy quit the force and moved to L.A., but so far he hadn’t been in any more movies that Abe had seen. In any event, in the glory days, just about every cop and clerk and even a few judges in the Hall thought they might turn out to be the next big thing if they hung around the director enough. If nothing else, they might get five seconds with one of the stars. For a week or more near the end of shooting, hordes of city workers would descend upon Pier 70, either in hopes of working as an extra, or to watch the fools who entertained those hopes.

Now, not much after one o’clock, Glitsky pulled over and parked. He’d told Gerson he’d be there at 4:00, but it would be bad luck to be late. He wanted to be absolutely sure he was the first man here. He wanted to walk over every inch of the area. He stopped on an unnamed industrial street of low-rise warehouses and garages a few blocks west of a dent in the Bay’s shoreline called the Central Basin. An abandoned railroad line ran down the middle of the road. When they’d been shooting the movie out on Pier 70, this street had been the glamorous, albeit slightly funky, production base—trailers for the stars, incredible catered spreads of food for everyone with a pass, lights and gurneys and hundreds of people. Now Glitsky sat behind the wheel for a short while, letting his senses take it in, warn him of anything that resembled trouble.

There was nothing but the empty street. A gust off the bay skipped some heavy dust off the car’s hood; some newspapers and candy wrappers fluttered in the recessed doorway of an empty storefront across from him. Another car was parked at the end of the block, but Glitsky had already driven by it once, and it appeared empty.

He got out and walked to the corner, looked out toward the Bay on his right. Pier 70 was the last of a series of six or seven piers jutting north into the water. In front of them was a relatively large open expanse of cement—reminiscent in some ways of Candlestick Point—although in this case there were few if any individual parking spaces. The area had once been used for loading and unloading and container storage, but for the past ten years or so, the piers on this stretch of the bay had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

Hands in his pockets, head down against the dusty wind, Glitsky crossed the shortest distance to the squat, yellowish building that marked the entrance to the first pier. The next three piers were similarly constructed—a large warehouse-style building out of which protruded the actual pier and boat loading area behind it. Everything was deserted.

Pier 70 itself was nearly a quarter of a mile long, a little over sixty feet wide. It was the farthest east of the half-dozen sister piers. Although there were a few open areas leading down to docks at the water level, most of the pier’s entire eastern exposure, along the Bay, had been built up into various one-story structures, many of them open to the elements, some of them railroad cars, to service its trade. This left a relatively broad asphalt roadway on Glitsky’s left as he walked out along the pier, his shoulder weapon drawn now and held in his hand, mostly concealed in his jacket pocket. He looked into the various doorways and openings. There was no mystery in why the famous director had chosen this spot for his finale—with its ramshackle, low- or open-roofed, wooden buildings facing a wide thoroughfare posing as Main Street, the pier resembled nothing so much as an Old West movie set, false fronts and all.

But Glitsky wasn’t in much of an aesthetic frame of mind to appreciate the art of it all. When he reached the end of the pier, water on three sides and no escape, he realized where he had to set himself—back where he’d begun, maybe a few structures in. Let whoever was coming next get in behind him and cut themselves off. With no escape.

Except past him.

He made it back in half the time he’d taken going out, but it still seemed to be one of the longest walks of his entire life. Doorway to doorway, one at a time, his gun in hand, eyes always on the head of the pier, the open expanse in front of it. Nothing and no one.

He was a hunter now, not a cop. Cops didn’t draw weapons without suspects or specific situations at hand. They didn’t conceal the weapon if drawn. They called for backup if even the remote chance of gunplay loomed.

A gull landed on a post across the way, studied him for a moment, then flew off with a series of derisive squawks. Somehow rattled by this natural display, Glitsky turned quickly, now impatient to find a suitable place to wait.

He found it in a low, barnlike structure maybe sixty feet from the front of the pier. It had no front door and was also open in the back, but half-height partitions within created several eight-by-four-foot spaces that might have served as horse or cattle stalls. He had looked cursorily into the place on his way out and had concluded that, because there was light from the front and back openings, and they were only four feet high, the partitions would be inadequate for hiding. He hadn’t even looked behind them when he passed.

Now, for the same reasons, suddenly they looked good to him.

He put his gun back in his holster. At the back opening, he scanned along the waterline, then turned and came back to the front. Another gull, or maybe the same one, had landed on the nearest post, and now was squawking continually. Glitsky looked around in the barn and found a large rusty hinge of some kind, which he chucked at the bird. It missed and splashed into the water below with a noise that sounded to Glitsky’s ears loud as a depth charge. The bird didn’t so much as shift its feet, and kept on squawking.

He pushed back the sleeve of his jacket and checked his watch. It was ten minutes until two. The wind whistled through the cracks in the structures around him. Not a streak of blue showed in the dun-gray sky overhead. Somewhere in the white noise of the background, he thought he heard a
chunk,
like a car door closing. He looked at his watch again. It was the same time as before. His hands, he realized, were damp with sweat.

On the cement no-man’s-land, a body appeared. A man alone, walking.

Once Glitsky was sure, he came back into view and stood in the barn’s doorway where he could be seen. Surprises among armed men could turn unlucky very quickly and he had no intention to be part of one. He found that he was unprepared for the wave of relief he felt at John Holiday’s appearance here. He hadn’t let himself consciously acknowledge that some part of him had half expected reinforcements of some kind to show up. In any case, he was glad of it.

Glitsky motioned him to move it forward, Holiday broke into a trot, and in a moment they were together, back in the shadows of the barn, but able to look out.

“Where’s Hardy?” Glitsky asked.

“I don’t know. I thought he might be with you.”

“No.” Then, “You came down here by yourself? What for?”

“I’ve asked myself the same question.” He shrugged. “You told Gerson you were going to turn me in. I thought it would play better if you actually had me here. Maybe give you fellows something to talk about for the first minute or so.”

“He might not come at all,” Glitsky said.

“And if he doesn’t, you’ll have to take me in. I know. We’ve already done that once today.” Holiday pulled at his mustache, maybe to keep from breaking a smile. “Well, Lieutenant, whatever way it works out, if it comes to a fight, I figure it’s mine as much as anybody’s. I belong in it. These boys don’t play fair.”

Glitsky looked him up and down, the heavy sheepskin jacket to mid-thigh. “Are you still packing, John?”

This time Holiday did break a smile. “I don’t know why you want to go and ruin a perfectly fine afternoon asking a question like that. No I am not. My lawyer advised me that it was against the law and my appearance here today points to my good faith. I’d be offended if you asked to search me.”

Glitsky allowed an amused grunt. “Sounds like you’ve been talking to Diz, all right. Did you see anybody when you were coming in here? If not, I thought we’d wait behind these partitions and let people get by us, if anybody comes. How does that sound?”

“That’s your call. I’m just here to help with the fuckin’.”

Glitsky frowned at the profanity, gazed out again at the no-man’s-land. “If it’s Gerson alone, I want to let him walk past, come out behind him alone. You wait back in here, and listen up. If we both come back to pick you up and take you downtown, I’ll pat you down and it would be smart if you didn’t get yourself armed between now and then.” A cold smile. “Do you understand me? If you try to escape, say out the back opening there, you’ve got an excellent chance of getting shot. Is that clear enough?”

“It’s clearer than why Hardy thinks you’re a sweet guy.”

Glitsky nodded. “He’s notorious for being a bad judge of character.” Suddenly, he narrowed his eyes, twisted his head slightly. “Did you hear that?”

Gerson eyed the length of the pier.

He squinted out along the asphalt roadway through the midday overcast. The last structures, way out there, were blurry and indistinct; the actual end of the pier seemed to fade into the gray-green water of the bay.