CUT TO: Shootout. Donnally firing at Norteno Gangster Number One and Sureno Gangster Number Three, both too preoccupied with shooting at each other to notice the detective with the double-handed grip leaning over the hood of his car.
JUMP CUT/HIGH ANGLE: A top-down view of Donnally sprawled on the Mission Street sidewalk next to the wheel well of his bullet-ridden undercover Chevy. Unmoving legs. Back riveted to the pavement. His Levi’s and leather jacket soaking up splotches of Coke and salsa.
TRAVELING SHOT: The whoop-whoop of patrol cars bursting through the South of Market intersections from the police station a half mile away.
PAN SHOT: Following behind the siren blasts reverberating against the storefronts lining the street: Carniceria Michoacan, Tortilleria Juarez, Tacos Guadalajara.
FREEZE FRAME AND CLOSE-UP: A bra and panty-clad manikin in a store window. A bullet hole in her throat.
POV: Donnally’s vertigo as the paramedic flops him away from the curb and toward the shattered plate-glass shop windows. Then a view past the black boots of the EMT squatting near his head and toward the Starbucks fifteen yards away.
“Cut!” his father yells.
Donnally watches director Donald Harlan point his finger at the couple slumped over the wrought-iron table in front of the coffee shop, their fake blood dripping through the latticed top onto the sidewalk.
“Don’t just slump,” his father says, throwing up his arms. “Audiences don’t want slumping. They want wrenching, spasmodic writhing. And knock over the goddamn coffee cups. Nobody’s going to believe you’ve been killed unless you knock over the goddamn coffee cups.”
VOICE-OVER:
NEWSCASTER
Officer caught in a crossfire.
CRANE SHOT: Dead Mexican gangsters lying in the street, all but their snakeskin boots covered by the medical examiner’s plastic sheets.
JUMP CUT: The shooting review board.
VOICE-OVER:
Let’s hear your version, Detective. Tell us what led up to the ambush.
“Ambush,” Donnally mumbled.
“What?” Janie leaned up on an elbow. It was still dark out. “What did you say?”
Donnally rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”
“It sounded like you said ‘ambush.’ ”
“I must’ve been dreaming.”
“About the shooting?”
“No, not now. It was last night as I was falling asleep.”
Janie reached over and ran her hands through his hair. “Are you fighting a battle in there, or planning one?”
Donnally stared up at the invisible ceiling.
“I don’t know what I was doing.”
“I can’t let this go until I hear him say it,” Donnally said to Janie, as they walked along the fog-curtained Ocean Beach after breakfast. Far ahead of them in the semidarkness stood a shivering crowd drawn to the shoreline by a rough tide’s exposure of the wreckage of the King Phillip, a clipper ship that went aground in the nineteenth century.
“Because of how you think you looked on television?”
“No,” Donnally said. “This isn’t about me.”
They stopped and watched the fog reach inland, over the surf and sand, insulating them, isolating them, the gulls wheeling away, their calls and shrieks fading like distant echoes.
Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled, then looked over at Janie.
“Tell me,” Donnally said. “Which is worse? Them failing to get Brown convicted over all those years or letting him plead no contest and drift away like he did nothing at all?”
Janie didn’t answer right away, her eyes moving, seeming to search the gray around them for something solid to attach her thoughts to.
Finally she said, “I’m not sure there is a worse.” She looked up at him. “Or even that they’re all that different. It seems to me they did the same thing twice.”
Donnally nodded. “And I’m not going to let it end this way.”
Chapter 25
T he burglar wasn’t after money.
Donnally recognized that the moment he stepped into Mauricio’s office. The petty cash tin lay open with the same fifty dollars inside that had been there since Mauricio checked himself into the hospital. Someone was either looking for something more valuable or trying to send a message, or both.
The voice on the blinking answering machine gave Donnally the answer.
“Interesting thing, Harlan,” Deputy Pipkins said on the recording. “I checked DMV and birth records and the only Mauricio Aguilera born in California on January 14, 1956, died on January 15, 1956. What do you make of that, Detective?” Pipkins chuckled. “Oh, yeah, there’s one other thing. Strictly speaking, can you call them wetbacks if they snuck in across the desert?”
The next voice he heard was Will’s, but coming from within his own head:
Deputy Asshole.
Donnally extracted the tape and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He didn’t put in a new one. Mauricio was done receiving messages.
While he straightened the papers on the desk, Donnally wondered what difference it made whether Pipkins found out the truth about Mauricio. Maybe he’d been resisting not because the truth would hurt anybody, but simply because Pipkins was Pipkins, or maybe because Pipkins was his father’s son.
By the time he’d stepped back and uprighted a chair, he realized that it made a difference for the same reason that promises made to the dying did.
And it sure as hell wasn’t because the dead cared afterward.
It was because the living had to live with themselves.
Donnally checked the rear door and each of the rooms until he found where Deputy Pipkins had broken in. Scuff marks showed that he had climbed through a bedroom window that was concealed from the cafe parking lot by an overgrown pyracantha.
After retrieving a flashlight from the kitchen, Donnally leaned over the sill and shined the beam toward the ground and among the intertwined and leaf-cluttered branches.
A glint of silver flashed back.
He swept the beam past the same spot a second time.
Another flash.
He locked on it and squinted until he could make out the outline of a basket-woven rectangular square of leather with a chrome clasp: Deputy Asshole’s ticket book.
A metallic pop and a “Jesus fucking Christ!” startled Donnally awake as he lay in Mauricio’s bed at 2 A.M.
Branches thrashed against the glass and the wood siding as Pipkins flailed, each yank on the badger trap onto which Donnally had tied the ticket book driving the jaws deeper into the deputy’s wrist.
Donnally grabbed his shotgun and racked it.
He heard an “Oh shit,” then the crunching of Pipkins fighting his way toward the ground, deeper among the thorns and out of the line of fire.
“Don’t shoot, you son of a bitch,” Pipkins yelled.
“Give me a good reason.”
Pipkins didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t embarrass him in front of his department or make him appear even more pitiful than he already was, and they both knew it.
Donnally reached for his cell phone, located a number, and pressed “send.”
“This is Donnally. I’m at Mauricio’s. Come get your idiot kid.”
Chapter 26
R ain thudded against his truck’s windshield and hammered the pavement as Donnally sat in the parking lot of the Santa Rita jail, spread out in a central Alameda County valley.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly 3 P.M., kick-out time for Charles Brown and the rest of the prisoners who had completed their sentences.
Donnally wondered how much the place had changed since the few trips he’d made out to the campuslike facility more than a decade earlier. The long, wide hallways and the bare interview rooms, with their unscuffed paint and inmate-waxed linoleum, were then as sterile as hospital floors and lacked the grime of despair and hopelessness that sometimes made the guilty want to purge themselves. As he watched the entrance at the end of the rising, grass-bordered walkway, Donnally wondered whether the place had now deteriorated enough to make detective work possible.