The slow clunk-swish of his wipers provided more rhythm than clarity as he waited for Brown to emerge. A couple of defense attorneys ran from their cars toward the entrance, attache cases gripped with one hand, legal newspapers held above their heads for shelter with the other.
He recognized one of them: Mark Hamlin, Sonny Goldstine’s lawyer, and wondered whether Sonny had finally been arrested for the gun he wasn’t supposed to own, and whether Hamlin had come to represent him, or maybe just to shut him up in order to protect others connected to the Tsukamata murder all those years earlier.
In any case, Sonny would surely have to wonder where Hamlin’s loyalties lay: with him or with former clients among the remnants of the sixties and seventies radicals whose secrets Sonny might want to trade to buy his way out of a third-strike life sentence.
For a moment, Donnally enjoyed thinking through the trajectories and anticipating the collisions, for time and distance and weariness had broken the gravitational pull of caring about Sonny’s future.
But then he remembered the dollar that tied him and Sonny together and that was still in the pocket of his Levi’s jacket. It made him feel queasy, doubting whether he should’ve accepted the money. Not only had he gotten nothing for it, but it felt like a leash around his throat.
A few minutes later, inmates began filing out through the front door and into the rain. They looked to Donnally like refugees who were still dressed in the clothes they were wearing when the bombs fell or the earthquake struck and destroyed their homes. He turned his wipers on high and peered out through the windshield, inspecting the men first for race, then size, then features.
The men streamed out one-by-one, then collected at the bus stop at the foot of the walkway. The weak stood in the rain and the strong under the surrounding trees.
But no Charles Brown.
Maybe he’d been moved to the county hospital psych ward, Donnally wondered.
Maybe he got released earlier.
Maybe-
The door opened again. It was Hamlin. Walking backward. His arms spread wide like he was trying to herd an escaped goat back into a pen.
Then Brown walked out, shaking his head and holding his hands out in front of him as though he was blocking an assault.
It wasn’t Sonny after all who had brought Hamlin to Santa Rita.
Hamlin backed down the walkway another twenty feet, moving side to side as Brown tried to slip around him with his eyes lowered and his body hunched. Hamlin reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. Brown pushed it aside, then cut across the grass, angling west away from the bus stop and toward the two-lane road leading to the freeway.
Hamlin watched him go, then stared at the receding figure like a salesman whose deal of a lifetime had been rejected by a customer.
In that gesture, Donnally saw Hamlin’s plan expose itself like a pervert opening his raincoat. Hamlin had intended to sign up Brown as a client, then call a press conference and display the hangdog lunatic as a victim of judicial abuse. He’d claim that the harmless, innocent man-child had pleaded no contest solely to end a miscarriage of justice, and then he would leverage that claim into a lawsuit against everyone who’d laid a hand on Brown, maybe even Donnally himself.
But Brown had walked away from it.
Why? Donnally asked himself. Too crazy to grasp his own self-interest? Rushing to reclaim his square of sidewalk in Noe Valley? Hurrying to get a blow job from a homeless crack addict behind a bush in Golden Gate Park?
Donnally watched the rain soak into Hamlin’s three-piece suit, then smiled to himself as the lawyer’s hair flattened to his head like seaweed on an exposed rock. Hamlin took a last look at his forty percent fee slipping away and then ran inside out of the rain.
Chapter 27
B rown, head down, seemed to Donnally not to be following a chosen route, but merely his feet, as he walked the maze of streets, lanes, courts, drives, and parkways that composed the Dublin Commons housing development.
Donnally tracked him from a distance, the space between them stretching and contracting like an accordion, Donnally pulling to the curb while Brown made progress, then catching up to close the gap.
Brown finally made it out of the neighborhood and under the freeway and into an office park. Another campus, but this one for software developers, temp agencies, and Internet startups.
The rain let up, but a cold breeze from the Pacific catapulting the hills bore down, causing Brown to shiver as he stood across the parking lot from the Sweet amp; Savory Cafe at the edge of a five-acre business complex.
Brown finally walked toward the entrance, but instead of going in, he sat down next to its double glass doors and wrapped his arms around his bent legs and rested his head on his knees.
A creature of habit, Donnally thought. A mascot again.
After Donnally pulled to the curb, he noticed that the restaurant served only breakfast and lunch. If Brown had reverted back to Rover the Mascot, he’d picked a bad place to start. Lunch was long over and breakfast wouldn’t be served until tomorrow morning.
Donnally glanced at this watch. In ninety minutes the sun would fall behind the hills and the valley temperature would begin sinking toward the forecasted twenty degrees. At some point in the descent, Donnally figured, Brown would be ready to accept the truck as the closest, warmest, safest escape from an alien, frozen suburb whose only refuges for the transient bore the names of Hilton, Hyatt, and Radisson, not Rescue Mission or Salvation Army.
When Donnally looked up again, a security guard was rolling up in a golf cart. The cart rocked and its miniature American flag whipped as a blockish man with a bovine face twisted into a scowl climbed out and approached Brown.
Donnally recognized the swagger. It was of a failed cop-wannabe whose life had already peaked, either when he’d made a game-saving tackle during his junior year in high school or when he got laid for the first time later that night.
The guard stopped a foot away from Brown. He scanned the parking lot, then kicked Brown in the ribs with the reinforced toe of his black work boots. Brown grunted, flopped to his side, and then shielded his head with his hands.
The restaurant door swung open and a woman in a baker’s apron pushed her way between the two and then slapped the guard’s face with a wet dish towel, all the while screaming words that were unintelligible to Donnally from where he sat inside his truck.
The guard raised his hands in self-defense, but didn’t grab for the cloth or strike back.
She screamed at him again, then turned toward Brown, now looking up from the wet concrete, cowering and bewildered.
Donnally decided that he couldn’t take the chance of Brown either being rescued by the woman or escaping into the complex beyond, so he jumped down from the truck.
Brown alerted to Donnally crossing the parking lot toward him. His eyes went wide, then he scooted backward, trying to rise and run away at the same time.
The woman and the guard turned toward Donnally and, like domestic combatants interrupted by the police, joined each other against him. As the woman pushed the security guard into Donnally’s path, the hulk transformed himself from a misbehaving puppy into her Doberman.
Donnally flashed his retirement badge as he ran by them, the sight of the gold shield first freezing the pair in place, then uniting him and the guard in common cause against Brown. Donnally grabbed the back of Brown’s jacket, swung him down to the concrete, and kneeled on his back. The guard held his feet while Donnally snapped handcuffs on his wrists.