“You can’t mean that. You know I’d give up the beach house if I thought it would bring Jack back.”
“That’s exactly my point. Though I’m not sure that asshole Dean Conners would give up his new Saab, or that bimbo he’s got stashed away down in Carlsbad, even if it would bring Jesus Christ back. What I mean is, nothing’s going to bring Jack back, but the rest of us have to go on. The wheels continue to grind exceeding hard here. We don’t just want a one-season wonder. You’re either on the bus or you’re off it, Sarah. Bottom line is we find someone you can work with real quick, or they can write you out, too, and start over. I’m sorry to be the guy putting the pressure on, especially with all the other shit that’s going down right now. But it was either me or Ollie the Producer from Hell. I kind of volunteered.” He grinned.
Sarah smiled and patted his hand. “Thanks, Stuart. I appreciate that. And I do understand what you’re talking about. I’m not that naïve. It’s just that to have him murdered on television the same as in real life doesn’t seem right. It seems sort of cynical, sick, disrespectful.”
“I hear what you’re saying, and you’re probably right, but that’s the way it’s going to go down no matter what you or I think. Makes sense in a way. I mean, cops do get shot on the job.”
A young man in shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt approached the table and Sarah tensed, ready to run if he came up to her.
At first, it looked as if the kid was going to pass right by, then he made a sudden movement toward them. Before Sarah had even scraped her chair back, a figure seemed to appear from nowhere, grab the kid from behind and throw him to the ground. Shoppers and tourists scattered as if a bomb had been thrown among them. People at the cafés screamed and hid behind tables. Sarah and Stuart stood up and moved away.
The kid in the sweatshirt lay on his stomach, the other man standing with one foot between his shoulder blades, holding a gun on him and talking on a radio handset. He was only medium height, but muscular, fit-looking, blond-haired.
“Hey, man!” the kid protested. “You’re hurting me. I only came to get her autograph, tell her how sorry I was about what happened to her partner. That ain’t no crime, is it?”
“Shut up,” the other said, increasing the pressure on his foot so the kid screamed. “Just shut the fuck up.”
Within moments, two security guards from the mall had arrived on the scene and the kid was being dragged away.
Stuart took Sarah’s arm. She was shaking. “Come on, honey,” he said. “I’d better get you back to work.”
“What happened?” Sarah asked, in a daze, allowing Stuart to lead her toward the exit. “Was that him?”
“Probably not. Like he said, just a kid after an autograph.”
“Who was the other man?”
“That was Zak, our bodyguard.”
“I’m glad he’s on our side.” Sarah felt a little dizzy, and her heart was beating fast. “I’m okay,” she said to Stuart, disengaging her arm. “Just a bit shaken, that’s all. If people keep treating my fans that way, I won’t have any left before long.”
33
Not much more than an hour after Arvo left a balmy late afternoon in Orange County, he arrived in a chilly, foggy San Francisco. He picked up his gun from airport security and headed for the cab stand.
The area around the airport was clear enough, if you didn’t count the dirty rags of cloud in the darkening sky, but fog loomed ahead over San Bruno Mountain as the cab sped along the Bayshore Freeway, past the still gray water around Candlestick Park, jutting out to the east.
Arvo had called the airport from Carl Buxton’s house and found out the time of the earliest available flight. After that, he had phoned a hotel he knew near Chinatown and booked a room for the night.
He had left a message for Sarah Broughton at the studio, asking her if she could remember anything about a member of Gary Knox’s entourage called Mitch, and leaving the name of his hotel. He had also let the lieutenant know where he was going and why, then he phoned Joe Westinghouse to see if Mitch’s name rang any immediate bells with Robbery-Homicide. It didn’t.
Around Union Square, it seemed to Arvo as if the fog really were some vast sea-wraith that had slid under Golden Gate Bridge and insinuated itself through streets, under doorways, smudging the neons and the streetlights, reducing the city to a few smears of blurred pastel on a gray canvas. It looked like a futuristic, Blade Runner kind of world; all it needed to complete the picture was steam rising from soup-vendors’ pots and people standing around at open counters eating noodles in the mist.
Arvo paid the cabby and checked into the hotel near the Chinatown Arch on Grant Avenue. It was close enough to North Beach. He hadn’t bothered renting a car; he knew from experience that wheels were more of a liability than a blessing in San Francisco. If he got tired climbing the hills, he could always hail a cab or jump on a cable car.
First, Arvo took a quick shower. He wished now that he had taken the time to go home and at least pack a change of clothes; he would stick out like a sore thumb in some of the places he was likely to be visiting tonight. It could have been worse, though, he decided, getting dressed. For his meeting with Carl Buxton he had put on light khaki slacks, a tan button-down shirt and his sport jacket. At least his appearance didn’t scream COP.
When he walked out onto Grant Avenue, he wished he had brought an overcoat, too, or at least a sweater. The fog seemed to have cold, ghostly fingers that pried deep and soon found every weak spot in every bone and muscle in his body.
Beyond the Chinatown Arch, the stores were open. Garish displays of T-shirts, electronics, handicrafts and Oriental gifts spilled out onto the sidewalk. Fog blurred the edges of the neon characters over the stores. Tourists milled around asking themselves if the no-name portable CD-player they bought here at a giveaway price would really work when they got it back to Buckeye, Sawpit or Bullhead City.
He heard the insistent clanging of a cable car as he approached California. Then he saw it glide through the fog across the intersection ahead of him like some special effect from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. San Francisco could get you like that sometimes.
Now and then Arvo fancied he caught a glimpse of workshops through grimy basement windows, sweatshops where people pressed clothes in clouds of steam, or printed local newspapers and flyers. Though the bad old days were long gone, when the area was a poor, cramped ghetto riddled with opium dens, child prostitutes and disease, Chinatown could still seem like an overcrowded warren riddled with connecting passages and rooms beyond rooms, none of them empty.
Arvo turned right at Broadway, which pretty much marked the boundary between Chinatown and North Beach. Carl Buxton had said that Mitch used to be a bouncer in a North Beach strip-joint, so at Broadway and Columbus, Arvo started with the first place he saw. At the intersection, he could hear the regular two-tone droning of the foghorn from the Bay beyond the traffic noise.
Inside the bar, the smoke created the same effect as the fog outside. A top-heavy black woman on the stage moved to some bump-and-grind song Arvo didn’t recognize. It hardly mattered, anyway, as her movements were out of sync and the meager audience was more interested in the flesh she was about to display than anything else. Having no intention of staying in any of these places long enough to catch something, Arvo went straight to the bar to start asking questions.