“I’d still like a look.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll call down to the morgue, tell them you’re on the way.”
A .41 caliber hollow point does a hellish amount or damage when fired at point-blank range. The upper half of the corpse’s face, including both eyes, was gone. The lower half wasn’t much better. Bruised and torn flesh from the bullet, decaying teeth, cold-cracked lips, skin lesions, popped blood vessels from alcohol consumption. Age: hard to tell, probably mid-forties, maybe older. Body type: an inch or two under six feet, skinny to the point of emaciation. Identifying characteristics: strawberry birthmark on the upper right arm; thin scar a couple of inches long on the underside of a narrow, pointed chin; long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple; knobs on two right finger knuckles that indicated the hand had once been broken.
The most interesting thing was three other scars, old ones, in a place you wouldn’t expect to find them — the genital area. The largest measured more than three inches, a curving, jagged line across the abdomen and down alongside the shriveled scrotum. The other two were on the penis itself, one across the top, one on the left side, that had deformed its shape. As if he’d been slashed down there with some kind of sharp instrument.
The morgue attendant, standing to one side of the sliding refrigerator drawer, saw where Runyon was looking under the lifted sheet. He said, “Looks like somebody tried to castrate him once.”
“Or he tried to do it himself.”
“Jesus, why would a guy want to cut off his own dick?”
“This one had mental problems.”
“His mental problems didn’t shoot his face off,” the attendant said. “You through here?”
“I’m through.”
The attendant sheeted the body again, slid the drawer shut. “Poor bugger,” he said. “Some life he must’ve had. At least now he don’t have to eat any more of the sandwich.”
“What sandwich is that?”
“Shit sandwich. Friend of mine says that’s what life is for most people — a shit sandwich, and every day we take another bite.”
“A philosopher, your friend.”
“Yeah. You agree with him?”
“He won’t get any argument from me.”
7
Jake Runyon
He spent the rest of the afternoon cruising the area within a ten-block radius of Visuals, Inc. No sign of Big Dog in Franklin Square or on the streets or in the soup kitchen or homeless shelter or among the handful of wary occupants of a cluttered, junk-infested encampment under the freeway interchange. A few of the street people he talked to owned up to knowing who Big Dog was, but none could or would say where he hung out. Most refused to say anything, even when money was offered. Even the soup kitchen and shelter volunteers were reluctant to speak freely. Fear seemed to be the motivating factor, not of Runyon or what he represented, but of Big Dog and of becoming involved in a homicide.
Runyon didn’t blame them. The thick shit sandwich out here was hard enough to swallow without adding dead meat and hair from a junkyard dog to the loaf. At dusk he called it quits for the day. The wind had sharpened, turned gusty, and the smell of rain was in the air. Raw night ahead. Most of the homeless were already forted up; the soup kitchen had long lines and the shelter had been nearly full at four o’clock. Trouble, not answers, was what you invited by prowling unfamiliar territory on a cold, wet winter night.
No food since a skimpy breakfast and he was hungry. He’d gone days without eating after Colleen died, but once he was away from Seattle his appetite had gradually returned. Two meals a day now, and starting to put back some of the weight he’d lost. He stopped at a Chinese restaurant on his way across Twin peaks, packed in a three-course meal. Egg rolls, mooshu pork, crispy Peking chicken — Colleen’s favorites. They’d eaten Chinese two or three times a week before she got sick, usually in the same little hole-in-the-wall off Pioneer Square. He’d continued the ritual after he moved down here, in honor of her and what they’d shared. Another way of keeping her memory close.
His apartment was on Ortega, a few blocks off 19th Avenue, on the city’s west side. Four rooms, furnished, on the third floor of an old, anonymous stucco building. When the real estate agent first showed him the place, he’d automatically cataloged each room and its contents down to the last detail. Now that he’d lived there for more than a month, he’d’ve been hard-pressed when away to say what color the living room walls were or whether or not there was a carpet in the bedroom. Familiarity made the details nonessential. That was the way his mind worked in professional circumstances: Particulars noted, retained for as long as necessary, then filed for future reference or erased completely from his memory banks, depending on their relative importance to the business at hand.
Cold night, cold apartment. He turned on the heat, went into the kitchen to brew himself a cup of tea. Colleen’s drink, now his. The fifth of Wild Turkey was stored in the same cupboard with the package of darjeeling, still almost half full. Emergency rations. Colleen’s phrase: “We ought to keep emergency rations on hand, just in case we suddenly have something to celebrate.” Or something to mourn. They’d gotten into the emergency rations just twice, the first time when he was promoted from patrolman to detective, the second when one of her sculptures sold for $300 at a crafts fair. He’d gotten into the whiskey just once on his own, the night she died. Booze was a crutch. He didn’t need a crutch, unless you counted work as one. The things he needed he could never have — a time machine and a cure for ovarian cancer. But he’d brought the bottle along anyway. Not because he might need it again; because it was something else they’d shared.
He took his tea into the living room, flipped on the TV. Five minutes of the seven o’clock news was all he could take. He shut the set off, sat there in the silence for a time, and then without thinking about it he got up and went to the phone. No need to look up the number. He’d dialed it often enough in the past few weeks.
And listened often enough to the same silly recorded message. “Hello. This is the disembodied voice of Joshua Fleming. Leave your name and number and my real self will return your call as soon as it materializes.”
Screening his calls all the time now, probably. The first call he’d answered, but as soon as Runyon said, “Josh, this is your father,” he’d broken the connection. Answering machine every call since. And still not one returned.
The beep sounded in his ear. He said, “It’s me again, son. I don’t enjoy pestering you, no matter what you might think, but I’m not giving up until we talk at least once. Pick up if you’re there.”
Silence.
All right. He recited his number again, started to lower the receiver, then brought it back up. “Please,” he said. “It’s almost Christmas.”
Too quiet in the apartment. He put the television back on for noise, surfed up an old movie — Casablanca, one of Colleen’s favorites — and sat staring at it without comprehending much of what was going on. His mind was on Joshua.
He’d come close to bracing him two weeks ago, when he’d gone down to Embarcadero Center to the firm of financial planners where Josh worked as a trainee. No good reason for going except to see what the place was like, maybe get a look at him from a distance. He’d got the look, all right, from a dozen feet away in the building lobby, but before he could make up his mind whether to speak to him, Josh had faded into the crowd. Just as well. Catching him off guard like that would’ve been a mistake; probably alienated him even more.
No longer a kid now, his son. Twenty-two and a man. Tallish, handsome in a pretty-boy way, with Andrea’s blond hair and blue eyes and narrow mouth. Otherwise, a stranger. Nothing of his father in appearance or mannerisms or the way he moved, and damn little, if any, of his mental or psychological makeup. If even a hint of Jake Runyon had manifested itself in Joshua in his early years, Andrea would have made sure to leech it out of him. Hell hath no fury. Her son, her image, her hate-child to the bitter end.