“Better. Those fucking kids. I’m still a little sore. I can’t take it like I used to. I swear to God, honey. I feel like I got old overnight.”
“Hey, Dad? Do you think they have places like this in Japan? I mean with the costumes and the music and everything?”
“I think they all eat McDonald’s over there,” he said.
She got a kick out of that, and he felt better about everything for the moment. When the woman brought the sushi, he watched Karyn stir the wasabi into a tiny dish of soy sauce with her chopsticks, and he thought she looked like some kind of lesser samurai, diligently observing a time-honored ritual. She ate carefully, using her chopsticks. He used his hands. He scarfed tempura, crunching steamed asparagus, feeling the wasabi clear his sinuses.
“So you’re in trouble again, huh, Dad?”
“Nothing I can’t handle, sweetie. I’m just taking a little vacation. I’m gonna get out of the city for a while.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding, and that was all they said about it.
He walked her back to the car and kissed her on the cheek. He could feel the hardness through her jacket, and she pulled away from him even as she nestled in his arms. Sunlight slanted across the tops of the houses on Twin Peaks, bathing them in pastel light, etching doors and windows in sharp bas-relief. Through layers of cloud, the radio tower pricked glumly at the sky.
“’Bye, sweetie.”
“Yeah. Hey, see you, Dad. You take care of yourself, okay? And thanks for dinner.”
As the sun slanted down and the sky turned from pink to cobalt blue, he sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac and dug the crumpled snapshot from his shorts pocket. He pressed it flat against the steering wheel. He didn’t even know the woman’s name. She stared up at him with panicked eyes, crow’s feet etched into their corners, her smile bright and hysterical, as if the expression of connubial bliss pained her somehow. She was wearing a mohair sweater, and her skin had an eerie luminescence, a metallic sheen acquired from too many deep pore cleansers, facial rinses, and mud masks. Her hair was pulled back in a way that made her forehead seem too wide, and her eyebrows arched sharply, identical and neatly plucked works of art. She wasn’t exactly catwalk material, Mickey thought. But she was still a hell of a good-looking woman.
He’d lost control in the park. He knew that. It seemed to happen more often these days. What did it mean when you quit drinking and you were even meaner than before? Like when those kids had jumped him the other night. He didn’t remember half of that. They’d circled him up, and the next thing he knew, he was on the verge of beating one of them to death with his bare hands. In the park it was the same. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody, but he’d seen the guy standing there in his expensive suit with his gold-plated Rolex, and it was like the ghost of every CO, every commissioner or DA who’d reprimanded him for the last twenty years had reared up on him suddenly, and before he’d even known what he was doing, the guy was flat on his back, out cold with one punch.
He figured Reardon was probably going to be pissed. Whatever angle he was playing, Mickey had blown it for him. And if he had enough money in the briefcase he’d taken from Marsh to pay off his debts and put himself in the clear, his instincts still told him to take the money and run, hotfoot it for the airport before everything started to catch up with him.
But another voice whispered at him through those luminous brown eyes in the photograph. They were crazy eyes, he realized; something was missing in them, something was fractured. It wasn’t lust they stirred in him. More like some deep and inexpressible desire to make good on his life after throwing forty-three years away. What was the point in running away from San Francisco? Here the battle lines had been drawn, and here he would make his stand. Only he didn’t know yet what he was fighting-or what he was fighting for. He’d lost Sue years ago, and he didn’t know if it was too late even to win Karyn back.
He let it all tick over in his mind as he started the car, meandering out toward the Great Highway as the last of the day’s light burned out over Ocean Beach.
She was much smaller in person than he’d expected. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. And Christ, the woman could shop. He tailed her to the malls, the department stores, the high-end places downtown. She took it seriously. Like some people take food or professional sports seriously. She stalked the aisles like a big-game hunter, shrewd eyes goggling out of her childish face. He watched her trying on a diamond tiara at Saks on Saturday, twisting from side to side in front of the mirror in her designer jeans, and he thought of Wonder Woman.
He staked out the house. He kept vigil. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed being a cop. However cynical you became, however arbitrary the designations seemed, by virtue of the uniform, you became one of the good guys. And you believed in it because it was all you had, because if you weren’t one of the good guys, the only thing left for you was to be one of the bad.
Those days seemed simple to him now. It seemed to him they’d all been playing dress-up, like playing cops and robbers when they were kids. How many of his friends from the neighborhood had he put away over the years? And why them, when he was no different?
He had the feeling he was broaching new territory, entering uncharted waters. If he no longer wore the uniform, if he no longer had the force of the law at his back, how could he know what was right any longer?
He wasn’t going to kill her. He knew that now. He’d known it from the first, from the moment he’d set foot in the bar and seen Marsh slouched there in his custom-tailored suit. And before, when Reardon had called. He’d known he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it, even then.
The house might have gone for a hundred grand five or six years ago, but if he had to hazard a guess, Mickey would have said half a million by now. It looked just like every other house on the block, and they were all butted right up against one another, one house stacked on top of the other like Dixie cups in a line all the way to the top of the street and the dun-colored hills beyond.
If you wanted to know what kind of parents they were, all you had to do was look at the kids. The girl was your typical tortured adolescent-combat boots that reached her knees, hair dyed black with a flaming red stripe down one side. She carried a lunchbox to school, and Mickey wondered if he hadn’t done all right by Karyn after all. As for the boy, Mickey just felt sorry for him. He was a chip off the old block, that was for sure. He already looked like his father-of whom, Mickey remarked, there had been no sign.
He ate fast food and slept in the car. After three days he could smell himself. He’d blown his tail on Sunday, he was sure of that, running a red light on Geary, and good sense told him to clear out before he got himself arrested. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. For the clouds to part and reveal the firmament-he didn’t know. He thought he’d figure it out when the time was right.
4
Henry Marsh checked into the Airport Hilton with a change of socks, a toothbrush, and a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He needed some time to think.
First thing Saturday, he called in sick for the week. He had AIDS, the Ebola virus. He’d come down with the bubonic plague. There was a family emergency, his grandmother was flooded out of her house in Mississippi, there was a war starting up in Bosnia again-whatever. He wasn’t going back to work, not for as long as he lived. His last official act as assistant general manager of the Radisson Hotel in downtown San Francisco was canning Tommy Reardon.
“He’s been late every day for a month. I think something’s going on. I caught him drinking during his shift twice last week, and I think he’s sniffing cocaine at work, too. He looks all bug-eyed and paranoid.”