And since Creed hadn't gotten close enough to get a good look at any of them, as soon as his three men stopped running, they would look like anyone else. He had a sense that the man who'd fired at him was bigger than the other two, but that was about it.
A fresh gust of wind brought on its front edge a wall of water as the drizzle became a downpour. Creed heard the insistent keening, still, of Silverman's alarm. He took a last look down Market, but saw nothing worth pursuing. He looked down at his gun, still clenched tight in his right hand. Unexpectedly, all at once, his legs went rubbery under him.
He got to the nearest building and leaned against it. He got his gun back into its holster, buttoned the slicker over his jacket against the rain, began to jog back to Silverman's. It didn't take him a minute.
Still, the alarm pealed; the door yawned open. The shop's interior lights illuminated the street out front. Creed drew his gun again and stood to the side of the door. Raising his voice over the alarm, he called into the shop. "Is anybody in there?" He waited. Then, even louder, "Mr. Silverman?"
Remembering at last, he pulled his radio off his belt and told the dispatcher to get the regular police out here. With his gun drawn, he stepped into the light and noise of the shop. But he saw or heard nothing after catching sight of the body.
The victim might have been napping on the floor, except that the arms were splayed unnaturally out on either side of him. And a stream of brownish-red liquid flowed from under his back and pooled in a depression in the hardwood floor.
The skin on Sergeant Inspector Dan Cuneo's face had an unusual puffiness-almost as though he'd once been very fat-and it gave his features a kind of bloated, empty quality, not exactly enhanced by an undefined, wispy brown mustache that hovered under a blunt thumbprint of a nose. But his jaw was strong, his chin deeply cleft, and he had a marquee smile with perfect teeth. Tonight he wore a black ribbed turtleneck and black dress slacks. He was a professional and experienced investigator with an unfortunate arsenal of nervous habits that were not harmful either to his own or to anyone else's health. They weren't criminal or even, in most cases, socially inappropriate. Yet his partner, Lincoln Russell-a tall, lean African-American professional himself-was finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate them.
Russell worried about it. It reminded him of how he'd gotten to feel about his first wife Monica before he decided he was going to have to divorce her if he wasn't going to be forced to kill her first. She wasn't a bad person or an unsatisfactory mate, but she had this highly pitched laugh that, finally, he simply couldn't endure any longer. She'd end every sentence, every phrase almost, with a little "hee-hee," sometimes "hee-hee-hee," regardless of the topic, as though she was embarrassed at every word, every thought, every goddamned impulse to say anything that passed through her brain.
By the last few weeks of their cohabitation, Russell would often find himself in a high rage before he even got to their front door, merely in anticipation of "Hi, honey, hee-hee," and the chaste little kiss. His fists would clench.
He knew it wasn't fair of him, wasn't right. It wasn't Monica's fault. He'd even told her about how much it bothered him, asked her politely more than several times if she could maybe try to become aware of when she did it, which was all the time. And perhaps try to stop.
"I'll try, Lincoln; I really will. Hee-hee. Oh, I'm sorry. Hee.. ."
One of the things he loved most about Dierdre, his wife now of eleven years, was that she never laughed at anything.
And now his partner of six years, a damn good cop, a nice guy and the other most intimate relationship in his life, was starting to bother him the way Monica had. He thought it possible that this time it could truly drive him to violence if he couldn't get Dan to stop.
Here, on this miserable night, for example, they had been called to a homicide scene just outside the Tenderloin, some poor old bastard beaten up and shot dead. And for what? A few hundred bucks? No sign of forced entry to his shop. Nobody even tampered with the safe. Botched robbery, was Russell's initial take on it. Probably doped-up junkers too loaded to take the stuff they came for. But a tragic scene. It's looking like the guy's married forever- an old lady's picture on the desk. Kids and grandkids on the wall. Awful. Stupid, pointless and awful.
And here's his partner humming "Volare" to beat the band: humming while the young beat guy, Creed, all traumatized, is giving his statement to them; humming as he follows the crime scene photographer around snapping pictures of everything in the store; humming while the coroner's assistant is going over body damage, occasionally breaking into words in both Italian and English. "Volare, whoa-oh, cantare, oh, oh, oh, oh…"
Now it's ten-thirty. They've been here three hours. Somebody is knocking at the door and Cuneo's going over to open it, suddenly breaking into song: "Just like birds of a feather, a rainbow together we'll find."
Suddenly Russell decides he's had enough. "Dan."
"What?" Completely oblivious.
Russell holds out a flat palm, shakes his head. "Background music. Ixnay."
Cuneo looks a question, checks the figure at the door, then gets the message, nods, mercifully shuts up. The sudden silence hits Russell like a vacuum. The rain tattoos the skylight overhead.
"I'm Wade Panos, Patrol Special for this beat."
And no pussycat. Heavyset, an anvil where most people have a forehead, eyebrows like the business side of a barbecue brush. Pure black pupils in his eyes, almost like he's wearing contacts for the effect. "Mind if I come in?"
Under his trenchcoat, Panos was in uniform. In theory, Patrol Specials were supposed to personally walk their beats in uniform every day. Then again, in theory, bumblebees can't fly. But obviously Panos at least went so far as to don the garb. He looked every inch the working cop, and Cuneo opened the door all the way. "Sure."
Panos grunted some kind of thanks. He brushed directly past Cuneo and back to where Silverman's body lay zipped up in a body bag. The coroner's van was out front and in a few more moments they'd be taking the body away, but Panos went and stood by the bag, went down to a knee. "You mind if I…?"
The coroner's assistant looked the question over to Cuneo, who'd followed Panos back to the doorway. The inspector nodded okay, and the assistant zipped the thing open. Panos reached over, pulled the material for a clearer view of Silverman's face. A deep sigh escaped, and he hung his head, shaking it heavily from side to side.
"Did you know him?" Cuneo asked.
Panos didn't answer right away. He sighed again, then pulled himself up. When he turned around, the Patrol Special met Cuneo's gaze with a pained one of his own. "Long time."
To a great degree, Cuneo's nervous habits were a function of his concentration, which was intense. His mind, preoccupied with the immediate details of a crime scene or interview situation, would shift into some other trancelike state and the rest of his behavior would become literally unconscious. And the humming, or whistling, or finger-tapping, would begin.
Now Panos took up space next to Russell in the front of the shop, neither man saying much of anything, although they were standing next to one another. The body had been taken away and the crime scene people were all but finished up, packing away whatever they'd brought. Cuneo was back in the office, doing snippets of Pachelbel's Canon in D while he took another careful look around-he'd already discovered the unplugged video camera, located one of the bullet holes in the wall and extracted the slug, lifted some of his own fingerprints.