"You have dog now, Miss?"
"No, it's a payoff to the neighborhood protection racket, so they won't turn over my garbage cans."
The man smiled his polite incomprehension and gingerly held out her change.
In one of her long letters north, she told Lee about the raccoon, whom she called Gideon ("Rocky's friend," she wrote in explanation). She also told Lee about work, the neighbors' building project that filled the street with pickup trucks, Dumpsters, and lumber deliveries, the new owners of the exercise club, a rumor that the restaurant at the base of the hill was about to reopen, a phone call from a client of Lee's who had wanted to tell her that his HIV test was blessedly negative, about Al and Jani and Jules and a few mutual friends. She received a handful of brief notes in return.
She did not tell Lee everything - not how she hated opening the door when she came home, nor how she'd taken to sleeping in the guest room or on the sofa. She did not write Lee about her fruitless search for Dio through the shelters and the streets, the hot lines and church soup kitchens and crack houses, the continual rounds of her informants. She did not write Lee about the brief, bloody spasm of gang killings in late September, set off by a theft from a high school locker, that left three kids dead and four bleeding in the space of a few days. She did not write to Lee about these shootings because they proved to be the shock needed to begin the process of corning out of the drifting malaise she had been subject to since driving Lee north in August.
The youngest of the three students to be killed was a slight thirteen-year-old girl with a plait of long black hair that curved down her thin backbone and across the rucked-up remains of what had been a white blouse. When Kate arrived on the scene and pulled back the blood-soaked flowered bedsheet that someone had covered her with, her heart thudded painfully for two fast beats: Her eyes had seen the body as that of Jules Cameron, lying in a pool of crimson agony on the weed-choked sidewalk.
She went on with her job; she took her statements and began her paperwork for the case, forgetting that moment of shock in the familiar routine. She went home and had her dinner and put out the dog biscuits for the raccoon; she ran a hasty vacuum cleaner over the floor and bathed and went to bed half-drunk, and toward morning she dreamed. It was not a particularly nasty dream, just wistful, and in it she was talking to the kid sister who had been killed by an automobile when Kate was in college many years before. They talked about a book and a baseball game, and when the conversation ended and Kate was beginning to wake, she saw that the person she had been talking to was actually Jules.
She came fully awake with a wry smile on her face. For some people, messages from the unconscious mind needed to be pretty blatant. Kate got the point.
When the sun was a bit farther up, she phoned Jules. Jani answered, a lovely, low voice with a lilt of accent.
"Good morning, Kate. Are you looking for Al?"
"Er, well, no, actually. I was hoping to catch Jules before she left for school."
"She is still here. Just one moment." Kate heard the muffling distortions of receiver against hand as Jani called, "Jules!" and then, again to Kate, "She will be here in a moment. How are you, Kate?"
"Fine. Just fine."
"And Lee, how is she progressing?"
"Lee's fine."
"Will you come to dinner soon? Both of you?"
"Well, that might be difficult."
"I understand," she sympathized, not understanding in the least. "But as soon as it is possible. Here is Jules."
"Kate?"
"Hey, J. How're you doing?"
"Did you find him?"
"Find… Oh, Dio. No, I'm sorry, nothing's come in. I was calling to see if you'd like to go and do something this weekend. I'm supposed to be off, unless something comes up, and I thought you might like to spend Saturday in riotous living. If it's okay with your mother," she added, belatedly aware that she sounded like an acned teenage boy with sweating palms, asking for a date.
"What would we do?"
"Whatever you like. Movie, the beach. Shopping," she suggested desperately. What do girls like Jules do in their spare time, anyway? Go to the library? Maybe this wasn't such a great idea.
"I'd like that. Let me ask Mom." Again the muffled sounds, the occasional mutter and word of a brief conversation. "Kate? She says fine, what time, and do you want to come back here for dinner?"
"Ten too early for you? And if you want, we could stay out, have a hamburger or some Chinese. Cruise the bars, look for some action?"
That raised a giggle, unexpected from that particular set of vocal cords.
"Ten is fine. Thank you."
Twenty minutes later, the telephone pulled Kate out of the shower, where she'd been berating herself for such a dumb commitment, picturing herself locked up in the car with Jules, driving up and down mumbling, So, what do you wanna do? and Jules answering, I dunno, what do you wanna do?
"Hello?"
"Kate? It's Jules," the girl said, sounding oddly furtive. "There's something I would like to do on Saturday, if it's okay with you."
"Is it legal?" Kate asked warily.
"I think so. If it isn't, don't worry - it was just an idea."
"What is it?" Kate wiped a dribble of shampoo away from her eye with the edge of the towel.
"I'd like to try shooting a gun somewhere."
Probably the very last thing Kate had expected.
"Sure. What kind of gun?"
"What do you mean?"
"Pistol? Rifle? Machine gun? Grenade launcher?"
"Just the pistol, I guess."
"Fine, if your mom doesn't object." Silence. "You think she would?"
"Probably," she said darkly.
"I really couldn't take you if she didn't approve. Ask Al to convince her."
"She doesn't like guns."
"I'm not crazy about them myself. They make a lot of work for me," she said darkly, Lee and the murdered Jules-like girl very much on her mind. "Ask Al."
"Okay."
Kate returned to her shower in a better frame of mind.
Nothing came up to keep Kate from her appointment with Jules, and on a gorgeous crisp autumnal morning, she drove down the peninsula and parked outside the apartment building. She was buzzed in, took the elevator up, and Al opened the door, unshaven and in a dressing gown and slippers. He nodded Kate in. She looked everywhere but at the partner who was in fact her superior officer. He did not seem to notice.
"Coffee?" he asked, holding out his own cup.
"Not if you made it, thanks."
"I think Jules did." She followed him to the kitchen and they examined the glass carafe. The coffee was still more brown than green. "Not too old."
"Yes, then I will have a cup."
"Taking her to the range, then?"
"If it's all right with Jani."
"Jani connects guns with some unpleasant things in her past, but she agrees that Jules has the right to an education."
"I don't want to create a problem here."
"You're not creating it. Ah, here's the Juice now."
"The name is Jules, Alhambra," she growled in the mock disgust of a long-standing joke, and in an aside added, "Good morning, Kate."
Today's T-shirt read, in delicate gold writing: WHEN GOD CREATED MAN, SHE WAS ONLY JOKING. Kate grinned.
"Hey, J, like the shirt. Ready to go? Oh, hi, Jani."
Jani came into the room, dressed more casually than Kate had ever seen her (though rumor had it that when Al Hawkin had first met her, she'd been wearing nothing but a towel, no doubt an exaggeration) - in yellow-orange cotton shorts and a loose white blouse, both crisply ironed. There were also sandals on her feet, two pencils through the heavy bun she wore her gorgeous black hair in, and a pair of reading glasses in one hand. When she entered the room, her daughter immediately stiffened and looked out of the window.