11th hour wmc-11 Page 16

  “My source says that Randall has compiled dossiers on every dealer in the Bay Area. He knows things about them that Narcotics doesn’t know. He has sources on the street, both dealers and hookers. Add it up. He had access to our property room and could’ve stolen the guns. He’s an excellent marksman. Maybe he’s got a whole lot of anger because of his brain-damaged son.”

  Brady said, “Yeah, okay. It’s plausible. What’s your plan?”

  “Same as before. The three of us and two teams from Narcotics. We take shifts and we watch Randall’s movements. And we stay off the radio.”

  “I like it,” said Brady. “Set it up.”

  Chapter 84

  Conklin and I followed William Randall, at a discreet distance, from the Hall to his home, cutting the headlights when we crossed the intersection of Elm and Scott in the Western Addition. I found a spot toward the end of the block where we could get a good three-quarter view of Randall’s yellow Edwardian-era house.

  It was now 11:30 p.m. and we’d been watching Randall’s street for five hours. There wasn’t a house or alleyway or garbage can I hadn’t committed to memory, and I knew every line and plane of Randall’s house by heart.

  His three-level home was typical of its time and this neighborhood. There was a small garage on the lower level. The second floor was the main floor: living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. The third level, the attic, had probably been converted into two small rooms.

  Lights were on in the house and Randall’s midsize black SUV was parked in his driveway. It had been there since before we began our shift.

  It’s been said that stakeouts are as interesting as watching grass grow, paint dry, water boil. But working Homicide means you don’t get neat nine-to-five shifts, and Conklin and I don’t mind sitting together for long hours at a stretch. We’re compatible and maybe a little more than that.

  Once upon a time, before he was seeing Cindy and at a point when Joe and I had split up, the spark between us kindled and almost burned up a hotel bed in Los Angeles.

  I’d called a breathless halt to what would have been a hot fling with a short duration and no future. I’d reconsidered that decision many times, but as Conklin was telling me that he loved me, I was thinking about how much I loved Joe. How much I missed Joe.

  Joe and I got together again.

  Conklin hooked up with Cindy and they were so perfect as a couple, you had to wonder why it had taken them so long. I put on the big diamond ring Joe had given me and we got married in a magical ceremony by the ocean. And now I was running it all through my head again.

  Conklin passed me the thermos of coffee. I took a couple of sips and passed it back to him. He stowed the thermos in the door pocket and called Cindy.

  “You going to bed?” he asked her.

  Pause as she said either yes or no.

  “I don’t know when. I can nuke something. Don’t worry.”

  Pause as Cindy said okay.

  “I don’t care how late it gets, I’m going to wake you when I come in.”

  He laughed at something she said.

  “You too.”

  He closed the phone. Put it in his pocket.

  “She’s okay?” I asked. “She’s writing. Don’t bother her when she’s writing. Look,” he said.

  I looked past the sofa that had been put out at the curb for garbage pickup, and saw a man, probably Randall, moving around on the main floor of the house.

  Then the lights went out.

  I had been hoping that Randall would leave his house, fire up his SUV, and take off so that Conklin and I could follow him and find out where a cop-and drug-dealer-shooting executioner went at night.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Soon the inside of the house was dark except for the attic rooms. I saw a TV jump to life in one of those rooms, and a few minutes later, I saw Randall walk between the lamp and the window shades in the second room. Then that light went out too.

  “He’s packing it in for the night,” I said.

  “Lucky guy,” said Conklin.

  We had three more hours before the next team took over.

  Chapter 85

  Will Randall had been watching the two-year-old blue Ford sedan from his rear window, had seen it pull into the empty space on Elm with its headlights off.

  And the car was still there.

  Will had expected to be tailed and surveilled, but his brothers in blue hadn’t seen him do anything and had nothing on him; if they had, they wouldn’t have been sitting outside in their car.

  Will went down the hallway, stopped in each of the bedrooms, and checked on the younger kids, all of whom were sleeping. He filled the hamster’s water bottle in the boys’ room, then went to the den, where his father-in-law, Charlie, was sitting in an easy chair, asleep in front of the television.

  The TV was on really loud, so Will lowered the sound and then the thermostat, opened the sofa bed, and helped Charlie get under the covers. From there, Will went into the hall bathroom and jiggled the handle on the toilet until the water stopped running; after that, he turned off the overhead lights on the second floor.

  Then he went upstairs.

  His oldest son’s room was right off the staircase and next door to the room Will shared with Becky. He pulled a chair up to the hospital-type bed where his son was lying and said, “You want to watch a little TV, Link?”

  “Dah,” Link said.

  “David Letterman it is.”

  Will pointed the clicker, turned on the TV, raised the angle of the bed with the other clicker, and when Link was sitting up, he put a straw into a water bottle and held it to his son’s lips.

  Father and son watched Letterman for a few minutes, Will’s mind drifting to the unmarked car downstairs, to what would happen to his family if he was caught. He’d had these thoughts before, and now he ran through the same questions and came up with the same answers.

  He was in free fall, but he wasn’t done yet.

  He brought his attention back to Letterman, who had finished his monologue and gone to a break. Will put the clickers down and said, “I’ll be back in a little while, okay, son?”

  Will went next door to his bedroom and saw Becky sacked out, completely zonked from a day of running this asylum.

  He loved her, worried for her health, admired her selflessness, couldn’t imagine life without her.

  He sat down on the side of the bed, put his hand on her cheek. She opened her eyes.

  “Coming to bed, honey?” she asked. “In a little while.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Will pulled down the shades, first standing for a moment in front of the window, knowing that a couple of cops down on the street were seeing his silhouette. Then he turned off the light.

  He paused in the doorway and listened to Becky’s breathing. Then he went downstairs to the garage, where he took his leather jacket off a hook and put it on. He took his gun out of a toolbox and tucked it inside his waistband. Then he exited through the rear door and went down the short flight of steps to the backyard.

  There was enough moonlight to see by but not enough to be seen. He crossed the grass and cut around the swing set, disappeared through the gap between the two houses that backed up against his yard and faced onto Golden Gate Avenue.

  He turned onto the deserted road with the grandiose name, kept his head down, walked a block past shabby Victorian homes, and found Becky’s Camaro where he’d parked it. He opened the car and got in, put his gun under the front seat, then started up the engine.

  A moment later, he was heading east on Golden Gate. He wanted to get this job done before Craig Ferguson started his e-mail segment on The Late Late Show, which would be in about an hour.

  If everything went as planned, he was pretty sure he could make it.

  Chapter 86

  Will Randall drove through the light-industrial area in the northern part of the Potrero Hill District as if he had an open barrel of beer in the backseat. He kept an eye on the speedomete
r, came to full stops at traffic lights, was careful not to attract any attention; he wanted to get this over with and go back home.

  He stopped for a yellow light at the intersection of Alameda and Potrero. Then he continued on for another block, turned right onto Utah, a quiet road adjacent to the Jewelry Center and during the day used mostly for local traffic.

  At night the area was nearly deserted. The lots were empty, and metered parking was open as far as he could see. Will pulled into a spot half a block from Zeus, a club and restaurant that filled a three-story brick warehouse and had the best sound system in San Francisco.

  From where he sat, he could see the 101 Freeway to the north, the newly planted trees up the street, a gang of laughing-out-loud kids stumbling off the wide sidewalk, crossing the street behind him, and heading for the black iron delivery doors that were the unmarked entrance to Zeus.

  Will forced himself to watch and wait as he sat in his wife’s car, a loaded gun under the seat. He thought about good and evil, that the purpose of evil was to overturn the world of good. How he’d operated for half his life on that principle and that the distinction between the two had been lost since Link’s brain had flamed out on bad drugs.

  Will turned up the volume on the police band and listened to the exchanges between radio cars and dispatch, and when enough time had passed and he was sure there was no activity in the northern part of Potrero, he took his. 22 out from under the seat. He screwed the silencer onto the muzzle, stuck the gun into his waistband at his back, and exited the car.

  The interior of Zeus sounded like a stack of bricks going around in a clothes dryer. There was noise, flashing lights, a mass of dancing, shifting youth high on their own chemistry and aided and abetted by alcohol, Ecstasy, coke, and whatever new drug had become novel and available.

  Will made his way to the bar under a wall that was illuminated by videos of bolts of lightning flashing over an open field. He ordered a drink, paid for it with a ten, and left the change; he took his drink to the edge of the dance floor. Clubs with live bands attracted kids and night-scene lovers of all ages.

  Watering holes brought in gazelles and lions. Where kids congregated, drug dealers followed. Will watched and classified the people in the surging crowd, the schoolkids, rogue males, and out-of-towners, and he saw money changing hands near the bar.

  As he watched, a dealer who went by the name of Stevie Blow turned and saw Will staring at him. Blow was one of hundreds of drug dealers on Will’s hit list. He wasn’t number one, but he was up there in the top ten.

  Will nodded his head; a signal sent, a signal received. His pulse quickened as the dealer made his way toward him through the throbbing gloom.

  Chapter 87

  The tall kid with pink-blond hair falling over his face and wearing threadbare jeans and a glittering T-shirt came over to where Will was standing with his back to the wall. He asked Will if he wanted to get high.

  Will didn’t know this kid personally, but he knew a lot about him. His given name was Steven Sargent, but the name Stevie Blow had stuck. Blow was twenty-five, looked younger, and liked to patrol school neighborhoods during the day and clubs, especially Zeus, at night.

  Will said that he wanted to buy some coke, and Blow said sure, and then he wanted to tell Will about his own brand of “bath salts.” This drug was highly addictive; it contained MDPV, a chemical that caused intense hallucinations and sometimes bad trips that made the user violent or even suicidal. Bath salts were generally available but Blow was pushing his own blend, Peach Bliss.

  He shouted into Will’s ear, “I guaran-damn-tee you, Peach is a smooth high. Only twenty bucks for a trial sample.”

  Stevie reached his hand into his back pocket and Will said, “Not here.”

  Some Other Mother was saying thank you, waving off an encore, taking in the storm of applause, and then leaving the stage. The crowd went crazy again as the favorite house DJ took his place in the booth.

  Will turned his head once to make sure Blow was behind him, then moved along the fringes of the crowd, looped around to the back, pushed the doors open, and entered the kitchen.

  The kitchen was in chaos. Orders were shouted, cooking oil sizzled, pans clashed against the burners, dishes clattered in the large sinks. The rear doors were propped open to vent the hot air outside.

  No one looked at them as Will and Blow made a swift exit through the kitchen and out to San Bruno Avenue. There was a gap in a fence leading to an area just under the freeway overpass, where it was dark and noisy.

  Blow was saying, “Man, you’re too paranoid. I could sell you this shit inside a police station and there’s nothing anyone could do about it.”

  “I like privacy,” Will said.

  “To each his own,” said Stevie Blow. “Anyway, you’re gonna love this stuff.”

  He was sorting out his packets when Will took his gun from his waistband. He held the gun by the grip, stuck the barrel into an ordinary plastic shopping bag, a plastic sleeve that would contain the shell casings and GSR.

  Will aimed and then fired twice.

  The sound was muffled by the suppressor; two little puffs, like popcorn kernels exploding in an air popper.

  Stevie Blow dropped his merchandise, flattened his palms to his chest. He looked at the blood on his hands, then brought his eyes to Will. He said, “Whaaa?”

  “You’re guilty and you’re dead, that’s what. I feel bad for your parents, though. I’m sorry for them.”

  Will put a shot into Stevie’s forehead, watched him fall, then dragged the body over to the wall and propped it in a sitting position between piles of bagged garbage.

  As he headed toward his wife’s car, Will felt no sadness for Stevie Blow. He was thinking about his own boy, how in twenty minutes he’d be turning off Link’s TV and then getting into bed beside his dear wife.

  He wasn’t going to lose any sleep tonight.

  Chapter 88

  I heard a phone ringing from far, far away, then someone was shaking my arm, saying, “Lindsay, wake up.”

  I was jerked out of a deep well of sleep.

  “What’s up?”

  I was in the passenger seat of the unmarked car two hundred yards from Will Randall’s yellow house. The house was dark and Randall’s SUV was still in his driveway.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after one thirty,” Conklin said. “Brady called. There’s been a shooting in the alley behind Zeus. A drug dealer took some shots to the head and chest.”

  “Randall couldn’t have done it. Could he?”

  Conklin repeated what Brady had told him: a busboy had seen two men pass through the kitchen. The one identified as the victim was known to the busboy as a dealer. The second man was six feet tall, dark-haired, and looked like the narc who’d busted the busboy’s cousin five years before.

  “The busboy was shown a photo array,” Conklin told me, “and tentatively identified Randall. He couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.”

  William Randall was dark-haired, six one, and had spent five years in Narcotics — but I was staring at his car. It hadn’t moved.

  Randall must have left the house by the back door, taken some other vehicle to Zeus, and shot the dealer while I was taking a snooze. It was quite possible.

  We had agreed not to use the radio, so I called Brady on his cell, told him I wanted to go into Randall’s house, see if our man was missing or if he was asleep in his bed.

  Brady said, “If Randall is home, treat him with all due respect. He’s Meile’s pet.”

  What if William Randall was home and had committed tonight’s shooting? That meant he had most likely committed all of the shootings we attributed to Revenge.

  The Randall house was full of kids.

  What if Randall took his children hostage?

  What if he decided to make a stand?

  If I had been wearing boots, I would have been shaking in them, thinking about all of the truly bad things that could happen if we went int
o Randall’s house. But I saw no choice. If he knew he was being watched, there was no telling what he would do. We had to get him away from his children.

  “Screw Meile’s pet. Send backup,” I told Brady. “Send everything you’ve got. If I’m right, I don’t want to play patty-cake with this guy. If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize to him. Profusely.”

  Two unmarked cars arrived within minutes. I told the officers to park on Golden Gate, then proceed to the back of the Randall house on foot and cover the exit. And I told them that the suspect was a cop.

  “If you encounter him, he could be wearing a uniform or he could ID himself as a cop. Treat him as you would any suspect who is armed and dangerous.”

  More cars streamed silently onto Elm, their sirens and headlights off. I briefed six more unis, told them that we had a murder suspect inside the house, that he was armed and dangerous, that there were five children and at least two other adults inside.

  I sketched out a plan, and then Conklin and I went up the long flight of outdoor steps that led to the front door. Conklin stood back with his gun drawn.

  I rang the bell and then knocked, calling out, “Sergeant Randall. This is the police.”

  I prayed that we could reason with William Randall.

  I prayed that bullets weren’t going to come flying through the door.

  Chapter 89

  A hall light blazed inside the house, then the main floor lit up. Someone peeked through the fan light in the door. The door opened and a woman in a thin yellow robe, her face lined with sleep, asked, “Can I help you?”

  I showed her my shield and introduced Conklin, who holstered his weapon. I asked the woman if she was Becky Randall and she said that she was. I told her in a few words that we were investigating a shooting that had taken place in the last hour.

  “I don’t see how I can help,” she said, “but my husband is on the force. William Randall. He’s with Vice.”