21

On Saturday morning, alone in the house, Hardy showered, dressed in jeans and a blue workshirt and went downstairs to the kitchen. He poured himself a mug of coffee and took the first essential sip. Lifting his eight-pound black cast-iron pan from where it hung from the hole in its handle on a marlin hook, he put it over a high gas flame on the stove. They were out of eggs- he'd used them all up with Amy the other night- and this slowed him down for a second, but he hadn't eaten dinner last night at all and was famished. So he cut a half inch of butter, threw it in the pan, let it start to melt.

With an English muffin going in the toaster, he opened the refrigerator, found some luncheon ham and cut it up with a can of new potatoes, half an onion and a red pepper. After it had browned up a little, he added a tablespoonful of flour and a bouillon cube, and stirred it all together into a dark paste, into which he then poured a coffee mug full of water and stirred again. After it had thickened up, he tasted it, added Worcestershire and Tabasco, stirred again, and turned down the heat while he went to get the paper.

Poured over the muffin halves, he figured his breakfast was at least as good as most of the specials at Lou the Greek's. Maybe he'd even type up the recipe, drop it by there. Chui would serve it over rice instead of English muffins, and probably use soy sauce instead of Worcestershire for the gravy, but it would be cheap to make and, at least for Hardy this morning, it was satisfying enough. He could call it "Hearty Bowl," a pun. Abe would love it.

The two homicides last night made the front page. The coincidences they'd mentioned on the radio had blossomed into a tentative theory- it had been the same shooter. They'd recovered 9mm slugs from both scenes and police were running ballistics to see if they came from the same weapon. But in both cases, there appeared to have been no sign of forced entry. The woman, Edith Montrose, was seventy-two years old, and lived alone on Belvedere Street, while the man, Philip, the fifty-five-year-old owner of Wong's Fine Produce, lived in a duplex on Twin Peaks Boulevard with his wife, Mae Li. The article noted that the two murder scenes were less than four blocks apart. There were other similarities as well: both victims were shot at very close range, in the chest. Nothing was apparently stolen from either domicile.

Hardy finished the article, then came back to the front page and found a follow-up story on Allan Boscacci. So far, Glitsky and his special task force didn't appear to have accomplished much.

He washed his dishes and poured another cup of coffee. It wasn't much after 7:00 A.M., still too early to call anybody on a Saturday. And who was he going to call upon anyway? He was beginning to think he should have gone up to Northstar with the rest of the family after all. Certainly, he hadn't helped Andrew's case by either of his visits last night. It wasn't really too late. He could hop in his car now, and if he flew, he could still ski a run or two before lunchtime.

Instead, he came back to the table and finished reading the rest of the newspaper. He'd think of something to do here. There were still several people he hadn't talked to, notably Hal and Linda North and their daughter, Alicia. He told himself he should just show up at the Wrights', Laura's parents, and try again to get them to talk to him. He thought his best bet, though, might be Juan Salarco. He was a nice enough guy, and something about their talk the other night had seemed somehow unresolved, although Hardy hadn't been able to put a finger on what it had been. Maybe if he went back there, went over the whole night one more time, talked to the wife…

Glitsky got the call back from Hardy at 9:15.

"Where have you been? I've been calling you for an hour."

"You only left one message."

"That's because if you hear that one," Glitsky said, "you won't need the others. Which apparently you did, since here you are, calling me back."

"True enough. I was taking a walk, clearing my brain. It didn't seem to do much good. What can I do for you?"

"You can listen to my adventure yesterday. Treya's getting a little tired of it after the fourth time, I can tell, but I think you'll appreciate it."

"All right. Hit me," Hardy said, and listened to Abe's version of his single-handed Cow Palace bust, leaving the van, loaded with illegal suppressors and paraphernalia, not to mention Ewing's driver's license and address, with the engine running, and blocking the unmanned Brisbane police cars into their places.

When the story ended, with Glitsky ducking into his car and making a clean getaway, he waited a minute for Hardy to say something. When he didn't, Glitsky did. "I said, is that cool or what?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah? That's your complete response to one of the great moments in my career?"

"Right," Hardy said. Then, with a small show of interest: "Sorry, Abe. I missed the end of it. What were you saying?"

As soon as he hung up, Hardy grabbed his telephone book and looked up Juan Salarco's number, which was listed. The phone rang four times, then he heard a message in Spanish.

"Juan," he said at the beep. "Soy Dismas Hardy, abogado de Andrew Bartlett. Importante, por favor." And he left his number in both English and Spanish.

He'd stopped listening to Glitsky about halfway through the saga, when it occurred to him that maybe his friend had inadvertently supplied him with what had been nagging him about Salarco's testimony all along. It was a small enough point, perhaps, but it could prove important.

He'd already listened to the Salarco tape several times all the way through, but to be sure now he got his briefcase, put it on the dining table and took out his notes and the tape. With some chagrin, he realized he'd even written a comment about street noise, and whether the gunshot could have been heard over it. But he'd never followed up. Now he put in the tape and started running the interview through another time. This time, knowing what he was listening for, it was even less ambiguous.

Salarco's voice. "… and turn on the TV, real quiet, but then there is this… this scream, the girl, and then a… a bump. You could feel it up here, like something dropped. The house shook. Then right after, a crash, the sound of a crash, glass breaking. And a few seconds later, suddenly boom again, the house shakes another time, somebody slamming the front door under us."

Stoked up now, Hardy ran it back, played it yet again.

A bump. "You could feel it up here, like something dropped."

A crash. "… the sound of a crash, glass breaking."

Boom again. "… somebody slamming the front door under us."

A bump, a crash, a boom. But no gunshot.

Paper-thin walls, where even the sounds of Andrew's and Laura's rehearsals could wake the baby upstairs, and yet Salarco did not hear, or did not comment upon, the explosive percussion of two 9mm automatic rounds fired probably within eight feet of him? Could it have been possible not to hear them?

The telephone rang, and Hardy leapt to it, perhaps Salarco getting back to him already, pulling a break on this case at last.

"Dad." Something wrong with the voice. Something wrong altogether.

"Vin. What's the matter?"

"Um, it's not bad. I mean, everybody's alive…"

"Jesus Christ, Vin, what?"

"It's Mom. She didn't want you to worry, but…

"Vin. What about her? What's happened?"

"She had an accident. Somebody hit her."

"In the car?"

"No, on the slope. Skiing."

"Is she okay? Where is she now? Can I talk to her?"

"She says she'll be okay, you know? You're not supposed to worry. But you can't talk to her. They had her on a backboard to the ambulance and now they've got her in the emergency room and the Beck's waiting outside in case… Anyway, she said I ought to call you."

"Where are you?"

"The hospital in Truckee. By the emergency room."

"I'm on my way up. I'm on my cellphone the whole way."

"Okay. And, Dad?"

"Yeah, bud?"

"Hurry, huh?"

Frannie was going to be okay. As Vinnie had said, nobody was going to die. But okay was a relative thing.

They let him take her home on Sunday, but as soon as she got there, Hardy was to make sure she got in bed and stayed there until her local doctor told her she could get up. She'd definitely sustained a concussion. It was very much out of character for Frannie, who didn't like to acknowledge physical pain, but she didn't argue with him at all. She'd be wearing a neck brace and sporting an arm sling for at least six weeks. After that they'd do some more tests and have a clearer picture of what, if any, further damage had been done to her spine and/or neck. She'd also cracked two ribs on her left side and sustained a Ping-Pong-ball fracture of the left shoulder socket in the course of dislocating it.

By the time he had fed her some soup and settled her into bed, it was full dusk, but the Beck still hadn't made it home. She'd been driving his hot little sports car, following close, but they'd lost sight of her in the traffic just outside Sacramento, and now they'd been home for almost an hour and still no sign of her.

For dinner, Hardy and Vincent cooked up two cans of corned beef hash- the black pan again, but without any romance- and quartered a head of iceberg lettuce with a mayo and ketchup thousand island poured over it. They amused themselves, and kept the unspoken fear about the Beck at bay by inventing tortures for the person who'd run into Frannie on the slopes, who of course didn't even slow down and had never been caught.

Finally, they heard the front door. Hardy put down his fork and prepared himself not to speak harshly. He'd almost been unable to swallow for the second half of his meal, as the minutes had passed. His beautiful, smart, clever seventeen-year-old was never late, and if anything had happened to her, too…

She stood at the end of the dining room. "I'm so sorry, Dad. I got a flat tire in Sacramento, and you had both cellphones with you, and I wasn't anywhere near a gas station. And then I couldn't figure out where they put the spare…"

"It's under the rug in the trunk," Vincent said.

"Thanks, dear brother, I know that now. And I even know how to change a flat tire. But, Dad, look, I pulled over and some guy stopped and… I mean, an older guy, and he helped me, but then he asked for my number, and I got… Anyway, I didn't think… I thought if he followed me…"

"Wait, wait, wait." Hardy held up a hand. "Did he follow you?"

"No. I don't think so. But I was afraid when I was parking…"

He stopped her again. "Are you okay now? Is the car okay? Good. Are you hungry? Sit down, I'll make you something." He stood up, put his arms around her, kissed the side of her face, the top of her hair. He kept his arms around her, tight around her back. "I love you. Everything's all right. Your mother's upstairs sleeping. Thanks for driving my car down. I'm sorry about the flat tire. They happen."

They separated and she looked up at him. Getting her bravery together. "But, Dad," she said, suddenly breaking a smile, "what a great car!"

Finally, finally, the kids both relatively calmed and catching up on their weekend's homework, he got to the Sunday paper. While they'd been gone, things had developed rapidly in the double homicides, and by this morning, "Executioner Stalks City Streets" was the banner headline. Ballistics had confirmed that both victims in the Friday night shootings had in fact been shot by the same weapon. Because of the nature of the attacks- the execution-style, point-blank shot to the heart- Marcel Lanier of homicide had told some reporters that he was afraid that what we had here was some type of executioner, and judging by the headline, the idiotic name looked like it was going to stick.

Hardy never even looked at his answering machine until the kids were asleep. He hadn't had a drop to drink since at least Thursday night, and was somewhat surprised to see that he hadn't missed it a bit. Still, now he thought he could use a beer. He opened a Sierra Nevada and, turning off the overhead, finally noticed the blinking light on the far end of the kitchen counter.

Salarco, getting back to him.

It was 11:15 on a Sunday night. The gardener undoubtedly got up at or near daybreak. Hardy wouldn't be doing himself or Salarco any favors by calling back this late.

For a minute, he cursed himself for all he'd absolutely had to do this weekend that he'd left unaccomplished. His client's hearing was now only two days away, and he'd made no progress of any kind. It had been through no fault of his own, true, but he knew that other lawyers might have found a way to proceed on the case even through two such difficult days. They might have called in partners or associates, hired private investigators, even pled hardship to the judge. He might have thought to do something, but all he'd been able to think of was the suffering of his wife, the worries of his children, the needs of his family.

"So sue me," he said aloud. Put down his unfinished beer. Went up to get some rest.