10th Anniversary (24 page)

Conklin beat on the elevator door with the butt of his gun, yelling,
“SFPD! Stop the elevator!”

There was no answer.

I tried to make sense of what was happening.

No one could have gotten into that elevator since Conklin and I had come to Quick Express fifteen minutes before. Whoever was inside it had to have been inside it before we arrived.

Conklin and I stared at each other for a fraction of a second, then took off in tandem across the garage floor, heading toward the stairwell door.

I was right behind my partner as we raced up the stairs toward the light.

THOSE SNEEZES had given me hope that Cindy was alive.

But Conklin and I had been unprepared for the elevator to start moving. If the car stopped between floors, if we got to the top floor and then the elevator descended, or if whoever was in the elevator beat us to the exit on Turk Street, we had very little chance of stopping him.

Conklin and I took the stairs two at a time, using the banisters to launch ourselves around corners. Conklin stiff-armed the
NO EXIT
fire door to Turk Street, and a piercing alarm went off.

I pounded behind him out onto the sidewalk, where I saw an assortment of law enforcement vehicles screaming onto Turk and Jones: fire trucks, cruisers, plainclothes detectives, and narcs pulling up in unmarked cars. Every law enforcement officer in the Mission had responded to the call.

I yelled out to two beat cops I knew.

“Noonan, Mackey, lock this garage down! No one comes in or goes out!”

Conklin was running up Turk toward the elevator exit, and I had to put on speed to catch up with him. He’d just reached the freight bay when the elevator door began to roll up.

A yellow cab was revealed by inches inside the mouth of the elevator. Conklin took a shooting stance square on the opening and was gripping his 9-millimeter with both hands when the cab rolled out of the elevator.

It was dark, but the driver and the backseat passenger were lit by headlights and streetlights. I could tell the passenger was Cindy from the light limning her curls.

The cab’s headlights were full-on.

There was no way the driver didn’t see Conklin.

Conklin yelled,
“Police!”
He shot out the left front tire, but the driver gunned the engine and the car leapt forward. Conklin was lit by the headlights, and yet the cab kept rolling, driving straight at him.

Conklin yelled,
“Stop!”
and then fired two shots high into the windshield. He jumped away in time to avoid being run down, but the cab kept moving, out of control now. It sideswiped a squad car on the far side of Turk, caromed off it, and plowed into a fire hydrant.

The cab rocked, then tipped, hanging on two wheels before settling down on all four. Water spewed. People screamed.

Conklin pulled at the passenger-side door, but he couldn’t get it open.

“I need help here!” he shouted.

The fire crew came with the Jaws of Life and wrenched open the back door. Cindy lay crumpled on the slanted floor of the cab, wedged between the backseat and the divider. Conklin leaned all the way in, calling her name.

“Rich, is she okay?” I yelled to him.

“She’s alive,” Conklin said. “Thank God. She’s alive.”

He hooked Cindy’s arms around his neck and pulled her out into the air. Cindy was fully dressed and I saw no blood. Conklin’s voice cracked as he said to her, “Cindy, it’s me. I’m right here.”

She opened her eyes halfway and said, “Heyyyyy.”

Conklin held her so tight, I thought he was going to crush the air right out of her.

And then her eyes closed and she started snoring softly, her cheek on his shoulder.

MARILYN BURNS was screaming, “God, oh God, I can’t believe this. What happened?”

She peered between her fingers and identified the dead man with one neat hole in his forehead, another in his neck, as Albert Wysocki.

I joined Conklin as he helped the paramedics strap Cindy in and load the gurney into the ambulance. He was panting and he was pale, and I knew he wanted to go to the hospital with Cindy. But he’d shot a man. He had to follow protocol for a shooting that was witnessed by thirty law enforcement officers. Conklin would have to wait for the ME, the Crime Scene Unit, and Brady to arrive.

I touched his shoulder, and his eyes met mine. His expression was flat, drained of emotion.

I’ve done what he had done. I’ve felt the same adrenaline
overload covering rage and fear and the emotional numbness of shock.

“Is Wysocki dead?” my partner asked me. “Did I kill him?”

“It was him or you, Richie. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“I’m glad I nailed the bastard.”

“Heeyyyy… Lindsayyyy,” Cindy called out to me from inside the ambulance.

“I’m right here, girlfriend,” I called back.

“You’ll go with Cindy to the hospital?” Conklin asked me.

I nodded and climbed up into the ambulance. I gripped Cindy’s hand and told her that I loved her and that everything was going to be okay.

“Did I get the story?” she asked me.

“You sure did.”

Conklin stood at the rear doors. He said, “Lindsay?”

“I’ll stay with her until you get to the hospital,” I said to him. “She’s going to be fine.”

LIGHT FROM THE SUNRISE was streaking through the windows when I greeted Martha inside the front door. I stripped off my jacket, my holster, and my shoes, and tiptoed down the hall to the master bathroom. I stepped into the “car wash,” let it blast me pink, and then put on my cloudy blue pj’s that were on the hook behind the door where I’d left them what seemed like a year ago.

Déjà vu all over again.

When I edged under the covers, Joe woke up and opened his arms to me, and that was good, because I wanted to tell him everything that had happened since I’d called him from the hospital.

“Hey,” he said, kissing me. “How’s Cindy?”

“Honestly? It’s like it never even happened,” I told him.
“She was asleep a minute after she got into the cab and woke up in a hospital bed five hours later.”

“Is she… all right?”

“He didn’t get around to raping her,” I said. “Thank God.”

I made myself comfortable under Joe’s arm, fitting my whole body tightly against him, my left leg over his, my left arm across his chest. “The doctor says she’ll be fine when the drugs wear off.”

“What did you find out about the bad guy?”

“He was some kind of lowlife freak, Joe. A friendless, unmarried, psychotic loner, fifty-five years old. He put in about eighteen hours a day in the Quick Express garage. Apparently he slept there in his car half the time.”

I told Joe that Wysocki had managed the place for some guy who lived in Michigan, so he had run of the place. Had the keys. Kept the log sheets. Ran the scheduling.

“No one questioned anything he did. And so he hangs an ‘Out of Service’ sign on the freight elevator, and that box becomes his own private real estate.”

“A big fish in a mud puddle,” said Joe.

“Exactly,” I said. “We found a date book in Wysocki’s jacket pocket. Actually had the words ‘Date Book’ inked on the cover. Inside, he’d written a list of his victims, six of them, and times, dates, places, what they were wearing.

“He had Cindy’s name in there,” I said. “Just made me sick to see her name written in that lineup.”

“He called it a date book?” Joe said. “So maybe he was acting like he was on a date.”

“That makes some kind of psycho sense, I suppose. He
picks up a girl, drugs her. Drives her back to his little out-of-service boudoir. I’m guessing he waits until his victims are semiconscious, then rapes them before the drugs wear off. Oh, yeah. Always the gentleman, he drives them home—or to a nearby alley. Perfect evening for Al Wysocki. Doesn’t even have to send flowers the next day.”

“How’s Conklin doing?”

“Crazed. A wreck. He says to Cindy at the hospital, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ She says, ‘What? Catch a cab?’ ”

We both laughed.

My indomitable friend Cindy.

Joe turned onto his side and kissed me. I melted against him.

“I love you so much,” I said. “I think I loved you even before I met you.”

He laughed, but I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

LOOKING INTO JOE’S EYES, I remembered the first time his baby blues locked on mine. We were working a case together. I was the lowest-ranking person there, and he was a top-of-the-heap Federal guy: Deputy Director of Homeland Security.

I liked his looks—his thick brown hair and solid build—and not only was he smart but he had an easy, confident manner, too.

He passed me his business card and touched my fingers, and we did a double take as electricity arced between us. It didn’t take long for us to get involved, but our sizzling new connection had been disrupted repeatedly and for months by missed planes and crossed schedules.

Joe lived in Washington, DC and I lived in the City by the Bay, and both of us had taken recent blows to the heart.

He’d been recovering from a savage divorce, and I was still
suffering from the loss of someone close who had been shot and killed on the job.

Neither of us was prepared for the frustrating up-and-down year of long-distance dating that was later complicated even more by an insane—and unconsummated—crush between Conklin and me.

Through all of it, Joe had been a rock, and I’d hung in like I was clinging to a cliff by my fingernails. I knew what was good for me. And I loved Joe. But I couldn’t give myself over to the permanence of the relationship.

Finally Joe got tired of it. He called me out on my ambivalence. Then he quit his job and moved to San Francisco. Somehow, while negotiating the zigs and zags, we’d found ourselves in each other.

“I just love you so much,” I said to Joe. I kissed the corners of his eyes. He put his hand on my cheek, and I kissed his palm.

He said, “I love you almost too much, Linds. I can’t stand it when you’re not here and I’m lying in the dark, thinking about bullets coming at you. It’s terrible to have thoughts like that.”

“I’m very careful,” I said. “So don’t think about bullets.”

I bent to kiss him, my hair making a curtain around our faces. That kiss went deep and it stirred me up. Stirred Joe up, too.

We smiled as we looked into each other’s eyes. There were no walls between us anymore.

I said, “I sure would like to make a baby with you, Joe.”

I’d said it before. In fact, I’d said it every month for a while
now. But right this minute, it was more than a good idea. It was an overwhelming desire to express my love for my husband in a complete and permanent way.

“You think I can make a baby on demand, Blondie?” Joe said, unbuttoning my pajama top. “You think a guy in his late forties can ‘just do it’? Hmmm?” He unknotted the tie on my drawstring pants and pulled the string as I unsnapped his drawers.

“Because, I think you could be taking me for granted. Maybe even taking advantage of me.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I am.”

Joe’s hands on my breasts made my skin hot and my blood burn. I shrugged out of my flannels and lowered myself onto him.

“Go ahead,” I sighed. “Try and stop me.”

IT WAS EARLY DECEMBER, about 10 p.m. on a damned cold night in Pacific Heights. Conklin and I were in an SFPD SUV, miked up, wearing our Kevlar and ready to go.

Six unmarked cars were parked here and there along the intersecting roadways of Broadway and Buchanan. Civilian vehicles provided cover for those of us on the ground.

Above and around us, snipers hid on the rooftops surrounding the eight-story Art Deco apartment building with its white-granite facade.

I’d been staring at that building for so long that I had memorized the brass-etched door, the ornate motifs and appointments, and the topiary boxwood and hedges between the side of the building and the street. I knew every line in the face of the liveried doorman, who was, in fact, Major Case lieutenant Michael Hampton.

There was a
NO PARKING ANYTIME, NO LOADING
sign in front of the building, and we could see every pedestrian walking past the door or going into the building.

If Major Case’s confidential informant was telling the truth, all of our planning and manpower would culminate in the takedown of a legendary bad guy.

If the CI was wrong, if someone blew the whistle and called the game, there was no telling when, or if, we’d ever get this opportunity again.

I stretched out one leg, then the other, to get the kinks out. Conklin popped his knuckles. My breath fogged out in front of my face. I would have given up half my pension for a cup of coffee, the other half for a chocolate bar.

At half past eleven, just when I thought I’d never be able to walk again, a long Cadillac limo pulled up in front of the apartment building. Adrenaline fired through my bloodstream, chasing out the cramps and the lethargy.

The “doorman” left his post and opened the door for the passengers. They had come from the opera and were dressed accordingly.

Nunzio Rinaldi, the third-generation capo of an infamous mob family, stepped out of the limo, wearing a smart black suit and a silver tie. He offered a hand to his wife, Rita, who had platinum-white hair you could have seen in a blackout. There was a high shine on the limo, and Rita Rinaldi’s jewels sparkled in the night.

As the Rinaldis stepped away from the car and moved toward the lavish vestibule of their apartment building, a slight man in a dun-colored hooded raincoat, carrying a
shopping bag and walking a small Jack Russell terrier, rounded the corner.

I saw him only out of the corner of my eye—he was one pedestrian out of many, and there were also cars speeding across my sight line to the doorman. But suddenly the little dog was running free and the man had dropped the shopping bag and pulled a gun from inside his coat.

It happened so fast, I doubted my eyes. Then I saw streetlight glint on the gun barrel.