Civil Twilight. Susan Dunlap
but he held on tight. “You passing yourself off as a tourist? Keeping an eye on someone who can’t spot an unmarked?”
“Just here to think.”
“About annexing my shoulder?”
“About Mike.”
“You drove an unmarked car, sat in a line of exhaust-spewing cars for twenty minutes, so you could park your official vehicle in a civilian spot in a crowded tourist attraction and not look at the view, all so you could have some thought about Mike that you haven’t considered in the twenty years since he disappeared?”
“This new lead you think you’ve got. You’re not going to find anything there.”
He squeezed my shoulder in a way he never had the entire time he was barking orders and complaining that we younger kids were out of control. Something was going on with my oldest, stiffest, most wary-making brother. I waited.
“I’ve been all over. I’ve checked every possible lead from San Diego to Seattle and beyond. I’ve had PIs on retainer.”
“And you kept them all to yourself? Did you think—”
“You want to hear about each dead end?”
I turned toward John, trying to read him. “This conversation could be about Mike, but it’s not, is it? What’s the matter, John? Are you okay?”
“Sure.” He bent near and hugged me. I was so stunned I didn’t move. Then I hugged him back, feeling like I was in the middle of a stunt and hadn’t read the script.
“Who’s your friend?”
I followed his gaze and saw Karen through John’s eyes: a slim, attractive blonde checking her phone messages as she waited for one of the telescopes to free up. She caught his eye and smiled, a sweet, longing expression. He wasn’t a bad looking guy. None of the star quality of Gary, but he was in decent shape, graying at the temples, and today sporting a lime green shirt that set off the green in his eyes, evincing a sartorial concern I’d never seen him show before. He’d sure dressed for someone. But not Karen. As for her, I felt sure she ached not for John, but for the sweet closeness she assumed we shared. John, though, was seeing something entirely different. He was smiling back with a hesitant, vulnerable expression. His whole being screamed: vulnerable.
Be careful, big brother! You’re out of your league with her. What you need—What he needed was to snap him back to himself. “You’ve had a PI on retainer? And he’s never found a lead to Mike? Maybe what he’s found is a patsy.”
“Patsy! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ah, that was the John I knew.
He put his arm back around my shoulder, but this time to herd me to the walkway where he could hold forth more privately. “I don’t walk onto your movie sets and decide I can do stunts, do I? But you assume you can do missing persons better than the police. I’m the professional, I—”
“John!”
“What!”
“Your car. That’s your car! Someone’s stealing your car!”
A woman screamed and grabbed a toddler, as the car shot past. Karen Johnson was at the wheel.
3
“SHE STOLE MY CAR!” John yelled at me as the unmarked shot across the parking circle onto the exit road.
I ran after. Skidded to a stop. No way I’d catch her. The exit road had no traffic, and only one stop sign. You don’t boost a police car, then brake for stop signs.
I raced for the sidewalk, jumped the parapet into the trees and underbrush. It wasn’t a dead drop but close. I skidded tree to tree. Below was the Lombard curve where the road ended. I had to catch her there. If she beat me, she’d be out into the warren of North Beach streets, in an unmarked black car made to draw no attention.
I slammed into exposed roots, grabbed for a tree trunk, swung around it. The hill was steeper, rockier, the drop to the curve almost straight down. I shot a glance at the road. Car barreling down. A family started across, jaywalking. Car kept coming.
“Karen!” I yelled. “Karen! Stop!”
She wasn’t braking. Wasn’t slowing. She was going to hit them.
“Get back! Get your kids on the sidewalk!”
A siren shrieked. I stumbled, leapt, landed hard ten feet down on the cement.
The car shot by, siren suddenly keening. The family huddled at the edge of the macadam; the woman flat out on the cement.
I ran into the road, after the car. Karen turned left onto a side street—out of the park, into North Beach—and when I reached the street she was gone. There was only one way she could have turned, but at the next corner there were more options and more at the next after that. She was out of sight, but in the distance, the siren screamed. The siren was still on!
No problem. I stopped, gasping for breath. John would have called in the theft. By now every patrol car in North Beach would be closing in. The woman had been an idiot to steal the car, and a lucky idiot not to have killed anyone, but now, pinpointing herself with the siren, she was just a run-of-the-mill dolt.
I stood, catching my breath, listening for new sirens, for sirens converging. Instead, silence. I tried to gauge where the sound last came from. No luck. I dug out my phone and called Gary. Gary’s machine. “Gar, get ready for a call from Karen. Whatever trouble she had an hour ago, it’s nothing to what she’s in now. She stole John’s car, his unmarked police car! Hey, what the hell’s going on? Call me!”
I hurried up the path. I needed to get to my brother before backup arrived. Before a uniform scooped him up and spit him out at the scene of Karen’s arrest, wherever that would be. How was I going to explain this to John? I slowed my pace. I couldn’t explain it to myself! I liked Karen. Liked that despite whatever was going on with her, she was interested in Mike. And me. Don’t beat yourself up! She’d paused to say that on her way to steal the car!
I was impressed by her immediate, certain response to the hundred-foot pole koan. You are atop a hundred-foot pole. How do you proceed? Letting go, I knew from reading rather than experience, meant not releasing your grasp and falling in terror, but rather stepping out of the past, out of who you are, into the next moment, whatever that moment brings. It was about walking though a door to the unknown. But was it stepping out of your life as a soon-to-be-divorced woman to drive away in a stolen police car?
What could possibly have spurred her to do such a crazy thing? Chance? The keys, obviously, had been in the ignition. That was going to make John look great. “Just-so John,” as he was called behind his back in the department, was now going to be just a laughingstock. Cops don’t leave the keys in the car. Civilians in San Francisco don’t leave their keys, not unless they’re hot to be pedestrians. The one small saving grace for him would be the muzzling of his biggest fun-poker—Gary would be silent, indeed.
Gary with his hush-hush client, John suddenly gone irresponsible, and . . . Karen . . . What the hell was going on here? I needed time to think. But time was the one thing I didn’t have.
A couple speaking German ambled down the steps. I veered around them and headed up. I wanted to beat the reinforcements John would have called, but not by too much.
What could have made Karen pull a crazy stunt like stealing a police car? I asked again, as if it was the koan. I was walking slowly now.
How do you proceed off a hundred-foot pole?
You step forward.
But something triggers that decision. According to John, chance is a bigger cause of crime than the law-abiding would like to believe. But he sure wasn’t going to make that argument in this case. Not and have the fault be all his own.
I