“Who else am I supposed to exchange my final words with?” Hank objected. “The frigging chipmunks?”
“Generally speaking, chipmunks are only active by day,” Gaines pointed out. “Too many predators at night. Also—”
“Shut up, Jimmy!” the Boynton brothers yelled in concert.
Gaines shuffled in his big forest boots. “Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to offer you a choice,” he said a little mournfully. “I mean, it’s not like I’m proud of this, you know. It’s just … needed.” The gun swung towards Frank, and Jimmy Gaines said, “Oh hell …”
It was the loudest noise Frank had ever heard. Like a sonic boom that rang throughout the forest. Unseen creatures skittered across on the ground around them, crashing through the leaves.
Hank had caught Jimmy Gaines’s shin hard with his foot as the weapon was coming round. More through luck than anything else, the gun was rising upwards, above them both, when the explosion came.
The recoil on the old handgun seemed tremendous, and the upward forty-five-degree angle pushed it all back into Gaines’s shoulder. The force bucked him away from them, onto the slight slope towards the redwood that had, until recently, been wreathed in his cigarette smoke. One stumbling step behind took over from another. Soon Gaines was running backwards downhill, arms flailing and cartwheeling through the air, old gun flying high into the moonlight, trying to stay upright, screaming and swearing until finally he toppled over.
The two brothers got up and watched, helpless. Momentum could be a terrible thing. He’d fallen past the lip of some projecting plateau in the forest floor and flipped over the edge like a tree trunk rolling downhill. In the gashes of light visible through the sequoia branches, they could see Jimmy Gaines’s body tumbling round and round on the moss and grass and rocks as the incline grew steeper and steeper, and the trees got more slender and scarce.
They stood together in silence. Then there was a long, solitary cry and Jimmy Gaines’s shape disappeared from sight altogether.
“Damn,” Hank muttered, and pulled out his little flashlight. The battery was low. The light was the colour of the wan moon above. Frank got his instead and ordered him to turn it off. They might need it later.
They held hands like children to make sure they didn’t lose their footings, stepping gingerly down the slope towards the place where Jimmy Gaines had vanished.
After a little while Frank put out an arm to keep his brother back. The incline was turning too sheer. There was no point and they both knew it. Jimmy Gaines lay somewhere below, a long way, close to the tinkling waters of the creek that they could now hear very clearly. Frank doubted even a skilled mountain rescue party could reach him quickly.
He pointed his little light back up the hill. They waited for a minute or two. Then there was the faint sound of some kind of vehicle and the flash of far-off headlights.
“You walk carefully, little brother,” Frank Boynton warned, still holding on to his arm. “This has been a very eventful day.”
A loud and repetitive electronic beep burst out of the lush undergrowth beneath the beam of his flashlight, one so unexpected it made Frank jump with a short spike of fear.
“My phone,” Hank said. “See? I told you there was a point to having different rings.”
Frank picked it up, looked at the caller ID. Then he said, “Pronto.”
9
There were no other vehicles in the parking lot by the bridge. Costa got out and walked to the edge of the bluff overlooking the Pacific. Fifty years before, somewhere below, a fictional Scottie had seen Madeleine Elster fall into the ocean and had dived in to save her, sealing his and her fate. The movie he’d watched with Maggie wouldn’t leave his head. Or what had happened after.
In the distance to the right there were lights in the Marina and Fort Mason, where the Lukatmi corporation was now a dismembered corpse. Further along, a vivid electric slur of illumination marked the tourist bars and restaurants of Fisherman’s Wharf. A few boats, some large, bobbed on the water. It was the noise that surprised him, rising into the starry sky, the gruff, smoke-stained roar of a constant throng of vehicles on the highway behind. Their fumes choked the sea breeze rising over the headland; their presence almost blotted out the beauty of the ocean.
The Mediterranean couldn’t compete with this scale. Maggie had been right that night she bit into the poisoned apple. In San Francisco the world felt bigger, so large one might travel it forever without setting foot on the same piece of earth twice. This idea appealed to her. Costa found it disconcerting. There was, and always would be, a conflict between two people like them, between his insistence on staring at a small, familiar place, seeking to know it — and by implication himself — better. And Maggie always fleeing, always looking to lose herself entirely in something vast and shapeless, to pull on any passing identity she could find before the next film, the next ghost, entered her life.
He climbed the steps of the viewing platform. Alcatraz stood like a beached fortress across the dappled water of the Bay. It was now two minutes past eleven. Tom Black was late. Perhaps he’d never show. Maggie was right about that, too. He should have called the SFPD.
All the same, he wished this were his case, not theirs, and, most of all, not the Carabinieri’s. So many opportunities had been lost through Gianluca Quattrocchi’s insistence that the core of the investigation lay within the cryptic poetry of Dante. The maresciallo had taken a wrong turning from the start. How did The Divine Comedy begin?
“ ‘For the straightforward pathway had been lost,’ ” Costa said quietly to himself.
Criminal cases, like lives, could so easily follow a false route, a deceptive fork in the road that seemed so attractive when it first emerged. Everything was an illusion.
His phone rang.
“Costa.”
“You’re alone.”
The voice was young, concerned, and American, mangled by the bellowing rumble of traffic behind it. He couldn’t be far away.
“Is that a question?”
“Not really.”
Tom Black sounded uncertain of himself, aware of that fact, desperate to hide it.
“Listen. There’s an unlocked bike at the back of the parking lot. Take it, then go to the pedestrian gate on the bridge. Buzz the security people. They’ll let anyone through with a bike. Ride across until I meet you. Don’t try to walk. They don’t allow pedestrians at night. You won’t even get past the gate.”
“We could just meet here.”
“I need to see you first. I need to make sure you’re alone.”
The line went dead.
Costa walked around the parking lot until he found the bike. He had the same unsettling feeling he’d had in Martin Vogel’s apartment: that he wasn’t alone. Maybe it was Tom Black watching him. But then …
He tried to shoo these thoughts from his head. The bike was an old road racer model, with lots of gears and even more rust. He wheeled it around the footpath and reached the gate. There was a button there, and a security camera. He hit the buzzer, a voice squawked something impenetrable from a hidden speaker, and then the barrier swung open on electric hinges.
Wondering how long it had been since he climbed on a bike, Costa got on the saddle and rode slowly onto the bridge, alongside the northbound traffic in the adjoining lane a few yards to his left. The noise grew so loud he could scarcely think straight. In the middle of the great span he paused. It was an extraordinary view. The entire southern side of the city was visible, and the communities on the far side of the Bay. The bridge was well lit. He could see all the way along the pedestrian footway to another closed gate at the Marin end.