I made good time until I neared Santa Rosa. Then I ran into an accident jam, and by the time I got past the blocked lane on the south side of town, I’d lost most of the twenty minutes or so I’d gained early on. Sometimes when you roll the dice you come up with snake eyes.
It was six forty-five when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and after seven when I reached Forest Hill. They were there, all right; his car was parked in front of the red-shingled garage. I stopped across the street. The only firearm I own, a lightweight .38 Smith & Wesson Bodyguard, I keep clipped under the dash; I popped it free, put it into the pocket of my jacket, then donned the jacket as I got out.
The gate in front of the house was shut. I still had Runyon’s key but I did not want to go in the front way if I could help it. I detoured to the side stairway, descended slowly to the landing midway down the hillside. The storeroom door was recessed under an overhang there.
The key worked that lock as well as the ones on the gate and the front entrance. I eased the door open, myself inside; shut it behind me. Stood listening until my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I could see the way across to the interior door. There were no sounds to hear.
I picked my way through the storeroom, peered into the downstairs hall. More empty silence. Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, they were being quiet about it. I entered the hall, moving quickly now that I had carpet underfoot, and poked my head around the doorway into the master bedroom. They weren’t in there, which was a small relief. It would have been bad, walking in on them having sex; I don’t know what I would have done. Consensual abuse is still abuse, the more so in Nedra Merchant’s case.
I padded down to her office and the spare bedroom; they were also empty. Back to the stairs... and above, not far away, I heard somebody cough. It didn’t sound right — liquidy, strangulated, the cough of a person in pain.
I went up fast to the middle landing, where the upper half of the stairs turned back in the opposite direction. A decorative wrought-iron banister ran partway around the staircase and through the pickets I could see into the entrance hall. What was up there made me stop, put a fresh clutch of tension across my shoulders. It also knocked me mentally off-balance, because it was not at all what I’d expected to find here.
He was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall facing me, his feet splayed out in front of him. Blood, a lot of it, had dyed the front of his pale-blue shirt a glistening crimson. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing... until his chest heaved and another cough, then a ragged series of coughs, racked his body. The floor around him was littered with objects: two large plastic bags that evidently had been dropped, spilling their contents. Cosmetics, perfumes, two small gift-wrapped packages, a bottle of champagne, several food items. On its side half in and half out of the bathroom doorway, as if it had been dropped or kicked there, was a suitcase — Nedra’s suitcase, the one that I’d seen in the bedroom at the Thornapple house.
I climbed up the rest of the way, cautiously, with my gaze swiveling between the formal living room on my right and the kitchen straight ahead. Nothing and nobody to see in either place. I went into the kitchen, then the family room; looked out onto the deck; checked the attached garage and the bathroom. Nedra wasn’t here. Nobody was here except Baby.
I knelt beside him. The wound in his chest was down low, under the right breast. Maybe life-threatening, maybe not; he’d lost a half pint of blood and it depended on the angle of penetration and where the bullet had lodged. Shot with a small-caliber handgun — probably a .22. There was no sign of the weapon among the litter on the floor.
It must have been Nedra, I thought... But then where was she and where was the gun? I could see her shooting him, if she’d somehow thrown off her psychological dependency and acted in a rush of hatred. But I couldn’t see her doing it and then charging out of the house on foot with the weapon in her hand. He’d turned her into a burrow animal, and animals don’t run wild in the daylight when they’re hurt. They hide in the dark and lick their wounds.
Whoever did it, I thought, it’s partly my fault. If I’d called the SFPD from Nice, this wouldn’t have happened. Then I thought: No, damn it, you don’t know that’s so. Explanations, priorities... the cops might not have gotten here any faster than you did. Some of the fault is Nedra’s and most of it is Baby’s; none of it is yours.
He coughed again, then started to shiver. I hurried downstairs and got a blanket out of the master bedroom and brought it up and put it around him. It didn’t stop the shivering. I leaned down and said against his ear, “Who did this to you?” His eyes stayed shut and he didn’t answer. He was conscious — wheezing with his mouth open, licking at cracked lips with a liverish tongue — but his awareness was a small, shriveled thing huddled somewhere in the dark within.
Seeing him like this, I felt nothing for him except the thin, detached pity I would have felt for any gunshot victim. No rage, no compassion, no sense of sorrow. Every man has demons and he’d let his destroy him, nearly destroy several innocent people; I had no patience with a man like that, no room inside me for understanding and forgiveness. I reserved my feelings for the fighters, the bogey-bashers and demon-slayers, the selfless ones who might hurt themselves but could never be driven to harm others.
The front door was locked; I opened it and took a quick look at the latch. No scratches, no marks of any kind. Then I went back into the family room. Something in there had caught my eye on the first pass: a glass on the coffee table where Runyon’s flower shrine had sat. It was a tall glass, half full of a dark liquid that was probably bourbon and three melting ice cubes.
Right.
From the phone in there I called 911, told the dispatcher who answered that I had a gunshot emergency and needed an ambulance right away at 77 °Crestmont. She asked my name, and I hesitated and then disconnected without giving it to her. It wasn’t the smartest move, to walk away from the scene of a shooting, especially if one of the neighbors happened to see me doing it. But I couldn’t bear the thought of hanging around here, waiting, going through another endless Q. & A. session. I had a pretty good idea now of where Nedra was and who had shot Baby. And I could do something about it if I got out of here immediately.
He was still sitting as I’d left him, still wheezing, still licking his dry lips. I went past him, opened the door again. There were no sirens yet, but it wouldn’t be long before an ambulance and a police cruiser or two came shrieking up the hill. Gunshot emergency response in the city is usually fast... in upper middle-class white neighborhoods like this one anyway.
Leaving the door open, I crossed the deck and cracked the gate. The street was empty and there were no pedestrians. To make things as easy as possible for the cops and the paramedics, I left the gate ajar too.
It was the last thing I could or would do for Victor Runyon.
Downhill on Irving i stopped at a service station that had a public telephone booth with a still-usable directory. The address I wanted was listed, a number on Paraiso Place. I had to look up Paraiso on my city map: a short street in the Parkside District, between Sloat Boulevard and Stern Grove. Fairly close to where I was now; ten or fifteen minutes, depending on traffic.