Muscle cramps tightened around his stomach and legs. His thighs quivered. He couldn’t run anymore. As he doubled over with exhaustion and grabbed his knees, a puff of air whipped by him, so close to his head that it ruffled his hair. A tiny ping of shrapnel struck the concrete wall behind him. There was no fire, no smoke, no gunshot, but someone had just shot at him and missed.
He looked back. Halfway down the block, a small man hiked calmly toward him through the darkness. The man carried a pistol with a strangely elongated barrel. An air gun. Silent. Lethal.
It was just the two of them on the street. Denny and the man who was going to kill him.
He staggered toward a dead end above him, where steps led through parkland to the heights of the Russian Hill neighborhood. Behind him, careful, measured, unhurried footsteps closed the gap between them. Another low pop and a strange puff of air filled his ears, and this time, he felt a pinch on his neck no more painful than a bee sting. He slapped his skin the way he would to kill an insect. When he looked at his fingers, he saw a smear of blood. Just a little bit, not the gushing flow of a bullet wound. He stared down the hill and saw the man not even twenty yards away, watching him calmly.
Waiting.
Denny rubbed the blood between his fingers until it dried. He took a breath in and out. He told himself that he was fine, but somewhere in his mind, he knew that he was not fine at all. He was going to die like the others. It was tempting just to sit down on the steps and accept the inevitable. The peaks of Russian Hill loomed like Everest above him, and he had almost no strength to go on.
Even so, he knew one person who lived up there, practically in the clouds. Once upon a time, the two of them had been like brothers, but they hadn’t spoken in years. He couldn’t call him a friend anymore, but he didn’t need a friend right now.
He needed a cop.
Denny climbed. Each step was a stab of torture. He wheezed in and out and realized he was struggling now to find the air his lungs needed. But he climbed. He made his way up the slope to Taylor Street, where there was another hill, steeper and more intimidating than the one before. And still he climbed. The higher he rose, the more the nighttime city opened up in a panorama of lights. He saw Coit Tower. He saw the pyramid of the Transamerica building. A ribbon of white lights marked the Bay Bridge.
He didn’t know how much time had passed since the sting. It might have been only a few minutes; it might have been half the night. The man who’d shot him hadn’t even bothered following him. Why follow a dead man?
Denny began to notice strange things happening to his body. His lips felt numb. His tongue grew thick and swollen. Drool ran down his chin. His head throbbed, and he swayed with each step, feeling the world spin. When he reached the last cruel set of stairs up into the trees, he found his limbs growing stiff, as if he were Pinocchio morphing back into wood. His body became a sea of tremors.
Every time he sat down to rest, he was sure that he wouldn’t get up. But he did. He climbed and climbed, and finally, he broke from the trees onto the summit, where the house was. He’d been here before. Half a dozen times in the past two years, Denny had come here to make peace, and each time, he’d driven away without even having the courage to go to the door.
There were no lights inside. For all he knew, the house was empty, and all of his labor was for nothing.
Denny collapsed on the sidewalk. His forehead hit the pavement, his glasses broke, and blood trickled down his face. He couldn’t walk anymore, so he crawled. He put a hand forward, then a knee, over and over, until he reached the front steps of the house. He slithered toward the door like a snake, and when he was there, he somehow willed his paralyzed body to stand.
He rang the bell again and again and again. And he waited.
A few seconds later, the outside light went on, and the door opened. There was his old friend, staring at him with horrified surprise.
“Denny?” Frost Easton said. “My God, what happened to you?”
Denny had so much to say and no breath with which to say it. His frozen knees caved beneath him, and Frost caught him. Denny was dead weight, but Frost held him under his shoulder blades, and they stood there locked in each other’s arms, face-to-face.
Two old friends who weren’t friends anymore.
Denny found one last word at the bottom of his throat. Someone needed to know the truth. Someone needed to know who’d done this. He gasped it to Frost before the fog closed over him.
“Lombard.”
2
“Most homicide investigators have to go out into the city to find their victims,” the pathologist from the medical examiner’s office commented as he knelt on hands and knees over the body in Frost’s foyer. “It certainly saves time when they come right to your house. I’m very impressed.”
“And you thought advertising on Craigslist was a waste of time,” Frost replied dryly.
The pathologist, whose name was Dr. Walter Finder, snickered from behind a polypropylene mask that covered most of his face. He was in his forties, with wild Albert Einstein hair and a pencil mustache. “Murder victims wanted? Apply in person?”
“Something like that.” Frost stared down at Denny’s body and then added in a low voice, “Actually, I knew him.”
“Ah. I’m sorry. Friend of yours?”
“Not really, not anymore. I hadn’t seen him in years. You’re sure this is a homicide, Walt? It couldn’t be some strange disease?”
The pathologist’s gloved hand turned Denny’s head sideways. “Oh no, he was murdered. See this little wound on the neck? He was shot with something. Probably some kind of dissolving gelatin pellet because there’s nothing inside the wound now. Was your friend a spy?”
Frost shook his head. “Denny? Are you kidding? He ran fishing charters for tourists. Why would you think he was a spy?”
“Well, his death looks to be the result of a rare kind of poison. I won’t know more for sure until I run tests in the lab, but based on the look of the body, I suspect it’s tetrodotoxin or something along those lines. It’s the kind of weapon you typically don’t see outside of Cold War political assassinations. Sticking people with lethal umbrellas, that kind of thing.”
“Denny Clark wasn’t a deep-cover CIA operative,” Frost said. “He was just an ordinary guy with a boat.”
There was a long stretch of silence between them. Then Dr. Finder shook his head, as if Frost couldn’t be more wrong. “Oh, believe me, there’s nothing ordinary here, Inspector.”
Frost frowned and let the pathologist continue his work. He found it hard to identify the man he remembered from his youth in the face of the corpse at his feet. It wasn’t just the effects of the poison. More than a decade had passed since he’d seen Denny Clark, and his former friend had changed. Denny had put on weight and shaved off his fisherman’s beard. The man who’d never owned a shirt with a collar in his life wore a trendy Italian-made pullover. He’d traded contact lenses for cool lime-green glasses. Even so, he still smelled like the sea, the way he always had.
The sadness that Frost felt wasn’t really grief. It was more like regret for how things had gone down. He’d known Denny in high school, but they’d lost touch while Frost went to college and law school. Then, when Frost was deciding what to do with his life, he’d hooked up with Denny again and spent a year living with him on a boat at Fisherman’s Wharf, taking tourists out on the bay. For eleven months of that year, he’d had the time of his life. The twelfth month was a different story. They’d broken up badly over a girl named Carla, and it was the kind of breakup that friends don’t come back from.