Julian no longer felt the pressure on his back. He looked down the street with exaggerated impatience.
The old man moved away, holding a dollar in his hand, looking at it as though he were reading the denomination. Then he was among the homeless men again. He stopped to pick up the blanket he must have been sitting on, and kept going. He rolled up the blanket loosely as he limped along Market Street. He was almost to the corner of Fifth when he slipped into the glass enclosure at the BART station entrance. As he moved toward the downward escalator, two men rushed to intercept him.
The nearest one was wearing a short raincoat. He reached out to grasp the old man’s hood. “No, you don’t,” he said.
Henry Dixon threw his blanket over the man’s head, swung his arm in a circle to wrench the hand off his sweatshirt, clasped the man in a bear hug, and hurled him down the escalator.
Next was a red-haired man wearing a Giants warm-up jacket. He lifted the back of his jacket with his left hand as he reached for the pistol holstered there with his right. The move put both of the man’s hands behind him for a second, which gave Dixon enough time to drive a sharp jab into the man’s nose and kick him in the groin. When the man doubled forward, Dixon slammed his face against the railing of the upward escalator. He pushed him halfway down the up escalator, and then bent over to pick up the man’s pistol while the moving stairs brought the half-conscious man back up to Dixon’s feet. He shoved the pistol into the marsupial pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, knelt by the man, and said, “I thought we had a deal.”
The man’s eyes rolled and he was spitting blood. “I don’t know what you’re talking ab out.” Bystanders had begun to gather behind them, some perhaps thinking Dixon was trying to help the man, but most of them seemingly paralyzed, not knowing what to do except wait their turn to go down the escalator.
Dixon pulled the earpiece wire that hung from the man’s ear, took the radio, and hurried down the escalator. He skirted the motionless body of the man under the blanket at the bottom and stepped to the turnstiles. He slid the ticket he had brought with him into the turnstile and withdrew it, reached the BART platform, and rushed to the open door of the train that was loading. He ducked in with the crowd and held on to a vertical bar while the train car’s doors slid shut. The train moved forward, picking up speed.
He took off the down vest before the train reached the Civic Center station, then took off the sweatshirt before the Sixteenth Street station to reveal a dress shirt, tie, and sport coat beneath. Before the Twenty-fourth Street station he took off the rubbers that had covered a pair of dress shoes. He rolled the extra clothes into a bundle before the car slowed on its approach to the Glen Park station.
The doors opened and he was out on the platform, hurrying with a hundred others to the upward escalators. On the way he dropped the clothes into a trash barrel, then took the next escalator up into the sunlight.
There was a parking lot on Bosworth Street across from the station, but he didn’t go near it. Instead he hurried up the other side of Diamond Street to Wilder Street, where there were no signs of cameras. As soon as he was visible on Wilder, the black BMW pulled away from the curb and glided up to him. He got into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and the car moved on.
17
Julian Carson walked along Market Street at a quick pace with the demeanor of a man irritated at the fact that his cable car had never come. As he forced his body to convey the feeling, his experienced eyes were picking out the intelligence people. He saw five men who had been seated inside a restaurant dash across the street toward the Apple store, then into the subway entrance beside it. The tables along the front window of the restaurant were now vacant. A man in a third-story window of the hotel across from the turnaround was looking down at the street and talking into a cell phone.
Here and there pedestrians stopped to talk into cell phones or radios or Bluetooth earpieces—an attractive young couple, the man in a sport coat and the thin blond woman in tight jeans and high boots, a pair of women carrying shopping bags that were heavier than they should be. There was a shout from somewhere near the subway entrance, and each woman put her right hand into the shopping bag that hung from her left, and kept it there until it was clear that the commotion was over. Julian didn’t know the women, but he knew that they had not been reaching for new dresses they had bought.