He cut the tags off the coat, put the gun into his right-hand pocket, pulled on the cap and gloves, shut the drawer. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked completely unremarkable.
Leaving the house on Russian Hill, Michael grabbed the still-wet umbrella from the doorstep, crossed the street, and dropped his alimony check into the mailbox on the corner.
He could have wired the money, but the check was better. She would have to open it. She would have to read the word bitch he’d put in the memo line. She’d have to cash that check, and the bank teller would see that someone hated her.
From his end, writing her name and filling in the blanks by hand forced him to recall the way his marriage had dropped dead, ending against his will. And he thought about what had led to the loss of his wife, and his prospects for a happy life ever after. His life interrupted.
As always, all roads led to HER. She was to blame for his failed relationships. But he would deal with her sins. He put up his umbrella, patted his gun through the pocket of his coat, and walked toward Columbus Avenue.
It was a busy night, the sidewalks and street spilling over with pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Michael stayed on Greenwich and headed toward downtown. At Mason he waited for the Powell–Mason cable car to pass, rattling its way downhill to the waterfront. Then he took a right onto Columbus toward the heart of North Beach.
He pressed on, passing the Condor and then Tosca Cafe on his left and the City Lights bookstore on his right, all the shops and clubs and bars brightly lit. Inside, customers were socializing, enjoying their tiny little plans.
Stupid people. Aliens. He told himself that he wasn’t bothered by their pointless cheerfulness. He thought about the ways he was different from other people as he fixed his eyes on the Transamerica Pyramid up ahead. It was like a beacon urging him to focus.
Humming his own take on a popular tune, Michael veered right onto Kearny at Cafe Zoetrope—and that’s when he saw HER. She was only thirty feet up ahead of him, no doubt heading toward the Tenderloin, where the vermin liked to congregate.
The woman was bundled up, carrying a heavy shopping bag in each hand, wearing a pink, translucent poncho, her head lowered against the fine, unrelenting rain.
God, he hated her.
And finally the odds of doing something about that were on his side.
CHAPTER 36
IT ALMOST SEEMED to Michael that he could kill that woman by just drilling through her back with his eyes.
Bam. Bam.
He was keeping her in sight, walking at a comfortable pace. He was starting to wonder where her trek would end, where she’d hunker down for the night, when she picked up her pace and awkwardly trotted across Clay just before the light turned red.
Damn it. Goddamnit.
He was stranded on the sidewalk as traffic swept along between himself and her. The sidewalk across the street was opaque with a moving wall of pedestrians shuffling along beneath their umbrellas.
And then he lost sight of her.
He was sure that he could catch up with her—if he could still see her.
Michael wiped rainwater away from his eyes with his sleeve. He was so close. He might not be this close again anytime soon.
Kearny was one way, but he looked right and left, his usual overabundance of caution, then dashed off the curb into the street, shooting the gap between two vehicles. He narrowly missed getting clipped by a red sports car, whose driver leaned on the horn, letting him know exactly how close he’d come to buying the farm and everything around it.
But the risk had paid off. He was on the opposite curb unharmed.
But where was she?
He jogged ahead, cutting between couples, turning right onto Geary, weaving around a boisterous gang of drunkards leaving Hawthorne, a club teeming with customers.
And then there was a clearing in the field of umbrellas. Michael peered through the opening and saw her leaning against the 77 Geary building, adjusting the hood of her plastic poncho, setting her bags down at her feet.
A memory came to him. College graduation day. She hadn’t shown up. When he went to dinner with a few friends, there she was—rooting through the trash outside. He was humiliated.
His heartbeat was in overdrive. This was it.
He walked toward her, and when he was close enough to read the name Peking Bazaar on one of her shopping bags, he called out to her.
“Hey, hey. Imagine meeting you here.”
The woman looked up.
She gave him a gappy smile and the dizzy look of a person who couldn’t quite see straight.
She said, “Hi, good-looking. Got some change? I haven’t eaten today.”
His disappointment was fierce and sudden. The loopy female leaning against the wall of the historic office building wasn’t HER, wasn’t even close. Michael cried out, “Oh, shit.”
The woman’s ditzy look changed to concern.
She said, “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he snapped.
He stood in that glistening clearing of sidewalk that would soon close around him.
“I’m just fine,” he said. “I do have something for you.”
Holding his umbrella with his left hand, he pulled his gun with his right. He was standing so close to the woman in the many-layered clothing under the shiny plastic wrapper he could almost count the beads of water on her eye-lashes.
He fired into her chest.
She gasped, “What?”
“I fucking hate you,” he said.
He fired the second round, and as she sagged against the wall, he scooped up the casings and started walking.
He didn’t look back.
That dirty old lump of dump. No one would even know she was dead until morning. Michael crossed Geary, his umbrella obscuring his face, but he saw a man running through the rain, coming toward the dead woman with a phone to his ear.
He was shouting into the phone, “Send an ambulance to Geary and Grant. Hurry.”
CHAPTER 37
MICHAEL STOOD OUTSIDE the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, a gray man within a gray crowd under a heavy night sky, the flashing red and blue lights from the squad cars beaming and slashing through the mist.
He thought of himself as a cool, professional-grade assassin, but he couldn’t quell the heart palpitations and sweat beading up at his hairline, running out from under his cap and mixing with the rain streaming down his face.
He rarely had this feeling. This was fear. Extreme fear bordering on panic.
He knew that he had screwed up. But he didn’t know how badly. Had the woman lived? Could she identify him? What about the man with the phone?
After firing on the woman, he’d crossed the street, skirted traffic, passed through alleys, and circumnavigated Union Square. He walked among other pedestrians, returning to the wide avenue, and stopped on the sidewalk to put his hands on his knees and take calming breaths.
Then Michael resumed walking. He made a wide loop around the scene of the shooting, taking a route from one end of Post Street to Kearny, then to Market and back up Grant, finally drawn back to Geary Street and what he’d done there.
He had a grip on himself now.
A crowd of curiosity seekers had assembled across the street from the office building behind the police tape that held them back from the scene of the shooting.
Michael merged into the dull gray crowd, taking a place at the end of a row three people deep. He asked the man in front of him, “What happened over there?”
“Don’t know. Someone must have died.”
Michael hoped.
His view of the dead woman was blocked by two squad cars parked up to the curb. He saw cops talking to one another, heard radios squawking and finally a shrill, whooping siren of an ambulance screaming up the street, braking hard only yards from where Michael stood.
Ambulance doors flew open. Paramedics jumped down from the back with a stretcher and moved quickly toward where Michael had last seen that woman.
Did the presence of an ambulance mean that she was still showing signs of life?