The Dark Room(29)

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything.”

“That narrows it.”

They jogged to the corner and crossed the street without waiting for the light. The guy must have planned this for a while, if he already had a note typed out. Otherwise, he would’ve handwritten it on a scrap of paper. So the note was planned, but maybe the call was a sudden decision. He couldn’t have known where Cain was going, couldn’t have planned for a pay phone within a block of the car. And if he’d started acting on impulse instead of on carefully thought-out plans, maybe he’d make a mistake.

On the other side of the street, a man came out of the Elite Café and tucked himself into the recess of a dark storefront two doors down. There was a point of light when he drew on a cigarette.

“Cain?”

Angela Chun was tugging at his elbow, whispering.

“What?” He didn’t take his eyes off the smoking man.

“That man—” She turned him so that he was looking back toward the intersection.

A man had slipped past them on the sidewalk, but Cain hadn’t paid him any attention because he was focused on the other side of the street. Now he just saw the tall man’s back. Charcoal gray running jacket, matching pants. His hands were in his pockets, his head down as he strode away from them.

“That’s our guy,” Inspector Chun whispered. “I think.”

The man couldn’t have heard her, but at her words he set off at a sprint. The traffic signal was against him, but that didn’t seem to matter. He dove through two directions of traffic, dancing sideways along the center line as a panel truck brushed past close enough that he had to duck its side mirror.

Then they were racing after him, coming off the curb and into the street without even looking. An eastbound BMW skidded sideways and laid on its horn. Chun reached into her jacket and came out with her badge, and the driver let up on the horn as they skirted past his front bumper. As they threaded through the westbound traffic, they spotted the man a hundred feet ahead of them. With each step, he increased his lead. Tall and thin, this guy. Built to run.

“SFPD!” Cain yelled. “Stop!”

Instead, the man found even more speed. They were following him up a hill, the man moving in a straight line, an easy target. It would have been a simple thing to end this with a bullet, but there was no justification for it. It’d be a bad shooting, and Cain knew it.

Near the hill’s top, the man grabbed on to the corner of a shingle-sided row-house and hooked out of sight into the alley that ran alongside it. That changed everything. They couldn’t confirm he was an unarmed suspect anymore, fleeing in plain sight; he could be waiting around any corner now, with anything in his hands.

Now was the time to draw his gun. Next to him, Chun did the same. He stopped running before they reached the alley, holding out his left arm to block Chun from running past its mouth. He nodded at the cedar-shake wall of the row-house, and she stood against it, close to the corner. She held the evidence bag in one hand, her gun in the other, its muzzle pointed at the sidewalk a few feet in front of her. Its illuminated sights glowed softly in the dark, three points of dull green. She looked at him.

“Ready?” she asked.

She didn’t sound like she’d just raced through traffic and sprinted up a hill. He took a breath before he answered.

“Wait,” he said.

“For what?”

He tried to remember her age. Ten years younger, maybe. That would put her at twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Young, sure. But she ought to know why he’d paused at this corner.

“Guys who run into something without looking first, those are the ones who get killed,” he said. “That’s not us.”

“He’s . . . the guy’s—”

“I know it,” Cain said.

He stepped to the right and dropped to one knee, looking down the alley’s length over the barrel of his gun. There were dumpsters at the fence blocking the far end. To the right, a medical building. Its ground level was a parking lot. Twenty spots, max, and maybe half of them taken. A gateway opened to a set of stairs that led up to the cross street.

“Shit.”

“What?”

“It’s no good.”

The guy might have run all the way down the alley, then climbed onto a dumpster to vault the fence. Or he might have dodged right, under the medical building, and taken the gate out. Then again, he might be behind any one of the parked cars, waiting for Cain and Chun to step a little closer.

“What do we do?” Chun said.

Cain stood up and holstered his gun, waited for Chun to do the same. He wasn’t even sure why they’d been chasing the man in the first place, except that he’d run. That wasn’t a good enough reason to keep going.

“We’ll go find Grassley,” he said.

“That’s it?”

“You’re not getting shot for Harry Castelli,” Cain said. “That’s the first thing.”

“And the second?”

“I told Grassley I’d buy him dinner. If we don’t get back, he’ll get stuck with the bill.”

Angela Chun went past him and stood at the entrance to the alley. She looked down it, toward the chainlink fence and the dumpsters. Then she turned to study the parking lot beneath the medical building, her eyes flicking to each car, to all of the shadow-heavy corners.