Out of Nowhere Read online

  And he’d failed.

  My brother, who had always been able to handle anything …

  But, dammit, I would not fail.

  I made the rounds, checking each mirror, silently daring the assailant. ‘You think I’m a sitting duck here? Bring it on!’

  Zen and other meditation practices emphasize bare awareness. Notice the sounds, the feelings, the sights, all without stopping to name and categorize them. It’s a hard practice to hear the fog horn without thinking ‘fog horn’ and easing into thoughts about fog horns I have known. Like when the 49ers score. Like … Just listening, just looking is hard. But here, now, it was perfect. Without moving my head I scanned the mirrors, from rain-blur to rain-blur, alert for movement, listened to cars starting and stopping, wind gust flapping an awning, for footfalls. ‘Bring it!’

  I was almost dry, sitting on a padded seat. I could wait him out. I shifted my glance from mirror to mirror, squinting against the increasing darkness. I let my gaze become specific now, noting cars, watching for repeat circlers.

  What I noticed was the sign ahead, almost out of view: Loading Zone.

  I laughed.

  The Honda had to have been sitting here, in this primo tourist district for at least an hour. Any other car would have tickets lined up under the window wipers.

  I started it up and slid into traffic.

  A meter maid came around the corner.

  I saluted and kept moving.

  Three hours later, having showered, eaten and sat zazen in the zendo, I pushed open the passenger door for my Zen teacher, Leo Garson. Formally, Garson-roshi. It was just 7.00 p.m. The rain was gone, the street so dry I could have imagined the storm. Leo was headed for a priests’ meeting at Zen Center San Francisco near the other end of Haight Street from Mike’s block. ‘And you?’ he asked as I pulled into the sparse twilight traffic.

  ‘Going to eyeball Mike’s place.’

  ‘Isn’t that in Noe Valley?’ i.e. not in the direction I was headed.

  ‘His building’s being renovated. He’s got a house-sit near the Park.’

  Anyone else would have sneered, ‘Renovated! Prelude to being evicted.’ But Leo makes a point of focusing on things as they are, not assuming what they soon will be. ‘Don’t assume,’ he tells me more often than he should have to.

  ‘This is just between us,’ I said.

  He grinned. He sees students week after week for private discussions of their Zen practice. ‘Just between us’ is his life.

  I summarized the events on the pier. ‘Mike has no idea why he’s being targeted. These attacks are escalating. There may not be anything useful in his apartment, especially since he’s just there for a few days, but someone may have been trying to get into the place he left. With luck I’ll spot what they were after. I don’t know where else to start.’

  I expected Leo to tell me to be aware or careful, not to assume. What he said was, ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Start with what you know.’

  ‘Things as they are?’ I said, quoting the Zen dictum.

  ‘Right. Even if you’ve told me before.’

  ‘OK. Mike’s been back in town less than a year. Before that he was missing for twenty years. Before that he was nineteen years old. Surely this can’t be connected to him as a teenager.’

  ‘Don’t assume.’

  I turned onto Broadway, headed west past topless clubs and Thai restaurants, crossed Columbus Avenue and Broadway suddenly became Chinatown. In two blocks we’d be in the tunnel. When we came out we’d cross Polk Street, the original gay mecca. ‘Admittedly he dabbled on the far side of the law. He was working with a dirty cop. But the cop managed to go on living all those years Mike was missing, so how dangerous could that have been? And Mike was just a kid. Nothing that long ago would merit this level of attack.’

  Leo didn’t say I’d piled assumption on assumption.

  Before he could reconsider I said, ‘So then, after the Loma Prieta earthquake he disappeared. At first we assumed he was just in some other part of the city, helping to dig out rubble or feed the people whose homes had crumbled. Everyone in my family was doing what they could. John and all the other cops were doing double shifts, Gracie was at the hospital, Gary was somewhere. The phones were down. No one knew where anyone was. So, it was a couple weeks before we really began to worry about Mike.’

  ‘And this year you found him and brought him back home.’

  Home to this! To be threatened! We’d all been searching in our own ways, but I was the one who had put things together to find him. I was the one who’d pulled him out of his safe life in hiding and exposed him to this! I cut right, too fast, nearly clipped a Subaru.

  Leo didn’t comment; didn’t even grab the door bar or brace his feet.

  ‘What do I actually know about him during the years he was gone?’

  Leo nodded.

  ‘He was involved in tree-sitting to protect the redwoods from becoming deck furniture, but the lumber companies wouldn’t be biding their time waiting to hit him. He cooked at a bare bones spa in the Mexican mountains. Drugs? Minor drugs, probably. But nothing worth assault.

  ‘OK,’ I had to admit, ‘what I know is just about nothing.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘He’s been doing some legal research-ish work for Gary, so that’s legal – and if he did come across anything incriminating, he’d have told Gary. Threatening Mike would only bring the problem front and center to Gary.’

  ‘Friends? Lovers? Hobbies?’

  ‘You sound like a questionnaire.’ I turned on to Gough and started downhill. Gough is four lanes of vehicles headed with purpose, switching lanes while focused on beating the timed lights lest they be condemned to listen to their engines idle as drivers on the cross streets sail by. Leo sat silent while I cut across the four lanes and hung a right on Page. ‘True answer? I don’t know. Mike is the master of telling you nothing without you realizing it. If this threat hadn’t come up, I wouldn’t even have known he moved. He could—’

  ‘You speculate.’

  ‘Leo! Speculation is all I’ve got.’

  ‘Speculation is what you think you’ve got.’ When I didn’t answer, he added, ‘Just be clear what you’re doing.’

  ‘Don’t assume?’

  Now he smiled. ‘Right.’ With that, he pushed open the door, hesitated, and stayed in his seat. ‘Darcy, you are very worried, more so than even the hit-and-runs merit. Why is that? What do you know that makes you frightened?’

  I sat, listening to the engine balance against the brakes, feeling the little car being shaken by the wind, shivering in the draft from Leo’s open door. What did I know? ‘I get Mike.’ The words seemed to burst out on their own. ‘I adore him.’

  Leo smiled.

  ‘But I’m not blind to him. He’s clever, resourceful, and charming. He can do anything he puts his mind to. It never occurs to him that he might fail. So, he never has a plan B.’

  The wind through the open door rustled my hair against my neck. ‘Because,’ I said, speaking as if reading off a teleprompter, as if I was seeing the words for the first time, ‘he has no Plan B, he hasn’t thought about the consequences of his first plan failing. He leaps for a ledge without a thought as to how far down the ground is.’

  ‘And who might be standing underneath?’ Leo said.

  It sounded so damning that I could barely make myself nod yes. And when he stepped out and shut the door, the sudden stillness seemed not warmer but ominous.

  I pulled into traffic, cut left and then right on to Haight Street, and headed toward Golden Gate Park. Each block became shabbier than the previous one, as if it were a trip back in time, decade by decade, block by block. Somewhere in the middle was the era when Mike had taken ten-year-old me on my first walk up the Summer of Love turned needle-culture street. Me wide-eyed as we stopped in head shops and vintage clothes stores. He’d bought me a peacock feather I still had in my room when he disappeared fiv
e years later.

  It didn’t surprise me that his address now was off the far end, near the park, between Haight and Golden Gate Park panhandle, which forms the northern edge of the Haight Ashbury district. Some of the buildings on Mike’s street had been repaired and repainted. A Victorian next to the corner now had two-color window trim to spice up its respectable beige paint. Only one small gang tag marred the garage door. But Mike’s building – two units up a staircase next to the garage – had withstood gentrification. A board covered one of the garage windows. Paint had been trod off the outside stairs. The place might have had a rental sign: Not much for not much.

  All the parking spots were filled and I ended up circling around three times, giving up, and finally finding a place half a mile away on the far side of Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park. The Honda was a good-luck car. In all the time it had waited for Mike’s return it had never been scratched, towed, ticketed, or stolen. But luck can do only so much.

  So I loped back along the dark roadway, past cars speeding out of the park toward the panhandle and downtown. The run was good. The sky had cleared and it was a standard cool April night. Now, on Mike’s block, the air smelled vaguely of mud from the panhandle, of garlic and tomato from Haight Street, of pot. I eyed the buildings across the street, looking for a shadowy spot from which to check out Mike’s building. There’s a lot more social leeway on a block like this than in other neighborhoods. I found a dry spot on the bottom step of a six-plex, leaned back and observed.

  You can observe for hours. There are tales of private eyes in danger of mummification. Maybe it was them balancing me to create the law of averages, but I sat for no more than twenty minutes.

  The bay window of Mike’s apartment was dark, but not curtained. As if he’d been taunting his attacker. I could make out the back of a sofa. A mirror or maybe a wide doorway behind it.

  And something moving.

  I shifted closer. Something low, like a guy squat-walking.

  Had I imagined …?

  No, there he – she? – was, a brush of hair showing over the line of the couch. Darker against dark in the black-and-white frame of the street light. Rising with each step. It’s hard to squat-walk for long.

  And gone. Out of frame of the window. I strained to see more clearly. Uselessly. Gone is gone.

  But he was still in there. Only that one set of windows faced the street.

  Odds were against it, but the intruder could be innocent. A friend from one of Mike’s other incarnations.

  I could wait and …

  I couldn’t.

  THREE

  Keys in hand, I raced up the five steps and into the foyer of Mike’s building, a dark space just large enough for the staircase and the doors. A sliver of light from the street eased through a high slit window. The ceiling fixture bulb was gone. Landlords do not remove bulbs and neglect to replace them. Bulbs don’t unscrew themselves.

  I half-expected the apartment door to fly open and the invader to come flying at me. And the upstairs neighbor to come stomping down, complaining about the noise.

  What do you know?

  I stood, feeling my breath moving in and out, suddenly aware how loud it was.

  I made myself wait. Other sounds filled the void, the thrum of music system upstairs, the rise and fall of passing cars, a dog barking furiously then not at all. A crackle. From Mike’s apartment, nothing.

  Ear to the door, I strained.

  Nothing.

  I could wait. Anyone inside had to pass me on the way out. I’d hear him nearing the door. I could wait.

  Waiting is not my strong suit.

  I stuck the key in the lock, turned, flung the door open and jumped out of the line of fire.

  Nothing! No shot, no gunman, no one racing out, no footfalls. Zip. Not even a curious neighbor.

  I shoved the door against the wall. No one behind it. Scanning the room, I took a step inside.

  Then I smelled it. ‘Gas!’

  The place reeked.

  I raced upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, and banged on the neighbor’s door. ‘Gas! Get out! Gas!’

  An old guy in old jeans and white T-shirt stumbled to the door. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Gas leak downstairs! Get out quick!’ I checked him again. Half-asleep? Stoned? Or just out of it? ‘You need to go now!’

  He didn’t move. I grabbed for his arm.

  ‘Hey, I’m not dead yet!’

  ‘Hurry!’ I ran back down and waited in the shadows by Mike’s door to see how ‘not dead’ the neighbor really was. He was moving fast when he passed me. I should have followed him out onto the street. Across the street. But Mike’s apartment was my only hope of a lead. If it blew it could destroy the only chance of saving Mike. I had time for a glance at least. Surely.

  Holding my breath, I rushed in, ran to the bay of windows, shoving the end of the sofa out of the way. The middle was a stationary pane. The whole affair was wooden and old. I braced my hands on the window near the kitchen and pushed up.

  Painted stuck.

  The gas was getting stronger by the moment. I needed to get out of here. Fighting not to inhale, I bent low, shoved like I was lifting a car off a baby. The window didn’t move. I gave it one last push. It held. Then the paint cracked and the window creaked up. Gratefully I stuck my head outside and gasped for breath.

  Which was why I heard the crash.

  I just about fell over Mike’s upstairs neighbor at the bottom of the stairs, standing alone on the sidewalk, holding a huge wrench.

  ‘Did you turn off the gas?’

  His eyes shot to the wrench and back to me.

  ‘Did you see the crash?’

  He shrugged.

  On the far side of the street, safely, a clutch of people looked and murmured.

  ‘Hey! The gas was on! The apartment was full of it. Just now there was a crash right outside, here! Big crash. Like someone threw a Volvo out the window. A minute ago!’

  ‘Oh that.’ He nodded. His head was big for his small, unhealthily thin body; his face was dark, lined, like a chestnut left out over the winter. He coughed, one of those coughs that seemed as much a part of him as his loose white T-shirt and his saggy jeans.

  ‘What do you mean, Oh that?’

  ‘Garbage. Some asshole throwing their cans and bottles in the can. Most cans are plastic. Not mine! I called the garbage crooks; I’m entitled to a decent can, but they say this one’s fine. Fine? Right. Can’s metal. Beer cans are aluminum, bottles are glass, crashing into the metal can, banging around everything in it. If I hear that once a day I hear it five times. Ten times. People got no consideration.’

  I was staring. I muttered, ‘Gas!’ swallowed, and added, ‘The whole building could have blown up. Someone turned on the gas. You could be dead!’ Mike could be dead!

  The man looked unimpressed.

  The hell to him. ‘Are the garbage cans under a window?’

  ‘Yeah, haven’t you been listening? People don’t listen anymore. Yeah, right under the damned window. That’s how come they can throw their cans and bottles in. If you lived here—’

  But I was already halfway around the front of the building. The trash alley was a tunnel to the backyard, level with the garage. Above that passageway the adjacent buildings touched. Right in front of it, directly below an open side window in Mike’s apartment, wedged now between buildings, was the dented metal trash can. Not exactly a catcher bag like we use to cushion high fall gags in the stunt world. The jumper could have hit the garbage can at an angle and careened off on to his neck. Or crashed through the lid and be stuck there like a candle in sand. Or come face to face with a neighbor taking out the garbage.

  He’d been very lucky.

  Which meant I would not be. No likely witnesses, no easy lead to him.

  I squeezed by the can and made my way down the passage. It opened onto a small, ivy-carpeted yard, half-covered by stairs to the flat above. Oddly, the yard was not fenced, a rarity in a city where we
cherish our personal bits of space. A ten-foot napkin of grass is like a meadow here where Victorians border the sidewalk. Even cement slab ‘backyards’ sport potted ficuses. Failing that, a fence keeps your neighbor from seeing bags piled on your garbage cans.

  But Mike’s building had only a low cement-block wall that anyone could leap. There were even two steps up to the top. Beyond them a narrow path led to an alley. Alleys lead to streets. The burglar’s highway!

  Slowly, the chill of the night invaded my clothes. The wind sifted between the buildings, and it struck me that the person who managed to break into Mike’s apartment, who turned on the gas full force, had stayed there in the apartment while it filled to the edge of explosion.

  Did I know that?

  Close enough. Too close.

  He had been in the apartment with me.

  He’d been watching me as I came in, as I tried and tried to open the window. Then, in those few seconds I’d had my head outside, he’d shot behind me and leapt out onto the garbage can. Like a serious pro. Or a desperate amateur.

  I shivered. Spitting on your grave, Dad called it, that nauseous near-disaster feeling.

  What could he have been after that was so vital? Did he turn on the gas and then search? Figure he’d grab and run and have the explosion cover his exit?

  Did I even near-to-know that? Not hardly.

  Still, I needed to get back in there and find out.

  Get into the place filled with gas.

  Shit!

  I could call the police. I could whirl around three times and make a wish. Same outcome. Except the wish wouldn’t laugh.

  My body was vibrating from the tension. I needed to do something.

  I did what everyone does. I walked back to the sidewalk, stood and checked messages.

  No word from Mike. Why hadn’t he called? He’d had time to buy a phone. Marin County wasn’t the Sahara; they have stores there. Right across the street from the ferry dock! He could have—