2nd Chance (31 page)

I took a few days off, to give my side and hand some time to heal, and the IA teams a chance to piece together what had happened at the shooting scenes. I hung out with Martha, took some long walks along the Marina Green and Fort Mason Park as the weather turned damp and cold.

Mostly, I replayed the events of the horrible case. It was the second time I’d had to fight a killer one-on-one. Why was that? What did it mean? What did it say about my life and what it had come to?

For[* *]a moment, I’d had an important piece of my own past given back, a father I never really knew. Then, that gift was taken away. My father had disappeared into the dark hole from which he had crept. I knew I might never see him again.

In those days, if I could have come up with one meaningful thing I wanted to do with my life, I might have said,
Let’s give it a ride.
If I could paint, or had some secret urge to open a boutique, or the stick-to-itiveness to write a book … It was so hard to find even the thinnest slice of affirmation.

But by the end of the week, I just went back to work.

Late that first day, I got a buzz from Tracchio to come up to his office. As I walked in, the chief stood up and shook my hand. He told me how proud he was, and I almost believed him.

“Thanks.” I nodded, and even smiled. “That what you wanted to say?”

Tracchio took off his glasses. He shot me a contrite smile. “No. Sit down, please, Lieutenant.”

From the edge of his large walnut desk, he picked up a red folder. “Preliminary findings on the Coombs shooting. Coombs
Senior.”

I regarded it tentatively. I didn’t know if some
IAB
bureaucrat had found something suspicious.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Tracchio assured me. “Everything checks out. A perfectly clean shooting.”

I nodded. So what was this all about?

“There is one thing outstanding, though.” The chief stood and leaned against his palms on the front of his desk. “The M.E. lifted nine rounds out of Coombs’s body. Three belonged to Jacobi’s nine millimeter. Two came from Cappy’s. One from your Glock. Two twenties from Tom Perez out of Robbery. That’s
eight.”

He stared down at me. “The ninth bullet didn’t match up.”

“Didn’t match?” I raised my eyes. It didn’t make sense. The commission had every gun from every cop who was involved, including mine.

Tracchio reached into a desk drawer. He came back with a plastic baggie containing a flattened, slate gray round, about the same color as his eyes. He handed it to me. “Take a look…. Forty caliber.”

A jolt of electricity surged through me.
Forty caliber…

“Funny thing is” — his eyes bore in — “it
did
match up to
these.”
He produced a second baggie containing four more rounds, nicked, flattened.

“We took these out of the garage and trees outside that house in South San Francisco where you followed Coombs.” Tracchio kept his eyes fixed on me. “That make any sense to you?”

My jaw hung like a dead weight. It didn’t make sense, except… I flashed back to the scene on the steps of the Hall.

Coombs rushing toward me, his arm extended; that frozen moment before I fixed on his face. From behind him, the thing I always remembered, couldn’t put away:
a voice, someone shouting my name.

In the melee there was a
pop….
Then Coombs lurched.

The bullets didn’t match up. Coombs had been shot with a AO caliber handgun…. My father’s gun…

I thought of Marty, his promise as he stood in my doorway that last time.

Lindsay, I’m not running anymore…. My father had shot Frank Coombs on those steps. He had been therefor me.

“You didn’t answer, Lieutenant. That make any sense to you?” Tracchio asked again.

My heart seemed to be bouncing side to side in my chest. I didn’t know what Tracchio knew, but I was his hero cop. Catching Chimera would erase the “Acting” in front of his title. And like he said, it was a clean shooting.

“No, Chief,” I answered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Tracchio fixed on me, weighing the file in his hand, then nodded, placing it at the bottom of a heavy pile of other reports.

“You did a good job, Lieutenant. Nobody could have done better.”

FOUR
MONTHS
LATER
…

I
t was a sparkling, clear March afternoon when we all went back to the La Salle Heights Church.

Almost five months after that first bloody attack, every chink in its exterior walls had been sanded and painted over with fresh white paint. The arched opening where the church’s beautiful stained-glass window had shone was draped with a white curtain erected for today’s event.

Inside, VIP’s from the city government sat shoulder to shoulder with proud parishioners and families gathered for the occasion. News cameras rolled from the side aisles, recording the proceedings for the evening news.

The choir, dressed in white gowns, belted out “I’ll Fly Away,” and the chapel seemed to swell and resonate with the triumphant power of the raised voices.

Some people clapped with the music, others tearfully wiped their eyes.

I stood in the back with Claire and Jill and Cindy. My body tingled with awe.

As the choir concluded, Aaron Winslow stepped up to the pulpit, proud and handsome as ever in a black suit and dress shirt. He and Cindy were still together, and we all liked him, really liked
them.
The crowd quieted down. He looked around the packed house, smiling peacefully, and in a composed voice began. “Only a few months ago, the play of our children was rocked by a madman’s nightmare. I watched as bullets desecrated this neighborhood. This choir that sings for you today was gripped with terror. We all wondered,
Why… ?
How was it possible that only the youngest and the most innocent of us was struck?”

Cries of “Amen” echoed from the rafters. Cindy whispered against my ear, “He’s good, isn’t he? Best of all, he means it.”

“And the answer is… ,” Winslow declared to the hushed room, “the only answer can be, so that she could pave the way for the rest of us to follow.” His eyes scanned the room. “We are all linked. Everyone here, the families who have suffered loss, and those who have simply come to remember. Black or white, we are all diminished by hate. Yet somehow, we heal. We carry on. We
do
carry on.”

At that moment, he nodded toward a group of young children dressed in their Sunday best, flanking the large white curtain. A girl in braids, no more than ten, tugged on a cord, and the canvas fell to the floor with a loud
whap.

The church became awash in brilliant light. Heads turned, followed by a collective gasp. Where once shards of fallen glass had left a jagged hole, a stunning stained-glass window shone[* *]intact. Cries of acclamation rang out, then everyone began to clap. The choir started up softly in a hymn. It was so damn beautiful.

As I listened to the moving voices, something stirred inside me. I glanced at Cindy, Claire, and Jill, thinking, reliving just how much had happened since I’d last stood in this place, since Tasha Catchings had been killed.

Tears welled in my eyes, and I felt Claire’s fingers at my side. She probed for my hand, squeezing me by the fingertips. Then Cindy cradled her arm through mine.

From behind, I felt Jill bracing my shoulder. “I was wrong,” she whispered in my ear. “What I said when they were wheeling me into the OR. The bastards don’t win. We do. We just have to wait to the end of the game.”

The four of us stared at the beautiful stained-glass window. A sweet and gentle robed Jesus was motioning to disciples, a yellow nimbus around his head. Four or five followers were trailing behind. One of them, a woman, had turned to wait for someone else, her arm extended….

She was reaching toward the outstretched hand of a young black girl.

The girl looked like Tasha Catchings.

TWO
WEEKS
LATER
, a Friday night, I’d invited the girls over for dinner. Jill said she had big news that she wanted to share.

I was coming back from the market, grocery bags in hand. In the vestibule of my walk-up, I fumbled for the mail. The usual catalogs and bills. About to move on, I noticed a thin white envelope, the standard air mail variety with red and blue arrows, the kind they sell you at the post office.

My heart jumped as I recognized the script.

It was postmarked
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

I put the grocery bags down, then I sat on the steps and split the envelope open. I lifted out a folded piece of lined paper. Inside, a small Polaroid photo.

“My beautiful daughter,” the letter began in an edgy scrawl,

By now, you must know everything. I’ve come a long way clown here, but I have stopped running.

You no doubt have some idea of what happened that day at the Hall. You modern cops have it all over old slugs like me. What I wanted you to know was that I wasn’t afraid to have it come out. I hung around for a few days to see if the story broke. I even called you at the hospital once.
That was me…
I knew you didn’t want to hear from me, but I wanted to hear that you were all right. And of course —
you are just fine.

These words are not enough to let you know how sorry I am for having disappointed you again. I was wrong about a lot of things: one of them was, you can’t leave everything behind. I knew that the moment I saw you again. Why has it taken me my whole life to let such a simple lesson sink in?

But I was right about one thing. And it’s more important than anything else. No one is ever so big not to need help every once in a while… even from their father.

The letter was signed, “Your stupid Dad,” then below it, “who truly loves you…”

I sat reading the note a second time, holding back a rush of tears. So Marty had finally found a place where nothing would follow him. Where no one would know him. I choked with the sad realization that I might never see him again.

I flipped the grainy photograph.

There was Marty … in a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, posing in front of some dilapidated fishing boat, raised on a scaffold, maybe twelve feet long. There was a little note on the bottom: “New
start, new life. I bought this boat. Painted it myself. One day, I’ll catch you a dream…
”

At first, I laughed…. What a jerk, I thought, shaking my head. What the hell did he know about boats? Or fishing? The closest my father ever got to the ocean was when he was assigned to crowd control on Fisherman’s Wharf.

Then something grabbed my eye.

In the background of the photo, past the proud countenance of my father, against the masts and hulls of the blue marina and the beautiful sky…

I squinted hard, trying to make out the lettering on the freshly painted hull of his new boat.

The single word scrawled there, in plain, white letters, in his own simple hand.

The name of the boat:
Buttercup.