Sunburn (31 page)

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Authors: John Lescroart

Tags: #Suspense, #Thriller

BOOK: Sunburn
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“Go,” Hardy said. “Call when you can.”
 
“The best bit of news,” Treya was saying to both of them as they listened on the two extension phones, “is that he’s out of his twos. Evidently the younger you are, the worse the prognosis. Three is way better than two. And this is a level-one hospital, so they had a neurological resident in-house, which is also lucky since he could go right to work.” Her voice, while not by any stretch remotely cheerful, was strong and confident-sounding. Conveying facts, keeping to the bearable news, she was keeping herself together the way she always did, by sucking it up.
“They’ve cooled him down to make him hypothermic,” she went on, “which is what they always do, and taken some scans and they’ve got him on a continuous EEG and his vital signs are good, so that’s all heartening.”
“But he’s still unconscious?” Hardy asked.
Frannie and Hardy heard Treya’s quick intake of breath and flashed their reactions to each other. “Well, that’s really not so much of an issue now, since they’ve induced a coma. He’s going to be unconscious for a while. Maybe a week or more.”
“He’s in a coma?” Frannie, before she could stop herself.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Treya said.
Silence collected in the line as this bit of horrifying, yet perhaps good, information began to sink in. Finally Hardy cleared his throat. “So how’s Abe?”
Treya hesitated. “Quiet. Even for him.”
“It’s not his fault,” Frannie said.
“I know that. It might not be so clear to him.” Again, a stab at an optimistic tone. “He’ll get to it.”
“I know he will,” Frannie said.
Hardy, not so certain of that, especially if Zachary didn’t make it, turned to face away from his wife. The women’s words continued to tumble through the phone at his ear, but he didn’t hear any of them over his own imaginings—or was it only his pulse, sounding like the tick of a clock counting down the seconds?
 
Bay Beans West enjoyed a privileged location, location, location at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco.
The large, wide-windowed coffee shop had opened in the summer of 1998 and from its first days became a fixture in the neighborhood. It opened every morning except Sunday at six o’clock, when it opened at eight, and stayed open until ten. Between the UCSF medical school a couple of blocks east, the University of San Francisco a few blocks north, the tourists visiting the epicenter of the birth of hippiedom, and the vibrant and wildly eclectic local neighborhood, the place rarely had a slow moment, much less an empty one.
The smell of its roasting beans infused the immediate vicinity with a beckoning aroma; the management provided copies of the city’s newspapers—the
Chronicle,
the
Free Press,
and the
Bay Guardian
—for free on the honor system that they wouldn’t be taken. The papers rarely disappeared before three o’clock. Even the homeless honored the custom, except for Crazy Melinda, who used to come in, scoop all the papers up, and try to leave with them. Until the patrons started setting aside a copy of each paper for her at the counter to pick up whenever she wanted them.
Comfortable, colorful couches were available as well as the usual chairs and tables; the ethic of the place allowed an unlimited time at your seat once you’d claimed it, whether or not you continued to drink coffee; for the past five years or so, customers could avail themselves of free wireless Internet service; and legal or not, pets were welcome. For many in the neighborhood, BBW was a refuge, a meeting place, a home away from home.
At a few minutes before seven o’clock on this Saturday morning, the usual line of about twenty customers needing their morning infusions of caffeine was already growing along Haight Street at the establishment’s front door. A long-haired man named Wes Farrell, in jogging pants and a T-shirt that read “DAM—Mothers Against Dyslexia,” stood holding in one hand the hand of his live-in girlfriend, Sam Duncan, and in the other the leash of Gertrude, his boxer. They, like many others in the city that morning, were discussing the homeless problem.
For decades, San Francisco has been a haven for the homeless, spending upward of one hundred fifty million dollars per year on shelters, subsidized rental units, medical and psychiatric care, soup kitchens, and so on. Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, and apparently due to a series of articles that had just appeared in the
Chronicle,
came a widespread outcry among the citizenry that the welcome mat should be removed. Wes finished reading today’s article aloud to Sam and, folding up the paper, said, “And about time, too.”
Sam extracted her hand from his. “You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t? I thought I did.”
“So what do you want to do with them? I mean, once you give them a ticket, which by the way they have no money to pay, so that won’t work.”
“What part of that statement—I hesitate to call it a sentence—do you want me to address?”
“Any part. Don’t be wise.”
“I’m not. But I’d hate to be the guy assigned to trying to diagram one of your sentences.”
“You’re just trying to get me off the point. Which is what you would do with these homeless people, who suddenly are no longer welcome.”
“Actually, they’re just as welcome. They’re just not going to be welcome to use public streets and sidewalks as their campsites and bathrooms anymore.”
“So where else would they go?”
“Are we talking bathrooms? They go to the bathroom in bathrooms, like the rest of us.”
“The rest of us who have homes, Wes. I think that’s more or less the point. They don’t.”
“You’re right. But you notice we’re loaded with shelters and public toilets.”
“They don’t like the shelters. They’re dangerous and dirty.”
“And the streets aren’t? Besides, this may sound like a cruel cliché, my dear, but where do you think we get the expression ‘beggars can’t be choosers’?”
“I can’t believe you just said that. That is so, so”—Sam dredged up about the worst epithet she could imagine—“so
right-wing
.”
Wes looked down, went to a knee, and snapped his fingers, bringing Gertrude close in for a quick pet. “It’s all right, girl. Your mom and I aren’t fighting. We’re just talking.” Standing up, he said, “She’s getting upset.”
“So am I. If you try to pet me to calm me down, I’ll deck you.”
“There’s a tolerant approach. And meanwhile, I hate to say this, but it’s not a right-wing, left-wing issue here. It’s a health and quality-of-life issue. Feces and urine on public streets and playgrounds and parks pose a health risk and are just a little bit of a nuisance, I think we can admit. Are we in accord here?”
Sam, arms folded, leaned back against the windows of the coffee shop, unyielding.
“Sam,” Wes continued, “when I take Gertie out for a walk, I bring a bag to clean up after her. That’s for a dog. You really think it’s too much to ask the same for humans?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because a lot of these people, they have mental problems, too. They don’t even know they’re doing it or where.”
“And so we should just tolerate it? You send your kids out to play and there’s a pile of shit on your front stoop? Next thing you know, half a school’s got hepatitis. You don’t think that’s a small problem?”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“Sam, that’s exactly what’s happening. They’ve got to check the sandbox near the merry-go-round in Golden Gate Park every morning for shit and needles. Some of these people think it’s a litter box.”
“Well, I haven’t heard of any hepatitis epidemic. That’s way an exaggeration.”
“The point is the alfresco-bathroom kind of thing that’s been happening downtown for years. I think you’ll remember we had a guy who used our front stoop at the office every night for a month. We had to wash the steps down every morning.”
“There,” Sam said. “That was a solution.”
“It’s a ridiculous solution. It’s insane. To say nothing about the fact that using the streets for bathrooms punishes innocent, good citizens and devalues property.”
“Aha! I knew property would get in there.”
“Property’s not a bad thing, Sam.”
“Which is what every Republican in the world believes.”
“And some Democrats, too. Dare I say most? And for the umpteenth time, Sam, it’s not a Republican thing. You can be opposed to Bush and still not want to have people shitting in your flowerpots. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“I think they might actually be.”
“Well, no offense, but you’re wrong. Public defecation and homeless encampments on the streets and in the parks are gross and unhealthy and sickening. I don’t understand how you can’t see that.”
Sam again shook her head. “I see those poor people suffering. That’s what I see. We’ve got a fire department with miles of hoses. We could deploy them to wash down the streets. The city could get up some work program and hire people to clean up.”
“What a great idea! Should we pay them to clean up after themselves or after one another? Except then again, where does the money to do that come from?”
“There it is again, money! It always comes down to money.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, sometimes it does.”
“The point is, Wes, these people just don’t have the same options as everybody else.”
“And they never will, Sam. That’s rough maybe, okay, but it’s life. And life’s just not fair sometimes. Which doesn’t mean everybody else has to deal with their problems. They get rounded up and taken to the shelters whether or not they want to go, and I say it’s about time.”
Without either Sam or Wes noticing, several others in the line, both male and female, had closed in around them, listening in. Now a young hippie spoke up to Wes. “You’re right, dude,” he said. “It’s out of control. It is about time.”
A chorus of similar sentiments followed.
Sam took it all in, straightened up, and looked out into the faces surrounding her. “I just can’t believe that I’m hearing this in San Francisco,” she said. “I’m so ashamed of all of you.”
And with that, she pushed her way through the crowd and started walking up Ashbury, away from her boyfriend and their dog.
 
Sam was the director of San Francisco’s Rape Crisis Counseling Center, which also happened to be on Haight Street. Her plan this morning had been to take her early-morning constitutional from their home up on Buena Vista with Wes and Gertie, share a cup of coffee and a croissant at BBW, then check in at the office to make sure there hadn’t been an overnight crisis that demanded her attention.
But now, seething, just wanting to get away from all the reactionaries, she had started out in the wrong direction to get to the center. Fortunately, the line for the BBW stretched down Haight Street, and not up Ashbury, and she’d gone about half a block uphill when she stopped and turned around, realizing she could take the alley that ran behind the Haight Street storefronts, bypassing the crowd and emerging on the next block on the way to her office.
But first she stopped a minute, not just to get her breath, but to try to calm herself. After an extraordinarily rocky beginning to their relationship, she and Wes hadn’t had a fight in six or seven years. She’d come to believe that he was her true soul mate and shared her opinions about nearly everything, especially politics. But now apparently not.
It shook her.
And okay, she knew that she was among those whom conservatives would include among California’s “fruits and nuts.” She certainly didn’t too often doubt the rightness of her various stances. She was in her early forties, and had seen enough of the world to know that the dollar was the basic problem. The military-industrial complex. Big oil and corporate globalism. Republicans.
But here now Wes, who had registered Green and hated the right-wingers as much as she did, was arguing for something that she just knew in her heart was wrong. You couldn’t just abandon these homeless people who had after all flocked to San Francisco precisely because of the benign political environment. That would be the worst bait-and-switch tactic she could imagine. She would have to talk to him, but after they’d both calmed down.
She crossed back to where she wouldn’t be visible to Wes or anyone else in the line as she came down the hill. It was the kind of clear morning that people tended to expect when they visited San Francisco during the traditional summer months. Those people often left in bitter disappointment at the incessant fog, the general inclemency of the weather. But today the early sun sprayed the roof-tops golden. The temperature was already in the low sixties. It was going to be a perfect day.
She got to the alley, squinting into the bright morning sun, when here was an example of exactly the thing she and Wes had been talking about: a pair of feet protruded from the back door area of BBW. Not wanting to awaken the poor sleeping homeless man, she gave him a wide berth and only a quick glance as she came abreast of where he slept.

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