The Dirty Secrets Club (37 page)

"We're okay," she said.

Sophie's shoulders hupped. She let a single loud sob fall against Gabe's shirt. He stroked her hair.

"Ssh, cricket, we're safe." He glanced at Jo. "You all right?"

She nodded, but clung to the door frame. "Thank you for flying Air Beckett. Please ensure your seatbacks are upright and tray tables are stowed for landing."

He flashed her a grin. She was still squeezing his hand when the lights flickered and went out.

At the U.S. Federal Courthouse, Leo Fonsecca ventured out from the doorway of the men's room and looked up and down the hallway for damage, ready to duck if plaster came down on him. The hall looked undamaged. The dark paneling gleamed. The marble floor had returned to polished stillness. Above his head the lights swayed back and forth like incense holders at a Catholic mass, sending light and shadow swaying around in the dusk. He pressed his cell phone to his ear.

"Lieutenant, are you still there?" he said.

"Yeah." Amy Tang sounded terse. "But I'm gonna have to get off the line here in a second. Listen, Mr. Fonsecca, what I called to tell you is—aww, crap."

"Lieutenant?"

"We just lost power." Her voice veered away for a second, and he heard her calling to colleagues. "Sorry. This is about the guy who's directing the hunt for the Dirty Secrets Club. Pray. His real name is Perry Ames. He's serving a sentence at San Quentin, but he's in the courthouse there with you, testifying in a case."

"What?" Fonsecca looked around. A couple of people peeped out of a courtroom down the hall, and a security guard came running up the stairs, checking for damage. Fonsecca waved an all-clear. "Which judge?"

"I don't know. I just wanted to alert you. Ames's accomplice is at large, and I don't know what he's got in mind."

"Okay, Lieutenant, I'll inform the marshals."

The swinging light fixtures blinked as if having a seizure, and the power cut out. The hallway dropped into darkness.

Tang kept talking. "Good. Let me know once Ames is securely back in the custody of—"

The call was cut off. Fonsecca tried to reconnect and got a
network busy
signal. He looked around the hallway. The window at the far end was dribbling with dim outside light. The normally well-lit Civic Center was a gray shadow with dark windows, as if it had been abandoned. He heard voices down the stairway. In the long hallway he could barely see his own hands.

He went in search of a U.S. Marshal.

The courtroom hollowed into complete darkness. It was window-less, and the light simply vanished, sucked away, and turned them all blind. There was a commotion, all the lemmings in the room going skittish.

The judge whacked her gavel, a stupid sound in the dark, but it cut through the fussing. "Just stay calm. The emergency lights will come on in a few seconds."

Perry was on the witness stand. The prosecutor had been questioning him. Now he put his hands on the wooden rail.

His nerves spitfired. He could sit here, wait for the lights to come on, keep testifying, hope the prosecutor had the juice to influence the parole board about his release date. He could play nice, and go back to his six-foot-wide cell in North Block at Quentin, and wait to find out if the law played nice with him.

Or not. He shut his eyes and visualized the courtroom. The bench, the court reporter's chair. Jury box. Prosecution and defense tables, with the gate and aisle through the gallery straight behind them.

Then the door.

Perry opened his eyes. He slid sideways out of the witness box and cut like a snake through the courtroom.

The judge cracked her gavel again. "Everybody stay where you are. Bailiff, secure the prisoner."

Everybody ignored her. He went out right behind a bunch of lawyers.

"On three."

Jo and Gabe counted it off and shoved the wrecked cabinet upright in the hall. Sophie held the flashlight so they could see. Jo ripped long strips of strapping tape, bit them off the roll with her teeth, and bound the doors shut. The coyote howl of car and burglar alarms outside was nerve-racking. Looking out the bay window, Jo saw a neighborhood returned to an earlier time. Candles flickered in windows, an anachronistic amber glow.

She got the broom and began sweeping up broken glass and china. Gabe pressed his cell phone to his ear and walked around lighting candles, trying again to reach the 129th. He gave up.

"Circuits are going nuts."

Jo pointed at her landline. "Give it a try."

Sophie was standing in the kitchen doorway, gripping the flashlight, looking lost. Jo put down the broom.

"Weren't we going to get your costume?" she said.

Sophie raised her shoulders in a tense shrug. Her brown eyes were wide and dark, flowing with candlelight. Her face had a look of deep tension, like a steel cable drawn too taut and asked to secure the world in a stiff wind. Jo felt a moment of sadness. She hated seeing anxiety so overt and constricting in a little kid.

She tossed her shoulder so that her zombie arm swung around. "This way. Do you want to be an old-school slow zombie, or a new-style fast one?"

"I don't know."

Jo headed up the stairs. Reluctantly Sophie followed her.

Upstairs, a hall window was blasted apart. The grasping branch of her neighbor's oak tree filled the far end of the hallway. The house smelled like dust and oak. Glass crunched beneath their feet. Sophie shrank from it when they went past into Jo's room.

"How about a SpongeBob zombie?" What was it Sophie played with? "A Bratz zombie?"

"Maybe." That earned a tiny smile. "Daddy hates Bratz."

"Then you'll be exceptionally terrifying, won't you?"

When they came downstairs ten minutes later, Gabe had the kettle going on the gas stove. He was bent over the kitchen counter talking on the landline, writing on a notepad under candlelight.

Jo moaned. "Sergeant Quintana."

He looked up. Sophie stuck her arms out straight, like a doll, and tilted her head sideways. "Daddy, take me shopping."

Her voice was an eerie high-pitched zombie squeak. He suppressed a smile and raised his hands, as though cowering.

"No, please—not that. Keep away from me."

Sophie staggered stiff-legged across the kitchen toward him. She was dressed in bits and pieces of fashion disasters Jo had exhumed from her closet, including a sparkly spandex top that she'd ripped all along the bottom. She had teased Sophie's hair to a Helena Bonham Carter full-throttle-insanity level, and rubbed black kohl all around her eyes.

The blue glitter eye shadow, left at the house by Tina years ago, she had dribbled from the corner of Sophie's mouth to her chin. It looked as though she'd been gnawing on Miss Teenage America's ball gown.

"Buy me makeup, Daddy." She careened toward him.
"Now."

He backed against the counter and threw his hands over his face. "No—it burns. It burns!"

Sophie laughed. Gabe hugged her and smiled at Jo. But he sounded serious.

"I have to go. The unit's shorthanded."

"Damage?" Jo said.

"Still getting a clear picture, but they need me." He knelt down beside Sophie. "Sorry, cricket. I won't be able to take you trick-or-treating." To Jo he said, "Preliminary reports of some road closures."

Jo's transistor radio was reporting fires and building's collapsed south of Market. Streets were blocked by toppled telephone poles. Electrical wires were down in a number of neighborhoods.

He looked momentarily fraught. "I can't get through to Mrs. Montero. The babysitter."

"Sophie can stay with me," Jo said. "If that's okay."

Gabe nodded. He took his daughter's hand and sat down at the kitchen table.

"You scare the neighbors here, okay?"

"Okay," she said halfheartedly.

"Sorry, cricket. This is my job."

She nodded, eyes down. He kissed the top of her head and stood up.

Jo walked to the door with him. "We'll be fine."

"Thank you. For this, and for cheering her up." He reached out and stroked her hair off her forehead with his index finger. "Jo, I—"

She put her fingers against his lips. "We'll talk. But right now, you go to work."

He held her gaze for a moment in the candlelight. He took her hand in his and kissed her palm. Then he was out the door and running down the steps.

The courthouse was a dim warren in the autumn twilight. Perry rushed down the corridor, cut through a fire door, and ran down two flights of stairs. He came out on another hallway. Everything was still dark. How long till the emergency generators kicked in?

People were wandering the halls. He had to get out. Get outside with this blackout, and he was gone. Gone for long and hard and good.

He ran to the far end of the hall, looking for an exit. He wasn't going back to prison. With every step he ran, his lungs filled with fresh air and his mind with more certainty. He wasn't going back to the locked cell by the bay, to the noise and mayhem, where he was voiceless and caged and surrounded by the constant roar of other men's rage.

If he could get out of the building Skunk would pick him up. Then they would track down the people who robbed him, tortured him, and ruined his body. He could finally mete out justice. All he had to do was get away from this fucking courthouse.

He found a set of back stairs and shoved open the fire door. The stairwell was coal black. He heard footsteps below in the dark, tentative, feeling their way. He grabbed the rail and ran down.

Half a flight down the emergency lights blared on. Harsh halogen ghost lighting, it turned everything black and white.

Below him the footsteps picked up pace, sounding assured now. A man was coming up the stairs. Pray put on a severe face and kept jogging down. The man coming up was small and gray and wearing a funereal suit. He looked like an apprehensive chipmunk. He glanced up at Perry and continued climbing.

"Excuse me," he said.

Perry kept going past him. After a moment, he heard footsteps again, this time descending the stairs. Gray Man was coming back down.

"Excuse me. Sir, if you don't mind," the man called.

Perry couldn't answer without using his voice synthesizer. He ignored him.

"Excuse me." The footsteps came faster. "Have you seen any marshals?"

Marshals? He stopped and turned to look at Gray Man. The guy was red in the face and out of breath. He descended the stairs, puffing.

"Did you come from Judge Wilmer's courtroom?" the man said.

Run, or not?

Perry was a good five inches taller than this guy, and had ten years on him. The guy was a mouse, but something in his eyes was mean. He looked Perry up and down. Even though all the man could see was a citizen in a cheap suit, Perry still didn't like it.

Out in the hallway an alarm began ringing. Gray Man's eyes got agitated. He looked at Perry. He looked at Perry's collar, at his neck. His whole face changed.

He turned blood-red. He knew.

Gray Man turned to run, but Pray was faster. Perry caught the man around the legs, clipped him, and watched him go down.

Gray Man hit the concrete stairs facefirst. When Perry leaped down the stairs toward the fallen figure, he already had his cheap blue tie in his hands.

He knew exactly how a garrote worked.

J
o and Sophie came into the house with cold cheeks and fingers. Sophie

reached into her trick-or-treat bag and pulled out a prickly fruit.

"Who gives kiwis for Halloween?" she said.

"Don't eat it. We'll turn it into Mr. Kiwi Head."

"What's that?"

"Like Mr. Potato Head."

Sophie stared at her, perplexed. Jo felt old and square.

Halloween was a bust. Neighbors wanted to know what Jo had heard. Did her phone work? Did she have a radio? How bad was it? they wanted to know. Were there fatalities, were the bridges okay, how about the Marina, anybody know if it held up this time? The neighborhood was veering between depression and mania, trying to carry on like London in the blitz but having a nervous breakdown.

Alarms were still ringing. A few parked cars were still flashing their lights, coloring the street like some postseizure aura.

The wires were down. The city was cut off from itself.

Jo locked the front door and looked out the bay window. "Hang on a minute. I'm going upstairs."

She jogged up the stairs in the dark. The enormous tree branch in the hallway looked like a dragon's exploded tongue. In her bedroom Jo opened the window. The city seemed to keen at her. It was a nervous sound, too scattered, abnormal. She heard sirens down near Fisherman's Wharf.

Sophie appeared in the bedroom door. "Is something wrong?"

"Wait here," Jo said.

She took off her zombie doctor coat. Pushing open the sash as far as it would go, she swung a leg over the sill and grabbed hold of the downspout.

"Where are you going?" Sophie said.