A Certain Justice

25

'Is anybody with you?'

'Kevin, is that you? Can you talk a little louder?'

'Yes, it's me, and no, I can't. Can you hear me?'

'Enough, I guess. Where are you? Are you all right?'

'I asked is anybody with you?'

'No.'

'Are you sure?'

'Kevin…'

'Because I need some help, Melanie. I need serious help, and I don't need Cindy Taylor or anybody else – damn.'

'What?'

He whispered even lower. 'There's a guy upstairs. He's moving around again. I just heard the door close.'

'What?'

'Wait. Just hold on. I can't talk. Just a minute.'

He heard the steps approach again, saw the faint shadow of feet under the doorway. The good neighbor upstairs was a model citizen, no doubt about it, keeping an eye on the empty apartments when people went on vacation. There was another knock on the door. 'Hey, anybody in there?'

In the phone, Melanie's voice. 'Kevin?'

He didn't let out a breath. Melanie would either hang up or not. He'd told her to wait. Maybe she would.

Finally, after maybe two minutes, the shadows under the door disappeared, and he heard the retreating steps. He waited another ten seconds, made sure, whispered into the phone. 'You still there?'

'Yes. Kevin, what's happening?'

'Can you come get me?'

A pause. 'Sure. Where are you?'

A problem. He didn't know where he was. There were a couple of magazines on the table in front of the couch and he risked rising and walking a couple of steps. The tiny noises he made – a spring giving in the chair, a squeaky floorboard – might as well have been bombs going off. He read the address off one of the magazines. ' One forty-eight Collins Street, number three. You know where that is?'

'No.'

Great.

'Western Addition. A block or two south of California. You might have to go around. There's some National Guard…'

'All right, I got it. I'll find you.' It surprised him. She was being all business. No panic in her voice. Who was this Melanie? She repeated the address.

There was another knocking now, urgent, behind him. Kevin turned, holding the phone. There, seven feet away from him, looking in through the ground-floor window, was, he presumed, the good neighbor from upstairs, still pounding on the window, yelling.

'Mel!' Thank God, she hadn't yet hung up. 'Forget Plan A. Don't move. Stay home 'til I call you. And don't call anybody.'

'Kevin, what's…?'

'Just stay home and wait, Mel. They found me again.'

He wondered where the cold had come from. It was the one thing about San Francisco he just hadn't been able to assimilate, how one minute it could be beautiful, su

On this street, whichever one it was, three adjacent buildings had burned, and the acrid smoke hit him with every turn of the wind, making him cough, tearing at his poor sore ribs.

He had no idea how far he 'd run – maybe five blocks, over three fences. The good neighbor wasn't much inclined to give up the chase, but finally Kevin felt like he'd lost him. The chase had had the salubrious side effect of bringing him closer to USF, through the worst of the Addition.

But so what?

He doubted Wes Farrell had waited all afternoon for him there – but he would check. Certainly he hadn't been back home. Kevin had called Wes's place when he'd woken up after crashing in the borrowed apartment – it had been going on five o'clock, and there'd been no response, no answering machine.

Ergo Melanie.

A truly last resort, but she 'd have come through for him on that last call if he could have stayed in the apartment and waited. He was sure of it. And that was a good sign. It could be the entire world wasn't lined up against him.

But for now his lungs ached from the run, pinched from the coughing. He wondered if one of his ribs was broken, if a broken rib could puncture a lung, if a punctured lung could suddenly collapse, bring on a coma…

He was coming up to a bigger cross-street, with traffic flowing. Geary? Was normal life going on someplace in the city? He found it difficult to believe but there was evidence of it right in front of him.

Shivering, coughing some more, he crossed with the light at Masonic, found another phone, and called Melanie again, telling her where he was. It was only another couple of blocks up to St Ignatius. Melanie knew where that was. She'd meet him there in fifteen minutes.

He sat in a pew in the back of the church, pretending to pray. He hadn't prayed much in the past five years, since the Houston diocese had refused to bury his father – a suicide – in the family plot in which his father, Kevin's grandfather, had been buried. Kevin's faith, never particularly strong, wavered after that. In the army, in Kuwait, after Joey's cleaning up on the Road of Death, it disappeared entirely.

But his hands were folded. He was on his knees. A priest came up the center aisle and nodded at him, blessedly without recognition, then he stopped, paused – about to say something? – thought better of it and moved along. Kevin let out a breath.

The door opened again. Please, he thought, don't let it be the priest coming back. He was too weary to run any further.

Melanie Sinclair slid in beside him. It startled him. Underneath her concern, the fear in her eyes, she looked radiant, alive, beautiful. Had he really dropped her? He must have been out of his mind. But she'd been, had seemed, such an uptight pain in the ass. He thought he remembered that – was sure he did – but the plain fact was that right at that moment he had never in his life been so glad to see anyone. Ever.

'I think you ought to get out of here.'

She was driving and he was slumped in the passenger seat, his face below the window line.

'I might do that,' he said.

'Kevin, you should do it…'

He glanced over at her, a look she'd seen before. 'Let's give the should a rest, huh, Mel. What do you say?'

Biting her lip, she almost, instinctively, corrected him again, telling him her name was Melanie. Not Mel. But she found she really didn't care if he called her Sweet Sue. She half-smiled at that, almost said it to him, could just see herself saying, 'Hey, Kevin, why don't you just call me Sweet Sue?'

'What's fu

'Nothing.'

He didn't pursue it, but Melanie wanted to make sure the air was clear. 'I didn't mean should like I knew, Kevin. I meant should like it seems like it might be a better idea to get away until this blows over a little. You're just too visible here. I could drive you right now. Just keep going.'

'You'd do that?'

She looked over, biting her lip again. 'Yes, I would.'

He took that in, satisfied. 'Except then I'm really on the run. If I'm caught…'

'But you're on the run now.'

This is true.'

They stopped at a burned-out streetlight where a policeman was directing cars through. 'Don't keep too low,' she said. There was more National Guard presence here, camouflage trucks lining the street, the traffic coming down to single file.

Kevin straightened up slightly. 'You're right.' He waved, smiling at a few of the soldiers. 'We're having some fun now.'

'Don't overdo it, okay. Please.'

He came back to her. 'You remember Farrell…?'

'Yes.' Wes, another unrepentant partyer, had been a sore point between them. 'Well, I figure my only decent shot is to get the story out on what really happened. Anything else – ru