The Hunt Club

As the crowd began to arrive, Staci fell into a rhythm with the work, and Palmer pretty much left her consciousness. She was after all serving half of the sixteen tables on one side of the outer patio, waiting on, among others, one superior court judge, the mayor's chief assistant, a gaggle of high-powered attorneys, a table of four of the 49ers, a city supervisor.

MoMo's was a happening place and had what they called a big yoo-hoo factor.

Over the next month or so, Judge Palmer came in nearly every workday, always choosing a table in Staci's section, arriving early enough, often enough that they got time to extend their repartee. His tips began at a generous twenty percent and grew to reflect the pleasure he took in her company. He learned that she was single, without a steady boyfriend, that she lived alone in a rented studio apartment just north of Market above Castro. She went to school part-time at SFCC and hoped to finish at junior college and go to Berkeley in the next couple of years, but the mission now was simply to make a living, which wasn't that easy on tips, in spite of the judge's largesse-not everyone was as generous as he was. She confided to him that she was thinking about taking another waitress job at another place on her days off here. But then she might have to quit school altogether and didn't want to do that. You didn't have a future if you didn't finish school.

She in turn found out, not only from him, that the judge had been married to Jea

After a while, they began to see each other outside of MoMo's, at quiet places down the coast where the judge would not be recognized. One day, he had come in much later than usual, close to one thirty, timing it so he was getting up to leave at around three, as she was finishing her shift. They walked together down the Embarcadero for a hundred yards or so, making easy conversation as they usually did at the restaurant. He asked her if she'd like to go over and walk by the water, where it was more private. He told her he had a present for her, which he so hoped she'd accept.

It was a solitaire one-carat diamond necklace on a platinum-and-gold braided chain.

6

Although he was now considered an official hero, Inspector Devin Juhle was coming off a very bad time. Six months ago, he and his partner Shane Ma

Ma

"Down! Down!" Juhle had screamed as Ma

"Shane!" he yelled for his partner. "Shane!"

Nothing.

Peering under the car's chassis-he remembered all of it as one picture, though the images were in different directions, so it couldn't have been-he saw two bodies down on the ground by a cardboard structure and behind them a half dozen or so people crouched in the lee of one of the concrete buttresses that supported the overpass, pe

He bolted for the low stump of a tree that sat in the middle of the asphalt. It shouldn't have been there-Caltrans should have uprooted the thing before they poured, but they hadn't. Now there it was and he'd reach it if he could. Ru

Juhle, on his stomach and with the side of his face and body pressed flat to the ground, knew that the stump didn't give him six inches of clearance and that the man was advancing now, sensing his advantage. He was still probably sixty or seventy feet away-and coming on fast. Once he got to forty feet or so, the shooter's height would give him the angle he needed. The next shotgun blast and Juhle would be history.

There wasn't any time for thought. Juhle rolled a full rotation, extended his gun gripped in both hands out in front of him, drew a bead, and squeezed off two shots. The man stumbled, crumbled, dropped like a bag of cement, and did not move.

Juhle called out for his partner again and again got no reply. Still in a daze, his adrenaline surging, he eventually got to his feet, his gun never leaving the downed man. In half steps, he warily crab-walked sideways toward him, with his gun extended across his body in a two-handed stance. When he got to his target, he saw that he had made the luckiest shot of his life. One bullet had hit the man between the eyes.

Which should have been the end of it. After all, Juhle had six witnesses to everything. Ma

But not necessarily.

Not in San Francisco, where every police shooting is suspect. One of the homeless in the encampment, a highly intoxicated diagnosed schizophrenic, insisted that police had run up to the deceased and executed him for no reason. The fact that he claimed there had been five such officers and that he maintained that the man had not had a shotgun-in spite of Ma

Beyond that, Juhle's shot was so perfect that it led Byron Diehl, one of the city's supervisors, to opine that perhaps the killing had, in fact, been an overreaction by an overzealous and enraged cop. Perhaps it had, in point of fact, been an execution. Nobody could hit a moving man with a pistol between the eyes at fifty or sixty feet. That just wasn't a possible shot. The man with the gun might have already surrendered, laid his gun down, and Juhle-out of control because of the murder of his partner-had walked up and shot him point-blank.

The other witnesses? Please. Most of them wanted the shooter dead, anyway. Plus, they were naturally afraid of the police. If Juhle told them they'd better back up his story or else, they'd say anything he wanted. They were simply unreliable and their testimonies worthless. Except for the schizophrenic, of course, who was struggling with his substance abuse issues. The idiocy was so palpable that it may have been fun to watch but not to be part of.