far above do you have in mind?”
“One of those places you need to seriously bribe the maitre d’. Somewhere with a view.”
I glanced at my watch: 5:02. “I’m going to have to go get ready for my stunt. But listen, it’s at California and Market. Why don’t you come down and watch when you’re done with Gary? It’s a car gag, bouncing off a runaway cable car. A pretty big deal. Water gushing. Ambulances and fire trucks all over. They’re going to close Market Street and the Embarcadero. I’ll leave word to let you onto the set. The schedule calls for a twilight shot, but I can’t swear how long it’ll run. Come around eight. If it’s still going, you can watch the action. If it’s over, we’ll go eat.” I added, “Above our element.”
“Sure,” she said, so offhandedly it was hard not to feel dismissed.
A horn honked. I turned to glare. “Hang on, Karen, that’s my brother.”
“The missing one!”
“No, no. My oldest brother. Give me a minute, okay?”
She looked at me curiously. “Darcy . . .”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me!”
“Okay. None of my business, but . . . your missing brother. You don’t want to beat yourself up. ‘If only I’d noticed . . .’ ‘If only I hadn’t said . . .’ you know? I don’t mean to intrude, but you assume something happened and he fell off the pole. Maybe he made a bad decision afterwards. It’s easy to jump; hard to climb back on.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wondered what Gary had told her, and why.
“None of my business. It’s just I’ve had friends . . . and . . . don’t be so hard on yourself.”
The horn beeped again. I headed toward it and when I turned back, Karen was walking toward the parapet.
John was pulling into a legal parking spot, something he rarely troubled to do. That meant he hadn’t swung around the waiting traffic, Code 3’d it up the down lane, and parked in the crosswalk, which would have saved him twenty minutes. He was dressed in a suit that fit better than any I’d seen on him. He looked good; he looked not like a cop. “You here on a case?” I asked, leaning into his car window.
He ignored my question—his family trademark—and opened the door, forcing me to jump back. I took that to mean Yes. He put an arm around my shoulder and walked us toward the west side of the circle. I have affectionate siblings, but John is not one of them. His arm around my shoulder historically meant I was about to hear something unlikely to improve my day.
“Amazing view, huh?”
“Yeah, John. Same as it’s been for a century.” I shifted my shoulders, but he held on tight. “You passing yourself off as a tourist? Keeping an eye on someone who can’t spot an unmarked?”
“Just here to think.”
“About annexing my shoulder?”
“About Mike.”
“You drove an unmarked car, sat in a line of exhaust-spewing cars for twenty minutes, so you could park your official vehicle in a civilian spot in a crowded tourist attraction and not look at the view, all so you could have some thought about Mike that you haven’t considered in the twenty years since he disappeared?”
“This new lead you think you’ve got. You’re not going to find anything there.”
He squeezed my shoulder in a way he never had the entire time he was barking orders and complaining that we younger kids were out of control. Something was going on with my oldest, stiffest, most wary-making brother. I waited.
“I’ve been all over. I’ve checked every possible lead from San Diego to Seattle and beyond. I’ve had PIs on retainer.”
“And you kept them all to yourself? Did you think—”
“You want to hear about each dead end?”
I turned toward John, trying to read him. “This conversation could be about Mike, but it’s not, is it? What’s the matter, John? Are you okay?”
“Sure.” He bent near and hugged me. I was so stunned I didn’t move. Then I hugged him back, feeling like I was in the middle of a stunt and hadn’t read the script.
“Who’s your friend?”
I followed his gaze and saw Karen through John’s eyes: a slim, attractive blonde checking her phone messages as she waited for one of the telescopes to free up. She caught his eye and smiled, a sweet, longing expression. He wasn’t a bad looking guy. None of the star quality of Gary, but he was in decent shape, graying at the temples, and today sporting a lime green shirt that set off the green in his eyes, evincing a sartorial concern I’d never seen him show before. He’d sure dressed for someone. But not Karen. As for her, I felt sure she ached not for John, but for the sweet closeness she assumed we shared. John, though, was seeing something entirely different. He was smiling back with a hesitant, vulnerable expression. His whole being screamed: vulnerable.
Be careful, big brother! You’re out of your league with her. What you need—What he needed was to snap him back to himself. “You’ve had a PI on retainer? And he’s never found a lead to Mike? Maybe what he’s found is a patsy.”
“Patsy! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ah, that was the John I knew.
He put his arm back around my shoulder, but this time to herd me to the walkway where he could hold forth more privately. “I don’t walk onto your movie sets and decide I can do stunts, do I? But you assume you can do missing persons better than the police. I’m the professional, I—”
“John!”
“What!”
“Your car. That’s your car! Someone’s stealing your car!”
A woman screamed and grabbed a toddler, as the car shot past. Karen Johnson was at the wheel.
3
“SHE STOLE MY CAR!” John yelled at me as the unmarked shot across the parking circle onto the exit road.
I ran after. Skidded to a stop. No way I’d catch her. The exit road had no traffic, and only one stop sign. You don’t boost a police car, then brake for stop signs.
I raced for the sidewalk, jumped the parapet into the trees and underbrush. It wasn’t a dead drop but close. I skidded tree to tree. Below was the Lombard curve where the road ended. I had to catch her there. If she beat me, she’d be out into the warren of North Beach streets, in an unmarked black car made to draw no attention.
I slammed into exposed roots, grabbed for a tree trunk, swung around it. The hill was steeper, rockier, the drop to the curve almost straight down. I shot a glance at the road. Car barreling down.
