CODA

August 25, 2020. Oakland. Eleven days after.

The guy on the corner across from her building had been there for thirty minutes and was not waiting for the bus.

Kiera Walsh logged it the way she logged everything. Weight on the right foot. Phone held but not used. Dark windbreaker in eighty-four degrees. He was either bad at his job or he wanted her to know he was there. She was, on balance, willing to entertain both possibilities.

She turned away from the window.

Her office sat on the second floor above a Vietnamese pho place on Broadway, which was a thing she liked telling new clients because it filtered the ones who minded the smell. Two rooms. Front office with a desk and two chairs and a window that looked at the BART tracks. Back room with a safe and a cot and a kitchenette and a door that opened onto a fire escape. The fire escape was climbable. She had climbed it three times in two years to be sure.

Benito was on the floor by the desk in the way he was always on the floor by the desk. Head on front paws. Not asleep. He'd been clocking the building's sounds since 6:14 AM, when she'd unlocked the door, and would keep clocking them until she turned the lights off, at which point he'd make a sigh of professional dissatisfaction and follow her out.

She poured coffee from a pot that had been cold for twenty minutes. She drank it cold. She had a thing about her mouth being reminded of other temperatures. She'd explained it to a date once. The date had asked her not to explain it again.

The book on the desk was Mick Herron. Slow Horses. Third reading. She had a stress headache she wasn't going to name. Herron's bitterness was the only thing in her current life that wasn't work or Diego. Rosalinda Pérez's name was in the locked drawer to her left. It would be there tomorrow.

The phone rang. She read the screen. Miriam Chen. She picked it up on the second ring.

"Walsh."

"Hi. You busy?"

"I'm reading."

"That's not busy."

"It's the third time, Miriam. I'm getting something out of it."

A short Miriam laugh. "I'd like to bring you something. Not over the phone. An hour. Tuesday."

"You said the magic word."

"Which one."

"Not over the phone. What kind of something."

"A client. Was a client. I'm not sure which yet. Second pair of eyes. I don't know what I'm looking at and I'd like you to be the one to tell me."

Kiera put a finger on the line she'd been reading and closed the book without losing her place. Benito's ears moved one notch toward her, which was Benito for we are paying attention now.

"Tuesday two o'clock. My office. Bring whatever you have, and bring it on paper. No phones in the room while we talk."

"Got it."

"Yours or mine."

"Yours. You make better coffee."

"I make cold coffee."

"Cold coffee's fine. I'll bring something."

"Two o'clock Tuesday. Hasta entonces."

"Hasta entonces, Kiera."

Miriam hung up. Kiera set the phone face down on the desk and looked at Benito. Benito looked back at her with the full attention of a dog who knows his person has just changed posture.

"Sí, lo sé," she said. "I felt it too."

She picked up the pen, wrote on the corner of the legal pad Miriam, Tuesday 2, paper only, and underlined it once. She set the pen down. She crossed the room and looked at the corner across the street.

The man was gone. Forty-seven minutes. He had not been waiting for the bus.

She made a note in the second column of the legal pad. White male, 30s, dk wb-jacket, RM-23 corner, 13:28-14:15. She'd been making notes like that since 2004. The kind nobody teaches you.

The phone vibrated against the desk. A text from her ex-husband, who was also a homicide detective, who was also Diego's father, who was also one of the seven people in the world she would still trust to drive her son anywhere.

Diego forgot his math homework. Going by your place to grab it. Ok?

She typed back. yes ok. key is where it is. tell him not to eat the strawberries.

A pause. Then: too late.

She let the look move across her face and not become a laugh. She set the phone face down again.

She picked up the book. She opened it to the line her finger had been on. She kept reading.

Outside on Broadway a pho delivery scooter started up and went south. The light coming through the window was the gold it goes at five in August.

Benito shifted on the floor. He put his head down. He did not stop listening. He never did.

In the desk drawer to her left, the Glock 19 sat in its holster the way it had sat since 2018. Unworn. Ready.

She turned the page.