They had already reached the Mission District. Jane was familiar with the area. As a student, she used to sneak down here to listen to punk bands at the old fire station. Around the corner were a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen where she often volunteered. The area had been a focal point for fringe activities as far back as when the Franciscan Friars built the first Mission in the late 1700s. Bear fighting and duels and horse races had given way to impoverished students and homeless people and drug addicts. There was a violent energy emanating from the abandoned warehouses and dilapidated immigrant housing. Anarchist graffiti was everywhere. Trash littered the street. Prostitutes stood on corners. It was the middle of the morning, but everything had the dark, dingy tint of sundown.
She said, “You can’t park Jasper’s Porsche here. Someone will steal it.”
“They’ve never touched it before.”
Before, Jane thought. You mean all of those times the brother you claim to hate drove down here in the middle of the night to rescue you?
Andrew tucked into a space between a motorcycle and a burned-out jalopy. He started to get out of the car, but Jane put her hand over his. His skin felt rough. There was a patch of dry skin on his wrist just under his watch. She started to comment on it, but she did not want words to intrude on this moment.
They had not been alone together since before they’d left the house. Since Laura Juneau had fired that last bullet into her skull. Since the politi had rushed both Jane and Nick from the auditorium.
The policemen had mistaken Nick for Andrew, and by the time they had figured out why Jane was screaming for her brother, Andrew was banging his fists on the door.
He’d looked almost deranged. Blood had stained the front of his shirt, dripped from his hands, soaked his trousers. Martin’s blood. While everyone was running away from the stage, Andrew had run toward it. He had pushed aside the security. He had fallen to his knees. The next day, Jane would see a photograph of this moment in a newspaper: Andrew holding in his lap what was left of their father’s head, his eyes raised to the ceiling, his mouth open as he screamed.
“It’s funny,” Andrew said now. “I didn’t remember that I loved him until I saw her pointing the gun at his head.”
Jane nodded, because she had felt it, too—a wrenching of her heart, a sweaty, cold second-guessing.
When Jane was a girl, she used to sit on Martin’s knee while he read to her. He had placed Jane in front of her first piano. He had sought out Pechenikov to hone her studies. He had attended recitals and concerts and performances. He had kept a notebook in the breast pocket of his suit jacket in which he recorded her mistakes. He had punched her in the back when she slumped at the keyboard. He had switched her legs with a metal ruler when she didn’t practice enough. He had kept her awake so many nights, screaming at her, telling her she was worthless, squandering her talent, doing everything wrong.
Andrew said, “I had all of these things I wanted to say to him.”
Jane yet again found herself helpless to stop her tears.
“I wanted him to be proud of me. Not now, I knew it couldn’t be now, but one day.” Andrew turned to face her. He had always been lean, but now, in his grief, his cheeks were so hollow she could see the shape of the bones underneath. “Do you think that would’ve ever happened? That Father would’ve been proud of me, eventually?”
Jane knew the truth, but she answered, “Yes.”
He looked back into the street. He told her, “There’s Paula.”
Jane felt the fine hairs on her arms and neck stand on end.
Paula Evans, dressed in her usual combat boots, dirty shift and fingerless gloves, fit in perfectly with the scenery. Her curly hair was frizzed wild. Her lips were bright red. For reasons unknown, she’d blackened under her eyes with a charcoal pencil. She saw the Porsche and flipped them off with both hands. Instead of heading toward the car, she stomped toward the warehouse.
Jane told Andrew, “She scares me. There’s something wrong with her.”
“Nick trusts her. She would do anything he asked.”
“That’s what scares me.” Jane shuddered as she watched Paula disappear into the warehouse. If Nick was playing Russian roulette with their futures, Paula was the single bullet in the gun.
Jane got out of the car. The air had a greasy stench that reminded her of East Berlin. She left the metal box on the seat so she could slide on her jacket. She found her leather gloves and her scarf in her purse.
Andrew tucked the box under his arm as he locked the car. He told Jane, “Stay close.”
They walked into the warehouse, but only to get through to the back. Jane hadn’t been here for three months, but she knew the route by heart. They all did, because Nick had made them study diagrams, run up and down alleys, dart into backyards and even slide behind sewer grates.
Which had felt unhinged until now.
Paranoia seized Jane as she made her way down the familiar path. An alley took them through to the next street over. They blended in here, despite their expensive clothes. Thrift stores and dilapidated apartments were filled with students from nearby San Francisco State. Wadded-up newspapers had been shoved into broken windows. Trash cans overflowed with debris. Jane could smell the sickly-sweet odor of a thousand joints being lit to welcome the new morning.
The safe house was on 17th and Valencia, a block from Mission. At some point, it had been a single-family Victorian, but now it was chopped up into five one-bedroom apartments that appeared to be inhabited by a drug dealer, a group of strippers and a young couple with AIDS who had lost everything but each other. As with a lot of structures in this area, the house had been condemned. As with a lot of structures in the area, the inhabitants did not care.
They both climbed the wobbly front steps to the front door. For the hundredth time, Andrew glanced over his shoulder before going in. The front hall was narrow enough that he had to turn his shoulders sideways to walk through to the open kitchen door. The backyard contained an old shed-like structure that had been converted into living space. An orange extension cord that draped from the house to the shed served as electrical service. There was no plumbing. The top floor balanced precariously on what was originally meant to be a storage area. Music throbbed against the closed windows. Pink Floyd’s screechy “Bring the Boys Back Home.”
Andrew looked up at the second floor, then looked back over his shoulder yet again. He knocked twice on the door. He paused. He knocked one last time and the door flew open.
“Idiots!” Paula grabbed Andrew by his shirt and yanked him inside. “What the fuck were you thinking? We all said dye packs. Who put that fucking gun in the bag?”