Chapter 102
THE AMBULANCE TOOK off like a rocket. I stood in the street and stared after the taillights and flashers until they became the size of pin lights, trying to understand what made no sense to me at all.
Why had Mackie Morales, our summer intern, been driving a stolen squad car with her baby in the backseat? Had Fish gotten to her in some way? Had he threatened her or her baby?
That had to be it.
Why else would a bright young woman with a big future and a small child commit a felony? But if Fish had threatened her, how did that square with him saying that he loved her?
Fire bloomed under a car that had been beached on the sidewalk under the marquee. The neon sign reading HOME OF THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS flickered madly. Hoses came out, snaked around my feet, and that’s what broke the spell.
I walked back to the twisted patrol car, where Randolph Fish was pinned under the weight of the big V-8. The car interior, such as it was, was bright from the surrounding headlights and halogen lamps. I saw that Fish was still taking in air, but his breathing was shallow and labored.
I angled myself into the driver’s seat, said to the dying man, “Randy, it’s Lindsay. How’re you doing?”
Fish opened his eyes and slowly turned his head so that he could see me.
“Mackie?”
“She’s on the way to the emergency room. My partner is with her. That’s all I know.”
Blood oozed through his prison jumpsuit. The weight and pressure of the engine block on his lap was likely acting as a lower-torso tourniquet, keeping Fish from bleeding out.
“Ben?” he asked me.
“He’s at the hospital.”
Tears shot out of Fish’s eyes, ran together with the blood on his cheeks, dropped from his chin. Christ. I thought psychopaths didn’t have feelings. I reached over and tugged at the oxygen mask so that it covered his nose and mouth. He took a ragged breath.
I felt his life leaving him. It didn’t take an MD to see that he was going to die, right here, right now.
I spoke to him over the noises on the street; men calling to each other, winches and engines grinding and roaring, sirens near and far.
“I have to ask you some questions.”
He nodded.
“Who is Mackie to you?”
I moved the mask.
“Ben is. Our. Boy.” He sighed.
“Yours and Mackie’s?”
He nodded.
My thoughts scattered yet again and I did my best to corral them into a cohesive pattern.
If Fish wasn’t lying or fantasizing, he’d known Morales for at least four years. Mackie Morales was a college girl, then and now. She was dark-haired, slim, definitely his type.
But instead of killing her, he’d fallen in love with her? Was that right? And they’d had a child together? And then, while he was in a coma, she had gotten an internship at the SFPD?
If all that was true, Mackie Morales was a plant.
She’d embedded herself in our squad, the squad that had brought Fish down.
The idea was within my grasp, but it was slippery and I thought there was more to it that I didn’t get at all.