Thank God. I didn’t want to hear that he or Yuki was in a jam. Once that was out of the way, I had to know, why the hell was Brady calling me at oh-dawn-hundred?
“What’s up?” I said.
Martha came into the bathroom and made circles around my legs until she successfully herded me into the kitchen. Her bowl was empty.
“I’m in your neighborhood,” he said.
“You’re saying you want to stop by? It’s not even six.”
“I’ve just come from the scene of a massacre,” he said.
“I’ll put the coffee on,” I told him.
By the time I’d showered and dressed in whatever was on the bedroom chair, Brady was at the door. He looked blanched, and this wasn’t the fault of the lighting.
“Sit,” I said, indicating a stool at the kitchen island. I double-checked that both bedroom doors were closed. Then I poured coffee and set out milk and sugar. I leaned against the stove, arms crossed, and waited for him to speak.
He said, “Why did you turn down the lieutenant’s job? I mean, you had it before you stepped down. Then, when Jacobi moved up, you could’ve had the job. But you turned it down again.”
“I couldn’t stand the paperwork, the meetings, the middle-management crapola,” I told him. “I wanted to work cases. One at a time.”
He said, “No kidding. I feel like a shit sandwich about ninety percent of the time.”
He sipped coffee. The suspense was killing me.
“What happened, Jackson?”
“Narcotics had been watching this house in lower Bernal Heights for a couple of months. It’s a factory disguised as a furniture showroom. They had eyes on the place, but they didn’t know what was going down until it was over.
“The scene inside that house.” He shook his head. “Like a freaking war zone.”
“Fatalities?” I asked him.
“You bet. I think seven.”
“What was it? A robbery?” I asked.
“That’s what it looks like. The dead men look like employees. We think the shooters got away,” Brady said. “Narco caught a nanosecond of video showing three guys in a white panel van leaving the Wicker House parking lot. At least one of them was wearing an SFPD Windbreaker.”
“Come onnnn.”
Brady said, “If those were our guys, they’re escalating from ripping off drug slingers and mercados to major scores like this. We may have caught some kind of break.”
Brady sank into thought.
“What, Brady? What kind of break?”
He snapped out of it. “We’ve got visuals of two punks leaving the house earlier in the morning, before the raid went down. They don’t look like our shooters, but they gotta know something. And we’ve ID’d them. Punks. Like I said.
“You call Conklin. I’ll call Swanson and Vasquez. Clapper is at the scene right now,” he said, referring to my friend the forensics lab director.
Brady stared into his coffee mug and said, “Look, Lindsay. I know I’ve been a dick lately. I’m worried about all this renegade-cop shit going down. I don’t mean to take it out on you. And I’m sorry.”
His voice caught in his throat. That was Brady apologizing.
“It’s OK. I totally understand.”
“I’m on your side. Always.”