The Big Boom by Domenic Stansberry Page A

“Did you talk to him?”
    “No. He wasn’t there.”
    “I thought he was one of the featured speakers.”
    “I thought so, too.”
    “Well, I don’t know if it makes any difference now.”
    “Why not?”
    “I just got a call from Antonelli.”
    “What’s he doing, replacing us? We going too slow for him?”
    Cicero laughed again.
    “You got it half right, anyway. He’s pulling us off the case.”
    “Did he give a reason?”
    “He said it was too hard on his wife,” said Cicero. “He said to let it drop. Let the cops handle it.”
    “I thought he hated the cops.”
    “Well, you know Antonelli, how he is, but I have to say …” Cicero’s voice started to fade. The reception was breaking up. It skipped in and out, and by some anomaly the background noise was louder than Cicero’s voice. Dante could hear Bennett on the jukebox now, singing the song everyone knew. The one about San Francisco and your heart breaking on the concrete. Cicero faded in.
    “And it makes sense. Barbara and Nick want to bury their daughter. They want closure. They want to move on.”
    “Yeah,” said Dante.
    He was standing there on top of Nob Hill. It was the place inthe city everybody talked about. The place where he’d kissed Angie once upon a time and other girls, too, whose names he could no longer remember. Meantime, Jake was still talking. Sounding a little drunk, saying this was how things went in this business. You followed a trail and then the client jerked the plug and you never knew. All this while the fog was coming in and Dante could see it rolling in over The Beach and up around the high tiers of the Bay Bridge. From this spot he could see down the hill into the gaudy nonsense of Chinatown, or the other way to Union Square, and at the same time taste the fog in his throat and feel the transport cable trembling in its groove under the street as the pulleys strained to bring the car up the hill. The phone was going in and out. He could hear the cable bells ringing and Bennett pouring it on. Then all of a sudden the static went away.
    Dante dropped his voice. “I don’t know if I can let this go that easy, Jake,” he said. “I don’t know.” There was no response. “Jake,” he said. And then he realized why the sound was so clear. The connection was broken. The line was dead. He stood there with the cell in his hand. The fog swirled low now, and a cable car lurched over the hill.

SIXTEEN
    O n a hillside, down the peninsula, a woman cried out, then cried out again. Perhaps her cries did not go unnoticed. It was dark, true, and there was no one on the street, and the neighborhood had, as always, the look of a place deserted. The neighborhood had this look despite the cars in the driveways and the lights in the windows. In the bushes, though, some small creature twittered at the sound of the woman’s voice—a rodent, perhaps, a possum—and a shadow fell across a picture window. Up the road, a car rumbled into a cul-de-sac and disappeared.
    It was a serene neighborhood, this hillside in San Mateo. The ranch houses were well tended. The birds-of-paradise were prim and upright. The televisions flickered. An orange dropped to the ground, thoughtless as a rock.
    Meanwhile the woman called out.
    “Oh, kitty,” she called. “Kitty, kitty.”
    She went through a gate into an open area behind the house. She cupped her hand to her mouth and directed her voice up the hill, toward the junca and the oak. Then she went down the bermalong the ravine, following a path behind the houses. She bent down. Calling into the gap under the redwood fences. Into the pink oleander. Into the poppies and scrub.
    There was no response.
    The woman was Barbara Antonelli, but she did not know how many of her neighbors recognized her voice, or even heard her at all. She had made a mistake, though, she was certain of that. The people inside the houses would tell you the same. You bring an animal to a new place, you keep it inside a few