The Big Boom by Domenic Stansberry

in its carrying case, and had fallen with her into the bay. He supposed that was possible. But there was something else that made him wonder otherwise. The way things were arranged haphazardly in the drawers. The dirty clothes on top of the clean. At first he’d thought it had been Barbara Antonelli, rearranging. But there was too much disorganization.
    Someone had searched the place, maybe. Someone had torn it
    up. But it hadn’t beenanyone professional, because they’d left too many traces.
    The jism. The bottle of wine. The empty glasses.
    He went to kitchen. Under the sink he found the wine bottle Barbara had mentioned. Now he took the rest of the trash can and dumped it out. Aluminum foil, burned at the edges. He unwrapped the foil and held it up to his nose. He recognized the smell. It was a smell he would have recognized even if he hadn’t just been down there under the I-80 interchange.
    And everything shuffled in his head.
    Angie in another world. On her knees, like those people beneath the underpass. Angie bringing someone here to fuck. To get high.
    Then stumbling into the water.
    He went to the window and looked out at Mortuary Row. No, he thought, this didn’t add up, either. Something else nagged at him, but he wasn’t sure what, and then he saw someone lingering in the shadows across the way.
    Whoever it was, they pulled away suddenly, and Dante bounded down the stairs. Moving too quickly, perhaps. Allowing himself to get carried away.
    Jim Rose, he thought.
    The alley was empty, but up Powell he spotted a figure receding, head down, a man the same size and build of whoever had been in the alley, maybe, he couldn’t be sure, the same build as Rose, perhaps, but he didn’t know that, either. He had only the one picture to go on, Rose leaning slope-shouldered against the boat railing Dante started after the figure, not running quite, but almost, closing the gap. Was it Rose? Yes! No! And when he was within hailing distance, he felt it a near certainty. A feeling based on instinct, on theswarming feeling in his gut. Then the man, hearing Dante’s footsteps perhaps, glanced over his shoulder and started to run. Dante’s certainty became absolute. He bore down. He grabbed the man by the collar and threw him against the brick. He was mistaken.
    The man at his feet, lying on the sidewalk, was not the man in the picture. He was not Jim Rose.
    The stranger rolled way from him then, yelling as he rolled, waving his arms and flailing in a manner so ridiculous, so ineffectual, that Dante wanted to kick him, to chase him down and stomp him until he was quiet. He’d felt the impulse before, back when he was a cop. He feinted now in the man’s direction, but at the last minute held off. The stranger rolled to his feet and scampered down the hill.
    Dante went the other way, up Powell. He needed to work the wildness out of himself, so he kept going, and pretty soon he was at the top, standing in front of the Stanford Hotel, the place where the cable cars crested before plummeting down again.
    As he stood there, his cell rang.
    It was Jake Cicero. Dante was glad to hear from him. There was something about his voice. The gruffness, the Old World fatalism.
    “I got news for you,” said Cicero.
    “What kind of news?”
    “You sound out of breath.”
    “I was just up at Angie’s place.”
    “Find anything?”
    “No.”
    “Then why are you breathing so hard.”
    “Ghosts,” he said. “I was chasing a ghost.”
    Cicero laughed. Dante could hear the sound of smoke in his throat, like that of some aging nightclub performer. He could heartinkling glasses and guessed that Cicero was in the bar by his house where he went sometimes when his wife wasn’t around. Dante could hear the old juke in the background. Tony Bennett, he thought. Or maybe Dino and Frank, some kind of duet. The cell was fading in and out, picking up static, stray conversation, and it was hard to tell.
    “How about Whitaker?” asked Cicero.