BLAM.

A black woman stands nearby, locked in place by the crowd. She turns toward him, round cheeked, wide-eyed. Stares into his face and . . . reads his mind.

“Okay, son,” she says, reaching out a trembling hand, “that’s enough, now. Give me the gun.”

She knows what he did. How does she know?

BLAM.

Fred feels relief flood through him as the mind-reading woman goes down. People in the small forward compartment move in waves, cowering, shifting left, then right as Fred swings his head.

They are afraid of him. Afraid of him.

At his feet, the black woman holds a cell phone in her bloody hands. Breath rasping, she presses numbers with her thumb. No, you don’t! Fred steps on the woman’s wrist. Then he bends low to look into her eyes.

“You should have stopped me,” he says through clenched teeth. “That was your job.” Bucky screws his muzzle into her temple.

“Don’t!” she begs. “Please.”

Someone yells, “Mom!”

A skinny black kid, maybe seventeen, eighteen, comes toward him with a length of pipe over his shoulder. He’s holding it like a bat.

Fred pulls the trigger as the ship lurches — BLAM.

The shot goes wide. The metal pipe falls, skitters across the deck, and the kid runs to the woman, throws himself down. Protecting her?

People dive under the benches, and their screams rise up around him like licks of fire.

The noise of the engines is joined by the metallic clanking of the gangway locking into place. Bucky stays trained on the crowd as Fred looks over the railing.

He judges the distance.

It’s a drop of four feet to the gangway substructure, then a pretty long leap to the dock.

Fred pockets Bucky and puts both hands on the rail. He vaults over and lands on the flats of his Nikes. A cloud crosses the sun, cloaking him, making him invisible.

Move quickly, sailor. Go.

And he does it — makes the leap to the dock and runs toward the farmer’s market, where he dissolves into the throng filling the parking lot.

He walks, almost casually, a half block to Embarcadero.

He’s humming when he jogs down the steps to the BART station, still humming as he catches the train home.

You did it, sailor.

Part One

DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

Chapter 3

I WAS OFF DUTY that Saturday morning in early November, called to the scene of a homicide because my business card had been found in the victim’s pocket.

I stood inside the darkened living room of a two-family house on Seventeenth Street, looking down at a wretched little scuzzball named Jose Alonzo. He was shirtless, paunchy, slumped on a sagging couch of indeterminate color, his wrists cuffed behind him. His head hung to his chest, and tears ran down his chin.

I had no pity for him.