“She won’t see a doctor,” Tamara said. “Just wants to go home.”
“Maybe her husband can talk her into it.”
“If he cares enough. I’ll tell him when he calls, if he calls.”
“She told you she walked here?”
“That’s what she said. Benn woman threw her out, apparently, wouldn’t even let her use the phone.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“Didn’t to me, either. Why didn’t she ask the desk clerk or one of the other residents?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the Hillman she walked from.”
“Fifteen blocks, she said.”
“It’s a wonder she made it that far in her condition. And without anybody stopping to help her.”
“In this city?” Tamara said. “Army of Dawn of the Dead zombies could march up Market Street and nobody’d pay much attention.”
“Yeah. Come on, let’s wake her up. I’m parked in a loading zone across the Square.”
Together we hoisted Janice Krochek into a sitting position. Tamara shook her a little until one bleary eye popped open and focused on me. “You,” she said.
“Me,” I agreed. “How do you feel?”
“Groggy. Shitty.”
“I can take you to a hospital, get you some medical attention …”
“No. Home.” The other eye was open now; her gaze roamed from side to side. “Where’s Mitch?”
“We couldn’t get hold of him,” I said. “He’s on a job site today.”
“Yeah, sure. Out screwing his latest bimbo.”
“Come on, Mrs. Krochek, on your feet. I’ll take you home.”
We got her upright. Shaky, but she could stand and move all right with my hand on her arm; I didn’t need Tamara’s help to get her downstairs. A couple of people on the sidewalk and in the park strip gave us passing glances and a wide berth.
One of South Park’s many attractions is that a Bay Bridge approach is only a short distance away. We were on the bridge in five or six minutes. Janice Krochek sat slumped in the seat, her eyes closed, massaging her chafed wrists, unresponsive to the questions I put to her. Whoever had beat her up, for whatever reason, she wasn’t about to confide to me. Or, I’d have been willing to bet, to her husband.
She was asleep again by the time we came off the bridge. I woke her up with a couple of sharp words to get directions; I had the Krocheks’ home address but the street name wasn’t familiar and I wasn’t going to stop to pore over a map. “Highway 24,” she said, “then straight up Claremont, ask me again when you pass the Claremont Hotel.”
My cell phone went off at about the time we reached the Claremont. Had to be Tamara. I pulled over to answer it; unlike most people nowadays, I don’t consider talking on the phone while driving to be safe, and it’s even less so on narrow, hilly streets.
Tamara said, “Mr. Krochek just called. I gave him the news. He’ll meet you at his house—on his way there right now.”
“Reaction?”
“Relieved and pissed off.”
I relayed the message to Janice Krochek, omitting the relieved and pissed off part.
“Be still, my heart,” she said.
We kept climbing. Turn right on this street, left on that one, half a mile and then right again on such-and-such. By then we were well up into the hills. Panoramic views of the bay, San Francisco, three bridges, Alcatraz Island. Expensive living for the financially well-endowed.
What was surprising about the area was how quickly it had been regenerated, how many new homes had sprung from the ashes of the firestorm that had engulfed these hills in October of 1991. Hardly any signs remained of the devastation along the narrow, winding roads. High winds, brush-clogged canyons, and tinder-dry trees had spawned that fire, and before it was done raging it had reached temperatures as high as two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to boil asphalt, burned sixteen hundred acres, destroyed nearly three thousand single-family homes and apartment buildings, left twenty-five people dead, and caused something like a billion and a half dollars in damage.
The Krocheks were too young to have lived up here at that time; they were among the multitude of newcomers who had figured lightning would never strike twice and so bought themselves a chunk of the rebuilt, relandscaped, million-dollar California Dream. They could have it. I preferred the West Bay; despite all its civic and other problems and the lurking threat of the Big One, the predicted earthquake disaster that would make the Oakland Hills fire look like a minor incident, San Francisco was my home and would be as long as I stayed above ground. My city, for better or for worse.