Night Is the Hunter Read online

  Junior looked past Donnally and down the block, like he was trying to see whether they were being watched, then back at Donnally.

  “You know how hard it is to get some distance from the Norteños? To get them to leave you alone?”

  “You got away.”

  Junior shook his head. “It’s blood in, blood out, man. Not just snitches, everyone. Even the generals who just want to retire in peace go out that way. They get hit even in super max.”

  “Then how . . .”

  “Me and Benaga have a kind of a truce because my father died in the cause. But if he goes to war against the Sureños or even if Norteño factions go after each other again, I’ve got to take his side and go get a gun.”

  “The cause? Your father died for a cause?”

  Donnally felt like he was talking to one of Janie’s delusional patients. Even as a cop he never understood the kinds of things these guys killed each other over.

  “Gangbanging is a cause? Wake up. It’s an evasion of causes, or at least an evasion of any decent ones.”

  Junior emitted a sharp, bitter laugh. “Spoken like a man who ran away.”

  Donnally had regretted telling Junior about his father even while they were still at the café, and now he regretted it even more.

  “At least I never put a contract out on anybody.”

  Junior drew back as though Donnally had cocked his arm to throw a punch, then glanced around and leaned in and said in a hard whisper, “Benaga tell you that?”

  Donnally shook his head. “It’s not important who told me.”

  Junior shrugged. “What difference does it make? Nobody died.”

  “It makes a difference because it’s about you. Who you are.”

  “You don’t know nothing about me.”

  “You set up the attack on Dominguez, and that tells me a lot.”

  “What you going to do about it?”

  “Probably nothing. You’re right. Nobody died. But tell me why you did it.”

  “It was time he paid for his crime. We waited long enough.”

  “We, not the cause again?”

  “Okay, so it wasn’t about the cause, at least directly. It was about us waiting too long.”

  “Why then, after ten years?”

  Junior shrugged again. “Things kinda came to a head.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Junior glanced down the block again, then over his shoulder. “Let’s just say we had a meeting. Call it old business that needed to be taken care of.”

  “That’s still not an answer.”

  “You wearing a wire?”

  Donnally shook his head.

  “Spread your arms.”

  Donnally pulled his gun from his holster so Junior couldn’t take it from him, and let Junior pat him down.

  Then Junior said, “We were at Benaga’s house, over there by his garage, watching the Giants playing the Dodgers one night. He takes out a piece of paper and starts writing down all the hits that went down after my father was killed. The ones by us and Nuestra Familia and the ones by the Mexican Mafia and the Sureños. He shows it to us and tells us it’s unbalanced—that’s the word he used, unbalanced—because we never got to anybody in the Sureños as high up as my father was. A street captain.”

  “What did that have to do with Israel Dominguez? If the issue was rank, he was a nobody. No rank at all.”

  Junior stiffened. “Hold on, man. I’ll get to it.”

  “Then get to it.”

  Junior stared at him for a moment.

  Donnally feared that he’d pushed him too hard, and he’d turn and walk away.

  Finally, Junior said, “Benaga started talking about guys we could whack and we toss the names back and forth. He settles on a Sureño captain down in Bakersfield, right near the border between them and us. Then somebody says, that’ll start another war and he says, then let’s take out Dominguez, make a kind of a statement, like we never forget our own.”

  Donnally remembered the Norteño oath from years ago. He’d seen it spray painted on the sides of buildings and on walls and fences in the gang neighborhoods.

  Revenge is a promise all the time.

  “That’s how the decision got made,” Junior said.

  “There was nothing personal in it? It had nothing to do with Dominguez being the guy who killed your father?”

  “Course it did. That’s why I carried the message into San Quentin.”

  “But why then? What was going on ten years ago that made it so important to do something right at that moment?”

  Junior paused in thought as though it was a question he’d never asked either Benaga or himself, then he shook his head.

  “I have no idea. I was just a nineteen-year-old kid. I didn’t think about the big picture, only about getting by.”

  “Like now?”

  Junior shrugged. “Like now, like always. Nothing changes for guys like me.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Donnally watched Junior drive away, then walked inside the house thinking back over the years, but not so much about him getting shot as about what had gone on before he’d stepped into the cross fire. The killing he was investigating when he got out of his car to walk into the Mission Street taqueria wasn’t gang related in any way. It had nothing to do with the Norteños or Sureños. Neither the shooter nor the victim were gangsters. It had just been a stickup robbery in front of the restaurant.

  He’d driven there ready to cut a deal with the owner. Donnally would get the D.A. to dismiss an unrelated narcotics case in exchange for information about the identity of the killer. He wasn’t even looking for testimony, just for a name, one he could use to obtain a mug shot and put together a photo lineup to show to the witnesses who’d already agreed to testify.

  But a gap still existed in his mind between his reason for going to the restaurant and what had happened to him on the street before he could get inside, and he still didn’t know whether he’d failed over the years to discover the link that connected them or whether there had never been one. He was certain he understood the mechanics, but wasn’t convinced he’d ever understood the meaning, and Benaga’s ordering Junior to set up the attack on Dominguez around the time he’d gotten shot added a new fact, a new event, but nothing more.

  As Donnally stood at the kitchen counter making a sandwich, he wondered what else was going on ten years earlier that might have made it urgent for the Norteños to get rid of Dominguez.

  Was it really about gang honor, or had that just been the cover for the real reason?

  And if doing it was so important, why hadn’t they tried again after they’d failed?

  Then he wondered whether Benaga later decided that mangling Dominguez’s shooting hand was good enough revenge or worked as a living symbol even better than death.

  But he didn’t think so. Revenge required parity, in this case a matching killing, or it wasn’t a promise kept.

  Donnally sat down at the table, the first piece of furniture he’d bought on his own after he moved out of his parents’ house. Maybe because he’d spent the last few days investigating a homicide, he felt a renewed connection to it, its oak surface and its scrapes and scratches, the wearing of life on wood. It was the same one that was there all the years he was at SFPD, the same table at which he studied for the sergeant’s exam, studied for his master’s degree in criminal justice at San Francisco State, and where he wrote out search warrant affidavits after he made detective.

  It was also the place where he sat reviewing the medical reports and the retirement forms, when he signed his name declining disability benefits, figuring that since he could walk and talk, he could still find some kind of work he wanted to do. He didn’t need the taxpayers of San Francisco paying his way. He’d do that himself.

  Being conscious of his sitting there also made him notice that it was where he and Janie did most of their arguing.

  He remembered Janie wondering one day years ago why they didn’t argue in bed like
her parents always had. Then Janie saying her folks were always trying to hide their conflicts from the kids . . . then he and Janie both realizing again that despite her being ten years younger than him, they’d met too late to have kids together . . . no way he could see himself as the sixty-year-old father of a teenager . . . and she getting that look on her face that said she was asking herself why didn’t she just move on and move out before the clock ticked all the way down and go find somebody else to have children with . . . but instead of talking about that, which would’ve led to an argument that would’ve made a real difference in their lives, maybe even led to them breaking up, they argued about why Donnally had forgotten to tell her that her mother had called a day earlier.

  Donnally found he was holding his breath and let it out.

  In recent years that had changed. Fewer arguments, no forgotten messages, more intimacy, but still there remained Janie’s regrets about children. He felt like he’d let her down, that if they hadn’t met her life would’ve been different, there would’ve been a husband waiting for her at home and kids sitting around a table doing their homework.

  The sandwich now didn’t look very appetizing, the bread looking drier than he knew it really was and the turkey more bland.

  He pulled a Coke out of the refrigerator and took a sip.

  Except the decision, or maybe there were lots of decisions, to turn the two of them into an us had been mutual. They both carried a key that would unlock the life into which they’d placed themselves, but neither had ever chosen to use it. And it wasn’t accommodation or settling. Not every relationship needed kids, a dog, and an SUV. And theirs didn’t. Love and trust were enough.

  The sandwich looked a little better. He grabbed it and headed toward the first-floor bedroom where they had a desk and a laptop.

  The walk down the hallway felt like a migration from the known into the unknown. He felt his mind make a jump as he reached around the threshold and turned on the light.

  And he was back into the Rojo Sr. murder.

  There was too much he didn’t know about what had happened in San Francisco since he’d put police work behind him. He’d even stopped reading the newspapers and watching the local news when he came down from Mount Shasta to visit Janie and work on the house. More than anything, it was because he didn’t like being reminded of all the dead people he’d known. Every murder reminded him of another he’d investigated, every sidewalk crime scene reminded him of another body that had bled out, every son reminded him of a father who died, every daughter, a mother. Children he’d once interviewed as witnesses were now becoming victims, and killers.

  Donnally sat down and ran an Internet news search on “Norteños” and “San Francisco,” and focused on the period between eight and twelve years earlier, the two years on either side of the attempted hit on Dominguez and the Mission Street shoot-out.

  The coverage centered on gang fights between the Norteños and Sureños in San Quentin, scattered homicides around the Bay Area, mostly unsolved, and three federal racketeering indictments.

  He knew little about the gang fights. And the two Norteño-related homicides he’d worked were connected neither with internal prison conflicts nor with the federal cases. They were straight-up disputes over control over a couple of blocks in the Mission District.

  Because he’d never been assigned to the narcotics unit and never needed the overtime, he hadn’t worked the wire rooms in the joint SFPD-FBI and SFPD-DEA investigations or performed surveillances of drug transactions.

  He also hadn’t spent much time with street drug task force officers or narcotics detectives. Some he’d suspected of planting drugs on suspects and of filing false police reports and of lying in search warrant affidavits and in court testimony. Too many were cowboys like Chen or true believers. Just like Junior, both state and federal drug enforcement agents saw themselves as engaged in a war, and all was fair, even if not legal, and they figured that if the guy they grabbed wasn’t guilty today, he was guilty yesterday or, if left on the street, would be guilty tomorrow.

  And everyone in the department knew it.

  Most cops in SFPD refused assignments on the drug task force or in the narcotics division, didn’t want to deal with the pressure to make their numbers and to help other officers make theirs. Narcotics officers who didn’t deliver enough bodies to the jail soon found themselves with their long hair shorn, their beards shaved, their uniforms back on, and their shoe soles pressing a patrol car accelerator or walking them down a sidewalk beat.

  Donnally sat back and drank from his Coke. He realized it bothered him that Junior hadn’t attacked him for trying to reopen the factual issues relating to the guilt, or the level of guilt, of Israel Dominguez, only for bothering his grandmother and talking to Oscar Benaga.

  He had the feeling that he’d missed something in their conversations, either at the café or in front of the house. Maybe because he was moved or diverted by Junior’s confusion, his disorientation, his disconnectedness, his struggle to find a place for himself in the world.

  Twenty-nine years old and Junior still had no clue about who he was, not even a clue about who he didn’t want to be.

  Even more, Junior was prepared to murder, or at least felt the urge to murder, a homicide detective for failing to disclose in his offense report that it had been Chen who’d called his father just before he walked up to the window where he was shot.

  And that only made sense if Junior now feared that some truth, something beyond the mere fact of the call, had also been suppressed.

  The logic brought Donnally back to the reason he’d done the Internet search. What was going on ten years ago when he was shot and Israel Dominguez was stabbed in San Quentin and even twenty years earlier when Rojo Sr. was murdered?

  And the only way to find out was to enter a corrupt world he’d avoided throughout his career and he thought he’d left behind altogether a decade earlier.

  CHAPTER 22

  Fifty-six-year-old Chuck Grassner, working security just inside the entrance to the 44 Double D Club in North Beach, looked to Donnally like a man who’d work for free just to see the shows. Dressed in a stretched-out blue sport coat, unpressed shirt, creaseless pants with shiny knees and steel-toed work shoes, he wore a watery-eyed, flushed-skinned alcoholic’s face.

  Seeing him stationed by the open door, trading back slaps and hellos and “How many hookers does it take . . .” jokes with entering customers, confirmed for Donnally that Grassner wasn’t in it for the money.

  Throughout his career at SFPD, from patrol officer, to narcotics detective, to joint designated state and federal agent, and back to patrol as a sergeant, Grassner’s mantra had been, “Thirty and out. Thirty and out. Thirty and out.” And at exactly thirty years to the day, including unused vacation and sick leave, he was out. He didn’t even hang around long enough for a final end-of-shift drink or return for a retirement party.

  He’d hit thirty and he was out.

  Standing across Broadway, Donnally didn’t know how Grassner now spent his days but knew that he spent his nights in the fifty-two weeks of San Francisco’s version of Mardi Gras.

  Donnally had decided to seek out Grassner because he was a talker, couldn’t help himself, and the edgier the information, the more he thrilled in the telling. In the days before police departments had intelligence units and computer databases, officers like Grassner functioned like archives, some in homicides, some in fraud, some in sex crimes, and some in drugs. And Grassner had been pals with Chen during the height of the crack cocaine years, when careers were made not by how many black street dealers they caught, but how many Mexican suppliers they took down.

  And the pair’s rules of police practice were based on a narrow-focused street pragmatism unconstrained by courtroom legality. They viewed judicial rulings not as the application of law and precedent, but as mere judicial whim and compared bringing an affidavit to a judge to giving the judge a hand job, always gesturing with their hands in front of
their crotches like they had twelve-inch penises.

  At times it felt to Donnally that Grassner acted like a guilty adulterer trying to set himself up to get caught. And after Donnally left the department, Grassner did get caught, for what Donnally never learned, except the punishment was that he finished his career in uniform and on patrol.

  In the locker room a couple of years before he left the department, Donnally overheard Grassner explaining to a young vice officer how he’d obtained evidence to convince a judge to issue a wiretap order by illegally listening in on the target’s conversations. He used the information to identify members of the gang and to figure out when they made their runs and where they stored their drugs. He’d seize drugs during pretext traffic stops or by towing and searching cars he’d claim had been parked too long on the street, then roll the underlings on his original target and incorporate that illegally derived evidence into the affidavit in support of the wiretap application.

  Other times officers like Grassner took information obtained from illegal wiretaps and used it in affidavits to obtain search warrants, just pretending that the source was an informant or an anonymous caller, and then walked over to the courthouse to find a judge who needed a metaphorical hand job.

  Grassner thought, and proclaimed to everyone at every opportunity, “It was a hoot.”

  That was the other phrase he used as often as “Thirty and out.”

  “It was a hoot.”

  Sometime, probably early in his career, and somewhere, probably with his knee on a suspect’s back or his boot exploding a door, Grassner had bartered his integrity for an adrenaline rush.

  Looking at Grassner now, joking and laughing at the titillating center of San Francisco, Donnally wondered whether it had ever been about integrity. Grassner seemed to just like the adventure. He didn’t care as much about stopping crime as about having a good time. And the more reckless he became, the greater the thrill, and like a junkie it took more and more to thrill him.

  Donnally had never met a street narcotics officer who believed the drug war could be won. They were merely addicted to the job and Grassner had the worst addiction he’d ever seen.