Everyone Pays Read Online Free PDF Page A

watched the corners and the streetlights through the windows as we rode in silence.
    I could smell fresh oil on the streets, see visions of the city caught in bubbles of water on the glass.
    On the corners I saw predators: buyers, johns, men looking for women or other men they could use to live out their desires. Money could buy anything here, from drugs to souls.
    San Francisco offered a marketplace of depravity. Whatever a man wanted, he could get: domination, she-males with postoperative breasts, good sex, bad sex, young boys, girls, women who let them inflict pain. For every taste, a different block with its own set of nightwalkers to satisfy an urge.
    I had read that the city’s slave trade was bigger than in the South before the Civil War. So far we had come. We should’ve known better. Someone had to.
    My mind’s eye flashed to a dried smear of blood over Farrow’s bed—not from tonight. What kind of a man would live like that? With blood on his wall?
    I still didn’t have a clue.
    “We talk to the girls, I bet we find something.” Hendricks stared straight ahead as he drove.
    “We could try that. Might get somewhere.”
    “They look like a link to me.”
    It was late enough for us to pass through the city, barely slowing at lights. We cruised all the way east and then south.
    When we pulled up outside my place in Potrero, a nice third-floor walk-up with great city views and a deck, Hendricks turned and touched my arm.
    “Listen, it was nice working with you tonight, Donner. Full truth, you make leaving a hot date to come out and see a dead guy not the worst thing imaginable.”
    I tried not to smile, because it was the most backhanded compliment I could get, but I knew what he meant. “Thanks.”
    I turned to the door to go.
    “Hang on a second, okay? About this case, what you think?”
    I sat back in my seat, sighed. “I think we got us a potential perv killer. Someone taking scum off the streets in the bloodiest ways. It’s a nasty world we’re dealing in.”
    “Maybe it’s best you ask off it.”
    “No,” I said. “This guy, he’s doing the perps. I want to see why.”
    It was after three in the morning, and we were on the clock again at nine the next day.
    He said, “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
    I moved for the door, then stopped. “You ever wonder?”
    “Wonder what?”
    “If this shit really comes out in the wash. If things wind up right in the end, justice served and all that.”
    “As long as the justice system does, that’s what I care. Courts get used, turds tried, cells filled. The cases go up and come down. My checks come. I get paid, even get out on a date once in a while. I see my kid the odd weekend. Have some fun, you know? Something you might try once in a while.”
    “I hear you.” But I was already turning away, opening the door to get out. I stepped up into the night.
    “Wait. Donner?”
    I turned back.
    “What does it for me is I think of their families—Farrow’s and Piper’s. I think about how I would want this case worked if I was one of them.”
    I nodded. That was the hook: the humanity in it all. The call to always do what was right for the other good people in this world, assuming they were out there.
    I thanked him for the ride and got out. At the curb, I turned back and watched him go, heard his tires roll along the wet asphalt.
    Hendricks was going to worry about me. It was his job, what a good partner did. And he was a good partner: picking me up at home, following my hunches, and letting me lead. I was lucky. I’d be fine.
    I wasn’t sure how I had gotten so tied up in my own head all of a sudden, gone away from having fun and giving Hendricks a hard time. But I did know too: it was the girls. They always got to me, got me down.
    I walked up my front stairs to the porch, could still smell the oil, but now something else too.
    Ash. Ash and dirt.
    In the morning it would all start again.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    MICHAEL
    The second name