The 6th Target Read Online Free PDF

dialing the numbers on the witness statements, but nothing in the first few calls lifted me out of my seat. Then I reached a fireman who’d been standing only ten feet from Andrea Canello when the shooter opened fire.
    “She was yelling at her kid when the shooter popped her,” the witness said. “I was about to tell her to take it easy. The next minute, uh, she was dead.”
    “What was she saying? Do you remember?”
    “ ‘You’re driving me crazy, buddy.’ Something like that. Terrible to think . . . Did the boy make it?”
    “I’m sorry to say, no, he didn’t.”
    I made more notes, trying to fit fragments together into pieces, pieces into a whole. I slugged down the last of my coffee and dialed the next person on my list.
    His name was Ike Quintana, and he had called late yesterday afternoon, saying maybe he’d been friends with the shooter some fifteen years before.
    Now Quintana said to me, “It looks like the same guy for sure. If that’s him, we were both at Napa State Hospital in the late ’80s.”
    I gripped the phone, pressing my ear hard against the receiver. Didn’t want to miss a syllable.
    “You know what I mean?” Quintana asked me. “We were both locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.”
     
Chapter 15
     
    I SCRIBBLED A STAR next to Ike Quintana’s phone number.
    “What’s your friend’s name?” I asked him, pressing the receiver against my ear. But suddenly Quintana was evasive.
    “I don’t want to say, in case it turns out
not
to be him,” he said. “I have a picture. You can come over and look, if you come now. Otherwise, I have a lot of things to do today.”
    “Don’t you dare leave home! We’re on our way!”
    I went out to the squad room, said, “We’ve got a lead. I have an address on San Carlos Street.”
    Conklin said, “I want to keep working the phones. New videos of the shooting have been e-mailed to our Web site.”
    Jacobi stood, put on his jacket, said, “I’m driving, Boxer.”
    I’ve known Jacobi for ten years, worked as his partner for three before I was promoted to lieutenant. During the time Jacobi and I were a team, we’d developed a deep friendship and an almost telepathic connection. But I don’t think either of us acknowledged how close we were until the night we were shot down by coked-up teenagers. Being near death had bonded us.
    Now he drove us to a crappy block on the fringes of the Tenderloin.
    We looked up the address Ike Quintana had given me, a two-story building with a storefront church on the ground floor and a couple of apartments on top.
    I rang the doorbell, and a buzzer sounded. I pulled at the dull metal door handle, and Jacobi and I entered a dark foyer. We climbed creaking stairs into a carpeted hallway smelling of mildew.
    There was a single door on each side of the hallway.
    I rapped on the one marked 2R, and a long half minute later, it squeaked open.
    Ike Quintana was a white male, midthirties. He had black hair sticking up at angles and he was oddly dressed in layers. An undershirt showed in the V of his flannel shirt, a knitted vest was buttoned over that, and an open, rust-colored cardigan hung down to his hips.
    He wore blue-striped pajama bottoms and brown felt slippers, and he had a kind of sweet, gappy smile. He stuck out his hand, shook each of ours, and asked us to come in.
    Jacobi stepped forward, and I followed both men into a teetering tunnel of newspapers and clear plastic garbage bags filled with soda bottles that lined the hallway from floor to ceiling. In the parlor, cardboard boxes spilled over with coins and empty detergent boxes and ballpoint pens.
    “I guess you’re prepared for anything,” Jacobi muttered.
    “That’s the idea,” said Quintana.
    When we reached the kitchen, I saw pots and pans on every surface, and the table was a layered archive of news-paper clippings covered by a tablecloth, then more newspaper layers and a tablecloth over that, again and again making an archeological mound a foot