Power Blind

Power Blind

A Graham Gage Thriller

Steven Gore

Dedication

For Hanna Fenichel Pitkin,

who asked the questions many years ago

that Graham Gage struggles to answer

Contents

Prologue

A Decade Before

Y
aqui voices chanted in Moki's ears as he loped up Jackson Street, his stride keeping pace with the water drums and rattling gourds. This wasn't really a San Francisco sidewalk beneath his feet, but the Red Rock Trail into the Chiricahuas. Those weren't shrubs grown tight against fences, but tumbleweeds trapped by the Sonoran wind. That wasn't a sprinkler, but a headwater spring feeding desperate patches of peppergrass and sage . . . each alive only by the grace of the weeping earth.

The boy glanced up as he crested the hill, his view of the darkening Pacific framed by six-story cliffs of stucco and brick. A startled pigeon—no, a desert nighthawk—swept across the dying sunset, then spun and dove toward a swallowtail emerging from the Flower World below.

A-la in-i-kun, mai-so yol-e-me,

hu-nu kun, mai-so yol-e-mee

So now he is the deer,

so now he is the deer

Moki pressed his palms against the earbuds, leaving himself deaf to all but the Mexican harps and the violins and the flutes of the Deer Dance singing in his head, the hunt played out in song and shuffling feet from dusk till dawn . . . through the eyes of the hunter, and of the deer.

So now he is the deer.

Moki cut right, startling a coyote that ducked behind a hedge. He smiled to himself. The blur of reddish-brown had merely been a family dog stalking whitetails that no longer grazed the asphalt-covered hills. He raced on, angling across the pavement, dodging a black Hummer charging up the hill, its chrome wheels flashing, its engine growling, its music thumping.

Now down toward the bay. The sidewalk steep and slick. Shorter steps. Touching lightly, almost skipping—but off the beat. He lengthened his stride to catch the rhythm . . . almost . . . moving faster.

That's it.

He heard his uncle's voice soar above the other singers:

A-la in-i-kun mai-so yol-e-me

So now he is—

Screeching tires ripped the air. The Hummer skidded and jumped the curb. His thin arms flailed as he slammed into its side and ricocheted into a retaining wall, his CD player exploding as his head and hands snapped back, the cinderblock scraping his flesh as he collapsed to the ground.

Stunned, dazed, nauseated.

Boots thudding on pavement. Laughter raging down. The stench of spilled beer and wet cigarettes. Throbbing subwoofers vibrating sheet metal and plastic and glass, savage words pounding through the haze from someone else's music, someone else's drums, someone else's life.

Slumping to his side, squinting up in terror, the streetlights blocked by ghostly screaming heads—then punching fists and stomping feet and cracking ribs and spattering blood . . . until . . . at length . . .

The stillness of the weeping earth.

Chapter 1

P
rivate investigator Graham Gage turned as a gentle knocking escalated through the threshold of his jet-lagged concentration. He looked up at his receptionist, Tansy Amaro, standing just inside his third story office, then toward his telephone, a call on hold, the blinking light silent, but not unspeaking.

“You didn't need to come up here,” Gage said. He reached down and slipped his road-worn passport into a safe anchored to the floor next to his desk. “I'm not talking to him.”

“But he sounds awful.”

Tansy rubbed her hands together like a mother fretting over a sick child, rather than over a man on the corrupt side of Gage's profession who'd spent his career destroying lives such as hers.

“It's not my problem,” Gage said, “and not yours either . . . especially not yours.”

Irritation pierced through the mental haze that had thickened around him during his flight across nine time zones from Zurich to San Francisco.

“You think it's ever bothered Charlie—or those punks, or their lawyers—that for ten years your son hasn't even been able to recognize the sound of your voice?”

Tansy lowered her eyes and wiped fine beads of sweat from her forehead. The mid-September inversion layer hovering above the city had overwhelmed the air conditioner and the redbrick walls of the converted warehouse.

She gazed through a casement window at the smog-leadened bay, then looked back at Gage and said, almost in apology, “I've just never been able to hate anyone.”

“It's not hate, Tansy. It's thirty years of disgust.”

Gage glanced at his watch. It had already been ninety minutes since his flight had landed at SFO. It was time for a cool shower, not for a descent into the miasma of deceit and corruption that had been Charlie Palmer's life—that Gage was certain still remained his life. For never in his career as a police officer, as a detective, and finally as a private investigator had Gage witnessed an authentic rebirth from a near-death experience, even one as cruel as the shooting that had left Palmer splayed on a Sunset District sidewalk six weeks earlier.

Gage was certain that whatever Palmer was seeking in his call, it wouldn't be justice. It would only be—it could only be—revenge. And Gage wanted no part of it.

“Does he know who you are?” Gage asked.

“Why should he know who . . .” Tansy's voice faded. She shook her head. “I don't think so. I'm not sure how he'd know.”

Gage pushed himself to his feet. The preceding weeks spent tracking a fugitive through Europe weighed on his middle-aged body as if each sleepless minute could be measured in pounds.

“Put him on,” Gage said. “Tell him who you are. But don't let him know I'm listening.”

“You can't expect—”

“Let's see what he's learned from living with just a fraction of Moki's misery. Let's see whether he feels any remorse at all for sabotaging the case against those thugs.”

“But we never got proof it really was him,” Tansy said.

Gage pointed at the speakerphone centered on the conference table and said, “Maybe after all these years we're about to get it.”

But Gage didn't think so.

Even if he was right that it had been Palmer who'd terrified the only prosecution witness into fleeing on the eve of the trial of the young men who'd beaten and stomped Moki, Gage doubted Palmer would now confess and make this his day of judgment. For confession would require Palmer to admit to himself who he was and what he'd been: a weapon in the hands of the wealthy and powerful employed to revictimize their victims, slashing through the fabric of their lives, leaving those like Tansy bereft of the truth of their own pasts, and those like Moki deprived not only of justice, but of the joys of a fully lived life.

Tansy sat down and reached toward the on button. She paused, staring at the phone, and then withdrew her hand.

“You don't believe he's learned anything, do you?” Gage said.

Uncertainty washed over Tansy's face. “No . . . I mean yes . . . I mean you can't expect people to change that fast.”

Gage knew it wasn't a matter of speed, but of possibility, for Palmer's flaws were of character, not aberrations of circumstance, and one of those was an indifference to tragedy that made him incapable of guilt and impervious to others' sorrow.

Gage tossed a file folder into his briefcase and pulled his suit jacket from the back of his chair.

“You're going to have to roll the dice,” Gage said. “Maybe you'll get your answer, and I'll get mine.”

Tansy took in a breath and connected the call.

“Mr. Palmer? Mr. Gage isn't available. I really did give him your message.”

The strained, wheezy voice of Charlie Palmer answered. “Why . . . would . . . I . . . think—”

“Because I'm Moki Amaro's mother.”

Tansy looked up at Gage. His grim expression filled the empty seconds, his gaze fixed on her.

“Mr. Palmer?”

In Palmer's silence, and in each other's eyes, Gage and Tansy heard and saw that they'd each gotten their answers.

Gage shook his head as Tansy lowered hers and reached toward the off button—but she left her hand hovering, as if praying the call wouldn't end in a soundless void.

A quiet sobbing emerged from the speaker. It rose toward a suffocating hysteria that choked off Palmer's voice as he grasped for words.

“I . . . I . . . pl . . . please . . . don't . . . hang up.”

Tansy's eyes teared. She covered her mouth, still staring at the phone. She again looked at Gage, silently asking,
Enough?

Gage wasn't sure it was enough, or if there was anything Charlie Palmer could do or say, or was capable of doing or saying, that would be enough. But gazing down at Tansy and listening to the man's hard breathing at the other end of the line, Gage couldn't escape another truth: that Palmer, too, was part of the fabric of others' lives. He was a father, a son, and a husband. And although Palmer's past meant Gage couldn't trust his plea in the present, in it Gage saw their faces and heard their voices.

Gage laid his coat over the back of a chair and set his briefcase down on the floor.

“What's on your mind, Charlie?”

Gasps and sobs fractured Palmer's next words, then the line disconnected.

“What did he say?” Tansy asked, looking up, her brows furrowed, as though searching for something lost. “I couldn't make it out.”

“I think he wants to compose himself,” Gage said. “It sounded like he said he'll call back in an hour.”

Tansy's eyes kept searching. “Will you wait?”

Gage nodded. “I'll wait.”

S
ixty-three minutes later, Tansy once again stood at Gage's office door. But this time her fretting hands and her downcast eyes that rose and looked past him toward the unblinking intercom light, told him even before she spoke the words that Charlie Palmer was dead.