Soon the Rest Will Fall Read Online Free Page A

Trinity Plaza Apartments was a graveyard of vehicles and dunes of trash bags. The buckled asphalt was littered with broken glass. In the center of it was Robert’s ride, a secondhand two-tone Hillman sedan. The car’s gray and red paint job glowered in the smog-encrusted sunlight.

    In the afternoon Robert curled up on the living room couch with Harriet. The window shades were drawn. The air conditioner struggled against the heat. Robert had the parole lady’s number in his pocket, but a force field of lethargy stopped him from calling her. He just couldn’t get himself to do it. He had no energy. It was too damn hot. Talking to that broad could wait.
    He explained his strategy to Harriet. “Now that I’m out of the joint, I plan to stay away from the police and the criminal element. I’ve turned over a new leaf.” Done with his speech, he asked for her approval. “What do you say to that?”
    Parole was akin to reentering the stratosphere after being in deep space. There were several dimensions to it. There were the traps the cops placed in a felon’s path, hoping that he’d self-destruct. Then there was the process of getting reacquainted with one’s spouse. Either way, a dude couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.
    Harriet held his hand and wondered when she and Robert were going to have sex again. It had been thirty-six months. She was concerned. “I hope so, daddy.”
    Â 
    A couple of hours later, Robert Grogan was steering the sedan east on Market toward the piers at the Embarcadero. A platinum moon hovered over Market Street. It welled above the fog and the heat and backlighted the Golden Gate Theater against a blue velvet sky. Half the storefronts between the Burger King on Eighth Street and Hallidie Plaza were abandoned. The shoe store at Sixth and Market was gutted. Merrill’s drugstore was closed down. Play Fascination had shuttered its doors. The St. Francis Theater was boarded up. Spear points of fog drifted offshore from Rincon Hill into the bay.

    Robert had an open can of beer between his legs, driving with his right hand on the wheel and smoking a cigarette with his bad hand. Harriet was riding shotgun; her hair was pulled back in pigtails. Their daughter was in the backseat wearing tennis shorts and a Ramones T-shirt. Robert looked at her in the rearview mirror and did a double take. The brat had the grill of a hardened convict, colder than the bore of a sawed-off shotgun. Her eyes were ancient. She intercepted his gaze and flipped him the bird. He asked Harriet, nodding at the kid, “How come she has a shaved head?”
    Harriet shrugged. “It’s what she wants. To be just like you.”
    â€œIs she a tomboy?”
    â€œWhy don’t you ask her?”
    â€œBecause she ain’t talking to me.”
    The floor in the backseat was piled high with weapons—a pump-action Mossberg shotgun, a bolt-action Winchester 30-06, and a Browning semiautomatic rifle. Robert had gotten his rifles from storage and put them in the car. Guns were his first love, hunting his vocation.
    He hung a right and followed Third Street over the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, past the Mariposa Yacht Club, the dry docks in India Basin, and the nightclubs at Mission Rock. He drove south beyond the abandoned Potrero Hill police station, the pump house at Islais Creek, the post office in Bayview, the Hunters Point housing projects, and the Cow Palace.
    A mile outside the city’s limits, he pulled the sedan off the road near the Southern Pacific rail yard. Lights stretched from Visitacion Valley over to Mount Davidson. The control towers at the international airport scintillated
on the shoreline. The San Mateo Bridge was luminous with car headlights. Over the water the burgs of Fremont and Hayward were penciled yellow in the fog.
    The faint grooves of a dirt track on the eastern slope of San Bruno Mountain were visible in the moonlight. Robert chased