Death in the Haight by Ronald Tierney Page B

pull-up on the window ledge and caught a glimpse of the silhouette. It was of a big chair and an arm dangling down the side. There was a bottle just out of reach. So far, Lang’s predictions were correct. If his calculations continued to be on the mark, Stern wasn’t just asleep; he was passed out. Lang had hours to do what he needed to do.
    There was a narrow passageway between the houses, used to cart out the trash bins from the back to the street for pickup. The back door and the frame that held it were out of kilter, the house obviously having settled over the years. There was a big pane of opaque bubble glass at the top of the door. The rest was wood. The handle wasn’t very secure either, but the door was locked. There was some give to the lock. Lang suspected it was as old and worn as the house itself.
    He set his small bag down and plucked from it a flat-edged piece of metal. He slid it in, then up, and that was enough. The door moved in a few inches and stuck on a chain. Lang slid in a piece of thin, L-shaped metal and closed the door far enough to give the chain enough slack for Lang to disengage it. He could hear it bang against the door.
    Lang was inside.
    The overhead kitchen light was on, and its low-watt bulb spread a dirty gold luminescence over the surprisingly neat room. The countertops were chipped, and the linoleum on the floor was worn down to the wood in some places. The floor creaked as he walked.
    Stern hadn’t heard a thing. The veteran cop hadn’t bothered to remove his suit coat, but he had taken out his service revolver and placed it on what was the dining room table, no longer needed so shoved to one side of the dining room. The belt and the top button of Stern’s pants were undone. His head slumped to one side. The light from the television caused shadows to dance on the inspector’s alcohol-swollen face. A PBS travelogue was on TV. They were in a street bazaar someplace in the Middle East, and there was a British voice describing it all.
    Business first, Lang thought. He took out plastic restraints. They were notched like the ties on some garbage bags and locked into place. He put them on Stern’s feet first, locking them together and then to feet of the chair. He ran an elastic cord with hooks on each end around Stern’s chest, hooking them behind the chair. Stern moved and lifted his head, but only briefly. Lang waited a few moments, until he sensed the man drifting back into a more solid stupor. Lang put the restraints on Stern’s wrists, brought them together and locked them in. They acted as plastic handcuffs. He ran a longer piece of plastic from the wrists to the feet, allowing him to sit comfortably, hands in his lap, but preventing him from raising his arms.
    Lang’s precautions completed, he would have to wait for the rest. Waking up a drunk mid-blackout would only mean an angry, loud, and incoherent drunk rather than just an angry and loud one. Lang wanted Stern sober. Completely.
    All sorts of dark thoughts passed through Lang’s brain. The room continued to be lit by the erratic flashing of colors on the screen and the changing shadows: brighter, then darker, as if there were a sometimes fiery thunderstorm on the interior scrim of his skull.
    It made for a depressing couple of hours, mind moving from anger to hopelessness. In the end, Lang preferred not to face reality and certainly not this way—in a stinking, crummy living room in the middle of the night.
    He would have liked to have finished Stern’s bottle of whiskey. It would at least dull the erratic images that swept across his sleep- and food-deprived mind. The thing was he knew he could do it. He could kill the man. The perfect opportunity lay right before him, and he had the mind-set. It would be a preemptive strike. The law might not buy it, but his conscience would. It was, in its way, self-defense. Hadn’t his country used that same argument to invade a country