Red Right Hand by Chris Holm Page A

was awfully imprecise. No, he thought, if they’d found him, they woulda probably popped him from afar with a high-powered rifle or grabbed him off the street and tossed him into a panel van to drive him someplace remote so they could work on him awhile in peace.
    If the attack had nothing to do with him, that meant he had a chance—albeit slim—of getting out of this alive.
    “Sir! Sir! ”
    The voice came from somewhere behind him. Male, tinny, distant. It took a moment for Frank to realize it was aimed at him.
    Frank spun, head swimming as he did. A man in a U.S. Park Police uniform was standing a few feet behind him. How he’d escaped Frank’s notice before, Frank had no idea. He didn’t realize until this moment how profoundly the blast had affected him. His ears rang. His equilibrium was shot. His head was cloudy and slow to process information. Concussion, probably. Not Frank’s first.
    The officer placed a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked. It sounded as if he were shouting from the end of a railroad tunnel. Consonants were lost. Meaning dulled. Frank mostly discerned his words based on the movement of his lips.
    “I’m fine.” His own words also sounded muffled to his ears, but the cop recoiled as if he’d shouted. The effort it took to speak set him coughing, a hoarse jag that ended with him spitting a wad of phlegm onto the path. “I’m fine,” he repeated, quieter, once his coughing subsided.
    “We need to get you checked out. First responders are setting up a triage area in Crissy Field. Come with me—I’ll take you.”
    “No!” Frank said, alarmed. If he were held, counted, and cataloged, he was as good as dead. He eyed the man’s sidearm. Handicapped the odds of wresting it free of its holster in his addled state. Decided they weren’t in his favor. “I mean—you can’t. There’s a family down the path from here,” he said. “Two parents and three kids. They were closer to the blast than I was. I think they’re hurt.”
    The cop looked torn. It was clear to Frank he’d been instructed to bring anybody he encountered back for processing. But then he nodded. “Okay. I’ll go check on them. See if they’re all right. But you stay put until I get back.”
    “Sure thing, Officer,” Frank said. “I ain’t going anywhere.”
    The cop took off down the path. As soon as he disappeared from sight, Frank fled.
    Eager to avoid other first responders lest he be forced to do something he’d regret, he ignored the footpath, instead ducking into the scraggly underbrush and pushing upslope through the branches.
    Small fires licked at trees where embers had caught. Debris littered the ground: Chunks of asphalt the size of Frank’s fist. Twisted bits of metal in glossy automotive finishes. A single tasseled loafer. As soon as Frank identified the last, he looked away; he didn’t want to know if anything was still inside.
    Once he could no longer see the footpath, he felt as though he were in a forest that could easily stretch miles rather than in a narrow swath of trees boxed in by roads. But sirens wailed all around, competing with the ringing in his ears and belying his apparent isolation.
    His aging muscles protested. His bum knee ached. His lungs burned. Now and then, he was racked with coughing fits, which forced him to stop until they subsided. Frank was only sixty-three—a decade younger than anyone who met him might’ve guessed—but they’d been sixty-three hard years. He’d spent a good forty of them drinking, smoking, and whoring around like he was still that young punk from Hoboken with something to prove to the big dogs across the Hudson in New York. Now he was paying the price for those transgressions—and it turned out the interest was steep.
    Frank had been coming to the Presidio ever since he’d settled in San Francisco six years ago. A former U.S. Army base now designated as a national park—albeit an unusual one, given its location within