Night Is the Hunter by Steven Gore

She lives in the same place.”
    â€œShe talked to you?”
    Donnally nodded.
    â€œShe sure as hell wouldn’t talk to us.”
    There was an angry edge in Ordloff’s voice, like the victim’s family owed him something, not as an officer of the court with duties to his client to discharge, but to him personally. He stood there like a mirror image of the kind of cop Donnally had hated working with, the kind who wore his uniform not as a second skin, but all the way through to the bone.
    â€œThe wound was way too fresh,” Donnally said, though he knew that fact couldn’t have been news to Ordloff. “And I didn’t approach it head-on.”
    â€œWhat did she say?”
    â€œThe important thing at the moment is that her son had received a call from an unknown person that caused him to walk behind the couch and look out the front window.” Donnally angled his arm upward. “Unless Rojo was right up close to the glass, a guy as short as Dominguez couldn’t have hit him. Even then it would’ve taken a sharpshooter.”
    Ordloff watched Donnally lower his arm, then said, “I knew about the call and about the police’s inability to trace it. It was a dead end. And I’m not even sure it meant that much. Not on NewYear’s Eve with lots of people on the street, coming and going. Lots of people looking to meet up and party.”
    â€œBut you didn’t think so at the time.”
    â€œNo. Not at the time. It walked like a setup and talked like a setup, but we couldn’t prove that’s what it was or discover whether Dominguez had anything to do with it. And neither could the D.A. That’s why McMullin limited the testimony about it. To keep the jury from speculating too much.”
    â€œWhat about the shooting itself? Dominguez have any experience firing a handgun?”
    â€œWhat difference would it have made?” Ordloff smirked. “Was I supposed to argue to the jury that Dominguez was too unlucky a guy to have gotten off a lucky shot?”
    Donnally shook his head. “That’s not telling me anything.”
    â€œYou’ve been to police seminars.” Ordloff nodded toward the distant conference center as though law enforcement also used it. “You know as well as I do how those Sureños train their people. They’re practically paramilitary. They have their own camps, just like terrorists.”
    He formed his hand into that shape of a gun. “When they decide to take somebody out, they take that somebody out. That’s who they are and what they do.”
    Then he tilted his finger upward and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 11
    D onnally noticed the tail as he drove from his house far out in the avenues, a few blocks from Ocean Beach, that he’d bought when he was with the department and now shared with Janie. He was on his way to Fort Miley Veterans Medical Center to pick her up at the end of her shift. The trailing Chevy Impala focused his mind that had been divided all day as he sat in front of a computer at the court of appeals reading through the briefs in the Dominguez file. He hadn’t anticipated that the consequence of his conversation with Ordloff was that he’d spend the next twenty-four hours feeling the Alzheimer’s barrel pressed against his temple.
    The car followed him as he made the three turns to get onto the commercial Clement Street and heading west toward the sunset. Donnally couldn’t make out the face of the single occupant, but the front license plate was missing its frame, suggesting it might be a rental.
    The problem for an ex-cop who laid his head in the town where he’d spent his career was that the past was never past. Chance sightings of the officers who’d sent them away remind crooks of wasted years, of dead time spent caged inside steel bars, pacing concrete. Animosities grind, sharpening thoughts of revenge,and then prison sentences end and the crooks