If Angels Fall Read Free Page A

They’ll pass it to a G.A., or some dink in Lifestyles.
Besides, isn’t Tanita’s mother in hiding?”
    “I have an idea, but--“
    The scanners grew louder.
    They turned to the small office tucked way in the far corner of the
newsroom. The “torture chamber.” A glass-walled room with twenty-four scanners
monitoring hundreds of emergency frequencies in the Bay Area. The incessant
noise inspired the room’s name. Experienced listeners kept the volume low, but
when a major incident broke, the sound increased.
    “Something’s happening,” Wilson said.
    Simon Green, a summer intern, was monitoring the radios. His face
was taut when he stood, jotted a note, then yelled at Al: “Child abduction off
BART! Balboa Park! They’re stopping the trains!”
    Booth grimaced at the newsroom. No one on, except Reed.
    “Are you clear?”
    Reed nodded.
    “Take it. Wilson, stick around, you might get overtime.”
    Across the newsroom, the weekend photo editor radioed a photographer
roaming the city to rush to the Balboa Park BART station.
    Reed slipped on his jacket, grabbed one of the Star’s cell
phones. “I’ve got number three, call me with updates, Molly.”
    “This is eerie. Balboa Park.”
    Tanita Marie Donner was abducted from the Section 8 housing complex
where her teenage welfare mother lived. In Balboa Park.

THREE

    Sydowski and his
father had good seats at the Coliseum. Thirty rows up from first. But the game
lacked zeal. Entering the eighth, with the A’s up by seven over the Yankees,
was not exciting baseball.
    Sydowski was stiff and hungry.
    “Hey, old man,” he said in Polish. “I’m going to get something to
eat. You want anything?”
    “Sure, sure. Popcorn,” his father said.
    Sydowski patted his father’s knee and headed for the concession
stand. Sydowski had not wanted to come to the game. He accepted tickets because
his boss insisted. Sydowski’s old man loved seeing the A’s at the Coliseum, but
would never ask to be taken because he figured the job kept his son busy.
    Standing in line, Sydowski reminisced about the old days. Whenever
Boston played the A’s, he would drive across the Bay Bridge to Oakland to pay
homage to Carl Michael Yastrzemski, a three-time American league batting
champion. Yaz took his third title by posting .301, in an era where pitchers
destroyed batting averages.
    That was perseverance.
    That was 1968. The year Oakland got the A’s and the San Francisco
Police Department got Wladyslaw Sydowski.
    Had it been that long?
    “You know you can take your pension any time, Walt,” his boss,
Lieutenant Leo Gonzales, often reminded him.
    Sydowski couldn’t. Not yet. What would he do?
    His wife, Basha, had died of Parkinson’s six years ago. The girls
were grown, had their own children, and had moved away. He had John, his
eighty-seven-year-old father, to look after. His old man was something. A
Polish potato farmer and barber he had kept his family alive in a work camp
during the war by cutting hair for Nazi officers. Sydowski’s old man taught him
how to listen, how to read people. Now John lived happily alone at Sea Breeze
Villas in Pacifica, tending a vegetable garden, following the A’s. He refused
to move in with Sydowski, who lived by himself in the Parkside house where he
and his wife had raised their daughters and where he now raised champion
canaries.
    “Sir? That’s four dollars.”
    Sydowski smiled, showing two gold-crowned teeth as he dug out some
cash. The teenage girl smiled back. At six-foot-three, with a solid
two-hundred-pound frame, dark complexion, and wavy salt-and-pepper hair,
Sydowski was a handsome man.
    He knew the hotdog would take a toll on his chronic heartburn, but
what the hell? He smothered it with mustard, relish and onions as the old
questions surfaced. What would he do if he retired? He was a cop. A homicide
inspector. It was his life. To some, he was one of the SFPD’s best; to others
he was “the arrogant Polack cocksucker.” While he