Part II
Friday, at dawn, he went to the warehouse.
In his youth Adan Kane had been an obsessive runner. Runners become familiar with their surroundings, quickly - the location of root lines that disfigure a path, the smell of the air at a certain time of day. There were some mornings in San Francisco when the night's breeze would settle curiously within the city, lingering shyly before the exhaust from cars and kitchens and buildings would push it aside. Those mornings had a certain smell to them.
Today was one of those mornings.
The new freeway had had a rash of accidents since opening (something about the lane dividers), so he took Third Street most of the way, caught between the venerable industrial buildings of the waterfront, with their rusty gravel storage yards and lazy garage doors, and the rhythmic monotony of freeway piers, snaking their way north and south, daring anything east of them to stay relevant.
The sign (if you could call it that) read, "Evans Avenue Shipping & Storage." It also confirmed to Kane that he'd come to the right place. He'd come here, of course, to gather Bernard Zinneman's records, and to begin a trace backward through the man's finances. Kathleen Zinneman claimed that her husband had been apprehended or killed in an economically-motivated crime, but could not speculate any further.
Kane's gut told him she knew more than she was letting on. As he approached the mucky warehouse he found himself conflicted. On the one hand, he wasn't in the business of recovering husbands. Then again, it had been such a long time since he'd earned an honest paycheck that he couldn't say with any real acuity what business he was actually in.
The door handle, wood brittled by age, was loose when he grasped it. It was also unlocked, and he let himself in.
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