“How bad is it?” Gage asked, heading toward the stairs to the main floor.

“I don’t know. It just came in.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Hold on…3E44…What’s your 1020?”

Gage took the steps two at a time. He caught a jumble of voices and static as the officer answered.

“They’re just pulling into SF Medical,” Spike said.

A crack of thunder drew Gage’s eyes toward a wall of windows in the living room of his Oakland post-and-beam house. He had expected to see the lights of San Francisco across the bay, but a late-October alloy of fog and storm clouds sweeping in from the Pacific had enveloped the city. Even the oak branches that framed his view were webbed in gray, their resident birds mute, invisible, cowering against a squall advancing up the hillside.

“What happened?” Gage asked as he climbed toward his third floor bedroom.

“The uniforms on the scene are telling me it was road rage. Witnesses said he’d just started jogging from his house when a guy blew the stop sign at Webster and Pacific. Jack yelled something and the asshole did a U-turn, fired a couple of shots, then took off. A neighbor recognized Jack as they put him into the ambulance.”

Gage knew his friend’s morning route, knew the intersection. Animated stick figures reenacted the shooting in his mind as if in a virtual re-creation. He fought off the image of an early morning downpour washing Jack Burch’s blood into a leaf-clogged gutter.

“Anybody ID the shooter?” Gage asked.

“Nobody we’ve talked to yet, but chances are slim. The commute hadn’t started and there weren’t many runners and dog walkers out because of the weather.”

“And the car?”

“Generic every which way, and nobody caught the plate.”

Spike’s radio crackled in the background. Gage heard him double-click the handset to confirm receipt of the message.